Thursday, August 18, 2011

College Sports Have Nothing To Do With Amateurism



Michael Rosenberg writes about the rules violations at Miami:
Nevin Shapiro basically paid for an eight-year party for anybody who was anybody in the Miami football program. Read the excellent Yahoo! Sports report and it's obvious. Nobody stopped Shapiro. Evidently, nobody tried, despite obvious signs that something was amiss. Cash payments, alcohol, strippers, hookers -- no wonder the Hurricanes haven't won much lately. They're exhausted.

The violations are so over-the-top, so blatant and widespread, that by the time you're done reading about them, you may reach the same conclusion I did: The people at Miami didn't care about the rules.

I don't mean they didn't care about right and wrong. I mean, that it didn't seem like a matter of right and wrong. I would bet that most of the players didn't think they were cheating. Oh, they might have known what they were doing was against the rules. But did they ever think Miami was getting some kind of competitive advantage? Did they think it was wrong? I doubt it.

And if people don't care about the rules, how do you stop them from breaking the rules. Should you even try? Most of the Miami violations fall under the NCAA rules about "extra benefits." The principle is that athletes should not get benefits that are not available to other students. 
But what if the NCAA flipped that around? What if the NCAA decided that if regular students can take free drinks and meals without anybody caring, athletes should be allowed to do that too? 
The current cycle is absurd and pointless: Athletes take what they can get. Schools ignore it. Unless an excellent reporter like Charles Robinson of Yahoo! looks into it, or a booster gets in legal trouble (as Shapiro did), nothing happens.

I won't say everybody cheats. I don't believe that. A lot of people have a fundamental inclination to follow rules, either out of guilt or a fear of getting caught.
But college sports, at their core, have nothing to do with amateurism.
Read the rest.

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