If as much energy were expended attempting to solve the financial crisis as advancing the case for an upper-level NCAA college football playoff, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be at 11,000 today.
Since talking about theoretical scenarios is so fashionable, I might as well jump on the pile and toss out three things I would do if I were the college football czar.
I’ve been around the game or written about it since I was old enough to know there were four downs, and I’ve researched it a lot further back than that. I know we can’t return to coaches making the same salary as the history professor, or to the single wing, but there are three basic issues I’d address.
It starts with the premise that the NCAA is a member organization, not a junta, and that remaining in it means a school has signed off on its standards. This is what there should be for the top division:
1. Coaching tenures:
A new coach gets a five-year contract, and if he’s fired before that, he’s paid every dime he’s due. That gives him one full cycle of recruiting, including a redshirt season.
With coaches, including Kansas State’s Ron Prince and San Diego State’s Chuck Long, increasingly being fired before they get that full cycle, it makes it more tempting to cut corners or outright cheat, especially in the first couple of years of recruiting. Long and Prince came out fine financially in their firings, so this clause would formalize how it works out, anyway. More important, though, it would give coaches more of a reason to feel as if they have time to build a foundation and do it with honor.
This is more of a revolution: The trade-off for that initial five years of security is that extensions all must be for two years, maximum. No “rollovers.” They can be signed only AFTER the original five-year, or the latest two-year term.
That puts everyone on the same footing and eliminates the most absurd buyouts. A coach getting nailed for NCAA infractions, bailing out, or resigning voids the contract, and the NCAA would have to be zealous or have an arbitration process tied to avoiding the ignominy of schools trying to run off a coach or making him resign to avoid paying him.
2. Academics:
Primarily because it’s difficult to get away with boosters paying players any longer (Alabama’s and Auburn’s mutual tattling helped change the rules of the game), the biggest cheating in college football now is academic fraud — or fudging. Skating some players through academically has been prevalent at least since George Gipp’s time. But the stakes are higher than ever.
Tying losses of scholarships to graduation rates assumes the cheaters won’t find ways to get their players diplomas, whether deserved or otherwise. They do and they will. It also ignores the reality that the graduation rate at Phi Delta Theta or in the band isn’t always great, either. At the fraternity and in the band, it’s considered an issue of whether individuals take advantage of opportunities presented them. That’s the way it should be for football.
Acknowledging that we’ve made college football a kazillion-dollar business, I’d take it a step farther, too.
Make the classroom optional for BCS-level players. Officially.
The football locker room is one of the most eclectic environs on campus, and this would only formalize that there could be a Rhodes scholar in one corner and a guy who cares about little besides football in another. They have five falls to play four seasons, and what they do in the classroom is their own business — even if it’s nothing.
3. Compensation:
Parents or students writing checks scoff at the idea that anyone attending school on an athletic scholarship is “exploited.” Football players used to get stipends; they were called “laundry money.” Plus, before the crackdowns, the other way to make money was selling complimentary tickets, in such time-honored fashions as taking them down to a clothing store/ticket brokerage and then picking up an envelope with cash in it later. But, again conceding what we’ve made college football, players should get that free education — if they want to take advantage of it — and realistic aboveboard stipends that give them spending money.
Now, about that playoff system . . . anything that doesn’t allow Dick Vitale (or his football equivalent, Lee Corso) to whine about the exclusion of the ninth-best team from a power conference is OK with me.
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
