Sports agents just part of problem

When Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who'll do anything to win, calls somebody a pimp, you know things are getting bad. Saban used the epithet to refer to unethical sports agents, and the NCAA is conducting an investigation of possible payoffs by sports agents to football players at the University of North Carolina and the University of South Carolina.

Sports agents' abuses, however, are just the latest manifestation of the fundamental problem underlying college athletics. The once-simple and low-key sports programs have become big business — very big business. The Atlantic Coast Conference recently signed a multi-billion contract with ESPN to televise basketball games. Coach Saban at Alabama makes more than $4 million a year, plus incentives, and Alabama fans probably think he's worth it. In a couple of months, any cable or satellite TV subscriber in the country will have a choice of more than a dozen college football games every Saturday, and that doesn't count the Thursday night games, which were added purely to satisfy television demands.

This latest scandal ironically comes just after Bill Friday, president emeritus of the UNC system, celebrated his 90th birthday. Friday has spent a good deal of his retirement time advocating for reforms in college athletics. The Knight Commission, which he co-chaired, pushed for reforms and a diminished stature for college sports, to no avail. The commission worried that athletics were dictating policies to academia, and academic standards and ethics were suffering.

When the NCAA finishes its investigation and hands out its penalties, much will be blamed on sports agents, but the real blame lies with universities that get caught up in the hype of college sports, build ever-more-grand football stadiums and basketball arenas, and allow television contracts to dictate schedules, game times and everything else. The blame also lies with alumni and fans who lavish money on athletic programs through booster clubs and capital campaigns, and with Congress, which treats donations to these booster clubs and athletic campaigns the same as donations to tax-exempt academic causes.

If you've ever listened to Andy Griffith's classic "What it Was Was Football," you know that college football has not always been big business, but it has always been fun. Less lavish programs in less grand facilities with more emphasis on area competition and less on national championships would be just as competitive, just as much fun and just as much a source of pride as today's grandiose and ethically hazardous College Sports Inc.