DALE MCFEATTERS Will Congress tackle the NCAA?
WASHINGTON -- I think millions will stand with me when I say that it's my right as an American to have high-quality entertainment at someone else's expense. Which brings us to college football.
The fact that this fall we can get college football Thursday, Friday and Saturday, occasionally even Wednesday, along with the odd Tuesday, should give our enemies pause. Is this a great nation or what?
True, we still have something called the Bowl Championship Series, which is designed, with fiendish complexity and brazen unfairness, to identify a national champion as season's end without going through the playoffs necessary to produce one.
But the public, myself included, will keep on whining, and television, acting on our behalf, will keep on piling money on the table until college football relents.
The great thing about college football is that it is a true product of democracy. It has nothing to do with education and little to do with economics, since most programs lose money. But the public wants it, and the public shall have it.
The entire enterprise is presided over by the NCAA, a group of very clever people who keep rewriting the rules to stop a group of equally clever people from cheating. It is important that both sides succeed or at least reach a stalemate. The self-esteem and self-worth of entire states depends on winning; but if the chicanery gets out of hand, you have a situation like the old Southwest Conference, which had to disband because it couldn't stop cheating.
The myth
The fiction is that the game is played by young scholars. You can tell because of the disproportionate hype given to the ones who actually are. Ohio State's quarterback last year, Craig Krenzel, majored in molecular genetics, a fact that was mentioned 500 or 600 times a game. Less celebrated was the Ohio State linebacker who had to take a remedial sex-education course to retain his eligibility.
You would think that the NCAA would be left alone to pursue this happy state of affairs, but no.
Congress is circling about and the specter of federal regulation looms. The lawmakers can't stand it when they see organizations screwing up something when Congress could screw it up better.
Actually, federal intervention saved college football. In the early 1900s, when the game really was played by scholar-athletes at academically elite institutions, football became so violent and lethal that there was substantial sentiment for outlawing it. Teddy Roosevelt intervened, founding an organization that went on to become the NCAA.
Fairness issues
A House Judiciary subcommittee has just finished a hearing ostensibly exploring the fairness of the procedures the NCAA uses to investigate and enforce its rules. The NCAA insisted that it was indeed fair, without directly saying the panel should mind its own business.
The subcommittee chairman, Rep. Spencer Bachus, a Republican from Alabama, insisted the hearing had nothing to do with the fact that the NCAA had put two of his state's schools, Alabama and Auburn, on probation. We take Bachus at his word but note that any Alabama politician who failed to stand up for those schools would meet a fate too horrible to contemplate.
The principal witness was a curious one: University of Colorado student Jeremy Bloom, whom the NCAA barred from playing football because he is a professional skier with a couple of endorsement deals.
If any case cried out for an exception, you'd think it would be this one. How often do you come across a junior wide receiver who doubles as a gold-medal-winning mogul jumper? About as many people can do that as can do molecular genetics.
For arcane reasons -- Bloom could have received a salary for skiing, but not sponsorship money -- the NCAA stood by its ban.
Of NCAA officials, Bloom told the subcommittee, "they are the judge, the jury and the executioner." Sounds like that education is paying off.
Scripps Howard News Service