MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES Midwest Research Institute Kansas City, Missouri

March 21, 1989

Joe McGuff Vice President and Editor, The Kansas City Star and Times

Are Big-Time College Athletics Damaging the Integrity of Our Educational System?

In the long ago, when I was a child, my favorite comedy team was Laurel and Hardy. Whenever a catastrophe of some sort had befallen them, Oliver Hardy would turn to Stan Laurel, his face a wonderful mix of anger, disdain, and resignation. Then he would say, “This is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Stanley.” I think many of us feel much as Oliver Hardy did when we see the things that are happening today in big-time college athletics. But, unfortunately, there is no Stanley to blame. We have a fine mess on our hands, but it was developed over many decades and is reflective of the society in which we live. I will not go into a long recitation of the developments that have taken place over the last two or three years, but as a point of reference, let’s consider what is happening in the Big 8, along with a few other situations. Three of the conference schools currently are on probation, one has just come off probation, and another is under investigation. Three members of the Colorado football team have been charged with rape, and seven others have been found guilty of charges ranging from assault to misdemeanor menacing. Three Oklahoma players have been charged with gang rape, one player shot another in the athletic dormitory, and Charles Thompson, the Oklahoma quarterback, has been charged with selling cocaine. Nebraska is being sued by a former faculty member who claims she was dismissed when she was too diligent in checking on the athletes’ grades and their attendance at class. Currently, we have a trial going on in Chicago involving two agents who signed up athletes before their eligibility had expired. These agents threatened to break these athletes’ legs if they tried to get out of their contracts. In the course of the trial we have learned that Ronnie Herman of Iowa played his senior year even though he didn’t meet the academic requirements for the Big 10. The summer before his senior season he took water coloring and elementary Spanish in an effort to bring his grades up. He withdrew from Spanish and got a “D” in water coloring. Early in Eric Dickerson’s career in the NFL, he had this to say about illegal payments: “Since I’ve been in the NFL, I’ve talked with other guys. Some of them had contracts – they got $2000 a month transportation and as many tickets as they wanted. College football is a business. There’s a lot of underhanded stuff going on.” As he was ending his basketball coaching career at Washington, Marv Harshman said, “Now the bottom line is money. Everybody needs money to run their programs. It’s simple. The more you win, the more people turn out, and the more

© MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 1 © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 2 money you make so you can finance those other programs that don’t make money.” When Willis Reed resigned as basketball coach at Creighton, he said, “If you’re going to stay in the college basketball business and be successful, you have to do some things I can’t do and won’t do.” What I propose to do today is take a look at how we have gotten into this mess and offer a way out. Cheating is as old as society itself. Things fell apart in the Garden of Eden when Eve persuaded Adam that they could get ahead in the world if they did a little cheating on God. Not only did Adam and Eve get booted out of Eden, but if the truth be known, the apple probably had Alar on it. From that time on, it’s been all downhill for the human race. If you think cheating is something new in college athletics, let me quickly disabuse you of that notion. Return with me, if you will, to the wonderful year of 1905. John F. McLean was the head coach at Missouri. New bleachers had been built at Rollins Field after a fund-raising drive that had netted $175. The Tigers won their first five games that season and then lost their last four. When the season was over, Coach McLean was fired for having used a fullback who was paid money illegally. I’m not sure about the significance of this, but after his dismissal, McLean went into the banking business. Although cheating has always been with us in college athletics, it remained at a tolerable level for many years. For example, in the forties and fifties some gamblers were trying to fix college games in Madison Square Garden, which was a big concern. The NCAA was such a low- level operation that it was administered on a part-time basis out of a Big 10 office in Chicago. When Walter Byers became the executive director of the NCAA and established an office in Kansas City in 1952, there were exactly four people in that office – Walter, Wayne Duke, and a secretary. Walter was his own first enforcement officer. Later on, a man named Art Bergstrom took over those duties and did it all by himself. With the coming of television, college athletics gradually changed from a small business to a big business. Larger stadiums were built, bowl games were added, schedules were extended, television revenues steadily increased. As the financial stakes grew, so did the pressure to cheat. Coaches realized they were much more likely to be fired for losing than they were for cheating. This is not to say that every school that plays big-time athletics cheats. There are many clean programs, but from what we are seeing today, it is evident that a disconcerting number of schools not only cheat, but have lax standards for the conduct of their athletes. As cheating has increased, the size of the NCAA rule book has grown, the size of its enforcement staff has grown, and the penalties have become harsher. The violations at Southern Methodist became so flagrant that it drew the so-called death penalty and its football team had to sit out two years. As an indication of just how big the business of college sports has become, the University of Michigan athletic budget for the last year was approximately $20 million. College presidents have become sufficiently alarmed that they are taking a more active role in the NCAA. They have commissioned a $1.75 million study about the proper role of college athletics in higher education. I was asked to appear at the NCAA convention last January and offer an analysis of this study. I pointed out to the delegates that different people will place different interpretations on this information. Martin Maassingale, the chancellor of the University of Nebraska, said it is reassuring to find that athletes are so near students in the survey and in the student body. Chuck Ninas, © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 3 director for the College Football Association, said the image of college athletics has not caught up with the progress it has made, and added, “I would like to believe the findings of the NCAA study confirm that point.” Bob Verdi, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, took a different view. He wrote that it is mind-boggling that the NCAA is spending $1.75 million on this study and observed, “One would think the NCAA has been around too long to be so naive, but we should never underestimate the ability of this organization to out-dumb itself.” Unlike Bob, I do see some merit in the study. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, but if the presidents are going to take a more active role in making policy decisions, they have to have some facts on which to base their actions. I can see this study as a starting point, but it could also be a dead end if the presidents choose to look at all the favorable points and say, “My! See how good things are.” I told the delegates in San Francisco that the study substantiated what I already believed. To wit, that the young men who play big-time football and basketball are athlete students not student athletes. I also said that the concept, of big-time football and basketball as amateur sports is pure fiction. Let me sum up my view of the findings in the first phase of what will be a fairly lengthy study. There are more reports to follow. The study shows that, in season, football and basketball players spend 30 hours a week on their sports. They spend 13.7 hours in the classroom and 11.6 hours preparing for class; thus they spend a total of 4.7 hours less time in class than they spend on sports. Even out of season they spend more time on their sports than they do in class: 17.9 hours compared to 14.4 hours. According to the study, student athletes miss about two classes a week when their sports are in season, while students participating in other campus extracurricular activities miss 1.2 hours. The study shows that football and basketball players score lower on ACT and SAT tests and have lower high school grade point averages than do athletes involved in other sports and those taking part in other activities. Football and basketball players in big-time programs are more likely to have academic problems than students involved in other sports. Summer sessions are attended by 42.8 percent of them as compared to 27.9 percent in the smaller programs. Forty-one percent of the athletes have repeated one or more courses, 34 percent have been on academic probation, and 23.5 percent have received an incomplete at least once. Twenty-two percent of football and basketball players feel it is hard to keep up with course- work, as opposed to 8 percent of students involved in other extracurricular activities. About 12 percent of football and basketball players and 14 percent in big-time programs had personal problems. In other sports, it was 4 percent; and for the extracurricular students, 7 percent. Twenty-five percent of the injured football and basketball players said they felt intense pressure to ignore their injuries. Student athletes who live in student housing with other athletes feel a greater sense of isolation than do those who live in housing with other kinds of students. Student athletes, on the average, have less spending money than do students involved in other extracurricular activities. Although there are some encouraging findings in this study, the picture that emerges is largely one of the big-time football or basketball player who is less gifted academically, who comes from poorer circumstances, devotes more time to sports than academic pursuits, has substantially more academic problems, and more problems living up to his academic potential. They feel isolated; they have more mental, physical, and personal problems; and on the whole, © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 4 we can see that they are a group set apart. In a college or a university, everything should be subordinated to education, but I don’t think anyone can look at the facts in this study and say that this is so. How have we gotten into the mess that we are in? First, the public has to accept much of the blame. That’s you and me. We are the Stan Laurels of this scenario. We over-emphasize sports in our society and under-emphasize education. We are not satisfied to have good competitive athletics. We want to win, and our egos are so caught up in the performance of our teams that we often place winning ahead of ethics. If Barry Switzer is fired at Oklahoma, it won’t be because his players are out of control in the dormitory. It will be because he doesn’t win. Because the pressure to win is so intense and the financial stakes are so high, the colleges that play big-time football and basketball find themselves in the professional athletic business. I know that saying this makes some people in the college athletic community indignant, but I think there is a simple definition of what constitutes professional. It is someone who accepts something of value to perform a service for an organization and, in turn, that organization profits from those services. A blue chip college athlete receives room, board, books, and tuition to play football or basketball. This could be worth from $4,000-$5,000 a year or $17,000-$18,000 a year depending on the school. Of course, if this athlete happens to be Hart Lee Dykes, there’s a lot more money to be made. The commercialization of big-time college athletics is reflected in the fact that over the last 20 years, schedules have been extended, post-season games have been added, and television income has grown. Television dictates starting times. Greater demands are being placed on athletes and coaches, and some schools now want to add a 12th game in football because they say they are running in the red. This brings us to the second reason that college athletics are in a mess. At the big-time level, the colleges are trying to administer what are essentially professional programs with amateur rules. History shows us that once the financial stakes reach a certain level, it is impossible to maintain an amateur operation. Tennis had a so-called amateur operation for many years, but everybody knew that the players were being paid under the table. That subterfuge was finally abandoned. The Olympics were once proclaimed an amateur event. Avery Brundage, who ran the Olympics for many years, fussed and fumed and fought about amateurism, but now we see that, in essence, in skiing, in track and field, in hockey, and in many other sports, athletes are openly paid. Now they’re talking about the possibility of the NBA players being allowed to play in the Olympics in the not-too-distant future. The veneer of amateurism in the Olympics is disappearing. Trying to administer big-time college football and basketball with amateur rules has become so unwieldy that we have situations where rules that have been enacted to curb one abuse have led to ridiculous situations. As an example, we have the case of the Alabama football team. An Alabama player named Willie Riles died in practice in August of 1986. Alabama had just played in the Kick Off Classic in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and was originally routed home to Tuscaloosa through Birmingham. Following the player’s death, the team was rerouted to Columbus, Georgia, to attend the funeral. A week later, the possibility of a violation came to light. The NCAA has a rule dealing with extra benefits that states, “Transportation to a funeral is © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 5 not one of the permissible expenses” an institution could provide to a student athlete. Fortunately, sanity prevailed, and Alabama was not penalized, but technically, it was a violation. At Indiana we had the case of a star basketball player, Steve Alferd, who posed for a sorority charity calendar and violated an NCAA rule. He was let off fairly easily and had to miss only one game. Tracy Graham, of North Scott High School in Elridge, Iowa, was recruited to play at Iowa State. She was an honor student and her ACT score was nearly double the NCAA’s required minimum, but she was declared ineligible for her freshman year because she was competing in a track meet and did not take the test on the NCAA-approved testing day. The NCAA eventually reversed itself, but by the time it did, she had missed her year of freshman competition. The thing about these rules that we need to understand is that a certain problem exists, and the NCAA – which is simply a group of colleges, not a group of officials who make up rules – enacts a rule to curb the problem. Is there a solution to the problems we see in college athletics? The answer is Yes and No. Yes, if the colleges are willing to accept the reality of being in the professional athletics business and to restructure the rules to fit that reality. No, if they continue to run their ever-growing business behind a facade of amateurism. There is nothing illegal or immoral about the colleges being in the professional athletics business. If this is what they want to do, and if this is what the public wants, then they should accept the reality of the situation, pay the players, and get on with it. If they don’t want to be in the professional athletics business, then there is an alternative approach that does not require the total dismantling of the structure that is now in place. The alternative approach would be: Give scholarships on the basis of need only. Place strict limits on the number of scholarships that are given. Curtail schedules. Require athletes to spend more time in the classroom than they do on sports. Reduce the profit motive by distributing the money from television and post-season play on an NCAA-wide basis. Change will come only if there is a public demand for it. Unfortunately, the packed stadiums and arenas and the growing amount of TV money indicate that the public is supportive of the system that is now in place. And now, as I understand it, if you have any questions or comments, we’ll spend the rest of the time on the issues you want to discuss.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS QUESTION: I have a question about your solution to the problem of universities. Would paying athletes and having a professional program eliminate, in all ways, their going to class? ANSWER: I think that’s something the colleges would have to decide. One way you could eliminate all the violations that are taking place now is to eliminate the rules. Let’s face it, these rules are not enacted by governments or anything, they’re enacted by the colleges themselves under the banner of the NCAA. If you have no rules, in other words, if you don’t have to go to class, you can’t violate any rules. If you can pay players whatever you want to pay them, there aren’t going to be any violations there. © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 6

I’ve seen a lot of different suggestions. One idea is to give some sort of a certificate or a degree in football or basketball, whatever these players are playing, and encourage them to come to certain classes, such as finance, public relations, or anything else they might use in their careers. This idea could keep them from being involved with some of these unsavory agents that we’re seeing. I think there are several ways to go about it. But clearly, it is unrealistic to keep asking these athletes to play and not pay them anything. That is just not going to work. That’s why they get paid under the table, just as the tennis players did, and the skiers in the Olympics before that. The colleges are making an awful lot of money out of this. The athletes are going to go into careers where they’re going to make a lot of money. You take some kid, especially one who has come out of the ghetto and doesn’t have any money. If somebody comes into the room and says, “Here’s $10,000 if you’ll come to our school,” how am I going to turn that down? It’s not realistic. There is no easy, clear-cut answer, but I think rules can be restructured. They don’t have to be as radical as the one example I gave, perhaps, but they have to move in that direction. QUESTION: What happens to colleges with baseball teams? ANSWER: Well, because baseball is not a big-money sport, nobody wants to televise it. You can’t draw many people for it. See, all these things follow money. All you have to do is look for the problems in our society, in the commodities business, in the brokerage business, in the savings and loan business. Wherever there is a lot of money available, problems follow. Where the big money is available right now in college athletics is in football and basketball. They draw the big television contracts. They have the big post-season tournaments. But baseball doesn’t draw many people except maybe for the World Series or the College World Series in Omaha. There is virtually no television except for the College World Series, but that’s not big-money television. I think the important part to understand is that in the early days of college football and basketball, when the money was not as great, there were not many violations. There were always coaches who cheated, and there were always players who cheated, but they weren’t nearly as flagrant. As the money has grown, the problems have grown apace. COMMENT: I’ve certainly enjoyed your advice that we recognize the professionalization of college sports. I think it would blow a breath of fresh air throughout the entire situation and dismiss us from the hypocrisy that exists today. I would like to augment your recommendation, if I may. Perhaps we could continue to recruit college players from high school ranks, offer them a four-year contract, adjusted annually on individual and team performance, and give them as much education as they are willing to accept. But they would be university employees, or in the case of state universities, civil service employees, with no more rights to a degree than the grounds keepers. Then the colleges would continue to receive their desperately needed income, the NFL would get their draftees, and football and basketball players would have the satisfaction of earning honest incomes. ANSWER: And there would be no rules to violate under the terms you describe. As I say, there are quite a few different ways to approach it, and I think that is certainly one valid way to look at the situation. I would have no quarrel with that. The whole thing comes down to being honest, not being hypocritical, and accepting the reality of what you are doing. Once you do that, © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 7 then you can begin to design a program that works with this reality. What we’re doing right now is trying to design a program that is out of touch with reality. QUESTION: Are there any studies that show what percentage of the profit goes back into education programs, and what part of it goes back into the athletic departments? ANSWER: In most schools, say the ones in this area, none of it to my knowledge goes back into education. It goes back into funding minor sports that are costly. This is how you support the entire athletics program. I’ve forgotten the exact number of sports you have to participate in to be in Division I, but anyway, most of the minor sports are money losers. How you support them and the whole athletic establishment is through the money that basketball and football earn. There may be schools where the money goes back into education, but I am unaware of them. QUESTION: In view of your comments that so many countries around the world do not have the education restrictions that we do, what is your personal opinion on developing a contest between countries whose best athletes compete regardless of where they’re from ? ANSWER: I think we’re clearly moving in that direction and there’s just no way to avoid it. What we’ve got is so many disparate systems. For example, in the Communist countries, these people are singled out very early in life. They’ve got two or three hockey teams that are probably the best in the world. But all these people do is play hockey. They are professionals because that’s how they earn their living. They may be part of the Red Army, or they may be part of some worker cooperative or something, but basically, what they do for a living is play hockey, so they’re professionals. The same is true in many, many other sports. Where the thing really started to break down was in skiing and figure skating. All the skiers were being paid, and they had these lucrative contracts to endorse skis, equipment, and ski wax. There was simply no way to prevent it. Of course, now we’re aware of all the big money that the track and field athletes are making. Carl Lewis will probably take in several million dollars this year, but theoretically, he competes as an amateur in the Olympics. I think what we’re seeing in the Olympics, as we have in every other big-money sport, is that the best athletes in the world will compete. Sure, in an ideal world, everybody would compete for the pure enjoyment of competing and we would take our athletes who did it that way, and the Soviet athletes likewise. But the reality is, that’s not the way it is. Sports are a big-money business. The Russians derive a lot of income from athletics, and they also use it for propaganda purposes. So what we would like to see and what we really have are two different things. QUESTION: Would you accept washed-up NFL and NBA players on professional college teams? ANSWER: That’s yet another question that the colleges have to resolve for themselves. I suspect that they would not want these players coming back after they had played four or five years because, let’s face it, they would be 30 years old. You’re dealing with young people who are 18 and 19 years old. It would not seem to be a particularly desirable situation, but those would be rules that the schools would have to work out. COMMENT: One might conclude from your presentation that money is the root of all evil. There are factors other than money that induce some college presidents to get involved in this, such as recruitment and alumni associations. I know at Boston College when Doug Flutie was there, he personally was credited with doubling the applications to Boston college over a © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 8 three-year period. We also need to heed the cynicism that the treatment of big-time college athletes can produce in our young people. I think that is something we cannot afford to do. If we go with the approach you’re suggesting, we should tax the income that non-profit organizations receive, because it has nothing to do with their educational purpose. That’s not what tax-exempt status is for. If it’s strictly a money-making activity, it should be taxed.. I am very proud of our program at Rockhurst to produce the scholar athlete. We are plugging NIAA, which is the alternative to the NCAA, or even the NCAA Division II. So, there are alternatives other than the one you suggest. ANSWER: I think that’s true. What we continue to see are two distinct levels in all this. As you get into the level away from the big-time sports that are so dependent on television and post-season competition for all the big money, then you have a large number of smaller schools that have very sane, wonderful programs that work well. So I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m lumping everybody together. I’m not. The problem comes with those that play at the big-time level and are realizing big income from this and have to go out and recruit aggressively. As you point out, not only does the university profit financially by doing so, but it brings great attention to it. It’s hard to tell what Georgetown has realized out of the basketball program that John Thompson has there. Before they became so good at basketball, I doubt that a lot of people in the country had heard of Georgetown. Now Georgetown is a name that almost everybody recognizes, and the university has obviously reaped great benefits from this. You touched on another point that I think is awfully important. That is the cynicism that develops among young people who go to universities and see these athletes who don’t go to class, who are failing in class, and yet, somehow or another, they keep being eligible year after year after year to play football and basketball. These other young people are subjected to rules. If they don’t go to class and if they don’t make their grades, then they fail and they can be kicked out of school. Take a look at the courses these athletes are taking, the grades they’re making, and the fact that they have no core curriculum. Often they’re taking absurd subjects. The other kids see this going on. What kind of a message is this behavior sending to them when the people in universities, who are supposed to be establishing the morals and ethics for our young people, are allowing this to happen. The college presidents, because they have set up this presidents’ commission, are looking at this issue and are becoming concerned. To me, this is as much of a problem as anything else; the message that we’re sending to young people, that there are two sets of rules out there. One for the athletes who are making money for the university, another set for the rest of us. That’s just not a healthy situation in college. But, there are a lot of fine programs, a lot of fine schools, and once you get away from the big-money aspect, it is possible to have very sane programs. QUESTION: Barry Switzer has made comments that he can’t know everything that’s going on in the classroom. Is there any kind of pressure being exerted to give the head coaches more responsibility in this area? ANSWER: I think if the coaches are to be more accountable, it has to come from the university president. But you also have to understand that many of these presidents are under great pressure. If you’re the president of the University of Oklahoma and you feel that Barry Switzer is not doing an adequate job, but his team is winning, and you try to fire him, you’ll be © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 9 gone long before Barry Switzer will. How would you have liked to challenge Bear Bryant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama? He was untouchable. So, the college presidents often find their hands tied; it becomes very, very difficult. The coaches probably know just about as much as they want to know. There are some that want to know a lot. Joe Paterno is one of them. Certainly, through the years, Notre Dame has run a very clean program. There are a lot of other examples out there, but there are also a lot of schools where winning comes first. This is what the alumni want, and the people who run the university are not going to be there very long if they are not responsive to the alumni, especially to the alumni who are big contributors. QUESTION: Will this study indicate the percentage of varsity athletes who actually get their degrees? ANSWER: No, they’re doing this thing in stages, and this was the first stage of this survey. I assume this will come up in others. But, believe me, the figure is not going to be very good. It gets harder and harder to get information out of the schools that have bad records, and there are a lot of the records that we know about in the Big 8 that aren’t very good. QUESTION: Colleges are not likely to move very expeditiously towards the sort of scenario you proposed. During the interim, who would have to take more action in order to maintain the kind of rules that most everybody would consider reasonable. Who would have to take what action? ANSWER: I think the action that you would have to take would be like any other movement where you are trying to influence the people in the state legislature, educators, or whomever. You’ve got to make your presence felt. I think there are two places to start with. One is with the state legislature and state-controlled schools because that’s where a lot of the money comes from. Certainly with the college presidents. With private institutions, I think you need to deal with the people who are in charge of the alumni association. Certainly the people who are willing to do anything to have a winning program always make their feelings felt. I think so often the rest of us are a sort of silent majority who sit out here and watch this and do nothing about it. Unless we make our feelings known, it’s just going to go right on like it is because the other side is always going to be very vocal. QUESTION: Will any studies be made of the effect on the athletes themselves? You read about these people who are encouraged to take steroids and to devote their lives to slam-dunking instead of academics. ANSWER: As far as the steroids are concerned, I don’t think we have any idea yet how much damage they are doing because this, in most cases, is a long-term effect. It would seem to me that it’s probably going to be over a 20-year span. It’s a little bit like the early days of cigarette smoking. Nobody realized quite the damage that this was going to do. I think with steroids it’s going to be a while yet before we see exactly what they have done to our young people. You talk about scandals out there today. This is one of them because it’s so prevalent in high school. We did a story about six months ago on how prevalent the use of steroids is among high school athletes. They understand that people in college do it, the Olympic athletes do it, and young boys want to look good. They want this muscular build, and their coaches kind of turn their heads the other direction and let them do it. The effects, long-term, are going to be © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 10 devastating. As far as a study of college athletes and where they have gone in latter years, to the best of my knowledge, one has not been done. I don’t know whether it’s part of the study the college president’s are doing or not. COMMENT: It seems to me that we didn’t have the professional sports when you and I were younger. College was the place where the great athletics went. Baseball was just about the only professional sport. Then as we got the other sports, there seemed to be an attitude about these people that they have lower standards. Then that kind of passed on into the collegiate sports. Now we’ve got the high school athlete who has both role models. Somewhere you’ve got to call a halt to this and get back to a half-way decent kind of morality and honesty. I don’t see how the people running the colleges and universities can take the stand, that they have to have the money so badly that they can let the morality of the sporting world deteriorate to this level. ANSWER: As I said earlier, society has changed. Going into 1950, baseball was the only major league sport in this country. Basketball was just coming out of its barnstorming days into professional basketball. Professional football was beginning to gain in popularity, but it was not a big-money sport. For most athletes, when you finished in college, that was the end of it unless you were a baseball player. There were a few programs like the AAU League and the Phillips Sixty-Sixers, but not many people overall went into that. Now, we’ve got a whole structure built around the colleges as a training ground for professional sports. What we see now in this trial going on in Chicago is that the Mafia has come into it with the agents, and they’re lumping the athletes and the entertainers together. The Mafia people have forced the entertainers to stay with certain agents. The agents have used the Mafia people to threaten the athletes with, “If you leave me, you’ll get your legs broken and that will be the end of your career.” So, it all gets tied together. But the fact is there’s so much money out there. The athlete right now is commanding huge sums of money. As a great football or great basketball player, you can come out of college and go into the NBA and, if you’re a true superstar, make millions of dollars. We’re back again to the fact that money is the contaminating effect in all this. QUESTION: Don’t you think there’s something else we have to think about? There are only so many jobs in professional football or professional basketball. Most kids won’t make it. ANSWER: I agree, that is the reality. The percentages say that very few athletes are able to go ahead and play at the major league level in football and basketball. On the other hand, right now we’re still having an awfully lot of athletes who come out of school without an education. You’ve read about these two kids in Iowa who were taking billiards and all sorts of other things while they were there. Some of these athletes are not getting much of an education right now in a lot of places. I don’t know how much more damaging the system of recognizing professionalism would be. The system we have now is not working in many instances. There are schools out there that are forcing kids to take a core curriculum and making sure they go to class, and that their grade-point averages are all right. We mentioned Penn State. That’s one. I think Notre Dame is another. Even though there are quite a few out there, we have an awful lot that are more interested in winning than they are in anything else. I don’t really think that the damages that would be wrought by recognition of professionalism would be much worse than the damages we have today. © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 11

QUESTION: If the college presidents, by some happy circumstance or great fortune, were all to agree that they would not permit their games to be televised, then at least we’d eliminate this drama that has grown up since television. Would they still be corrupted by wealthy alumni? ANSWER: I think you’ll always have some of that, but it just won’t be as big a problem as it is today. As for television, well, let’s take the Ivy League for example. They do allow television, but they don’t permit their teams to take part in post-season games. The Ivy League is not pure either. You can go around and talk to people who are in the college athletics business and they can tell you some things about Ivy League schools, but, on the whole, they do require their kids to go to class; classroom takes precedence over sports. If you’ve got a practice that conflicts with a class, you’re going to go to class. They don’t take part in post-season competition, so the pressure is minimized and they don’t very often get on television to realize big money out of it. So they have far fewer problems than other schools. I think there would be a couple of steps you could take. One, spread the television money out. Look how much money you take home from a bowl game or from a telecast or from the NCAA if you get to the Final Four. There is big, big money involved in all this. But if this money has to be spread out among all the schools in the NCAA, that really lessens the incentive to cheat. They tried that with the so-called Robin Hood Rule, and the big schools voted that down in a hurry. QUESTION: Ethically speaking, there’s something very disturbing to me about the idea that a great big university devoted primarily to learning and knowledge should have a team of professional gladiators paid just to promote a state. Don’t you find it ethically disturbing. ANSWER: Yes, I agree with you, but the reality is that’s the situation we’ve got today. It doesn’t seem to me that this should be part of higher education. But, unfortunately, over the years, we’ve gotten ourselves into this predicament and now it’s hard to find a way out. QUESTION: Don’t you think the real answer lies in what the president of Rockhurst said in his comment, that moral indignation on the part of the public in not adopting this cynical attitude of “let’s pay the athletes,” because who is going to police them? How much are they going to pay? Somebody’s going to be paying under the table.. So, let’s stop it now. Isn’t that the best answer? ANSWER: I think we’ll get something done if there’s enough moral indignation; that is, if people are saying they don’t want our schools to be in the professional athletic business, let’s change it. But until there is a lot of public indignation, we’re going to go along with the system we have in place. There’s a big structure in place and there’s a lot of money involved. It’s going to take a lot of moral indignation to get this changed, but I agree with you. QUESTION: A place to start is with the alumni, because a winning basketball team brings in money from the alumni. I think if we, as alumni of universities, make it perfectly clear that we want an educational institution, not a professional athletics institution, that would be the place to start. ANSWER: I think if the college presidents had a mandate and they could go to the board of curators, to the state legislature, and to other people and say, “Look, we’ve got all these letters from these people who are contributors to our university, and they say if we keep doing this this © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 12 way, they’re not going to give any money any more,” I think that would have a profound effect. Absolutely. Nearly all the Big 10 and certainly all the Big 8 schools finance their athletic department totally from ticket sales and contributions to the department. Those contributions to the educational side grew out of the fact that the university wanted to tell the taxpayers and the legislature that it wasn’t spending any tax dollars to support the athletic program. That’s created a kind of a monster in the sense that the athletic director and the coaches have their own empire with a great big checking account. But it also has kept these two things separate. Have they made a mistake in creating the athletic department as a separate entity? Would reversing that improve the situation? The SMU experience would tend to indicate that it doesn’t make any difference. Does your study say anything about that, or do you have an opinion? The study, at least as far as it has gone, does not say anything about it. My personal feeling is, it would be much better if it were a part of the university as a whole. What sense does it make to have the athletic department separate any more than it does to say to the English department or the chemistry department, “Hey, go out and raise some money for us.” There are reasons why these things have happened. But I think now that we’ve seen the evil of this system, it would be much better if it were under the total control of the university administration. As you have pointed out so well, a lot of the problem now has been that the athletic department has gone its own way. © MRI, 2000 Joe McGuff, March 21, 1989 Page 13

JOE MCGUFF, the well-read columnist, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended Marquette University. He came to work for The Kansas City Star as a sportswriter in 1948, and was named Sports Editor of The Kansas City Times in 1966. In 1986 he became Editor and Vice President of the Kansas City Star and Times. During his career Joe was one of America’s most honored sportswriters. He was president of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 1965 and president of the Associated Press Sports Editors in 1976. He was named six times by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association as “the best sportswriter in Missouri.” In July of 1985, he received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 1986 Joe received the Roy M. Yates Medallion for Distinguished Service to the Community and Nation. Also in 1986, the Kansas City Press Club named him Kansas Citian of the Year. Along with Star Company publisher James Hale, Joe was honored by the Sons of the American Revolution in 1987 for improving the newspapers and making them a dynamic force for community betterment.

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MIDCONTINENT PERSPECTIVES was a lecture series sponsored by the Midwest Research Institute as a public service to the midcontinent region. Its purpose was to present new viewpoints on economic, political, social, and scientific issues that affect the Midwest and the nation. Midcontinent Perspectives was financed by the Kimball Fund, named for Charles N. Kimball, President of MRI from 1950 to 1975, Chairman of its Board of Trustees from 1975 to 1979, and President Emeritus until his death in 1994. Initiated in 1970, the Fund has been supported by annual contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Today it is the primary source of endowment income for MRI. It provides “front-end” money to start high- quality projects that might generate future research contracts of importance. It also funds public- interest projects focusing on civic or regional matters of interest. Initiated in 1974 and continuing until 1994, the sessions of the Midcontinent Perspectives were arranged and convened by Dr. Kimball at four- to six-week intervals. Attendance was by invitation, and the audience consisted of leaders in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The lectures, in monograph form, were later distributed to several thousand individuals and institutions throughout the country who were interested in MRI and in the topics addressed. The Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Kansas City, in cooperation with MRI, has reissued the Midcontinent Perspectives Lectures in electronic format in order to make the valuable information which they contain newly accessible and to honor the creator of the series, Dr. Charles N. Kimball.