JUST WIN, BABY

 

               The NCAA Final Four weekend is about kids playing basketball, of course, but it also serves another function. It’s an annual, though informal, coaches’ convention, where college hoops mentors from around the country gather to network and gossip, the latter talk centering on what might be available where in the game’s always-lively job market.  A colleague once remarked to me that every sportswriter in America was on the lookout for a better job. The same is true of coaches, and then some.

               The celebrities of the conclave are the coaches whose teams are boogying in the “big dance,” or who have otherwise distinguished themselves. Coaches are among the most suggestible of people, always eager to put to use anything that might add a W” or other filip to their resumes. The saw “nothing succeeds like success” is nowhere more applicable than in their profession.

               The lessons of what counts or doesn’t in the scramble up the greasy pole were rarely more evident than at the just-ended get together in Indianapolis. Exhibit A was Kelvin Sampson, whose University of Houston Cougars were a Final Four contestant. If you follow the sport loosely you might have been surprised to learn that Sampson still worked at the collegiate level. He’s a heckuva coach, with a long record of winning seasons, but also left a trail of slime as a result of NCAA rules violations at Oklahoma and Indiana, his previous collegiate employers. He put both those schools on probation before moving on.

               NCAA members don’t trust one another so the organization has a fat rulebook, full of petty crimes. Thus, it’s easy to dismiss some violations as nitpicking. Not so in Sampson’s case. At Oklahoma he was found to have made, um, numerous improper recruiting phone calls over a several-year period ending in 2005, 550 to be exact. That figure impressed the most jaded and earned the school a three-year spanking, which included recruiting restrictions.

               Sampson wanted no part of that so by the next year he’d fled into the waiting arms of Indiana U., a promotion by most standards. In short order there he not only repeated his depredations but also lied about them to university and NCAA investigators. In 2008 Indiana got a three-year rap and Sampson personally was tagged with a rare order that effectively barred any NCAA school from hiring him for a five-year period.  

               That made him unemployable collegiately but he landed on his feet with a number of NBA teams, whose coaches employed him as an assistant. The fraternity takes care of its own that way. His penance completed, he’s thrived at Houston, pulling down a reported $3 m yearly to guide young men there, a shining example of rehabilitation.

               That, maybe, is what the good fathers at Iona College, a Catholic institution in New Rochelle, New York, had in mind went they hired another FF-weekend celeb, Rick Pitino, as their basketball coach last year, and watched him lead the Gaels to this year’s tourney.  A peripatetic type who’s bounced between the pros and the colleges, he got in trouble at his last employer, the University of Louisville, when it was discovered that his team hired stripper/prostitutes to entertain recruits in parties at school dorms.

 A hapless assistant coach took the rap for that one but none was available when Pitino’s name came up in the “pay for play” scandal of 2018 that had the shoe company Adidas funneling money to recruits to play at schools that used their products, so out he went. In between, he’d bravely fought off a shakedown attempt from the wife of an assistant with whom he’d had an adulterous relationship.  His reported Iona salary of $1 million a year is a small fraction of what he’d made at L’ville, but it’s probably enough to get by on.

Also taking bows at the tourney was another “Adidas school” principal, Bill Self, the head basketball coach at the U. of Kansas. His latest distinction was for landing a five-year rollover contract that amounted to a lifetime pact at the school at a $7 million-plus annual salary, something about which his contemporaries can only dream. Self was taped by the FBI yakking with an Adidas functionary about payoffs to one recruit, and about the guy’s continuing help in keeping KU supplied with future NBA lottery picks. Nonetheless, he denies all.

 Sean Miller, the coach at the U. of Arizona and another figure in the long-moldering scandal, just lost his job, but unlike Self’s teams Miller’s didn’t continue to win big in the three years since the thing broke. The point has been taken, I’m sure.

Another figure of veneration for the educators was Roy Williams, who retired after 18 years as head coach at the U. of North Carolina. Williams’ tenure at Chapel Hill included eight years (2003-2011) during which the school maintained an academic shell department, called African and African-American Studies, whose main function over an 18-year period (1993-2011) was to keep UNC athletes eligible by handing out no-work credits and grades. The Drake Group, a faculty-based college-sports watchdog, called it “the mother of academic fraud violations.”

Butch Davis, UNC’s football head coach at the time, was fired when the story surfaced. Not Williams, whose teams were busily winning ACC championships and contending for national honors. He claimed total ignorance of the fraud, and over the years questions about it faded. The New York Times devoted two full columns of its national-edition sports pages to Williams’s career when he called it quits, and only one paragraph mentioned the episode.

 How does that line go: “The evil men do lives after them”?

 Well, sometimes.

 

              

                    

BETTER BASEBALL

 

               There was a Major League baseball season last year, but not much of one. Because of covid they played 60 regular-season games instead of the usual 162, barred spectators from the stadiums and staged the postseason in “bubbles.” The statistical records, the sport’s lifeblood, were reduced to oddities. What could you make of a campaign in which 22 home runs, 60 RBIs and eight mound wins led leagues?  Seeing such numbers, a future fan most likely will just shrug and move on.

               In another sense, though, last year’s stats were important because they confirmed multi-year trends that could only be called troubling for the National Pastime. Strikeouts were up on average and home runs challenged recent highs. Batting averages were down and stolen bases continued to be regarded as relics of bygone eras. The fans, clustered around their TV sets at home, were restive.  Attendance had declined annually in each of the previous four seasons and a 2020 upturn would have surprised, had it been possible.

               The game has taken note and has mulled changes that could lead to more action on the field. Alas, aside from starting extra innings with a runner on second base (a plus!), nothing of importance will go into effect during the new season that begins today.  A number of things are being tried in various minor leagues, most notably a rule that pitchers must step off the rubber before attempting a pickoff throw (to encourage base stealing), but the gap between the Bigs and the Class A league in which this one is being tried is large. Baseball doesn’t change easily and this should be no exception.

               The causes of baseball’s turgidity are well known, but not all can be corrected or even addressed. One, perhaps oddly, is the trend toward bigger and stronger athletes at all positions, but especially pitching. Time was that a 95 mph fastball was remarkable, but today every team can trot out a half dozen pitchers who can hit that mark or higher routinely. Improvements in coaching at every level have enabled hurlers to be more refined as well as stronger, and that isn’t going to change.

               Another is the go-for-broke philosophy that governs many (most?) hitters’ approach to their at-bats. It’s a baseball cliche that chicks dig the long ball, but general managers do, too, especially at contract time. Until those two groups change their minds today’s bigger, stronger, fitter hitters will continue to flail for the fences at every opportunity, strikeouts be damned.

               Lastly, as much as it chafes traditionalists, the statistical focus called “analytics” is here to stay and pitching and defense will continue to be its main beneficiaries. The numbers crunched from every diamond action are behind what is thrown to whom and where fielders are stationed. Hitters can benefit from knowing pitchers’ tendencies, but the game’s central fact—that it’s really, really tough to hit a well-pitched ball— remains unchanged.            

               By me, though, three changes that are less than revolutionary could tilt the game’s balance in favor of more hits and runs, and, therefore, more action. The first is going to happen anyway so it might as well be sooner rather than later: MAKE THE DESIGNATED HITTER UNIVERSAL.

That was done last season to accommodate the increased inter-league play that accompanied regional scheduling groupings, but the change was erased for this one. Whatever argument against the DH that existed when the American League adopted it in 1973 has long been resolved on the ground; every organized baseball league from kids up now uses it. The main reason the National League holds out is because it's a bargaining chip for the owners at contract time. Look for it to be in play in the contract talks that begin after this season.

               The second change might be a bit more controversial: REQUIRE TWO FIELDERS TO BE ON EACH SIDE OF SECOND BASE BEFORE EVERY PITCH, thus eliminating hit-choking overshifts. Yes, the free positioning of players is a baseball tradition, but limits on it exist in other sports; football mandates that there be seven offensive players on the line of scrimmage before every ball snap, and basketball and hockey don’t permit players to lurk around an opponent’s goal when the ball or puck is in the other end. This change could be accomplished with a flick of a pen.

               My third change would require some pick-and-shovel work on the diamonds: LOWER THE PITCHING MOUND. That was what the game did in 1969 to counteract a hits drought in which pitchers like Bob Gibson, Luis Tiant and Sam McDowell were posting sub-2 ERAs. That year mound heights were dropped from  their longtime 15 inches to 10 inches. It worked, with overall averages climbing from .237 in 1968 (they were .245 last year) to .248 in ’69 and .254 in ’70.  This time let’s drop them to, say, six inches.  

               A little basic geometry explains how this would help hitters: lowering the mound would reduce pitchers’ leverage and flatten their deliveries. One reason pitchers are throwing harder these days is that they’re taller on average than they used to be; ones under six-feet tall are rare and those over 6-feet-4 are common. Lowering the mound would cut them down in size.

               Baseball also is casting around for ways to speed games but proposals to do this, such as instituting pitch clocks, only would nibble at the problem. A more-radical reduction would come if all the catch-playing that goes on before and during innings would be eliminated. In no other sport are players permitted to practice in-game the way baseball players do.

Do pitchers really need six warmup throws before an inning or when coming on in relief? Must infielders throw the ball around between outs? Those guys have been playing catch since age six and aren’t likely to forget how.

 

              

TAKE ME OUT WITH THE CROWD?

 

               The reality of the Covid 19 pandemic came home to me a year ago yesterday when I showed up at the Turf Paradise horse track in Phoenix, Arizona, to occupy my usual Saturday carrel in the place’s Players Club, and found it closed. Sure, I’d heard about the disease, but cases in the area in which I live numbered only in the dozens, and had caused little stir. Within a few days baseball would cancel its spring training and the NBA and NHL would suspend their seasons. The spring and summer to come would be a virtual winter in the world of sports.

               Now the physical world has come a full 360 degrees and the Texas Rangers just announced they would open their 2021 home season to full attendance of 40,000-plus on April 5, thus marking the symbolic if not the real end to this unique chapter in American sports history. Whether 40,000 brave (or foolhardy) souls can be mustered to complete that particular circle remains to be seen, but it’s Texas so the answer probably is yes.  Good luck to them and to the rest of us.

               Fact is, to go or not to go to any sort of gathering has been pretty much up to us from the outset of the pandemic, and will remain so until the danger passes. A national vaccination process is in full swing while thousands of people die daily from the affliction. The ideological tug of war over mask wearing continues to muddle rather than clarify our decisions. The fear of dying on the last day of a war is stronger in some than in others.

               Thanks to our elderliness, wife Susie and I have been vaccinated, altering our risk assessments considerably, but the no-no go decision remains. I voted for “go” last Thursday when my also-vaxed friend Harvey Volin came up with tickets to a Chicago Cubs-Colorado Rockies spring training game at Salt River Field in Scottsdale, about 15 minutes from my home. The place seats about 12,000 people but this spring that figure has been reduced by about 80% for covid reasons.

               Aside from an inflated price tag of $57 per, the experience was both enjoyable and edifying. Parking was easy and seating for the 2,200 folks in attendance was comfortable, the ambience being close to that of the annual Fall League games at the park.  People sat in scattered groups of two, three or four, with the other seats made unsittable by plastic ziplocks.

Masks were supposed to be required and just about everyone wore one, no small matter in this famously maverick state. Outside the stands social distancing was suggested by the “stand here” ground stickers at the gates and concession stands, but those were mostly ignored. More effective was the closing of every other urinal in the men’s rest rooms.

Concessions were cashless, peanuts and sunflower seeds verboten. Hots dogs came in plastic containers, drinks in bottles. All very spic and span. Look for the same arrangements for at least a month after most regular-season games commence in the double-and-triple decked stadia of the Bigs. Even vaccinated I wouldn’t feel right sitting shoulder to shoulder with my fellow citizens while the virus still rages and some 90% of the population hasn’t had their shots, but those precautions make sense.

I wasn’t surprised that corporate baseball was up for staging post-quarantine games because they’ve done well generally since resuming play last July. So, too, have our other major professional team leagues. If you follow this space you know that I wasn’t optimistic that our Big Four (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) could handle their returns. That’s partly because protecting their casts under dire circumstances would be a major undertaking, far outside the usual for their narrowly focused enterprises. I further doubted that the rich and entitled men who make up the teams would sit still for the discipline that would be required.

It’s helped that the virus has been relatively kind to the young and healthy; only a handful of the notable jocks who’ve been infected have suffered more than mild symptoms (Freddie Freeman, Jayson Tatum and Von Miller were among the exceptions). It’s also helped that the leagues have the kind of money and clout that allowed them to elbow to the front of lines to obtain the virus-testing and contact-tracking capabilities others could only envy.  

Their response wasn’t perfect, of course. Games were canceled or postponed, schedules were knocked out of whack, teams played shorthanded. Empty stands became the new normal, weird even with the crowd noises the teams skillfully conjured up for the benefit of the television audiences.  

In total, though, the leagues performed admirably, and the entertainment they produced provided a welcome respite from virus-enforced monotony. We waited out the virus without sports from mid-March through June, and with them from then on. With was better.

During World War II President Roosevelt was asked to halt Major League Baseball for the duration, on grounds that the games consumed scarce resources and their crowds presented tempting targets for saboteurs. He refused, citing baseball’s contribution to civilian morale. Much the same thing can be said for our pro leagues today.    

              

JOSE CAN YOU SEE?

 

               Back when I was employed as a columnist people sometimes would ask me how I kept coming up with ideas for pieces.  “No problem,” I’d answer, “God provides.”

               That was a wisecrack, of course, but the universe regularly churns out plenty of grist for a writer’s mill, and if a week’s supply is short there always are a few “evergreen” subjects to which one can turn.

               One such is how our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, is used or abused in the world of sports.  It’s as predictable as sunrise that, every so often, somebody, somewhere will take offense at how the song is treated, and start a row. Then the research done for previous pieces can be trotted out for reuse, good as new.

               The latest anthem contretemps involves Mark Cuban, the ubiquitous billionaire who owns the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, among other things. On his instruction, with a nod to recent protests over racial inequities in American society, the team didn’t play the anthem at the start of its first 13 home games this season. The lack went unremarked until a reporter for the website The Athletic noticed and wrote about it. Then the bricks started flying.

               Last summer, while the protests boiled, the NBA told its teams they could do what they wished with the anthem. Not so this season, commissioner Adam Silver decreed-- league policy is to play it. Cuban relented and Mav fans now are oh-saying along with the others.  Thus, it turns out that not playing the song could be as offensive as kneeling, sitting or making other gestures while it’s played.

               I qualify as an expert on the anthem, if only by virtue of having heard it played a couple thousand times in a long life of games-going. More than once it’s occurred to me to ask why it has become more connected with sports than with other public gatherings. One could spend decades at movies, plays, concerts and such without being asked to stand for it.

               As Tevye the dairyman said in another context, the answer is TRADITION, but one not old as most people think. The words to the song were written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore by the British in the War of 1812, and set to an existing English song. It was no instant hit, though, taking 117 years before Congress in 1931 dubbed it the anthem, the nation having gone without one before that. It didn’t become a sports fixture until Major League Baseball teams began playing it before games during World War II.

               There were dissenting opinions about the song’s worth when it gained official status, and they continue. Its meter is lumpy, its 12-tone range makes it hard to sing properly and its words are hard to get the tongue around, which is why it’s often prerecorded and lipsynched for major public performances. When polled some Americans say they’d pick “America” (my country tis of thee), “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America” to represent this land. “God Bless the USA,” aka the red-neck anthem, also gets some votes. Before one event I attended, a U.S. Olympics Trial, the Lee Greenwood ditty was played, and everyone took off their hats and stood.

 “God Bless America,” which Irving Berlin wrote in 1918 for a Broadway musical but decided it didn’t fit, gained co-anthem status after 9/11 when MLB began playing it during the seventh inning stretch at games. That’s still done in places. Again, people are asked to stand for it, anthem or not. 

               With all its repetition one would think Americans have anthem protocol down pat, but they don’t. Men pretty much remember to stand and remove their hats when it’s played, but the rules for women are fuzzier; baseball-type caps are supposed to be doffed but women’s “style” hats can remain planted. And while it’s clear what to do when you’re in your seat when the song begins (unless you’ve got a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other), what about when you’re in a stadium concourse, a concessions-stand line or a restroom? I’ve seen some amusing confusion in those places.

               The worst things I’ve seen done to the anthem came from people who performed it, not from disrespectful players or fans. A proper anthem can be sung in about 75 seconds but many singers prolong their spotlight time by stretching it well beyond that. Paul Zimmerman of Sports Illustrated used to put a stopwatch to the song in football press boxes and announce the result. I recall him once getting a reading of two minutes 15 seconds.

               Relatedly, the vocal gymnastics some singers employ can render the song all but unrecognizable. Opera singers and members of the military can be counted on to deliver it straight, but others not so much. The worst anthem I’ve heard “live” came at a Chicago Bulls’ game when the country singer Ferlin Husky sang offkey and then had to quit because he forgot the words. The worst end-to-end rendition, which I heard on video, was by the Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis, before a Houston Rockets’ game. It killed his singing career.

               Some years ago the actress Roseanne Barr capped a screechy rendition of the anthem before a San Diego Padres’ game by clutching her crotch and spitting—in homage to baseball, she said. Botching the anthem—or sitting, kneeling or first-raising during it--isn’t against the law, so nothing happened to her afterward except some boos, but she got some laughs, too. If you’re having a bad day check out her performance online. It’s a classic.

ROOTS

 

               I always knew I’d go to college because my parents (who hadn’t gone) made it clear I would, but like many in my era (I recall) never gave much thought to where. When looming high school graduation (class of ’55) made a choice necessary I sent out two applications—to Northwestern University and the University of Illinois. Northwestern didn’t accept me and Illinois did, so off to Champaign I went. The rest, as they say, is history.

               I can’t say that NU’s rejection was unexpected-- my high-school record wasn’t sterling. Nor can I claim it bothered me much. But being a normal, petty person it didn’t endear me to the leafy campus on Lake Michigan just north of Chicago, and for many years I got even by rooting against the school’s athletic teams.

That posture became a bit harder to maintain beginning in 1975, when an adult I and my family moved into a big old house on Pioneer Road in Evanston, Illinois, an easy, six-block walk from Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium football home. The Mildcats (er, Wildcats) were not a big draw then so tickets were cheap and on many an autumn Saturday afternoon I’d take my kids to a game. I’d watch the action and they’d frolic in the south-end-zone bleachers, which always were nearly empty. Walking home amid the smell of burning leaves is a fond memory of that time.

Some of wife Susie and my friends during our tenure in Evanston were NU faculty people. They included Bruce Corrie, the school’s athletics director for a time, and his lovely wife Jane. We’re still in touch even though we’ve moved apart geographically. By osmosis, my enmity toward NU athletics changed to benevolent neutrality, and so it remains.

That lengthy intro is meant to explain what is to follow, a “good news” take on a subject I’m rarely not down on. That would be big-time college sports and the swamp that surrounds it. A few weeks ago Northwestern announced that it had signed a 10-year contract extension with football head coach Pat Fitzgerald. Such pacts usually elicit shrugs because successful college coaches rarely let a few pieces of paper keep them from bounding upward, but based on Fitzgerald’s biography I’m betting on this one to stick. 

Fitzgerald got to be NU’s headman in 2006 by accident—the sudden death in July of that year of his predecessor, Randy Walker. The appointment surprised many people, probably including him; he was the team’s linebackers coach at the time and, at age 31, five years younger than any other top-division collegiate head football coach.

 Before he took the job the Wildcats mostly had been joke-level bad, with just five winning seasons in the previous 40. From 1976 through 1981 their win-loss-tie record was 3-62-1. A high-toned private institution with just 8,000 or so undergrads in a conference of state-school behemoths, their Big Ten status often was questioned, the mid-major Mid-American Conference seemingly a more-appropriate roost.

Fitzgerald, though, knew what he was getting into. Chicago born and raised, and an ex-NU linebacker and grad, he’d been a three-year assistant coach at the school and its recruiting chief. After an obligatory first-year losing record he’s been plus-.500 nine times, is 106-81 overall and has taken teams to 10 bowl games. That wouldn’t cut it at Ohio State but it’s dreamy good at NU.

About here sportswriters usually opine that Northwestern’s high academic standards mean it can’t recruit with the big fellas, but I won’t say that. Stanford and Duke have standards at least as high and regularly field first-rate football or basketball teams. The collegiate big-timers all recruit from the same talent pool and it was my observation that the biggest difference between the Stanfords and the Ohio States is that the gap between the jocks and the rest of the student body is wider at the formers than at the latters.  Still, people who grade such things say Fitzgerald’s teams outperform their recruiting rankings, so the guy must be a good judge of talent and know his X’s and O’s.

What is unquestioned is his loyalty to his school and the example it creates.  He’s called his position his “dream job” and one can only believe him. He’s reportedly turned down offers from other colleges and the pros, and while his annual salary of $3.3 million ain’t hay it’s less than he could get elsewhere. His roots to Sweet Home Evanston are thick and deep.

Northwestern’s example well might be followed by the U. of Illinois, my school. It has floundered in football’s slough of despond throughout this still-young century and now is on its sixth head coach in that span. Each of that number had good credentials but none had much connection to the institution going in. No matter what they may have said, for them the UI job was a gig, another step in a typically winding career.

In college football them that has gets, so breaking into the title-contending group of any “Power Five” conference requires extraordinary oomph.  Roots seem to be one engine for that. Wisconsin has escaped the mire via a coaching tree started by Barry Alvarez (1990-05). At Iowa the key has been Kirk Ferentz, a nine-year assistant at the school before he got the top job in 1999. Indiana had one of the Big Ten’s saddest football histories before Tom Allen turned things around in 2019. He’s an Indiana native, former state high-school coach and an ex-assistant at the school.

Tom Lasorda, the longtime L.A. Dodgers’ coach, manager and executive, used to talk about “bleeding Dodger blue.” Blood also comes in collegiate colors. 

? ? ?

 

              

               I turn 83 tomorrow but still have more questions than answers. Here are some of them:

--How did it figure that Cox told me my bill would go up if I dropped one of my two telephone “land lines”?  It was something about “bundling” but I didn’t stick around for the whole explanation.

               --When the traffic light turns green and the guy in front of you doesn’t move, isn’t there about a 90% chance he’s texting?

               --What’s the chance there will be a computer snafu when you try to order something online, and that it won’t be correctable? 20%? 30%? 50%?

               --Shouldn’t the college-basketball cliché “one-and-done” be changed to “none and done”? Most jocks who use it drop out during second semester and don’t complete a year of schooling.

               --Why does unplugging and replugging your computer eliminate bugs?  Other appliances don’t respond to that.

               --Were “smart phones” designed to make users (some, anyway) feel dumb?

               --COVID-19 thought: Parkinson’s Law has it that work expands to fill the time allotted to it, but doesn’t that also apply to idleness?

               -- Why was it that, for the same home-repair job, we got bids of $8,600, $22,400 and $27,000?

               -- Why was I not surprised that the same politicians who rolled back anti­-pollution laws were the quickest to advocate reopening businesses in the face of the virus? Human sacrifice didn’t end with the Aztecs.

               --Is there any modern plague more difficult to shake than identity theft (besides the virus, of course)? Once the scammers have even a little bit of your data they never let go.               

               --Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when a company calls its employees “team members” or “associates”?

               --How do our appliances know to wait until 5 p.m. on a Friday before breaking down?

               --Doesn’t high-definition television highlight how many people have really bad skin?

               --Aren’t all social movements demanding “justice” doomed to failure? Human disputes rarely work out to the complete satisfaction of anyone.

               --Does anything taste better after dinner than a Frango mint?

               --Why are backyard seed receptacles called “bird feeders” instead of “squirrel feeders”?

               --Did you know you can take a comfortably warm shower around Phoenix in the summer without turning on the hot water?

               --Is there a bigger bargain than the $29 I paid for a year’s online subscription to the Washington Post? Or was it $39? Either way.

               --Why do people bother to wear face masks if they walk around with their noses sticking out?

               --Is there anything tastier than Dungeness crab? Besides stone crab, I mean.

               --What have things come to when a husband (me) can tell his wife (Susie) “cute mask”?

               --I know you hate to admit it, but aren’t some of those Progressive Insurance ads clever?

               --Isn’t one of the (few) good things about the covid siege that people usually are at home when you phone them?

               --Won’t a return to “normal” depend as much on finding effective treatments for severe virus-caused illnesses as on the vaccines?  Continuing mutations will make immunity illusory, just like with the “regular” flu.

 --Is there a recorded-phone-message menu that doesn’t announce it recently has changed?

               --When did “reticent” become a synonym for “reluctant”?

               --Doesn’t accenting the first syllable instead of the second in the word “insurance” constitute a setback for the language?

               -- How can anyone believe there was guiding intelligence behind the mob that vandalized the Capitol? Most of those bozos weren’t smart enough to cover their faces.

               --Has there ever been a better made-for-TV miniseries than “Lonesome Dove,” which first was aired 31 years ago?

               --Why is it that I talk to my kids more than ever these days but still miss them more?

               Just askin’.

PASS THE SPINACH

 

               As any parent knows, give a child a choice between spinach and ice cream and he or she will pick the ice cream. That choice isn’t restricted to kids, of course, nor is it limited to young children, and in the older group it usually doesn’t stem from any lack of information. Just about everybody’s mom makes the point that spinach is the wiser option long run or short, and she has a popular cartoon figure to back her up. Still, in the long run we’re all dead and, meantime, we might as well have as much fun as we can.

               The purpose of that little observation is the change that’s about to happen to big-time college sports. After years of defensiveness and internal hand wringing the NCAA is about to relent and allow college athletes to be paid for the commercial use of their names, images or likenesses. Although action on the matter was delayed this week, it should happen this year and maybe by this fall, in time for the new football season.

               The move will be widely cheered, especially by the “just pay ‘em” crowd that believes that putting a few more dollars in the pockets of some (not all) college athletes will cure most of what ails college sports. That would register on the ice-cream side of the proposition above, an easy fix that won’t change much of anything. At the same time, it won’t include and possibly could set back more worthwhile changes that would register in the spinach category. These relate to putting more college into the college-sports mix and protect the bodies as well as the futures of the young men and women who make up the particularly American institution.

               This is not to say that the change is a bad one. College sports may have begun as healthful outlets for students’ energies but on the big-time level they’ve morphed into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that has twisted out of shape their sponsoring institutions. The notion that this beast is supported by a work force that has few of the protections of the lowliest civilian employee has, finally, become more than the courts or general public would swallow.  Allowing some athletes to cash in on their fame amounts to simple justice by any measure, when all around them have been doing that for decades.

               To call college jocks unpaid isn’t true, however. Their scholarships have value, both in immediate and long-range terms.  The dollar value of a “free ride” of tuition, books and room and board is substantial, ranging from about $30,000 a year for in-state students at state schools like Ohio State University and the University of Alabama to more than $75,000 a year at private schools such as Duke and Northwestern. Furthermore, since 2015 scholarship athletes have been given cash “cost of attendance” stipends of between $2,000 and $6,000 a year to cover such things as travel from home, local transportation and school supplies their awards don’t provide. Added up, it’s a tidy haul for what amounts to semi-skilled labor.

               Long term, the rewards of a degree from a four-year institution are much greater, by various estimates amounting to something approaching $2 million over a 40-year work life compared with people with only high-school diplomas. And that’s in addition to the broader cultural horizons higher education permits.

               The rub is that participation in a top-level college football or basketball program makes it difficult to get the education the scholarships promise. Counting games, travel, practices and conditioning, it amounts to a full-time job, made all the tougher because many scholarship athletes are marginal students who gained admission on the basis of jock cred. Once on campus, they’re steered to low-content courses by “academic advisors,” and assigned “tutors” who carry them through academe. The kids often contribute to their own exploitation by going along with the program, but their youth is a defense. At age 18 or 19 (or higher), I would have picked shooting baskets (ice cream) over reading some boring textbook (spinach). Wouldn’t you have?

To the above duties the new rules would add commercial responsibilities but, in fact, relatively few would have them. Athletes’ endorsement income is widely overestimated at the pro level and figures to be spread more thinly at the collegiate; young superstars such as Zion Williamson or Trevor Lawrence might have been able to earn serious money as undergrads, but a backup offensive lineman at, say, Purdue wouldn’t cash in similarly. I’d guess that most endorsement money would come from the likes of a booster who might book a few players for an autograph session at his car dealership. The NCAA’s proposed rules would prohibit extra-income offers as recruiting lures, but that is to laugh.

The rules would ban endorsements of products that would conflict with school contracts (read that shoes and apparel) and prohibit kids from using school logos or emblems in their ads or appearances. They could hire agents but only to handle outside-income opportunities. The changes would cost member schools nothing.

It’s not a given that the schools will get their way on all of that. A half-dozen states, including California and Florida¸ have passed laws opening outside-income doors to college jocks, and such bills are pending in a couple-dozen more. The NCAA used to regard with horror Federal legislation touching on its affairs but now it’s pleading for it, if only to keep from having to cope with lots of different state laws.  

Maybe it should watch what it wishes for. A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate by several Democrats including Cory Booker, who played football at Stanford, touches on not only outside income but many other matters. Among other things it would guarantee athletic scholarships to graduation, extend athlete medical insurance past attendance, require independent team trainers and doctors, remove academic advisors and tutors from athletics-department control and set up a commission (not the NCAA) to oversee it all.

 Chances are it won’t pass—it makes too much sense—but it’s good to get such ideas into circulation. Maybe some day.