A good start, and a long way to go for NCAA

When Bob Dylan wrote “The Times, They Are a-Changin,” I doubt he had college sports in mind. Nonetheless, his raspy voice and twangy tunes would find a fitting home in NCAA President Mark Emmert’s office these days.

On Monday, Emmert backed a proposal to offer an additional $2,000 per year to student-athletes receiving Division I athletic scholarships, an idea which the NCAA Board of Directors will vote on tomorrow. While this rule would not directly affect Columbia’s athletic department—the Ivy League prohibits member institutions from offering athletic scholarships—the Board of Directors will vote on a litany of other proposed legislation that could very well impact the Light Blue.

Before we get into specifics, a little context: After years of watching the NCAA slowly smother itself under petty rules and embarrassing scandals, it seems that people like Emmert are done trying to tinker with the current system and are ready to completely retool the entire mess. To give you an idea of how backwards things have gotten, just take a look at the disparity between NCAA rules and the reality on the ground.

While star athletes like former Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor and former USC running back Reggie Bush have been investigated for everything from free (or reduced-rate) apartments to trading memorabilia for tattoos, compliance directors around the country are bogged down by NCAA rules so minute and obscure you almost have to laugh out loud. One example Emmert himself has used is an ongoing debate over whether putting cream cheese on a bagel provided to a recruit means that bagel is no longer a snack but an unapproved meal. So while Pryor sells his Sportsmanship Award from the 2008 Fiesta Bowl to get a little extra ink (I’m not making this up), the compliance people charged with preventing these types of transgressions are debating the nutritional value of cream cheese. No wonder Emmert described NCAA rules as delving into “painful, brutal, laughable detail.”

Now that we have set the stage, let’s take a look at what is being proposed. The main changes being considered tomorrow include the additional $2,000 per year backed by Emmert, an increase in a team’s required academic performance level to be eligible for postseason play, a retooled freshman redshirt model, and stricter eligibility requirements for junior college transfers (Research credit to ESPN’s Heather Dinich, whose stellar article on the subject informed much of this column).

While these ideas may not seem as earth-shattering as I made them out to be, consider the following: Had the proposed academic performance requirements (measured by a team’s APR score) been in place last year, seven men’s basketball teams which participated in the NCAA tournament last year would not have even been able to take the court. That list includes UConn, the eventual champions and Columbia’s first opponent of the 2011-2012 campaign. Could you imagine if coach Jim Calhoun’s Huskies were forced to sit and watch someone else cut down the nets during March Madness last year? These types of ideas come as music to my ears. I have long been disgusted by the NCAA’s nit-picky rules—former Utah men’s basketball coach Rick Majerus was once penalized for taking a player out for a meal at a local deli after his father died—and felt it was in need of some serious help.

My concern: The changes don’t go far enough. College sports have long been mocked for failing to live up to their joint mission of academic and athletic achievement. The fact is the vast majority of student-athletes, coaches, and administrators do honor—even cherish—this mix of school and sports. Yet Columbia, where student-athletes do not receive athletic scholarships and are subject to specific admissions requirements above and beyond those the NCAA mandates, is nonetheless a part of the same system that allows high-school superstars to spend one-year joy rides in college before leaving for the NBA.

Just think about how hard you are studying for midterms right now. Now think about Carmelo Anthony taking in a Knicks game in Madison Square Garden after winning the NCAA tournament during his spring semester. Assured of his place in the upcoming NBA draft, Anthony did not spend the rest of the term hitting the books—and why should he have? Melo’s currently a millionaire who calls MSG his home court, and it’s clear his lack of academic rigor never came back to bite him. The problem is not with him but with the system that condones the professionalism of big-time, multi-million-dollar college sports programs by covering it with a thin veil of “amateurism.” You could make the argument that Bush and Pryor were justified in reaping some benefits for their services, given how valuable those services were: A recent study valued the average Duke men’s basketball player’s worth to the university at $513,000 annually.

So kudos to Emmert for calling out the pettiness of the NCAA’s current rules structure and pushing for substantive change. But I hope Thursday is just the beginning, not the end. Because when Dylan warned the power brokers of yesteryear, “don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he that stalled,” he very well could have been speaking to the NCAA Board of Directors. They are the ones who are charged with fixing the system, and they will be the ones held accountable if it continues to be broken.

Zach Glubiak is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. He is a member of the varsity men’s soccer team.
sports@columbiaspectator.com