Broken But Not Broke: Corrupting College Sports

In 1952, though nearly a half-century old, the NCAA was just becoming a burgeoning organization. It wielded minimal power of enforcement and lacked a central headquarters of operation.

The NCAA Tournament, in fact, was only then entering its adolescence. For the first 13 years of existence, it waged war against the third-party N.I.T. for postseason supremacy in men’s basketball. Bowl games were entering a cursory explosion, but were nonetheless still considered products of exhibition and meant more for a week-long winter excursion than a meaningful competition.

Then, a 29-year old visionary managed to popularize college athletics all the while maintaining the core principals of amateurism. Enter Walter Byers, the early architect of the NCAA. For the next three-and-a-half decades, he would become a conductor, of sorts, guiding the NCAA through a monumental rebirth.

The second-year NCAA Executive Director was brought aboard, according to the NCAA’s own bio page, to tackle issues of recruiting, financial aid and the new frontier: television.

When Byers arrived, T.V. was his biggest nemesis. At the time, there were only a handful of media contracts with NCAA institutions. Byers was tasked with spearheading a solution to the growing number of televised games with concern attendance would be effected. After a one-year ban on live broadcasts proved unpopular, the NCAA instead took control of national contracts and limited the number of appearances in a given season by any one school. According to a 1995 L.A. Times story, the first NCAA television contract authorizing an NBC game-of-the-week was valued at just over a million dollars for the entire season.

Soon, however, television was put on the backburner and Byers was presented with a brand new conundrum—addressing a maligned point-shaving scandal at Kentucky.

In October 1951, New York City District Attorney Frank Hogan had three UK basketball players arrested for accepting $500 bribes to fix the 1949 N.I.T. Championship. The scandal, which followed on the heels of notable point-shaving by the City College of New York during the same time period, led to Byers’ first NCAA investigation with a newly-formed infractions committee to put teeth into the bite of the enforcement process.

Though Kentucky was never sanctioned by the NCAA for the point-shaving, the investigation ultimately led to findings of then head coach Adolph Rupp engineering a pay-for-play system among his players. The NCAA instituted the first of five "death penalty" rulings, which meant the program was shut down for an entire academic season.

For the next 30 years, Byers and the NCAA lived in relative peace and tranquility. They vigorously defended the principals of amateurism and chased after violators of NCAA rules. But on May 12, 1983, Byers’ vehement defense of college athletics took a downward turn for the worst.

A panel of three judges from the 10^th Circuit Federal Court ruled in favor of plaintiffs from the Oklahoma and Georgia Board of Regents who claimed an NCAA television plan—much like the one first concocted by Byers in 1951—was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.  The ruling asserted the NCAA couldn’t limit the number of appearances, nor could they prevent universities from entering into their own negotiated media contracts.

More alarmingly for Byers, it was the legal position used in the trial that shook his beliefs to the core.

In Byers’ 1995 book, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, he writes of the trial which was conducted in Oklahoma City. Then-University of Georgia President Fred Davidson testified against the NCAA, arguing, "My general feeling is that our people would be better able, taking everything into account, to run our business than would be the NCAA—the business of our business."

Oklahoma University President Bill Banowksy went one step further suggesting they should be free to make their own "marketing and business judgments."

Essentially these statements were de Facto admissions of a commercial approach to athletics. From that moment on, Byers, the conductor, watched helplessly as his collegiate Choo Choo became a runaway commercialized freight train.

Over the next 28 years, Byers has seen NCAA Tournament revenue grow from $23 million to over $700 million annually. Georgia, who according to Davidson earned $5 million in revenue, brought in about $90 million in operating revenue during the 2009-10 academic year according to information gathered by USA Today.

As revenues have risen, so too have the motive and opportunity for corruption.

When the infractions committee began in 1953, it started with just two full-time investigators. As recently as May of this year, the NCAA now spupports an enforcement staff of 38 members as reported by Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel. It’s anyone’s guess how successful they’ve been.

In the last six decades, the number of major NCAA infractions cases has nearly doubled from 70 during the first 10 years to 136 (and counting) since 2003. That’s not an alarming rate necessarily, as NCAA membership has grown from about 450 to 1,062 current active members. Further, the NCAA now has an institution-to-investigator ratio of 28:1, down from 250:1.

However, given the sheer volume of money pouring into the coffers of major universities’ athletic departments, corruption is inevitable. After all, according to USA Today’s college finances database, nearly $6.8 billion was earned in revenue in 2009-10 out of 225 reporting institutions. That’s nearly $10.1 billion estimated for all of Division I, out of 337 current active members.

More than being a booming multi-billion dollar business, of which athletes are working for pennies on the dollar, college sports have become a raging wildfire and the NCAA is fighting it with a garden hose.

It’s clear that beyond the sheer hypocrisy of amateurism, where institutions earn millions off the likeness and performance of its athletes, all the while they’re punished for selling their own autographs or hard-earned memorabilia, there is a vacuum of evil that permeates through the entire molten system. Coaches, pressured by heightened expectations and lavish salaries, are constantly eager to exploit the softest loopholes and push the limits of ethical boundaries. Administrators are overzealous to protect their cash cows. Boosters lurk around every corner to shower exploited, unsuspecting athletes with discounts, gifts and hundred-dollar handshakes.

Despite this broken culture, fans shake a bony finger in the direction of other dirty deeds, but rush to the defense when the skeletons fall from the closets of their own glass houses. Few have accepted that there are few, if any, do-gooders remaining in today’s landscape.

Kids are loyal only to their Twitter following, their professional draft projection and greenbacks, and aren’t wearing the college jersey out of some outdated sense of pride. Coaches are indebted to their paycheck, not the team grade point average or keeping players on the straight and narrow. And athletic directors would rather increase the bottom line than eliminate the bottom rung.

Perhaps this is most eloquently stated, ironically enough, by former Lucchese crime family boss Henry Hill.

In a 2007 USA Today article, Hill says, "Everybody has a number. Everybody is corruptible. I don't care who it is. It's just a matter of how much — and how much they think they can get away with.

Hill was the engineer of the infamous 1978 Boston College point-shaving scandal, which involved several members of the B.C. men’s basketball team. They were paid as much as $2,500 per game to finish under the point spread. Hill later confessed to the scheme to avoid prosecution in a RICO conspiracy case.

"You offer a kid 10 large ($10,000), he's at least going to think about it," Hill added.

Gambling is just one element of corruption facing college sports. A 2008 anonymous survey conducted by the NCAA found that 1.6 percent of men’s basketball players and 1.2 percent of football players confessed to having been asked to perform poorly or otherwise influence a game in exchange for money. Nearly one percent (0.9) of football players and just over half a percent of basketball players (0.6) confessed to actually accepting the offer.

But it begs the question: if nearly 1-in-100 admit to accepting money in exchange for poor play, i.e. point-shaving, how many actually did?

"It’s out there. We know it’s out there," FBI chief of organized crime Matt Heron said in the same 2007 USA Today story, "whether we can prove it is a different matter."

Attempts to measure such fixing have been scattered. In 2006, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School’s Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy, examined over 44,000 games between 1989 and 2005. His conclusion was that roughly 500—just over one percent—included some sort of foul play, or "gambling-related corruption." Another study in 1998 by the University of Michigan found that more than five percent of male athletes admitted to wagering on a game they were involved in, accepting money for performing poorly or at very least, provided inside information to third-party sources.

According to a CNBC special report, The Big Business of Illegal Gambling, nearly $120 billion is wagered illegally on college football and college basketball annually. The immense popularity coincides with the increased exposure.

In college football, there might be as many as 50-55 games in a given week. This past season as many as 40 of them were broadcast on a national or regional network. College basketball yields similar results on a larger scale. This past season, of over 10,000 regular season games, nearly 2,300 were televised—more than 20 percent.

It’s this type of exposure that breeds the dark underbelly of athletics. It begins at conception, however. It’s now infiltrating the lives of the athlete earlier than ever—recruitment.

By the time kids receive their first college scholarship offer, they’re being courted by beat writers, recruiting analysts and even Facebook stalkers. Some kids receive 30-40 calls a week at 16 years of age from anxious reporters seeking an interview or collegiate recruiters. Add in the element of slimy street agents looking to broker a pay-for-play scheme to the destination of the highest bidder, and you have kids that are bordering on rockstar status by the time they ever step foot on campus.

What’s more? Some of them are flat purchased, paid for and shipped to campus first-class.

The 2008 book, Meat Market by ESPN columnist Bruce Feldman goes behind the scenes to follow former Mississippi Head Coach Ed Orgeron in his attempts to rebuild the Rebels’ program. Speaking of corruption that existed during the 1970s and 1980s, when Byers was fighting to curtail cheating, an unnamed retired coach recalled for the book, "We had boosters who practically kidnapped some recruits to make sure we’d get them. You did whatever it took because you knew the other guys would and you really never thought twice about it. It was like the Wild, Wild West."

In fact, Byers retired in similar fashion to how he began: by administering the death penalty to a rogue program.

The NCAA hit SMU’s football program with the capital punishment after a lengthy case exposing the payment of recruits and players by coaches, boosters and even the eventual governor of Texas. The SMU penalties and a decade-long crackdown of conference foes by Byers and his cohorts led to the ultimate demise of the roughshod Southwestern Conference

While Byers won the battle, the war is ongoing. Coaches today rarely endorse such blatant scandalous behavior by boosters in the recruiting process for fear of reprisal. But it doesn’t mean they’re unwilling to turn a blind eye to the behavior, nor does it preclude the practice from happening before, during or after the recruiting process concludes. While advances toward the end of Byers’ tenure forced booster activity underground, it’s hardly gone away.

But college coaches have more than greasy palms to worry about. Now they must deal with inflated egos.

Nowadays, the existence of recruiting sites as well as the emergence of social media has created vast overexposure of high school athletes. As recently as 2007, Scout.com boasted over 200,000 paid subscribers to the network—largely stemming from collegiate team sites whose clients are paying for access to recruiting information. Rivals.com, when purchased by Yahoo! in 2006, was reported to have over 180,000 subscribers. The boom in business caused ESPN to get in the game. More recently, a new network—24/7 Sports—was launched to join in the windfall.

The result has been a great popularization of recruiting. 

Even if recruits escape the solicitation, it’s unlikely they escaped the exploitation. For months and sometimes years prior to graduation, they’re lauded, worshipped and celebrated.

The quasi celebrity status never disappears by the time they arrive at college. When on campus, they’re solicited with sexual favors, booze, drugs, cash, cars, clothing and a netherworld of forbidden delight. But they’re expected to abide by an outdated code of conduct, and turn down the very things we all dream about at 18 years old, while their coaches and colleges profit off their blood, sweat & tears.

And when they ultimately submit to their inhibitions, accepting these gratuitous perks, fans again point the accusing finger and wonder how they could shame their favorite institution. Along the way, it makes you wonder if anyone has stopped thinking like a fan long enough to imagine what they’d do if faced with the same opportunity.

There likely isn’t a major university in America that’s immune from the sleazy side effects of college sports. Rest assured there’s a few well-to-do boosters in desperate need of self-worth that are patrolling the parking lots of practice facilities nearby.

Unfortunately, the institutions made this bed they must now lie in it. A wholesome believer can become jaded if they live long enough. Ask Byers.

The man who won many battles fighting collegiate crime is reminded most by the ones he lost. In spite of several successful high-profile victories against NCAA rebellions prior to retirement in 1988, it was the 1983 defeat in the Oklahoma City courtroom that overshadows his otherwise impeccable legacy.

So much so that in promoting his book in 1995, he did an about-face and told the Associated Press he supports the thing he’d fought for 35 years to avoid: paying players.

"I believe the athletes should have the same access to the commercial marketplace that the supervisors and overseers as well as other students have," Byers explained.

The NCAA has come a long way under his tutelage. Hopefully it goes a little bit further.

----------------------------------------

Check back on Friday for the second part of this series. I’ll examine the finances of college athletics and show support for Byers’ conclusion, as well as some suggestive measures I would take to clean up the landscape.