In the short term, the criminal cases against four college assistant basketball coaches and two Adidas apparel employees will be embarrassing.
But they will be good in the long term if they force the NCAA and its member schools to drop the fantasy that the best players in its high-revenue sports are amateur athletes.
Sports fans are treated to these scandals every few years. In the latest version, a federal investigation that included wiretaps and undercover sources made it plain that some top basketball coaches are taking bribes and that Adidas employees were giving cash to families of star high school players.
Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino is the most famous name in this net. He is not charged but has been placed on leave by the school — meaning that something bad was going on.
As the Oct. 9 issue of Sports Illustrated observed, the bribery was nothing more than the free market in action. SI says the NCAA’s restrictions on player gifts have failed to keep up with the multi-million-dollar cash generators that basketball and football have become.
The more money that comes to universities through television rights, apparel sales and the ever-increasing price of tickets, the greater the pressure on coaches and athletic directors to deliver a winning product.
This inevitably creates intense competition to convince 18-year-olds to attend your school, and an obvious way to make that happen is to offer cash and gifts.
Shame on anyone who blames a star athlete or his family, especially those from a low-income background, for accepting impermissible gifts.
From their point of view, universities are bringing in millions but sharing very little of it with the players that fans come to see.
Sports Illustrated believes there is a way to get the youth coaches, apparel companies and shady agents out of the picture. It’s a pretty simple, common-sense solution: Allow college athletes to be represented by an agent.
SI says this would benefit players, agents and the schools themselves:
• The NCAA could register agents who agree to follow the rules and cooperate with investigations. This would give the NCAA influence over a group that it has been unable to control.
• Any violation of NCAA rules or failure to cooperate with an investigation would cost the agent the right to represent college players. This would be “professional suicide,” as SI called it, and is a powerful incentive to behave.
• Under such a system, college athletes would be represented by an agent who chooses to follow the rules instead of by one who’s willing to break them. This ought to help get the players with pro potential out of college without the embarrassment of a scandal.
Nobody seems too surprised by the latest case, which means the public has become used to college scandals. This trend is an embarrassment to universities whose primary mission is education. It’s past time for these schools to clean up the mess, and part of that means treating top athletes like the revenue producers that they are.
