Vandy plan won't catch on

Given all the opinion-voicing and hand-wringing that's been going on about Maurice Clarett, it was probably rather easy to overlook the decision by Vanderbilt University chancellor E. Gordon Gee to eliminate his institution's athletic department. (Sorry, Dr. Gee; it's "restructure.")
To help you put that into perspective, that's like General Motors shutting down half of the Lordstown operation.
What adds some intrigue to all this is the fact that Gee was formerly president at Ohio State. Before that, he was at West Virginia and Colorado, and those schools, during his tenure, both played in bowl games that were recognized at the time as being for the championship of major college football.
Granted, Vandy probably never will play for such a title in any major sport in your lifetime or mine.
This season is the 114th for football at Vanderbilt, for instance, and the program has competed in only three bowl games.
Vanderbilt is a charter member of the Southeastern Conference and never has won a conference championship in football. That covers a span of 70 years.
Extreme optimism
So, even though school officials insist the move doesn't signal a de-emphasizing of athletics at Vanderbilt, you can't help but sense the rival coaches in the SEC have to control themselves from chalking up an automatic "W" when they see the Commodores on the schedule.
"We're in Division I, we're in the SEC, we're going to a bowl game and we're going pretty soon," said David Williams, Gee's vice chancellor, right-hand man and evidently, an extreme optimist.
Gee suggested that the school will attract better recruits because, deep down, the athletes who choose to attend Vanderbilt really want to be students first and athletes second.
And that may very well be true at Vanderbilt, a school whose academic reputation rivals that of Stanford, Duke and any of the Ivy League institutions.
It doesn't get you many wins in the ultra-competitive SEC, though, especially in football. And, like just about everywhere else, in the football-crazy South, success on the field almost always translates into increased giving by alumni.
And money is the lifeblood of any institution, particularly to private ones like Vanderbilt.
Too much money generated
Football coaches around the SEC were understandably doubtful that their schools would choose to follow suit.
Auburn's Tommy Tuberville no doubt echoed the sentiments of many of his coaching fraternity brothers: "I don't think there's too many teams in the SEC that will make that move because of the money generated. Athletics is just as important to the careers of young people and the things they do and the things they learn. I don't think downgrading or overlooking athletics is something you're going to see too much of in this league."
In other words, don't expect Auburn to overturn the last 50 years of unbridled spending in order to keep up with the Jones' (or, in their case, the Tide).
In 1985, when Mike Gottfried was about to be introduced as the new football coach to an assemblage of media at the University of Pittsburgh, then-university president, Dr. Wesley Posvar, leaned to one noted sports columnist and asked, "Do you think all you guys would be here if we were announcing we'd been awarded $10 million for a research project?"
Well, no, of course not. But when was the last time 60,000 people went to see somebody split an atom?
Therein lies the truth about big-time college sports, whether or not we want to admit it -- research grants and education are what the universities were created for, but it sure doesn't hurt to have 100,000 people or so on campus a half-dozen Saturdays every fall.
XRob Todor is sports editor of The Vindicator. Write to him at todor@vindy.com.