Extracurriculars

Alabama had barely hoisted the BCS national championship trophy late Monday night when the long-winded explications of the entire college athletic landscape were being churned out.

Actually, those missives have been continuing for a good long while. But in the context of a remarkable and dispiriting college football season — fraught with realignment, record streams of television money and a jarring sex abuse scandal — these arguments will take on a new complexion.

The college basketball season is in midstream, but football has been driving the argument more than ever, prompting such non-sporting journalistic figures as Taylor Branch and, more recently, columnist Joe Nocera of The New York Times (here and here) to launch tirades against the NCAA.

And with the NCAA convention beginning Wednesday in Indianapolis, sportswriter Patrick Hruby piles on to that theme, exhorting college athletes in revenue sports — football is his only reference here — to go on strike:

“It would make the bad situation of big-time college sports better by making it more equitable, more honest. By exercising their dormant power, players would become partners, not serfs, free to make negotiable demands instead of unheeded requests. Maybe college athletes don’t want cash. Maybe they want four-year, irrevocable scholarships and lifetime health insurance for their injuries. Maybe they want the same right to profit from their image and endorsement deals that college-attending actors and musicians take for granted. Or maybe they really do want a salaried piece of the multibillion-dollar pie. Whatever the case, the important thing isn’t the particulars; it’s that athletes would have the ability to ask. And that matters. At their core — or at least at the for-show ersatz core that ensures ongoing tax-exempt educational status – college sports are supposed to be about more than wins and losses. They’re supposed to be about building and shaping character. Do we want a system that conditions our athletes to think like atomized short-timers, too cynical and defeated to care about anything but the scraps they can grift from a corrupt system? Or do we want sports to nurture independent thinkers, empowered individuals who also can work together for a common good?”

This thinking is running headlong into more traditional reformers, who continue their windmill-tilting about regaining some notion of the amateur ideal. But Douglas Lederman of Insider Higher Ed is skeptical these calls will be heeded, since they haven’t been before.

A few details of his reporting jump out — the possibility of something like class-action Title IX litigation that may prompt cutbacks in football that women’s sports advocates have wanted for years. One such veteran, former Women’s Sports Foundation head Donna Lopiano, tries making her long-standing claims about the “arms race” more startling than ever, believing this also might quell the cult of the coach that led to scandals at Penn State and Ohio State.

That’s unlikely, as are renewed desires to strip the NCAA of its tax exemption. But Lederman casts a very long-range scenario for possible change:

“And while it is often suggested that the most-visible and richest sports programs own all the power in the NCAA, the Ivy League, Division III and other nonscholarship programs have something on which the sports powerhouses arguably depend: the ability to cloak themselves in the ‘amateur’ mantle that the most competitive and commercialized football and basketball programs have increasing difficulty claiming.

“In a restructured college sports landscape in which the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.”

While Big East Commissioner John Marinatto reaches all the way to San Diego to keep his crumbling league together, Larry Scott, his Pac 12 counterpart, continues to make himself the most intriguing figure in college athletics.

After pulling off a record-setting Pac 12 television contract this spring, Scott is looking to the Far East to extend the conference’s footprint. But as Pete Thamel wrote in The New York Times Monday, Scott’s current visit to Beijing is just as much about academic and cultural exposure as it is about athletics:

“Pac-12 presidents and athletic directors say there is a strong desire for the results to transcend sports, hoping that an increased presence in China will lead to recruitment of future students and positive cultural experiences for their athletes who travel there.”

The goal is to have some Pac 12 games in sports like basketball and volleyball to be played in China in the next few years, and Scott also has hired a Nike marketing veteran with previous experience there.

This is all unprecedented and fascinating as Scott continues to turn heads with his novel ideas. With his background with the Women’s Tennis Association, Scott has brought a creative, forward-thinking approach to college athletics that is really refreshing.

But as Sports Business Daily indicated in a June profile of Scott, it’s his consensus style that has helped elevate the Pac 12’s profile in a hurry. Said Arizona State president Michael Crow:

“The conference in the past was what I’d call sleepy and procedural. He’s made it entrepreneurial and creative. It’s been a challenge, but he has us working as a group instead of individual universities. It’s a political process and he’s been very successful at it.”

What really struck me about Scott were his comments to The Oregonian last year that he wants to see if women’s sports can turn a profit someday:

“My dream would be for us to have two or three women’s sports that not only pay for themselves but be revenue-generators.”

Now, there are a lot of skeptics about this. I count myself in that group, and even he admits it’s a long-term goal at best. But what I like the most about Scott is that he’s willing to put these thoughts out there, publicly, unlike anyone I’ve heard in his position.

If nothing else, setting such a lofty goal might be just the thing to unlock some creative marketing and promotional possibilities for some women’s and even men’s non-revenue sports.

Whether Scott’s latest ideas will bear fruit remains to be seen. But contrast that with Marinatto, who was taken totally by surprise when Syracuse and Pittsburgh bolted for the Atlantic Coast Conference this fall. A glorious basketball conference is being shattered, primarily because the Big East didn’t have the proactive football chops to stay ahead of the curve. To be fair, Marinatto inherited a weak hand, and the league was made vulnerable after losing Virginia Tech, Boston College and Miami to the ACC in 2004.

If its Big East football move is officially formalized, San Diego State will shift 14 other sports to the Big West, giving athletes in those sports an entirely different experience.

This may become the unfortunate reality for many schools chasing down BCS affiliations and money and committing crimes against geography. It’s truly a shame, and while college realignment is nothing new, what’s happening now in some places is the result of a lack of foresight and creative thinking.

Unlike some of the usual suspects who decry the continued commercialization of college athletics (also not a new charge), Scott has to work pragmatically inside a system that typically doesn’t welcome new ideas.

I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.