Sports, scandals and athlete-students

News headlines over the past week have been strewn with claims from Sports Illustrated writers George Dohrmann and Thayer Evans that Oklahoma State University must join the ranks as yet another university to go rogue, reportedly paying their student athletes, turning a blind eye to star players’ drug use and committing academic fraud all in the name of becoming a dominant college football program.

The script is the same, besides a few name changes. Instead of Pete Carroll, Joe Paterno or Urban Meyer playing the starring role, former Oklahoma State head football coach Les Miles and current head coach Mike Gundy (famous for his “I’m a man, I’m 40” rant) have had their names and football program stained with reports of an immense, decade-long disembowelment of NCAA rules. From cheating on tests to handing out cash payments to players and even having recruits seduced by student employees, Miles and Gundy’s program has come under fire for a university-wide scheme to turn the downtrodden Cowboys of Stillwater into a national football powerhouse.

The story has been tweaked but it’s core tenets are not new to the college athletics landscape.

Any rational person knows that academic fraud and under-the-table payments are part of today’s college sports. The multi-billion dollar monopoly that is the NCAA has grown so large that the rules and bylaws it upholds are next to impossible to police, leaving its member institutions responsible for maintaining some sort of integrity when faced with the allure of millions of dollars in revenue for the school. Most athletic departments do stay under control, but a select few have found the pursuit of college football supremacy too much to pass down and have turned a blind eye to the influx of shady boosters throwing Benjamins around in their locker rooms.

The nature of college athletics has dramatically changed, and the NCAA is struggling to adapt. At one point, it was hard enough for the NCAA to allow girls to play, and now it seems it is even harder for the organization to justify the structure of college sports in general.

There is nothing amateur about the NCAA, though, especially not with its ever-changing conference realignment, which makes it suitable for San Diego State University and Boise State University to be playing in the Big East Conference and the Big 12 to have ten teams. As revenues have climbed into the billions, it has become increasingly more difficult to defend the “they’re just amateurs” argument. Surely there was a time when the game on the field was truly a competition between opposing student-athletes—but not anymore. The NCAA is a minor league for the NFL and NBA in which athlete-students are exploited for their talents with no compensation. Tuition, room and board and apparel are provided for scholarship athletes, but these are simply expenses that are incurred by the universities. Compared to the immense revenues generated by the schools from television contracts and jersey sales, it is meager compensation that is conditional for performing as a university employee.

Hence the reason I’m sick of hearing about what university “scandal” the NCAA is set to investigate, because—last time I checked—nothing has changed. Even after a number of major institutions such as the University of Southern California and Ohio State had fallen under fire for their discriminate actions regarding their athletes, Oklahoma State still gave cash to its players. The NCAA’s “give them a postseason ban and that’ll teach them” approach obviously does not discourage much, so let’s not kid ourselves any longer—there is no integrity to uphold while NCAA President Mark Emmert’s wallet is being stuffed at the expense of student-athletes.

Mark Schreiber is a Trinity freshman. His column runs every other Friday. Send Mark a message on Twitter @MarkSchreib.