Is Jay Paterno the sole voice of reason still talking?

Paterno, a Penn State assistant football coach and the son of coaching icon Joe Paterno, burst on to the commentary scene a month ago with an essay that linked college athletics with higher education. It was actually filled with mainstream, traditional observations about college sports, but the overall media discussion about amateurism has gotten so aggressive that Paterno’s positions now may be regarded as somewhat contrarian.

More recently, he participated in a panel discussion on The Daily about compensating student-athletes. The flavor du jour among pundits is that student-athletes should be compensated, but not with institutional funds. So, this question was put to the group:

The Daily: “What if we just allowed a complete free market? What if T. Boone Pickens, who has given hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma mater, Oklahoma State (hence Boone Pickens Stadium), could spread some of that cash around to players?”

Jay Paterno: “That’s when you get into a very dangerous situation. Who is really calling the shots in terms of your program now? The head coach may want these five guys, but T. Boone Pickens walks in and says, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m going to buy this quarterback, and he’s a five-star on Rivals.’ Even though the head coach evaluated him and … what you get yourself is a team owner. And the team owner isn’t going to really give a damn if you graduate your kids. He’s going to want to be sitting in University of Phoenix Stadium when they’re playing for the national championship. He’s not going to care if you graduate 30 percent of your guys or 80 percent of your guys.”

Sounds right to me.

The notion of outside compensation is seductive, but it is surely more complicated than many sportswriters seem to believe. Writing Tuesday in SI.com, Michael Rosenberg offered this: “(The) NCAA Manual devotes 16 pages to amateurism. We can cut it down to one, with one principle: Athletes may not be paid directly with university funds. That’s it. One rule. There is your ‘amateurism.’ This way, universities can spend their booster donations, TV money and sponsorship dollars subsidizing facilities, staff, operating costs and athletic scholarships. College athletics will continue to thrive across dozens of sports. But those who can cash in on their fame and success will be able to do it. If a wealthy South Carolina alum wants to give $50,000 a year to every Gamecock, he can do it.”

What if that alum is a known gambler? What if he owns the local strip club and wants the kid to promote wet T-shirt night? What if a kid strikes a deal with adidas at a Nike school? How about a local gym where steroids are known to be readily accessible? Would that be an acceptable endorsement?

The Bylaw Blog’s John Infante, participating in the same panel discussion with Paterno, seemed to recognize the pitfalls of such an approach, even if he did endorse a pay-for-play model: “I would allow college athletes to earn outside income related to athletics, but with a lot of restrictions. I would still prohibit loans or payments from boosters or agents, so it would have to be legitimate commercial endorsements.”

He even added the possibility of correlating pay to $1,000 times a student-athlete’s grade-point average. My take: Paying your kid for good grades is a bad idea; the same goes for student-athletes.

Let’s go back to Jay Paterno, my lone voice of reason in a summer full of hubbub: “Ultimately what we have to keep in focus is, whether we want to or not, and whether it sounds idealistic or not, the whole idea of college football is that we are part of the university. Where you lose the argument about these guys getting used or not being paid is that you don’t take into account the value of the education. A kid like (Stanford’s) Andrew Luck, he’s getting a $70,000 per year education and the NCAA has limited his football time to 600 hours a year. You do the math, that’s over $100 an hour. Pretty good deal.”

So it is.

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 A recent blog post about testing for sickle-cell trait arrived at a good conclusion, although it may have left a misimpression about how Divisions II and III have addressed the issue to date.

Writing on The Business of College Sports blog (one of the most informative and insightful blogs around), Alicia Jessop of RulingSports.com encouraged Divisions II and III members to approve mandatory testing for sickle-cell trait at the NCAA Convention in January.

Clearly, there’s no problem with that conclusion. My only concern is that the piece was light on background about how the topic has evolved in Divisions II and III − and may have left casual readers with the mistaken belief that testing for sickle-cell trait had not been considered at those levels until now, or that Divisions II and III are necessarily resistant to such legislation.

In fact, Division II developed proposed legislation last year that is similar to the proposal that will be considered in January. The proposal crafted in 2010 would have required Division II institutions to test for sickle-cell trait without any provision for student-athletes to decline the test. Division II, however, held up on a vote to give the overall Association a chance to address the issue more holistically.

In the intervening time, Division I added a provision to its own legislation that requires student-athletes to sign a waiver releasing the institution from liability if they decline to be tested.

As for Division III, the dynamics were a bit different. Members there wanted to approach the topic from a timely, data-driven perspective. With that in mind, those members asked the NCAA’s Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports to gather information on several points:

•  Cost and availability of the test
• The incidence of sickle-cell related illness in Division III
• Whether the significant differences in preseason conditioning standards in Division III obviate the need for mandatory Division III testing

The competitive-safeguards committee surveyed the overall membership to determine the state of affairs regarding testing, counseling, prevalence of the trait and safety practices, among other things.

The survey results and subsequent competitive-safeguards committee recommendation (that testing for sickle-cell trait should be consistent across divisions) bring us back to Divisions II and III Management Council discussions that will occur today and tomorrow.

One other observation: In 2007, all three divisions adopted legislation requiring student-athletes who are beginning their initial season of eligibility to undergo a medical examination before participation in any practice, competition or out-of-season conditioning activities. 

By the way, the Orlando Sentinel carried an extensive package on sickle-cell trait in its Sunday and Monday issues:

Sickle-cell trait: The silent killer

Danger zone: College football culture, sickle cell trait are lethal combination

NCAA has no say in forcing schools to change workouts

All children in the U.S. are tested for sickle-cell trait, but few athletes know they have it

Marquis and Shana Daniels push for more sickle-cell trait education

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If you can’t decide how you feel about pay-for-play after all the effort ESPN has put into the subject, then you simply aren’t good at making decisions.

Seemingly every commentator in the ESPN arsenal has weighed in on the subject, and the whole shebang is aggregated on one big pay-for-play page.

Of all that was written, I thought Pat Forde drew the best conclusions. In his column “Myth of Exploited, Impoverished Athletes,” Forde made the following points:

• “Most revenue-producing football and basketball programs are largely populated with guys … who are unlikely to make a long-term living playing professional sports and understand the value of a cost-free education.”
• “For those who feel compelled to monetize everything in college athletics, don’t forget to factor in the cost of four years of schooling. At a lot of places, that will run about $200,000. Most students emerge from college saddled with debt that will take years to pay off, but scholarship athletes are exempt from that burden.”
• “Most college sports fans identify more with the school than the players. They root for the place they attended, or grew up with — the old front-of-the-jersey cliché. If that weren’t the case, minor-league football and basketball would be more popular.”

One of his most important observations, however, had to do with how women factor into the discussion.

Writing about options that would compensate basketball and football student-athletes while stiffing non-revenue athletes, including women, Forde wrote: “If Title IX doesn’t squash that notion, campus politics and simple fairness would.”

We do female student-athletes a disservice when we act as though the law is the only factor working on their behalf. Indeed, as Forde states so well, their interests are strongly underwritten by political and ethical considerations. To portray women as an inconvenient, and likely irresolvable, legal obstruction to paying male football and basketball players puts them on the defensive, a position they have occupied for most of the four decades since Title IX was made into law.

There are many reasons to tread carefully in the pay-for-play waters, and the treatment of non-revenue athletes – including women − certainly is a factor.

But as all of the conversations play out, everybody would do well to get their sequence straight: Think first about what’s fair, and then consider what’s legal.

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Is requiring a program to vacate wins gained while using ineligible players an effective deterrent?

The Division I Committee on Infractions has used the penalty from time to time, and committee chair Dennis Thomas clearly believes the sanction has clout based on his reaction to how Kentucky counted vacated wins in honoring men’s basketball coach John Calipari for 500 victories.

Now comes the Ohio State football case and the program’s self-sanction of vacating wins earned involving ineligible student-athletes.

Based on reaction to the Kentucky matter (that is, the sentiment that people pay no attention to vacated outcomes and evidence that programs other than Kentucky disregarded orders to vacate victories), you might think the media reaction to the Ohio State’s self-penalty would be uniformly negative, but that’s not the case. Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandell thought the penalties seemed reasonable given the nature of the allegations at the moment.

Two commentators, though, have advanced a different approach. They want to require offending programs to pay train-riding dollars for games in which they used ineligible athletes.

Blogging for Forbes’ SportsMoney, Patrick Rishe proposed consideration of severe monetary sanctions – millions of dollars − for programs that knowingly violate the rules. “(V)acating revenues earned with ineligible players and instituting strict financial penalties for cheaters is the only way to truly show contrition,” Rishe wrote. “If the NCAA truly wants to institute change while scaring the bejesus out of Division I coaches and administrators, it needs to ‘man up’ and legislate specific and strict financial penalties that would surely cause a reduction in infractions.”

Rob Oller of the Columbus Dispatch took a similar approach. “College football is big business,” he wrote, “so treat it as such by throwing the checkbook at cheaters. It’s time to speak the language of athletic directors and presidents. You cheat, you pay. Packing such a powerful punch could be as restorative as it is punitive. The NCAA could divide the guilty school’s payment evenly across other conference schools. Talk about an effective deterrent.”

The list of possible penalties is provided in Division I Bylaw 19.5.2.2, and one of them (paragraph f) is “a financial penalty” − although that hasn’t been taken to mean anything on the order of the $10 to $15 million hit that Rishe described in his article. The most recent change to those penalties occurred in 2003, and the nature of the enterprise has changed remarkably in the intervening years.

Maybe it is time to see if the punishment fits the time.

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