Sports Commentary

Knight Commission Has No Chance
By TOM KERTES & M.C. COHEN

If you are, like many critics of college sports, sick of student-“athletes” rarely, if ever, attending class, or if you’re outraged that your university’s basketball coach makes over fifty times the salary of its Nobel Prize winning physics professor, you will be riled up about the Knight Commission’s recommendations for cleaning up college sports.

The ten year-old Commission, made up of 28 college presidents, business leaders and other people connected to the field of education, reconvened in June 2001 and published several recommendations.

While the Commission’s basic tenet may be right on the money—that intercollegiate athletics has become a monster run amok that pays only lipservice to academics—ultimately, the Commission has only the power to recommend, and the NCAA does not need to listen.

Add to this the fact that, since the initial recommendations in 1991, college sports have gotten far worse, and some Commission members may be aiding in the very commercialization they deplore.

At best, we have a wonderful public relations coup for the NCAA—“Look, we’re actually trying to do something!” At worst, this is an insult to everyone involved.

The Commission said that that athletic teams that do not graduate at least 50 percent of their players should be barred from conference championships and postseason play, and college athletes should be prohibited from wearing corporate logos on their uniforms. The Commission recommended that the salaries of college coaches be brought in line with other university educators and that the NBA and the NFL, should form minor leagues. The Commission also supported “creating an independent watchdog body” to monitor college sports programs.

In theory, much of what the Commission has recommended makes sense. However, in practice, college sports have gone way too far to turn back now.

The Big Ten, the Big East, or other major conferences, will not heed the 50 percent graduation rate recommendation and play their postseason tournaments with half their teams. Alumni, the colleges’ major donors, will not support the school if the football games do not fill the stadiums. And network television will not pay colleges to air biology majors playing intramural lacrosse.

And what about coaches making less money? Let’s be realistic. How many chemistry professors bring in the kind of revenue a successful basketball coach does? College sports have become all about money, and the business is not is about to change.

“We are in the education business,” said Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of Notre Dame co-chairman of the Commission. “Not in the entertainment business.” Then what is Notre Dame doing with that multi-million-dollar, exclusive NBC football/basketball contract?

It’s time to take a look at the way things are in college sports. But its time for some to start by taking a good, hard look in the mirror.

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