The Shame of College Sports

[Spider John]

I ran across this, and thought it looked like a good read:

“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.

But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/pri ... orts/8643/

[TheoSqua]

crazy long read, but very good.

[obucard]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... orts/8643/

A long, but interesting read.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Everybody is posting that link!

http://gatewayredbirds.com/forum/viewto ... &start=190

http://gatewayredbirds.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=47140

[thrill]

Finally got around to reading this. This is the best-researched, most complete and well-put together article on the sham that is the NCAA that I've ever read. A cohesive narrative of the history of it's corruption and what is being done about through various private endeavors such as the Ed O'Bannon imaging lawsuit, Scott Boras representing athletes testing the draft waters, Sonny Voccaro working to expose big corporations and the NCAA governing body's system of mutual benefits and Jim Delaney and the Big 10 network kicking off this radical, impending conference realignment and the ultimate effects that may have.

If you're at all intrigued by the future of college sports, this article is must-read.