The NCAA, Unmasked
Two items in today’s New York Times put the NCAA’s de facto raison d’etre in stark relief:
Item 1: The NCAA chides Oklahoma for inadequately policing its football players’ off-field activities, thereby enabling two of them to - WARNING: MOVE ANY YOUNG CHILDREN AWAY FROM YOUR SCREEN BEFORE READING ON
- earn money. Yes, the starting QB and an offensive lineman stand guilty of “taking excess pay” from an auto dealership where they were employed during the summer of 2005. Between the two players, they wrongly accepted some $15 thousand in compensation. The horror… the horror…
Item 2: The University of Wisconsin has signed football coach Bret Bielema to a 5-year, $7.5 million contract. The report notes that his average annual compensation of $1.5 million will only put him in the middle ranks of Big Ten football coaches.
So coaching an extracirricular activity justifies a seven-figure pay packet and, in most cases, making the coach the highest-paid person on campus (or as is often the case with state schools, the highest-paid public employee in the state). But should one of the coach’s players -the people that students, alumni and fans actually pay to watch play - seek to capitalize on his popularity to pick up a little beer money over the summer (in the Oklahoma case, amounts that equate, after-tax, to about $100 bucks per week), this offense justifies expulsion, and banishment to a Division I-AA school.
If indeed there exist an infinite number of universes, then one must exist in which this arrangement is morally justifiable. But I’m pretty sure this one isn’t it.