The Big Game

There was a big game Saturday.

The anticipation was as palpable as the restlessness of crazed bargain hunters waiting for the doors to open on Black Friday. Excitement, uncertainty, analysis, prognostication hung in the air, permeating every public gathering like the lilting tones of elevator music in a furniture store.

Fans on both sidelines smelled victory, yet suppressed their overconfidence, lest they succumb to an ignominious embarrassment. Each team was on a roll, although one's string of successes had come by perilously close margins, and the other's defensive line had been debilitated by a rash of frustrating injuries.

The waiting begets its own intensity. Unlike baseball and basketball, whose long, leisurely seasons diminish the impact of any single contest, whose wins and losses follow each other so rapidly that one has little opportunity to savor the former, mourn the latter, or contemplate the consequences of either before the next is upon him, football's titans clash only once a week.

During the interval, the suspense builds to a fever pitch, fueled by an incessant spate of partisan posturing and media blather rushing to fill a vacuum, until it abruptly implodes with the opening kickoff, to be reconstituted within hours in the form of pretentious postmortems and specious Sunday morning quarterbacking.

The manufactured drama even got my attention. I made a bet -- a daring twenty dollars -- mainly to silence the cavalierly clatter of a friend of mine. I watched the first half on television with four of my children -- who were more spellbound by their Scrabble game than any rumblings on the field -- and listened to the sobering conclusion on the radio while driving my daughter and her husband to Roanoke to catch a plane.

Having acknowledged my apostasy, would it be disingenuous to proclaim once again on this web site my distaste for this communal combat disguised as sport?

Lift the veil of gladiatorial romanticism and transcendent athleticism, and consider what lies beneath: controlled violence and orchestrated brutality that in any other setting would be deemed assault and battery; interior lines anchored by hooded behemoths of such size and strength as to render ordinary mortals Lilliputian by contrast; a repetitious series of maneuvers in which the belligerents face off in a crouched position, engage their alter egos in bone-jarring collisions, and scatter across the field to pursue and upend a feisty ball carrier; and a sedentary expenditure of three hours to watch all of fifteen minutes of real-time action, net of huddles, unpiling, and replays.

To make full disclosure, I never played the game. Once I reached puberty and looked around at my peers, I realized I was too small, weak, slow, uncoordinated, nearsighted, and averse to physical contact for pads, helmet, and cleats to do me any good.

Perhaps this handicap prevents me from fully appreciating a friend's spirited defense of football in response to my previously documented disparagement. "It is the most team-oriented sport of all," he said. "Everyone works together to achieve a common goal. Of twenty-two players on the field, fifteen have no chance to touch the ball, barring a fumble or interception."

The rewards of football come at a high price, according to Kris Jenkins, former all-pro defensive lineman for the Carolina Panthers and New York Jets.

"Pain in football is consistent over time," he writes in the New York Times, November 20, 2011. "You're still hurting in the off-season. You're hurting when the next season starts . . . You ever been in a car crash? Done bumper cars? You know when that hit catches you off guard and jolts you? Football is like that. But ten times worse. It's bad . . . From the double teams over the years, I wore the left side of my body down. I was past hurt. I was at the point of numb . . . I couldn't feel part of both arms. I couldn't feel part of both legs . . . I'm just starting to get feeling back in my left side."

Of course, he's talking about professional football. Maybe it doesn't hurt so bad, or so long, at the college level, even though recent hits in that arena have been equally devastating.

For the true devotee, there's obviously more to the big game than what meets the eye of the uninitiated, but whatever it is eluded me when I visited Annapolis, Maryland, two years go to watch Navy square off against Wake Forest -- ending a two-decade hiatus for me. It was all downhill after the soul-stirring parade of one thousand midshipmen and an exhilarating flyover by the Blue Angels prior to kickoff.

Seated fifteen rows back on the fifteen-yard line, I strained to penetrate the amorphous confluence of black, gold, and blue brush strokes slithering back and forth across a muddy streaked canvas. So well-hidden was the ball that I doubted its substantiality, until I glimpsed it briefly wobbling through the gloomy mist. A few minutes into the second half, a curtain of water descended on this dreary charade, mercifully dispatching my companions and me to the warmth and dryness of our hotel room to commiserate over the televised swamping of the Deacons with a bottle of wine.

Perhaps I chose the wrong venue.

Friends extol the joys of tailgating -- those lavish outdoor cocktail parties where thousands of enthusiasts feast upon sumptuous home-cooked delicacies or professionally-grilled entrees and consume gallons of free-flowing alcohol (but none shall pass the lips of the underage students hovering in the background, I assume), thus to be well-fortified for a rigorous agenda of shouting, cheering, booing, cursing, and general hell-raising.

On some campuses, I am told, the masses are treated to a grand revue worthy of the British monarchy, where the home team disembarks from its royal coaches and marches past the star-struck revelers in its resplendent armor, en route to a valiant defense of its sacred turf.

What are these festivities all about? Love of the institution, whose raison d'etre is, ostensibly, the higher education of our youth? Adoration of the team, upon whose broad, padded shoulders are borne the hopes, dreams, credibility, and wagers of its disciples? A lust for aggression, which is sublimated, displaced, and resurrected in the bodies of these noble avatars? I suspect it is all of the above, plus semi-calculated theater to inspire the faithful and keep their plentiful dollars flowing.

Why do "schools work so damn hard and often take ethical shortcuts to forge themselves into football powers," to nurture a culture of unconditional team worship? Because, says sports journalist Michael Weintraub, a graduate of Penn State, "if they are successful, then the game serves as as the lifelong bond between alums and townspeople and the university, thereby guaranteeing the institution's self-preservation through donations and season-ticket sales and infusions into the local economy . . . [and] college football [will become] (other than our own families) the purest emotional attachment of our adulthood." (Gitlin, The New Republic, November 14, 2011)

Such fervent loyalty is hardly limited to "alums." Some of the most ardent collegiate sportsmen I know never sniffed their adopted alma maters until well into their post-graduate years.

The seeds of sustainment are planted early, as legions of students are swept up in the frenzy -- painting their faces, baring their chests in sub-zero conditions, standing in solidarity throughout the entire contest, berating their opponents with malicious taunts. Sometimes their enthusiasm overruns the boundaries of juvenile delinquency.

In 2008, after their Nittany Lions defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes in Columbus for the first time in thirty years, back in State College "thousands of inebriated Penn State students poured into a downtown residential area known as Beaver Canyon and began to riot, breaking windows and toppling street signs." Police officers resorted to pepper spray to subdue the unruly celebrants. (Ben McGrath, The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, p. 21) At the most civilizing of establishments, the outcome of a child's game shattered the restraints on wanton behavior, and society ran amok.

Three years later its emperor would prove to have no clothes.

The most explosive scandal in the history of college sports erupted on November 4 when state authorities released a 23-page grand jury report documenting multiple incidents of sexual abuse against young boys committed by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky between 1994 and 2009. Most occurred either in Penn State's football facilities or at football functions. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

Despite his prominence and relatively young age, mid-fifties, Sandusky retired in 1999, but was allowed full access to the facilities and provided with an office and a phone. One year earlier police had investigated a complaint by an eleven-year-old boy that Sandusky had bear-hugged him in the shower, but had closed the case without filing charges. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

The most damaging grand jury accusation stemmed from the testimony of receiver coach Mike McQueary, who said he saw Sandusky raping a boy in the shower in 2002, after which he informed head coach Joe Paterno. As the account moved up the chain of command, ultimately reaching university president Graham Spanier, its severity moderated to the point where no one felt it necessary to inform any police agency. The lone reprimand was that Sandusky was prohibited from bringing children onto the campus. (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

The fallout from these revelations was swift and lethal. The Board of Trustees fired Spanier and Paterno. For the latter, the fatherly figure affectionately known as JoePa, irreparably shattered was a legacy enshrined in 409 wins, two national championships, an 89% graduation rate, the library that bears his name, a health center for which he was the major contributor, the football fortress underwritten by his friends, and the $2 billion endowment he espoused. (Werthem and Epstein, Verducci, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

Sandusky's heinous acts were only half the story; equally despicable was the coverup -- a pattern of deceit and denial designed to preserve and protect the sanctity of a quasi-religion, which, insulated, isolated, and bereft of a moral compass, had assumed a monolithic life of its own. When President Spanier tried to coax his seventy-seven-year-old icon into retirement seven years ago, he was firmly rebuffed -- long before "too big to fail" became a sound bite.

The Penn State football program was hardly a model of purity. Between 2002 and 2008, forty-six players were charged with a total of 163 crimes ranging from public urination to murder. In 2008, McQueary broke up "a player-related knife fight in a campus dining hall." (Werthem and Epstein, Sports Illustrated, November 21, 2011)

In 2007, six players were charged by the police with forcing their way into an apartment and beating up several students. The school's chief disciplinarian, Vicky Triponey, subsequently resigned, citing "philosophical differences" over a judicial process by which football players were treated "more favorably than other students accused of violating community standards." In one meeting, Coach Paterno stated that "his players couldn't be expected to cooperate with the school's disciplinary process because, in this case, they would have to testify against each other, making it hard to play football together." (Reed Albergotti, The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2011)

If the cult of JoePa turned out to mask a culture of corruption, its exposure was only the latest -- if not the most egregious -- confirmation of the endemic rottenness of the whole nasty enterprise. Just since 2010, one shock after another has rattled its glass facade.

The University of Southern California was stripped of its 2004 National Championship and Reggie Bush of his Heisman Trophy after the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) determined that Bush and his family had received "improper benefits" -- free airfare and limousine rides, a car, and a rent-free home -- from overzealous sports agents. The father of Auburn quarterback Cam Newton allegedly used a recruiter to solicit $180,000 from Mississippi State University in exchange for his son's matriculation. Ohio State coach Jim Tressel resigned after Sports Illustrated reported that twenty-eight players over nine years had traded autographs, jerseys, and other memorabilia in exchange for cash and tattoos. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

These trespasses pale in comparison to the sordid activities of University of Miami sports booster Nevin Shapiro, whose poisonous tentacles ensnared seventy-three athletes, seven former football and basketball coaches, and three staff members, according to Yahoo! Sports. (Alexander Wolff, Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2011)

Dazzled by Shapiro's bulging checkbook, the school's administrators, with the blessing of President Donna Shalala, permitted Shapiro to fly on the team charter, lead the players onto the field, and stamp his name on their lounge in the Hecht Athletic Center. They turned a blind eye to his eight-year spree of lawlessness, which included stocking hotel rooms with prostitutes, paying for an abortion, installing a stripper pole in his luxury box, offering bounties for incapacitating opposing quarterbacks, and drunkenly threatening a compliance director in the Orange Bowl press box. (Alexander Wolff, Sports Illustrated, August 29, 2011)

Inflated egos, overweening ambitions, the unrelenting pressure to win, and above all endless streams of money have inundated and indelibly stained the gridiron. Indeed, protecting its obscene profits -- $50 million generated from $70 million in revenues at Penn State in 2009 -- is the core value of college football. (Joe Nocera, The New York Times, November 11, 2011)

In 2010, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference became the first college league to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts.

The bulk of the purse comes from television contracts, in pursuit of which the signers readily cede their weekend destiny and compromise their academic mission. "We do everything for the networks," says William Friday, a former president of North Carolina's university system. "We furnish them the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on . . . If they want to broadcast football on a Thursday night, we shut down at three o'clock to accommodate the crowds." (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Scandals proliferate in darkened corridors; multinational corporations, submissive universities, the voracious NCAA, and media moguls wheel and deal like Wall Street wizards; coaches and their assistants rake in huge salaries; alumni and friends pour buckets of tax-deductible dollars into foundation coffers. And the laborers in the trenches -- many of whom cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home -- go unpaid.

Is it conceivable that the volunteers upon whose backs this edifice is constructed might decide to protest their exploitation?

Last year CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting paid the NCAA $771 million to televise its 2011 basketball tournament -- its principal source of revenue since a 1984 Supreme Court decision stripped it of exclusive football broadcast rights. Friday recalls a threat to boycott the championship game. "This team was going to dress and go out on the floor but refuse to play" -- jeopardizing millions of television dollars, countless livelihoods, the NCAA budget, and subsidies for sports at more than 1000 schools. Fortunately, it lost before the finals. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

For $29.99 a piece, the NCAA now offers dvd's on demand from its huge vault of college sports. In 2008, Electronic Arts sold 2.5 million copies of a football video game licensed by the NCAA. None of the profits derived from their being depicted in these products goes to the athletes. "Once you leave your university, one would think your likeness belongs to you," says Ed O'Bannon, a former college basketball player of the year who has filed a class action antitrust lawsuit claiming a share of the revenue generated from his image. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2000, after twenty-five years of legal haggling, an appeals court ruled that Kent Waldrep -- a running back for Texas Christian University -- was not an employee when he was paralyzed in a 1974 game against Alabama, and thus ineligible for worker's compensation. School officials testified that they had recruited Waldrep as a student, not an athlete -- a patent absurdity, says Waldrep. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

The NCAA's moral authority -- and indeed its defense in all such cases -- is embedded in the concept of the student-athlete, which it crafted in the 1950's. The logic of the device is that, as students, college players would never have to be compensated for more than the cost of their studies. As athletes, however, whose enrollment was necessary for success on the field, they would not be held to the same academic standards as their peers. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Ironically, this deliberately ambiguous terminology, and its sanitized corollary, "amateurism," are nothing more than synonyms for the essential hypocrisy that girds this superstructure.

While players' scholarships often don't cover the full cost of attending college, coaches' salaries have escalated dramatically. According to Charles Clotfelter, economist at Duke, "The average compensation for head football coaches at public universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 per cent since 1984 (adjusted for inflation), more than twenty times the cumulative 32 per cent rise for college professors." Many coaches pile on assorted bonuses, endorsements, speaking fees, country club memberships, and negotiated percentages of ticket receipts. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Are athletes granted special treatment in the classroom?

In 1989, Dexter Manley, Washington Redskins defensive end, famously teared up before a Senate subcommittee when admitting he had been functionally illiterate in college. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In the 1980's, Jan Kemp, an English instructor at the University of Georgia alleged that she had been demoted and then fired because she refused to inflate grades in her remedial English course. Documents showed that administrators had replaced her grades with higher ones; on one notable occasion they awarded unearned passing grades to nine football players who otherwise would have been ineligible to compete in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. Once, said Kemp, as she struggled to maintain her integrity, a supervisor questioned her judgment: "Who do you think is more important to this university, you or Dominique Wilkins [a star basketball player]?" (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2009, following an admission by academic tutor Brenda Monk that she had asked a member of the basketball team to submit electronically another player's test answers, Florida State University conducted an NCAA-mandated "vigorous self-investigation." Interviews with 129 athletes revealed that absentee professors had allowed group consultations and unlimited retaking of open-computer assignments and tests. Sixty-one athletes were suspended, and the football team was required to vacate twelve victories, but the harshest penalty fell upon Monk, who had testified voluntarily. Through a dreaded "show cause" order, the NCAA, in all its perverse wisdom, rendered her effectively unhirable at any college in the United States. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

The logic of the NCAA's inverted moral universe has it chasing intermittent petty violations like a traffic cop swooping down on unwary speeders while a bank robber makes off with thousands one block away.

At the start of the 2010 season, the NCAA suspended Georgia wide receiver A. J. Green for four games for selling his Independence Bowl jersey -- to raise cash for his spring break -- while the Georgia Bulldogs flaunted replicas of the same jersey for $39.95 and up. Five Ohio State players were suspended for five games for selling Big Ten Championship rings and trading autographs and other memorabilia for discounted tattoos -- while commercial insignia from multinational corporations were plastered on their bodies. Last season, while he and his father were under scrutiny for allegedly taking bribes, Cam Newton wore at least fifteen corporate logos -- on his jersey, helmet visor, wristbands, pants, shoes, and headband -- as part of Auburn's $10.6 million deal with Under Armour. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

When players are seriously injured and can no longer play, or when they underperform, coaches often yank their scholarships, forcing them to drop out of school. (Joe Nocera, The New York Times, November 11, 2011) The National College Players Association -- which seeks modest reforms such as safety guidelines and better death benefits for college athletes -- reported that 22% of Division I basketball scholarships were not renewed in 2008-2009. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

Since 1973, an NCAA rule "has prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than one year, to be renewed or not unilaterally by the school -- which in practice means that coaches decide each year" who is in and who is out. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

In 2009, Joseph Agnew was cut from the Rice University football team and his scholarship revoked before his senior year, leaving him with a $35,000 tuition and expense bill if he decided to complete his degree. The coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to another school, and his replacement switched Agnew's scholarship to a recruit of his own. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011.)

In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action lawsuit over the cancellation, seeking to remove the NCAA's cap on scholarships. Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with the eight colleges who had recruited him and could have received a multi-year guarantee. While it has yet to be decided, the case represents a direct challenge to the rationale for the NCAA's tax-exempt status, which is the promotion of education through athletics; restricting the availability of scholarships would seem to deny opportunities rather than foster them. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

College athletics programs have dodged the IRS for years -- and foisted a heavier burden on the tax-paying public -- because of their purported educational mission. Yet when coaches pull down $4 million salaries, the NCAA builds a $50 million complex and purchases a $1 million jet, and two-thirds of the athletic revenue at large universities is derived from ticket sales, television rights, and advertising and merchandising contracts, one is hard-pressed to detect a link between all this rabid commercialism and academics. (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

Much of the money is plowed back into a spiraling arms race as "universities spend increasing resources on measures of athletic success that, at most, benefit their own institutions at the expense of others." (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

Contributions from individuals and businesses -- including fees to purchase prime seats and luxury boxes and facility naming rights -- continue to be tax-deductible, often against the recommendations of the IRS, which are repeatedly rejected by Congressmen feeding at the trough of powerful lobbyists. (Eric Dexheimer, Austin American Statesman, December 26, 2009)

"College football and men's basketball have drifted so far away from the educational purpose of the university," says James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan. "They exploit young people and prevent them from getting a legitimate college education. They place the athlete's health at enormous risk, which becomes apparent later in life. We are supposed to be developing human potential, not making money on their backs. Football strikes at the core values of a university." (Todd Gitlin, The New Republic, November 14, 2011)

"Ninety per cent of the NCAA's revenue is produced by one per cent of the athletes," says Sonny Vaccaro, a former executive at Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. "Go to the skill positions, the stars -- ninety per cent African-Americans . . . The least educated are the most exploited." (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

NCAA rules require college athletes to sign a "Student-Athlete Statement" attesting to their amateur status. Implied in the document is a waiving of their rights to profits from any sales based on their performance. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

"But the NCAA has no recourse to any principle in law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing . . . No legal definition of amateurism exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repugnant and unconstitutional nature -- a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship," and the right to be compensated fairly for their labor. (Taylor Branch, The Atlantic, October 2011)

For one brief, terrible moment a few weeks ago, as the Penn State scandal burst into the public consciousness, one dared to imagine that a tipping point had been reached, that some influential individuals might take an objective look at a cancer that was not merely localized but indeed systemic, and broach the subject of fundamental reform. Such hopes were illusory.

Instead, the season has marched inexorably toward its routine controversial denoument, in which millions bemoan the absence of a true playoff, but for which I am forever grateful, because it exposes for once the ultimate futility of taking sports seriously. The outrage has subsided, and been superseded by conference championships, BCS computations, Bowl matchups, and the next Big Game. Resisting the initial pleas that it shut down its program, Penn State will justify its participation in the TicketCity (formerly Cotton) Bowl as an obligation to its guiltless players and devoted fans and by donating the proceeds to sexual abuse prevention groups.

In other words, it's business -- I mean football -- as usual.

By the way, Virginia Tech beat Virginia 38-0.