I know he’s got a long way to go, but I’m willing to bet right now that cooperating with the NCAA will go down as the dumbest thing A.J. Green ever does his entire life. And whichever compliance genius in Athens advised that course of action ought to be unceremoniously shown the door.
In case you can’t tell, I’m still not over that damned suspension.
Filed under The NCAA
Mercifully, it’s a Tebow-free buffet.
This sort of dropped in the hopper out of the blue today.
Slive: If issues like cost of attendance don't occur "it may be appropriate to talk about some alterantive or division." Not his desire.—
Jon Solomon (@jonsol) April 29, 2013
Sounds like somebody’s growing tired of the NCAA sitting on its hands about player compensation. If Emmert can’t address the problem, is Slive ready to find somebody else who would? Stay tuned.
Filed under The NCAA
Hey, last night amidst all the excitement over the NFL draft, the NCAA’s chief legal officer saw fit to weigh in on the O’Bannon case.
“Instead, the plaintiffs take out of context quotes and statements from representatives of member conferences and institutions, and even NCAA officials, and attempt to weave them together to support their faulty theory.
Them bastids is even twisting our words!
How much twisting was needed for this, I wonder.
In one e-mail exchange in 2005, former NCAA official Bo Kerrin noted there is “real concern” that the NCAA’s use of athletes’ images in video games “adds to the argument that student-athletes should be unionized and receive a cut of the profits, etc.”
During a different 2005 e-mail exchange with NCAA Vice President David Berst, then-Ivy League compliance coordinator Brian Barrio questioned whether the use of personally identifiable characteristics of players in video games was a liability for the NCAA. Barrio said he heard the same concern at his previous job at Ohio State.
“This seems to go beyond the plausible deniability inherent in selling a jersey with a uniform number but no name on the back,” Barrio wrote. “Is anyone at the NCAA tracking on this issue? We wanted to make sure there is an awareness of the level of identification in this game, given that it is presently one of the highest-selling video games on the market.”
Later in that e-mail thread, NCAA membership services official Steve Mallonee raised similar concerns with NCAA colleagues Kevin Lennon and Kerrin.
“The jersey number along with the position and vital statistics is clearly an attempt to have the public make the association with the current student-athlete,” Mallonee wrote. “And it appears to be working. The Best Damn Sports Show was aired several weeks ago and had (then-USC football players) Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush acknowledging that they were in the video game.
“That then raises the issue of whether getting in line with technology means being more restrictive or lenient with our rules. … The biggest concern I have is that such a position really does allow for the maximum commercial exploitation of the (student-athlete) and if that occurs, will it be long before we can defend not giving them a piece of the profits?”
Oof.
Donald, looks like you got some more ‘splainin’ to do.
Filed under The NCAA
Simple. Nourishing.
Filed under BCS/Playoffs, Georgia Football, It's Just Bidness, Stats Geek!, The NCAA, Whoa, oh, Alabama
Another day, another alienated group of people.
As outgoing North Carolina chancellor Holden Thorp explained in Chapel Hill on Friday how ill-equipped most collegiate CEOs are to handle the issues surrounding major collegiate athletics, several dozen Division I athletic directors gathered at a beachside hotel probably nodded in agreement. The ADs came to Santa Monica not for the pier, but to discuss the major issues facing college athletics without anyone from the NCAA around. Besides, several athletic directors said, few people at NCAA headquarters seem to care what the ADs think these days.
And that might be the NCAA’s biggest problem.
Commence the airing of grievances.
Under president Mark Emmert, the NCAA has aggressively embraced a model that puts all the power in the hands of university presidents and chancellors. That would be fine, some high-profile athletic directors said, if the presidents sought the advice of the people who work in athletics on a daily basis. Instead, Emmert and his hand-picked group of CEOs have rammed through rules and policies with only minimal consultation of the people who must actually implement those rules and policies. Why will much of the recently passed football recruiting deregulation package probably get tabled? Because no one bothered to ask the people working in athletics. If they had, they might have realized a relaxation on the rules that govern how often coaches can contact recruits would be fine with most ADs and coaches. They also would have realized a relaxation on the rules that govern exactly who may contact recruits could result in a hiring spree by the wealthiest schools that would leave everyone else going further into debt while trying to keep up. Why did the plan to offer athletes up to a $2,000 annual stipend to cover the full cost of attendance get scuttled after its passage at a 2011 presidential retreat? Because no one bothered to check with less wealthy schools to see how they felt about it. If they had, they’d have known it stood no chance of passing an override vote.
The athletic directors want to have an open dialogue with the NCAA about the pending Ed O’Bannon lawsuit, which could radically reshape the business model of major college sports. They want to talk about the potential impact should former football players sue over concussion-related issues. They want to talk about conference realignment, which has upended the industry in the past three years. They talked about all those issues Thursday and Friday in Santa Monica because the NCAA leadership doesn’t seem to want to discuss any of it with them. And the people in charge of some of the nation’s most powerful athletic programs are fed up.
In other words, Emmert chose a management model that relies on decision-making from a group of people who, according to Thorp, at least, don’t have a damned clue about how to go about their business (“… We go to conference or NCAA meetings to discuss new rules and when we get home, our ADs tell us we were crazy to agree to these changes. And they’re usually right…”). That actually explains a lot.
Which brings us to the bottom line:
At the meeting in Santa Monica, another AD said there is “zero confidence in the guy in that chair,” referring to Emmert. While the enforcement issues have received the bulk of the attention, this issue may be the most critical for Emmert’s NCAA. Because while problems with enforcement aggravate the handful of schools being investigated, the systematic shoving aside of some of the brightest and most experienced people in college sports aggravates people at every school. And, despite what has transpired in the past three years, the schools still ultimately run the NCAA. The schools want the NCAA to work. The wealthiest schools could strike out on their own, but that would require significant time and investment. They would prefer to create a workable system within the NCAA.
So, they don’t want Emmert. But they need the NCAA. That’s not such a great combination for your long-term prospects, if you’re the president.
Filed under The NCAA
When they’re not patting themselves on the back about all the money rolling in or figuring out the new and improved postseason at this week’s meeting, college football’s movers and shakers may be privately discussing something even bigger.
One group, though, will surely dominate the cocktail party and golf course conversations, even while its influence in the future of college football further weakens: the NCAA.
As college athletics sifts through an avalanche of foundational issues, the credibility and viability of its governing body has never been more in question. Among realignment that has deepened separation of the haves and have-nots, the legal challenges to the NCAA’s amateurism model, an explosion in football and television money and embarrassing misconduct in the NCAA’s enforcement arm, the calls to start over are louder than ever.
Starting over could be accomplished by either restructuring D-1 to split into, for want of a better phrase, separate divisions of the haves and the have-nots. Or the haves could simply pick up their ball and go home, which would be an enormous disaster for the NCAA, considering what such a move would do to its basketball tourney.
One thing’s for sure – the natives are getting increasingly restless.
The topic has reached such a boil in recent years, it was even broached directly to NCAA president Mark Emmert at an athletics directors convention in September 2011, when realignment had gripped the entire industry following the ACC’s raid of the Big East for Syracuse and Pittsburgh.
According to a person in the room, whose version of events was confirmed by two others, one athletics director asked Emmert directly whether it was time for the top football conferences to split from the lower-tier conferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision, and perhaps even away from the NCAA altogether.
“I think he responded in a way that, it was a little political,” said the person, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was supposed to be private. “It was more along the lines of, we’re going through a lot of changes now and he had heard about those kind of backroom-type conversations, and he basically said it might be time to put everything out on the table and talk through all these issues that we see in the future. He didn’t back away from it.”
Whatever that means. He sure hasn’t done anything concrete about it, either. Of course, given his recent track record, maybe doing nothing as long as possible is the most prudent course of action for Emmert.
Filed under The NCAA
Good piece in today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education about the slow growth in multi-year scholarships being offered after the NCAA last year adopted a policy allowing programs to guarantee athletics aid for multiple years. I think it shows that schools are feeling their way around what works for them on this front.
When things shake out, it’ll make for a useful recruiting tool, particularly for schools that can’t match the resources that some of the big boys tout.
Instead of offering more guaranteed aid, the most powerful programs are relying on their rich athletics traditions, broad television exposure, and other advantages over less-wealthy foes. But a handful of power programs appear to be using multiyear aid as a recruiting inducement in the biggest sports.
Florida says it has given multiyear awards to “pretty much every eligible football player.” At Ohio State, more than half of its 41 new offers of multiyear aid went to football and basketball players.
Some mid-major programs are using the four-year guarantees as points of differentiation against bigger programs. Fresno State University handed out 425 multiyear awards this year—one for every scholarship athlete—says Jason Clay, an assistant director of communications. One reason, he says, was to reduce pressure on students who had to compete for spots every year.
Other mid-major officials say they are open to multiyear agreements when athletes demand it.
“We’re not out there selling it, but if a student-athlete says, ‘I want a two-year deal,’ or, ‘I want this guaranteed for four years,’ we can certainly do that,” says Mario Moccia, athletic director at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
All of which makes me hope that Texas, the richest program in D-1 athletics, loses a few kids along the way because of its arrogance.
“Who gets a four-year, $120K deal guaranteed at age 17?” Christine A. Plonsky, women’s athletic director at the University of Texas, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “The last thing young people need right now is more entitlement.”
Yeah, save entitlement for things like the Longhorn Network, bitches!
I guess Plonsky’s point is that at Texas, what’s sauce for the goose 50ish-year old head coach in the form of a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with buyout clause isn’t sauce for the gander student-athlete. And they say youth is wasted on the young.
Filed under The NCAA, It's Just Bidness
I’ve never been a big fan of Andrew Zimbalist, so if there’s a part of something he’s authored that resonates with me… well, you read this:
Today, “pay for play” refers to compensating an athlete as an employee. Before 1957, it meant awarding athletic scholarships. That year, the NCAA coined and mandated the term “student athlete” as part of an effort to protect itself from workers’ compensation claims.
As college sports grew and became less a campus extracurricular than a lucrative business enterprise, programs complained about and violated rules so often that the NCAA took step after step away from its original notion of amateurism, allowing athletic scholarships in 1948 and termination of financial aid if a student stopped playing in 1967, permitting coverage of educational expenses in 1957, and prohibiting multiyear scholarships in 1973.
One thing you can say about that trend is that it doesn’t favor the player. The context makes it hard to disagree with his argument.
“In short, amateurism in intercollegiate athletics is whatever the NCAA says it is,” reads the report, written by Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, and Allen Sack, president of the Drake Group, which advocates for academic integrity and greater balance in college athletics. “The NCAA maintains its own, idiosyncratic, changing, frequently arbitrary, and often illogical definition of amateurism. NCAA restrictions on college athletes’ free participation in the lucrative market for their images, likenesses and names are obviously not necessary to uphold the principles of amateurism, which are constantly changing to meet industry needs.”
When students become athletes, they sign an agreement with the NCAA that essentially gives the association ownership over their names and images. The NCAA and video game companies can profit from using photos of the athletes or images that strongly resemble them for as long as they like, and the athletes never see a penny.
Sack, a professor of sport management at the University of New Haven, said that to share this revenue with athletes “is no more a violation of amateurism than paying for their educations, or conditioning the renewal of their scholarships each year on athletic performance.”
Compare that with the NCAA’s official position on O’Bannon, which is that it doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
“Amateurism is what separates college sports from pro sports, and the NCAA membership has decided that those who participate in intercollegiate athletics should be students first and not paid professional athletes,” he said. “The NCAA does not limit how a student-athlete takes advantage of his or her likeness after college.”
That’s some impressive smoke blowing there.
Filed under The NCAA, It's Just Bidness
The line is open, so grab a plate.
