SIDE DOORS

 

               The two-year-old saga about rich people trying to buy their kids’ way into high-toned colleges now is playing out in the courts, with predictable results. A number of the 50 or so people charged with giving or receiving bribes have pleaded guilty and been handed prison sentences measured in months instead of years. It’s no news that our courts treat upper-class criminals more kindly than less-favored ones, and the trials now in progress in Boston should have similar outcomes.

               The connection with sports is that most of the finagling that was done involved phony athletic credentials that allowed bribe-getting coaches to sneak academically unqualified aspirants past their school’s admissions officers. This is a familiar feature of American academe, so familiar it has a name-- “side-dooring.” That entrance portal is available to jocks of many stripes with no criminal involvement. Ivy League schools routinely bend their admissions standards to improve their teams and so do other NCAA members that claim not to award athletics scholarships. That also goes for our national military academies, which additionally will arrange prep-school rides for the athletically talented who haven’t made the grade in high school.

               It’s been noticed by some that the Government minions behind the current prosecutions had to stretch to identify a victim in the frauds. That issue also arose in a 2018 episode in which an FBI “sting” operation netted some coaches and middlemen for funneling under-the-table money from the shoe-company Adidas to A-level basketball recruits being wooed by schools affiliated with the company. The immediate parties in that one (the kids, coaches and Adidas) all stood to benefit from the schemes so it was decided that the universities involved had been defrauded, even though their coffers would have swelled had they succeeded in landing the kids in question. If they were capable of doing so, prosecutors might have blushed advancing that theory.

               College-sports revenues didn’t much come into play in the present cases because its side-door portals were connected to such “minor” (i.e., non-revenue) sports as tennis, soccer and water polo. That was because sought-after football and basketball recruits tend to be so well known that unfamiliar names can’t be slipped into the mix. In the minor sports admissions people tend to take the word of coaches for who should and shouldn’t be given special treatment, thus opening the way to manipulations.

               About $25 million was said to have changed hands in the deals, funneled through William “Rick” Singer, a former basketball coach who ran a firm that facilitated college enrollments. One of his biggest conduits was Rudy Meredith, a one-time soccer coach at Yale who pocketed $400,000 in one admissions scheme and lined up $450,000 in another before investigators stepped in.

But while corrupt coaches got most of the money some went to the supposedly victimized schools. A case in point involved Stanford U and John Vandemoer, its former sailing coach. A September 27 story in the New York Times, by Billy Witz, tells how Vandemoer turned over to the university the $770,000 he received from Singer to help gain entry for two students. The story said he pocketed nothing but was fired nonetheless and spent a day in jail and six months in house arrest after a felony guilty plea for racketeering conspiracy he says he entered because he couldn’t stand the expense of a criminal trial.

Putting aside the question of why any university save the Naval and Coast Guard academies needs a sailing team, the episode sheds light on the role in the bigger college-sports picture of men’s non-revenue sports and just about all of those for women. Begun to create recreational outlets for students, they now are maintained in part to enable the big-timers to claim they’re not just football or basketball factories. They survive because of small but dedicated alumni factions and, since the 1972 enactment of the so-called Title IX, the need to satisfy a government requirement that women and men have equal access to athletics scholarships.

 Except for a few places like Eugene, Oregon (for track and field) and Iowa City, Iowa (wrestling), the teams don’t pay their own way and depend on various kinds of charity to continue. They live precarious existences, always waiting for the axe to fall in the next economy wave. Revenue losses from Covid-19 brought wholesale slaughter to the minor-sport ranks; by one published tally 35 NCAA Division I schools alone cut 112 such teams between January and June of this year.

The Times story made clear the ties between Singer and the august institution in Palo Alto, California. It said that when Vandemoer turned over one Singer check for $500,000 to Bernard Muir, Stanford’s athletics director, he was met with warm congratulations. When the coach tried to explain the source of the money Muir cut him off, saying “we know Rick.” The piece said Singer was known to other Stanford coaches and sometimes entered Vandemoer’s office unannounced even though a key card was needed for access to the athletics-department building. Stanford’s “side door” also included a front door, it seemed.

The list of colleges with which Singer did business was long, also including Georgetown, the U. of Texas, UCLA, Cal Berkeley and Southern Cal. One female student he “helped” was a family friend of a USC trustee. Far from being victims of the frauds, the universities involved were beneficiaries. The corruption that sustains their entertainment enterprises runs deep. At the least it should spur Congress to take a critical look at the tax-free status their athletics revenues enjoy.