Category: non-finance

Nelson Mandela once said that sports “laughs in the face of all forms of discrimination.”  And he’s absolutely right.  Sports is an incredibly democratizing force that has the power to break down bigoted barriers.

Jesse Owens showed black men were just as good as any man.  In 1936 he outran Adolf Hilter’s eugenics athletes at the Berlin Olympics.  Greg Louganis showed that gay men could compete and win in athletics just as well as straight men.  In the 1984 and 1988 Olympics be dominated the diving competitions, bringing home 4 gold medals.  In 1954 the boy’s basketball team from Milan High, the team on which the movie Hoosiers was based, showed that a bunch of farm boys from a tiny speck of a town could outplay any other team in the state of Indiana.

 

We’ve come a long way, but not that far for women

Women’s sports have made tremendous strides in the past several decades.  The US Women’s soccer team captivated the nation over the summer, bringing home their third championship.  The WNBA will celebrate its 20^th anniversary next year.  Women’s tennis is as popular as ever, and Serena Williams won “Athlete of the Year”.  Title IX, passed in 1972, has expanded female collegiate athletics by orders of magnitude.

Yet for all that progress, women’s sports as a spectator sport has lagged woefully behind their male counterparts.  Sure there are some bright spots like tennis and soccer and more recently MMA thanks to Ronda Rousey, but when evaluated by virtually any metric of popularity, women’s sports is SUBSTANTIALLY behind men’s.  There are fewer women professional athletes, their games/tournaments/matches draw much smaller crowds, people aren’t willing to pay as much to see them, they have lower television ratings, they get less ESPN coverage, they have much lower name recognition which leads to much smaller endorsement deals, and because of all of this they earn much, much less money.

I don’t believe these issues are related in any way to concerns about equal pay for women in the broader economy (actually I think that $0.79 study has serious flaws in it, but that’s for another day).  Sports is probably the most capitalistic industry.  Athletes get paid what they are worth or, thanks to free agency, they play for someone else.  Fans watch sporting events that are exciting to them, and they don’t watch those that aren’t.

So why aren’t women’s sports more popular?  Because it’s an inferior product.  Women’s sports just aren’t as good as men’s.  I’m not trying to be sexist, although I can certainly understand why it might come across that way at first, but please read on and you’ll see my logic.  Some may argue that they’re different and you can’t really compare them, like apples and oranges.  And there’s some truth to that.  But fans vote with their feet and their wallet, and they are voting that men’s sports are better.

 

Exclusionary sports = less entertaining sports

On the surface it’s easy to look at this and blame misogyny.  After all, most sports fans are men, although it’s not skewed nearly as much as you’d think.  For example attendance at NFL games is about 56% men, 44% women.

The answer lies in the exclusionary nature of women’s sports.  By definition, women’s sports only allow women to compete, excluding men.  Men’s sports on the other hand aren’t really men’s sports as much as anyone who can compete.  To play in the WNBA you have to be really good at basketball AND have XX chromosomes.  To compete in the NBA you have to be really good at basketball, and that’s it (you’ll notice there is no “M” in the NBA).  As I once explained to my wife in an extremely crude manner, “it doesn’t matter if you have one dick, two dicks, or no dick.”

Which league has the better, more entertaining, more popular product?  Obviously the NBA.  And it’s because most of the best basketball players in the world are men; the NBA allows those players to compete in their league while the WNBA does not.

And this isn’t just a woman thing.  Compare the Olympics to its cousins who exclude competitors based on some criteria.  The Olympics is far more popular than the Special Olympics (excludes competitors without disabilities), the Gay Games (excludes heterosexual competitors), the Senior Olympics (excludes younger competitors), the Junior Olympics (excludes older competitors), and any other that I may have missed.  It’s not even close.

Of course that’s not to say that women’s sport or those other exclusionary sports aren’t worthwhile.  THEY ABSOLUTELY ARE.  If women had to compete against men, most probably couldn’t, so I’m glad there are women’s (and more importantly girl’s) leagues.  Blind people or those with Down’s syndrome or paraplegics couldn’t compete against non-handicapped people in most sports, so I’m glad there is the Special Olympics.  The Gay Games seems as much a get together for like-minded people as it is a sporting competition so I’m glad it can serve that purpose.

But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to vote for them with my feet or wallet.  I’m a huge sports fan and I watch the sports that are entertaining and compelling.  Sometimes it’s women’s ice skating or gymnastics during the Olympics, last summer it was Serena’s run for the Grand Slam, and of course I watched the Americans win the women’s World Cup.  But mostly (roughly in order of importance to me) it’s men’s basketball, football, baseball, and soccer.  And I’m not alone.  All those metrics I mentioned earlier show that most men AND MOST WOMEN agree with me.

There’s a simple formula here.  If you want to produce the best, most popular sports product, you have the best athletes.  Not the best female athletes or the best male athletes.  Not the best old athletes or the best young athletes.  Not the best black athletes or white athletes.  THE BEST ATHLETES.

 

Playing with the boys

Quick, name the most famous race car driver you can.  Maybe you said Jeff Gordon.  He’s pretty good.  He won the NASCAR championship four times and 93 races over his career.  Maybe you’re old school and you said Dale Earnhart (won 7 season championships, 76 races) or Richard Petty (7 season championships, 200 races).  Maybe you’re new school and you said Jimmy Johnson (6 season championships, 75 races).

You know who a lot of people say: Danica Patrick.  She’s probably one of the most popular racers out there.  Is it because she’s won so much?  No, she hasn’t won a single NASCAR race.  Is it because she’s pretty?  Maybe, but there are a lot of pretty women out there, many much prettier than Danica.

She’s so popular because she is a woman competing against men.  If she was racing in a female only circuit, no one would care.  She wouldn’t do GoDaddy and Secret commercials, for which she makes about $10 million per year, among the highest of any NASCAR driver.  But she refuses to race against inferior competition because of her gender, and the public loves her for it.

Remember Tom Watson’s second place finish in the 2009 US Open?  There has been a lot of guys who finished second place in golf tournaments, but why do we remember this one with Tom?  Because he was a 59 year old guy competing against golfers in their 20s and 30s, and he nearly beat them.  Sure, there’s a golf tour for old guys, it’s called the Senior PGA and its ratings suck.    Watson could have dominated that the Senior PGA, but he decided to compete against the best without any qualification and the golfing community loved him for it.

Does the name Jim Abbott ring a bell?  He was a major league pitcher who had a record of 87-108.  That’s not really all that good, but why do we remember Jim?  He did that with one freaking hand; he was born without a right hand.  Sure he could have been the all-time greatest pitcher at the Special Olympics, probably pitching perfect games every time, striking out every batter he faced.  But no, he decided to compete against the best baseball players in the world, and he won.  Opposing teams even tried to bunt against him, figuring he couldn’t field the balls because of his missing hand.  He took on that challenge too, having a fielding percentage commensurate with his fellow pitchers, all of whom had two hands.

Here are examples of athletes who could have competed against inferior competition because of their gender or age or disability.  But all of them refused to be held back, and they competed against the best athletes in the world at the highest level.  And for that the sporting public loved them more, gave them more money and more ESPN coverage, and came out to see them in greater numbers than their performance alone probably merited.

 

Women’s sports are holding female athletes back

So let’s bring this full circle.  Women’s athletics.  Physiologically, men are stronger and faster than women.  Because of that it would be nearly impossible for even the most gifted female athlete to compete against men in sports like basketball or baseball or MMA or swimming or track and field.  Even the all-time great Serena Williams would probably lose in the first round of the men’s bracket (although it would be entertaining as hell to see—more on this in a second).  The US women’s soccer team would almost certainly lose three games in a row, probably not even scoring a goal, if they competed in the World Cup.

But there is an extremely popular sport where I think women can compete against men—golf.  Right now there is a tour that features the best golfers in the world, the PGA, and there is a tour that features the best players in the world but excludes men, the LPGA.  As you would imagine, the PGA is much more popular, covered on ESPN much more extensively, pays its winners much larger purses (about twice as much), produces much bigger stars, and on and on.

Every once in a while, a brave female golfer decides not to be held back by her gender and competes in the PGA.  Everyone loves it—Presidents mention it, the media goes bonkers, and that woman golfer starts trending on Twitter in a major way.  Unfortunately, it happens very rarely, about once every few years.  Anika Sorestan did it in 2003 and Michele We did it a few times between 2004 and 2008, and that’s about it.  Sadly, most women compete in the LPGA in anonymity for lower pay with smaller crowds and less coverage.

Why don’t more women compete against the boys?  The common refrain is that women aren’t as strong as men (fact), and can’t hit the ball as far (possibly fact), so they can’t compete (fiction).  So long as female golfers continue to buy into this self-defeating paradigm, they’re missing out on gold and glory the likes of which no female athlete has ever seen.

 

Why women can compete against men in golf

Really the whole thing comes down to drives off the tee.  There’s no real reason women can’t putt as well as men.  That involves the ability to read a green, hand-eye coordination, and a deft touch.  Strength is not a factor.  Women’s abilities there are certainly equal to those of men.

The middle game, between the drive and green, can involve hitting the ball a long way, but club choice can probably address that.  Maybe a stronger, male golfer would use a 7 iron when 170 yards from the pin, so a weaker, female golfer would use a 5 iron.  Problem solved.

So let’s get back to the driver.  As you would expect, male golfers hit the ball longer with a driver than female golfers do.  Dustin Johnson averages the longest drives on the PGA tour at about 319 yards, while Joanna Klatten averages the longest drives on the LPGA tour at about 274 yards.  That’s a difference of about 45 yards.  Interestingly, that 45 yard difference tends to be consistent.  The difference between the average drive length for PGA golfers and LPGA golfers is about 41 yards.  The difference between the best golfers, Jordan Speith for the PGA and Inbee Park for the LPGA, is 43 yards.  The difference between the golfers with the shortest average drives, David Thoms in the PGA and Lisa McCloskey in the LPGA, is 45 yards.  So it seems there’s something to that 45ish yard distance.

Yards	PGA	LPGA
Longest driver	Dustin Johnson—319	Joanna Klatten—274
Average driver	290	249
Shortest driver	David Thoms—270	Lisa McCloskey—225
#1 player	Jordan Speith—292 (ranked 77th)	Inbee Park—249 (ranked 78th)

 

Now an extra 40 yards on each hole is a big deal.  It might seem like a pretty insurmountable advantage for the male golfers, but a closer look shows a few different reasons why maybe it isn’t that big of a deal after all.  First point, golfers don’t use their driver on every hole.  Certainly, they don’t use it on the four par 3s typically found on each course.  Additionally, there are shorter par 4s where the male golfers tee off with a three-wood or an iron, because they don’t need to get maximum distance.  Finally, courses may be designed to limit the advantage of a long drive.  Doglegs are a common feature on holes which force golfers to hit shorter shots off the tee so they can make the turn when the dogleg bends.  Ponds and streams have a similar effect.  All those are examples of how hitting longer balls doesn’t necessarily mean playing better.

Second point, no one knows how far women can drive a golf ball.  Just as noted above, men aren’t always hitting the ball their hardest with their biggest club because of the course features, there’s no reason to think the same doesn’t apply to women.  LPGA courses are set up to be shorter than PGA courses.  If women are teeing off closer to the green than men, it shouldn’t be surprising that they don’t hit the ball as far.  Taking the 2015 US Open and Women’s US Open as examples, the men’s (although it’s not really right to call it “men’s” since women are able to compete in the US Open as well) course at Chambers Bay in Washington was 7384 yards long while the women’s course at Lancaster Country Club in Pennsylvania was 6483 yards.  That’s a difference of 901 yards for 18 holes.  Do some easy math and what is that difference on a per-hole basis?  Wait for it . . . . 50 yards.  Hmmmmm.  Women drive about 45 yards shorter than men do, but they play on courses whose holes are about 50 yards closer.

Third point, faster, harder swings aren’t the dominant factor in successful drives.  Golf club technology has made amazing strides forward.  Sure you still have to swing the club, but weaker individuals can hit balls further thanks to titanium drivers, carbon-fiber shafts, and all the other stuff in clubs today.  Driving is more a matter of hitting the ball in the sweet spot and with the proper back swing, than it is swinging hard.  If swinging hard was more important you’d see golfers with thick arms and butts who can really generate some serious club speed due to their strength.  As it is, most golfer have thin body frames.

Final point, just because you drive long doesn’t mean you win.  Look at the #1 golfers on the PGA and LPGA tours.  Jordan Speith is the #1 golfer on the PGA, but he has the 77^th longest drive on the tour, 27 yards shorter than the longest driver.  Inbee Park is the #1 golfer on the LPGA, but she has the 78^th longest drive on tour, 25 yards shorter than the longest driver.  Those numbers are eerily similar.  Of course the reason is that the other components of the game, that have nothing to do with strength, allow these golfers to succeed.  It’s commonly acknowledged that Speith is the best putter on the tour, and he leverages that to win more than anyone else.

 

For gold and glory

Let’s put a bow on this package.  It’s not true in a lot of sports, but in golf women can compete against men and they can win.  THEY CAN WIN.

Why do professional athletes compete?  For fame, for immortality, to beat others, to prove they’re the best, for money?  All those become bigger and better for a female golfer who competes in the PGA.  And not just a little bit better.  Orders of magnitude better.

What’s the most famous tennis match ever?  Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs in 1973.  It was dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes”.  It was played in the Houston Astrodome in front of over 30,000 fans (attendance at the US Open championship for tennis is usually about 24,000).  It was carried live television and seen by millions.  And competitively it was a farce.  King won, “proving” a woman could compete and win against a man, buuuuuuut King was in her prime at age 30 (Serena was 34 when she won three grand slams) and Riggs was 55.  King didn’t prove that a woman could beat a man as much as she proved a younger person could beat an older person.  Even so, it was an enormous deal that captivated the nation and which people still talk about nearly 50 years later.

Can you imagine if a cadre of the world’s best women golfers decided to do the same thing?  We’ve seen it already just in small doses, but what if it became a real thing where women seriously competed against men, not just as a one-week lark but as a legitimate member of the tour?  The internet would explode, Twitter would blow up.  Instantly, they would be on every late-night talk show, they would get top-billing on ESPN, they would have more endorsement deals than they would know what to do with, they would get White House invites, they would have throngs of fans at the events.

And if they won?!?!?!  That wouldn’t be the biggest sports story of the year, it would be the biggest story of the year or maybe even the decade (if there wasn’t a major war).  She would instantly win “Athlete of the Year”, a Congressional medal of honor, and probably a Nobel Peace Prize.  Seriously, what event would have a bigger impact on gender equality that a woman showing she could beat the men on the field of play?

It would put a sword through the heart of the argument, currently a very valid one, that women’s sports are inferior to men.  It would inspire millions of girls (and boys too) to take on the biggest challenges and know you can come out the winner if you work hard enough despite your vagina.

It could do all those things and it’s so achievable.  Will it be easy?  No, such things rarely are.  Will it force the best golfers on the LPGA to eat a little humble pie as they go from being dominant among inferior competition to fighting it out against the world’s best?  Yes, absolutely yes.  But if those LPGA golfers are doing it for money or fame or importance, all those things wait for them by taking on the men.  Only that money and fame and importance are hundreds of times bigger than the best they can hope to achieve now.

I don’t know if it will happen, but as a sports fan and as an advocate for gender equality, I sure hope so.

Normally I write about personal finance and the stock market.  However, due in some part to the fact that I have a lot of free time since I don’t have a real job, I was thinking about posts on the weekends that look at other parts of society that interest me.  I’m a huge sports fan, so let’s take a Stocky-Fox look at college football and men’s college basketball.

 

College sports has a hallowed place in American culture.  Wait a second, let’s be honest with ourselves, really two college sports have a hallowed place in American culture—football and men’s basketball.  ALL the others fall significantly short when you look at basic metrics to gauge popularity and importance—the revenue they generate, the fans that attend the events, the coverage they get on ESPN, the Facebook posts/Tweets they get, etc.  I am willing to concede that in certain geographies men’s hockey, men’s baseball, and women’s basketball are quite popular, but even then they tend to be small potatoes compared to football and men’s basketball.  So for the sake of this post, let’s focus on the two biggies.  Unless I say otherwise, when I refer to college sports in this post, I am specifically meaning football and men’s basketball.

I am a huge college sports fan, but I am also extremely conflicted.  Some of my fondest memories growing up with my dad revolved around college sports—picking our basketball brackets, watching New Year’s Day bowl games on TV, going to University of Redlands basketball games, to name a few.

But the state of college sports is shameful, and has always been.  Just recently the University of Louisville, bear in mind I went to high school in Louisville, just put its men’s basketball team on probation because of a scandal involving prostitutes and recruits.  A couple years back the University of North Carolina, bear in mind I just moved to North Carolina, got in hot water for a pretty extensive academic fraud where the basketball players weren’t going to class.  A few years before that USC’s football team had to vacate their Heisman trophy and national championship because of allegations of paying players, bear in mind we just moved from Los Angeles.  And there’s a million others—sexual assaults, point shaving, physical assault, drug abuse, steroid use, and on and on and on.  Year after year after year.  Are these the types of institutions and people our society should place on pedestals?  If I am watching them play, aren’t I complicit in that pedestalization?

I want to take this post to objectively look at the pros and cons of big-time college sports.  As you read this, I would love to hear what you think.

 

What is the role of higher education?

First and foremost, we need to decide what we want colleges and universities to do.  Is it to educate students in subjects like math, science, history, and literature?  Teach life skills? Prepare them for gainful employment?  Expose them to a diverse world?  Offer an opportunity to explore their interests?  Provide really fun times?

For non-athletes, the only one of those that sports at their school meets is the “provide really fun times”.  Let that sink in for a second.  College sports, which is a huge deal across the country, benefits the vast majority of students by providing “fun”.  For all the time and effort and money that surrounds the issue we’re talking about, that’s the benefit to most.  That doesn’t really seem to align with the mission of higher education, but maybe it should.  More on this a bit later.

For athletes it’s a bit more complex.  College sports has nothing to do with educational subjects.  Nor does it have to do with exploring interests; only in the rarest of circumstances does a guy go to college and say “let’s try basketball out.  I always wanted to do that.”

For a very, VERY small fraction of athletes it does prepare them for gainful employment in a professional football or basketball league.  However, you could also argue that too many college athletes who don’t have the skills to be professional athletes might dedicate too much effort chasing that professional dream that will never materialize.  That said, let’s agree that for the best athletes, college is an important place to prepare for future employment, just like it is for non-athletes.

The big one in my opinion is the life skills piece.  Whether you go pro or sit the pine, being on a team offers great opportunities to grow and mature as a person.  Admirable qualities like dedication, commitment, teamwork, humility, pride, achievement, and many more are very available for any athlete who is open to accepting them.  But remember, only the athletes benefit from this, not the larger student body.

So there you go, when you look at the role of higher education and its intersection with college athletics, it really seems to boil down to the life skills that athletes are getting, with a small element of job training for the most gifted athletes.  And non-athletes get bupkis (except maybe some really good times).

 

 

Supporting all the other athletic programs

To the degree that you believe in that “life skills” argument for the athletes then you have to support college football and basketball.  Why?  It’s a simple answer—MONEY.

Those two programs (and football much more so than even men’s basketball) generate the money that pretty much supports every other sport.  Just as an example at the UofL, since they’re in the news, the two big programs generate a ton of money, about $2 million of which goes to the other athletic programs.

Other sports like gymnastics, swimming, volleyball, and on and on—none of those could exist without the largess from football and men’s basketball.  All of those are money losers.  What funds them?  You have two choices: either your football and men’s basketball programs, or you can pay for them by the general funds of the university.

So let’s say you’re fed up with football and men’s basketball because of all the crap.  You can shut down your athletic program, or you can pay for it by using funds that could otherwise go to student housing, scholarships, research, or (try not to laugh) lowering tuition.  How important is gymnastics or lacrosse or wrestling?

 

Women’s sports

I could have mentioned this in the “pay for other athletic programs” category, but women’s sports deserves its own section.  In 1972 Title IX was passed into law which basically equalized college sports for men and women.  It required that the same amount of money be spent on women’s sports as men’s, and that the same number of athletic scholarships be given to women as men.

This was a huge boon for women’s athletics, as you can imagine.  The number of sports that schools offered for women increased because they had to even out things with their men’s programs.  Football teams are allowed 85 scholarships, so that has to be matched by 85 scholarships for women’s programs.  Just using round numbers, that means the football program is balanced out by the women’s swimming, gymnastics, field hockey, soccer, and softball.  Not bad.

But let’s be honest with ourselves.  The only reason Title IX was possible was because football and men’s basketball were so profitable.  You can’t really tax those programs in a traditional sense, so really the only way that society could dictate where that money went was by forcing a “gender equality” gambit on them.  And by most standards it’s been a huge win.  Football and men’s basketball get to continue to do their thing and now there is a whole generation of women athletes who get to participate in collegiate athletics and get all those life-skill benefits it provides.

But make no mistake, without college football and basketball, women’s athletics are dead meat.

 

Students who wouldn’t otherwise be there

Football and men’s basketball is often a path to higher education for many students who would otherwise never be able to attend college.  The number of young men who parlayed their athletic abilities to get a higher education is countless.  And that’s important.  Undeniably college sports has taken men who would otherwise be blights on society and given them the opportunities to get an education and become contributing members of society.

This is especially true for poor students and black students (who statistically tend to be poorer).  There are a million examples, but a good one is Georgetown University.  It is an extremely highly-regarded, extremely expensive private school in Washington DC.  The total student body is about 6% black.

It also has one of the most storied men’s basketball program in the nation, thanks to the legendary coach John Thompson (who I think is best basketball TV analysts out there and I wish he would do more games).  The starters for the basketball program for the past several decades are probably about 90% black.  A student body that is 6% black with a basketball program that is 90% black.  How many of those black students would be going to Georgetown if it wasn’t for basketball?  Probably not many.

Of course that’s good for the students, but that’s also good for the university.  Isn’t college supposed to offer that type of exposure to diversity?  Probably a lot of that goes away if one of the main avenues for “different” types of students to attend the school goes away.

 

What really matters to college students?

If you’re a non-athlete student going to college, what are the things that are really important?  In a lot of ways college is a bit of a commodity.  The calculus you learn at UofL is the same I learned at Pitt.  Biology is the same, accounting, English literature, mechanical engineering, and on and on.  Sure, there might be slightly nuanced approaches to teaching the subjects.  And definitely the professors can make a huge difference, but every college has their share of good and bad teachers.  There are some schools that truly offer coursework that no other institution offers, but those tend to be the exception.

There’s the campus as well.  Is it idyllic like Centre College in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky?  That can be really nice and peaceful, allowing the student community to really forge strong bonds on their “academic island”.  Is it an urban campus like I had at Pitt, allowing us to embrace the city of Pittsburgh and all it had to offer?  Those are differences.

Also, there are the amenities on campus: the niceness of the student housing, the food court, workout facilities (probably funded by the athletic programs).

We haven’t mentioned fun yet.  When you’re a student what are you doing for fun?  Sure there’s a ton of things, much of which involves beer and bad decisions regarding sex.  One of the main sources of fun for a very large part of the student body is football and men’s basketball.  There’s tailgating, going to the game, celebrating the wins, and getting collectively pissed at the refs who robbed your team of the game in the loses.  Unquestionably, there are a lot of students who couldn’t care less, but there isn’t another school activity that brings more students together than college sports.

 

What really matters to alumni?

As important as college sports is to the students while in school, they become even more important to an even larger part of the alumni after they leave school.  Just look at the vernacular: “Homecoming”.  That is when alumni come back home, come back to campus.  And what is the centerpiece of “homecoming”—it’s a football game.

As a Pitt alumni I try to be involved in recruiting and mentoring, but it’s pretty hit or miss.  You want to know what connection I consistently have to Pitt—getting together with local alumni to watch the football games each Saturday (I did this in LA, but now that we’re in Greensboro, surprisingly, the Pitt network isn’t as strong).

I couldn’t tell you the number of Rhodes Scholars that Pitt had or the amazing patents their research institutions have filed.  I have no idea who the most influential lawyer or innovative entrepreneur or life-saving doctor is.  You want to know what I do know?  The football team had a decent season and lost to Navy in their bowl game.  The basketball team is middle of the pack in the ACC and will probably miss the tournament.  And that is going to be the same for 98% of the alumni out there.

 

Being entertaining as hell

College athletics can reasonably be seen as an entertainment product.  How many other things do you know that can pack a stadium with 100,000 people, have fans camp out for tickets, drive a huge Nielsen rating on television, and bring a local community together?  Not many.  So that’s a good thing.

People who are disdainful about sports because of all the bad apples are surely entertained by something.  If not sports then opera or theater or movies or concerts or something.  College athletics in many ways is just that, a really entertaining product.

 

Our entitlement society

Now we’re at the crux of the issue, all the bad behavior.  Prostitutes, skipping classes, drugs, alcohol, and all sorts of other bad things.  Of course, all those things are pretty common on college campuses, whether involving athletes or non-athletes.  The problem comes in with the difficult-to-wrap-your-arms-around idea that college students represent the school and should be held to a higher standard.  That’s a tough one to hold them up to a higher standard and punish them when they do the same things other students do.  A huge plank of the anti-college athletics argument is “fairness”.  Where is the fairness of holding college students to a higher standard?

When athletes do break the rules, there’s the perception that they get treated with more leniency than an ordinary student, and that is most certainly true.  But why should we be surprised?  That is society.  How many rock stars or actors or politicians act like absolute assholes but society turns a blind eye because they are famous?  Justin Bieber, Ted Kennedy, Hugh Grant, and on and on.

Why should it be different for a similarly talented person, but their talents are putting a ball through a hoop instead of writing a catchy tune?  Now the optimist will say we shouldn’t allow that all.  Every person should be held to the same rules.  I agree with you.  But we don’t live in that world.  Let’s be realistic.  That is a problem bigger than college athletics, that’s a problem with fame.

But it’s fair to say why should colleges tolerate these bad guys on their teams, knowing that these misbehaving athletes will be the face of the university.  The short answer: WINNING.  We live in an entitlement society and athletes enjoy those entitlements.  The better of an athlete you are, the more entitlements you receive.  And any economist will tell you that without repercussions for bad behavior, people will behave badly.  It’s that simple and that’s what’s happening with college athletics.

Sure, there are sterling examples of good athletes.  Grant Hill comes to mind as a superstar college athlete who was a genuinely good guy and didn’t get in trouble.  So does Peyton Manning . . . except that would have been true two weeks ago.  Now there are allegations that he sexually assaulted a female athletic trainer when he was at University of Tennessee.  Of course, you don’t have to go very far to find the athletes who are bad guys.

 

Can a college exist without sports?

So what’s a school to do?  We probably need to accept that in the foreseeable future if you want a winning college athletic program, you have to get athletes who have a certain amount of unsavoryness to them.  Suggesting otherwise is just putting your head in the sand.

Maybe some should follow the University of Chicago’s example (I went to UofC to get my MBA, incidentally).  Back in the 1930s and before Chicago was a sports powerhouse.  They were a founding member of the Big 10, won the first Heisman trophy, fielded a football program that competed against the Chicago Bears on the Midway (the Midway is a park on the UofC campus; ever wonder how the Bears got their nickname “Monsters of the Midway”?).

They gave it all up.  In 1939 they abolished their football program and in 1946 they left the Big 10.  As you might expect, their athletic program descended into obscurity.  They are now a Division III school.  Their football stadium and basketball areas seem like small high school facilities.  Why would a school give it all up?

They wanted to focus on academics.  Wait?!?!  What?!?!  A university wanted to focus on academics at the cost of their athletics program.  Hard as it may be to believe, it’s true.  Chicago is now widely considered one of the premier research universities in the world.  Their student body is one of the smartest.  It’s also one of the nerdiest and least fun.  There are t-shirts that boast “UofC: Where fun goes to die”.  And there’s a lot of truth to that.  There are no football bonfires, no big games that bring the school together, no championship banners, no alumni events centered on a great gridiron victory.

The choice is there.  A school can focus on academics and rid itself of the collateral damage that comes with it, that comes at a major cost.  Which schools are willing to do that?  To my knowledge, Chicago is the only school that deliberately destroyed such a strong athletic program for the sake of staying true to its academic mission.

 

What to do?  What to do?

If you look at all this, it’s a tough call.  Football and college basketball are fairly filthy, but a lot of good comes from that filth.  Support for all the other athletic programs, including women’s sports; greater diversity on campus; fun and a sense of university community; entertainment for the masses.  Do you give all that up, like the University of Chicago did, just to rid yourself of the filth?

My answer is “no”.  I hate that football and men’s basketball programs are so despicable and drive a double-standard.  But to me the good outweighs the bad.  Just like in society at large, you have to take the good with the bad, and college football and men’s college basketball are no exceptions.