The scandal involving USC and UCLA football players and an Oxnard-based sports agent highlights a poignant irony--many would say hypocrisy--arising from the cutthroat enterprise that has become big time college athletics.
Three USC players and one from UCLA have been suspended from their teams amid allegations that they accepted cash and other inducements from the agent--transactions that would clearly be in violation of National Collegiate Athletic Assn. rules. These rules, which restrict athletes' employment opportunities and the value of gifts they can receive from non-family members, have always been enacted and defended, of course, in the name of preserving amateurism--a most worthwhile goal.
However, the irony--or hypocrisy--revealed by this latest scandal stems from the fact that, while the NCAA is understandably outraged by the exploitative tactics of unscrupulous sports agents, its amateurism-preserving rules belie the lucrative, high-stakes realities of big-time college sports.
Indeed, the onus appears to be squarely on the NCAA and its members to show how their high-powered sports programs--typically men's football and basketball--are themselves not exploiting student-athletes under the pretense of amateurism. The stakes have become obscenely high: We no longer talk about high-profile men's football and basketball programs in terms of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, but in terms of billions.
While genuine amateurism does indeed continue to thrive in many quarters of intercollegiate athletics, including in many NCAA sports, it is virtually extinct in those major college sports we so frequently watch on TV. Consider:
* The NCAA agrees to a billion-dollar pact with CBS for broadcast rights to its basketball tournament.
* Universities like Notre Dame sign billion-dollar contracts with NBC to air their football games.
* Universities, including USC, Michigan, Duke and Florida State, in exchange for millions of dollars and free uniforms, force their players to become unpaid models for Nike.
* Coaches sign six- or seven-figure contracts with sporting-apparel companies and force their players to become running billboards.
* Universities pay coaches two to 10 times more than the highest-paid distinguished professor at their particular institutions and then proceed to defend those salaries in the name of free-market enterprise.
