The Most Important Article Ever Written About College Sports*

The article was amazing. The research was amazing. The depth was amazing. I agree with the conjectures. I am not sure college sports can function in a reasonable format, logically.

And I'm still going to watch college football this weekend. Because I love the game. Because I love the games. And I'm going to be one of millions.

The obvious questions are: Will the hypocrisy ever stop if we keep our TVs on, and will we turn our TVs off during the games we love?

The deeper one, the one at the heart of every one of these columns, yet the one avoided by each of these columnists: Do we really want college sports to end?

 

Of course not . . . but it would be nice to see the epic assholes lose a little more than 3% of the time.

 

College sports don't have to end. The people running college sports either need to get their heads out of the sand and figure out a fair way to compensate those who are providing the work that earns their paychecks.

The Olympics didn't end once athletes got paid. If anything, I'd say that it's grown bigger. People still feel national pride when their country's athletes win a gold medal, even if those athletes are millionaire basketball players.

 

I tend to think the only acceptable way to go about this massive restructuring is to break the link between academia and athletics entirely. We should have extensive minor-league systems and feeder programs the way soccer has organized itself in Europe (and, increasingly, in America). That would be the only way to end the level of corruption we're currently faced with, in my opinion. But it would also sap so much passion out of the world of sports.

 

I'm not nearly as smart as most here, and I haven't finished the article, but to me it comes down to alma maters. So much of people's identification with college sports is associating it with their college times, and rooting for the teams they spent 4-10 years rooting for. If you take away that affiliation, I think the sports become more like the NBDL than like the behemoth they are today.

 

The piece gets national attention because it's Taylor Branch and The Atlantic. Their reputations give the work weight it never got when done by sportswriters. The major difference is, Branch came to the issues new. He'd been lost in MLK and Clinton for 30 years. So every NCAA issue was fresh and crazy to him. He put them all together in an historian's high-concept language. Sportswriters, and I include myself here, had long since become tired of fighting those battles and allowed ourselves to become angry shouters instead of measured thinkers.

As for Whitlock's attacks on Yahoo, does it not occur to him that much of Branch's piece is based on work like Yahoo's? (I was on the staff when the Atlanta Constitution reported every breath Jan Kemp took. The UGA lawyer's rationale rings forever in my mind as: Better they be postal workers than garbage men.) Without that investigative work exposing the system's flaws, there is no indictment of the system.

 

I got my copy yesterday and look forward to diving into the piece this afternoon. I've long enjoyed Murray Sperber's books on college sports, so I can't wait to read this one. Dave is probably right - the fact that it's The Atlantic and Taylor Branch gives it weight that it wouldn't have if it were Sports Illustrated or even USA Today. But that's OK.

I'd be all for ending athletic scholarships.

 

This is why I quit watching college football this year. I quit cold turkey.
I love college football. Love it. It was nothing to watch it all weekend starting on Tuesday or Thursday night. I turn the TV on Saturday at noon and turn it off around 1 a.m. - whenever the late PAC 10 game wraps up. ...
I have said - and written - for years the only way the system will change is when fans quit tuning in and attending games. I am now practicing what I preach.


Unrelated tangent ...
The Atlantic article is pretty astounding - I also thought it was really long and dry - but how earth-sharttering is it?
As Kindred noted this work has been done before, but not on this scale or with this depth... That being the case; how does this compare to the baseball reporting on Steroids era?
It's seems there has been a flood of this work coming out lately, but this shit has been going on for years. It was reported, but not as a whole, more just incidents, like Miami, the FSU shoe scandal and SMU.
Does it compare to the reporting - or lack thereof - that wasn't being done when everybody was wagging their tongues at the homers but not asking about steroids?


Did college football writers miss this?

 

I think college football writers have been beating this drum lightly for years, and it's picking up more and more every year.

Also, regarding the article, I think it does to the NCAA what the SI story did on the Tressel thing. It connected dots, added some new (or, I suppose in this case, substantiated previous) information and more than anything, spelled everything out with precision and clarity. It put it all out there. It made it all impossible to deny.

I thought it was interesting that it barely touched on the BCS.

 

I disagree that the story isn't earth-shattering -- reporting on that lawyer's journey through the labyrinth of the NCAA's rules was new, I believe. And maybe the cases of the baseball players and their agents were reported piecemeal as they happened. But I doubt the reports would have come with that kind of legal discussion of the details; in any case I had never heard a word of it, and I consider myself a pretty intense sports fan, moreso than a good 95 percent of the population at least. So this is new information -- as is, for that matter, the fact that "student-athlete" started not as a lofty academic ideal but as a dodge of workmen's comp rules.

Besides, framing and context matters huge. If all of those things were reported and make up a piece of the puzzle, this puts the puzzle together.

 

But did we really need Yahoo!'s work to know the system is broken? People have known about all this for years. And at this point, framing matters. Charles Robinson's problem with the system is the lack of enforcement of the rules; the real problem, though, is the rules themselves.

Also, for those interested, Branch said they'll be putting out an e-book with a lot of stuff that needed to be cut out of the article to fit in the magazine. This includes portions on Title IX, Div III sports, etc.

 

This is kind of related to a question I raised earlier ...

http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/the_scandal_beat.php