When the NCAA Final Four gets underway this weekend in Indianapolis, Colorado teams will be nowhere in sight.
But across town at the annual meeting of The Drake Group, Colorado is taking center court. Again.
Few things have energized the college sports reform movement as much as the University of Colorado at Boulder’s football recruiting scandal, which has been going on so long now the data are in from research inspired by it.
One such study will be presented Friday to The Drake Group, a national organization of university faculty members who advocate sweeping reforms to college athletics.
The study is titled “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: NCAA Recruiting Trips,” and it reveals that providing booze, sex, drugs – and excuses – for high school recruits on campus trips is hardly unique to Colorado.
Heather Morris, a former student-
athlete and an assistant professor of sport management at Ohio University, along with two faculty members from Southeastern Louisiana University, surveyed more than 5,000 student-
athletes who took recruiting trips from 1999 to 2005 and identified some striking trends.
Let’s start with the good news: Only eight of the recruits said they committed rape during their recruiting trips, though more than three times that number admitted to engaging in non-
consensual sex that did not end in intercourse, and 3 percent (about 150 recruits) said they engaged in intercourse that they described as consensual.
Also, almost 74 percent of the recruits reported having contact with an academic adviser during the trip, and only 6 percent of the recruits were given souvenirs in direct violation of NCAA rules.
OK, I know what you’re thinking: That’s the good news?
Qualifying in the bad news category: 27 percent of the recruits – nearly all of whom were high-school seniors – said they consumed alcohol on the trips; 11 percent were taken to bars; 33 percent went to parties off campus; 2 percent (that’s about 100 recruits) were entertained at strip clubs; and 2 percent were provided recreational drugs.
Now let’s get ugly.
The researchers found the worst behavior generally occurred among athletes in what Morris describes as the “revenue sports.” With only rare exceptions, that means men’s basketball and football.
So while the survey sample included 5,000 athletes across 32 different sports at universities across the country, and 47 percent of them were women, the findings revealed that the recruits most likely to get drunk or stoned, go to strip clubs, engage in non-consensual sex, get in fistfights and generally act like fools were the very ones eligible for the biggest scholarships: male football and basketball players.
The study does not reveal where the misbehavior took place.
“The research was conducted through the institutions,” said Morris. “We knew they would not have cooperated if the recruits had to identify where this behavior occurred.”
Here in Colorado we call that plausible deniability.
The other nonspecific part of the survey is the number of times the behaviors occurred.
“We don’t know if a recruit participated one time or five times in the activity,” Morris explained. That means while the number of recruits admitting to rape was eight, the number of rapes committed could have been far higher.
On the bright side, Morris said the occurrence of negative behaviors dropped significantly after the NCAA implemented stricter rules for recruiting athletes in August 2004.
“We still had a large sample of recruits in the 2004-05 school year, and we saw an almost 15 percent drop in alcohol consumption, a significant drop in the use of recreational drugs, going to strip clubs and engaging in sex,” she said. “Vandalism and fistfights went down too.”
That is the legacy of “the unfortunate situation” at CU, she said.
Too bad the “unfortunate situation” at CU had to happen to get anybody at the NCAA to care.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
