Sara Ganim just dropped an avalanche of NCAA-damning tweets

Sara Ganim is perhaps best known as the reporter who broke open and then most-doggedly pursued the Jerry Sandusky story at Penn State University. Now, she does her thing for CNN. This evening, she posted a series of tweets from her reporting on college athlete literacy. Here's a selection of those tweets.

James Madison University the latest to mistakenly think its football team is a ticket to something greater for the university

Hey, look! James Madison University wants to move its football program up from the Football Championship Subdivision to the Football Bowl Subdivision, and certain faculty are bent out of shape about it, for obvious reasons.

First, there's the simple matter that the NCAA exists largely to make money off of grossly underpaid labor, and its history is one of redefining its role as is convenient. That doesn't sit well with some of the JMU profs, for obvious reasons, one of the big ones being that they don't want to be in the "subsidizing athletic endeavors" business, but rather in the "educating young people for the world" business.

There's also the little matter of cost. There's nothing wrong with wanting to pay for something fun and nice, which an FBS football team can be, but let's not dance around the point that JMU (and all schools starting from scratch in this regard) will have to actually pay for it. Playing at that level isn't just an automatic money-maker, and apparently, it appears it's fallen to the profs to point this stuff out and make it explicit.

If you want to see the downside of leveling up, go to Philadelphia and see what's happened to Temple University since it brought its football team to the FCS. Yikes.

Ultimately, the problem is a matter of framing. If we could start over the athletic-industrial complex in the United States today, would we tie big-time athletics to universities? Of course not. We'd set it up like the old minor league baseball days, or like the club soccer system overseas, where independent minor league teams would sign players and develop them either on behalf of major league teams, or on their own behalf before selling their rights to major league organizations. As Tommy Craggs put it a couple years ago (and as should be framed at the entrance of every NCAA basketball and football complex): "You begin from the assumption... that the NCAA is a worthwhile institution with flaws. I begin from the assumption that the NCAA should be dynamited."

Shift the starting point and put it on the NCAA to explain why it should exist, and the pretense falls apart. It's all one unending shell game: Universities exist to provide academic development... Universities make a bunch of money from athletics... The athletes making a bunch of money for the universities, however, have to be seen as being there for their academic development, per the universities' mission, otherwise the academics lose their integrity... Enter the NCAA, which exists, ostensibly, in order to ensure universities' academic integrity by enforcing eligibility requirements based on athletes' maintaining student status... Which is only necessary because universities don't want to be seen as accepting students only because they're athletes; after all, universities exist to provide academic development.

It's not just colleges. High schools suffer from the same bullshit, too. But if JMU (and UNC-Charlotte, and Appalachian State) only want to focus on some grand fantasy of winning a national championship in football someday, instead of focusing on being the best university they can be, while fielding football teams that do well enough in the FCS and already do the job of providing a community rallying point at that level, they're bound for disappointment.

Be happy with having a successful FCS team. Unless you're already there, it's not worth playing FBS (and sometimes, even if you are, it's not).

(Image cc-licensed: "Zane Showker Field" by Taber Andrew Bain)

"We were too hungry to get in there and battle those big country boys full of ham and kale."

Link: "We were too hungry to get in there and battle those big country boys full of ham and kale."

Dave Zirin points out that the Grambling State football team’s refusal to play is hardly unprecedented. In 1936, Howard University’s football team refused to take the field in protest of not receiving any food from the school. In that case, it appears members of the student body actively supported players in the protest.

Zirin also notes that the All Players United protests this season could easily take on a new tenor, given the revelations of how Grambling’s team has been treated, and that much of this conflict can be traced back to Louisiana’s state-level budget cuts.

To play or not to play football: Adrian Peterson and Jadeveon Clowney faced football’s play-at-all-costs culture. Jay Cowit and David A. Arnott try to understand their decisions and, in the Clowney situation, try to brainstorm a solution.

Download MP3 (27:02)

Here’s Adrian Peterson’s text to FoxSports.com and @LauraOkmin:

My brother passed the night before the combine and I decided to go through with it. The same reason why I will play this week. You may ask why? God wants good to come from it. … We mourn and grieve but heaven had the baddest welcoming party for my son. That knowledge gives me peace. I’m still hurt and feel the pain of life, but I’m able to function because of the peace and joy of knowing my loved ones are in a much better place.

The precise quote attributed to Vince Lombardi about concentrating on football, as formulated by Jim Valvano in his famous ESPYs speech, is:

Gentlemen, we will be successful this year, if you can focus on three things, and three things only. Your family, your religion and the Green Bay Packers.

If there’s one thing you ever read about the NCAA, it ought to be Taylor Branch’s “The Shame of College Sports”, which devastates pretty much every argument in favor of the NCAA’s existence.

Music by J Cowit and the Ruthless Orchestra.

The Creamy Middles Podcast is a weekly discussion attacking the belly issues of sports -- ideas that go beyond wins and losses. Jay Cowit usually produces it, though David may occasionally step in. Music is either royalty-free, by J. Cowit and the Ruthless Orchestra, or 29 Sunset. Subscribe in iTunes or in another podcatcher with this RSS feed.

The argument against paying NCAA football and basketball players that the NCAA and schools can't make

There seems to be a movement among some college sports fans who can’t embrace the idea of paying players that the least the NCAA can do is allow those players to take endorsement money. I’m not sure precisely how I feel about applying that idea in the current environment, but for now I’d like to point out there is A reasonable logic to “maintaining amateurism” and preventing endorsements based on athletic ability — the NCAA and school administrations are simply in no position to defend that logic, because they’re ************** and ******** of hypocrisy.

The argument would go something like this: <rhetorical>Schools exist to educate. Intercollegiate athletics are non-essential to schools’ mission to educate. “Amateurism” is to protect against academic malfeasance.

If a student attended, say, Boston College solely because he was there to play football, and he was paid money to play football, whether that’s by the school or an outside entity, that cheapens the value of a Boston College education by making football the reason that student is there. That’s the sort of environment in which academic cheating happens, because the education becomes something to be endured or worked around in order to play sports.

The current scholarship-for-play model is based on the idea that the scholarship is the most valuable part of the transaction, and Bobby Middle Linebacker has chosen to attend BC because of BC, not because BC is a way station to something else.</rhetorical>

We know that’s not how big-time NCAA sports actually work, but I can see the principles behind it.

College education and the NCAA

There may be a way to kill the NCAA — corrupt institution that deserves to be dynamited — and at the same time address the problem of skyrocketing college costs. I can’t be the first person to think of this, but I could be one of a relative few who would be perfectly happy jettisoning the NCAA in the service of improving universities’ finances and, by extension, their students’.

This would have to start with a public university system, which could then lead to changes at private institutions.

1 — Beef up the junior colleges. Under this plan, junior colleges will become equal partners with full universities.

2 — In the public university system, allow any student who lives in a junior college’s “district” to attend, like an optional public high school. Students may fail and fail and fail, but because it’s optional, they can keep coming back and trying to earn their credits and paying their tuition. It’s key to create “districts” for JUCOs because…

3 — *Deep breath* Make the full universities in the public system only responsible for the final two (standard) years of college education; that is, they will only offer major-specific classes. Admissions to these schools will still be competitive, but will be based on students’ performance in junior college.

Junior colleges can offer their Associate Degrees and a litany of general education and prerequisite classes for a fraction of the cost that full universities charge for those same classes. Leverage that.

Students who test out of prerequisite classes in high school wouldn’t have to take those junior college classes. Some would probably end up at full universities a semester, or even a year early. That’s great!

You know what else is great? If private schools followed the public schools’ lead, there might pop up a bunch of new, competitive, private junior colleges. It would be a whole new tier of education, but one predicated on the idea that the first two years of university could fairly be a lot cheaper than the third and fourth years.

And a happy byproduct would be that with only two-ish years of attendance from students, the “upper” universities wouldn’t be able to field competitive NCAA sports teams, and so it wouldn’t be worth it to keep competing.

Of course, some interests would want JUCOs to affiliate with “upper” schools so that, say, someone attending San Francisco City College and another person attending San Francisco State University would be able to play on the same sports team, but in my fantasy, the legislation creating this tiered system prohibits such partnerships.

Are we all just “playing school” so Urban Meyer can live like some sort of absurdist sports sultan? Are my blood, sweat and tears first and foremost a means to pay for the fuel for my coach’s private plane?

Dave Zirin, urging “student-athletes”* to question the premises of the NCAA.

*The scare quotes are intentional.