college sports corruption

Not the least bit surprising:

“North Carolina expanded the inquiry into its football program to include allegations of academic impropriety involving a former tutor writing papers for players, sources said Thursday.”

One of the interesting side-issues of teaching at DePaul while a graduate student there is that we all had the chance to trade notes about fishy incidents involving basketball players… Things like one star player turning in his required course notebook in a suspiciously feminine script, or in my case one player “forgetting” to turn in his final paper before the conference tournament, and then suddenly it was FedExed to me in a good but not too good writing style that was a bit beyond his normal level.

My position on this issue has changed a lot over the years. I’m obviously a great fan of sports, including college sports. But there’s no longer any question to me that big-money college sports is inherently corrupting, makes a mockery of the student athlete concept, and to my mind no longer has a place in higher education. It’s become too lucrative to stay honest. Essentially, I’ve flipped to the other extreme on this issue and now would like to see major sports removed from American universities altogether and placed in clubs, in the European fashion. Every time I had anything to do with the process, it simply smelled too bad.

And that’s just the academic corruption side of things. Bring in the gambling angle, and it’s even worse. It’s common knowledge that college basketball is the easiest sport to corrupt. There are a small number of players on the court, the point guard will generally be doing most of the ballhandling at the end of the game, which means he will often be fouled by the other team and will be shooting free throws. It’s not that hard to miss a free throw intentionally while looking like you’re trying your best. Corrupt that one player and your chances of winning the bet are pretty good. How to corrupt him? There are lots of ways. For one thing, he’s likely to be from a fairly poor family. For another thing, you can get him addicted to betting on other sports, get him in the hole for $20,000 or $30,000, then start making threats while offering him the chance to pay it all off by just missing a few free throws at the end of the next game.

While I was still in Chicago, one of the Sun-Times columnists swore he was witness to a college basketball gambling arrangement one year. He was in a bar on the North Side before the beginning of an NCAA tournament game. Five minutes before the game, cell phones started ringing in the bar. Soon the whispers were passed throughout the room: the fix was in. And sure enough, the star player of the heavily favored team had a horrible game and the team lost.

And switching to college football… Don’t even mention to me the name of a certain star Iowa player in the 1986 Rose Bowl, someone who also later dropped an easy touchdown pass in the end zone in an NFL playoff game under suspicious circumstances. I still keep expecting him to write a “confessional” book about his gambling addiction one of these days; you had to see the 1986 game, and you’d know what I mean.