Are college sports really pure anymore?

By: Nate Lipka

Posted: 5/14/09

Being a college athlete is, to put it plainly, an enviable position. But should it be a lucrative one?

It's an issue that, on its face, seems to produce a fairly universal "no" from sports fans and impartial observers alike.

College sports purportedly contain a sort of glowing purity, a supposed ever-even playing field smoothed out by a slew of rules, regulations and standards to make sure that the thousands of participating student-athletes remain amateurs and the competition untainted.

It's the contention that fuels the angry upheaval against certain characters perceived to be skirting the system.
Like former Arizona State and Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller, who recently filed a suit against EA Sports contending that the video game producer unlawfully utilized his likeness in several installments of the popular "NCAA Football" series.

Or USC men's basketball coach Tim Floyd, who according to a Yahoo! Sports report gave at least $1,000 cash to a representative of then-star recruit OJ Mayo in 2007 to convince him to play for the program.

Popular opinion paints Keller as a desperate money-grabber and Floyd as a snake in the grass - two opinions this writer won't go out of his way to dispute - but does no one recognize how futile it is to single out the two in a sprawling sea of gluttons and serpents?

The notion of a virginal NCAA is now no more than a pipe dream. Many millions earned through television contracts, licensing deals and ticket price increases strung that perception up, and boosters, shoe company reps, agents and "tutors" hacked it into pieces long ago.

Not to imply that all collegiate athletics are dirtied by the system. There are plenty of athletes who pride themselves on hard work and a life on the up-and-up, even in the so-called "money" sports (football, basketball, and to a lesser extent, baseball).

But the system itself is as grimy as it gets, as gifted athletes at the top of their games sweat and toil (mostly) for free while stuffy-suited television execs and NCAA officials who huff it while struggling up their mansion stairs see their pockets get fatter and fatter.

Money even takes precedence over the on-field product, in many cases. Why else do fledgling major conference teams receive invites to the NCAA Basketball Tournament over elite mid-majors? And why else would the BCS still exist in place of a true college football playoff?

The laundry list of grievances against the NCAA is even longer than that of unchecked violations at USC, but what's the solution? Pay student-athletes their due and destroy any remaining façade of sanctity in college sports?

The consequences of such a decision are too dire to even comprehend.

Barring some sort of salary cap (which the schools would ignore, as they largely do with current rules already), big schools with deep pools of booster money would buy all of the top talent in the country, rendering the already disadvantaged smaller institutions light-years behind.

Self-promotion and personal branding would fully replace school pride.

Most troubling, the line between professional and amateur sports would be nonexistent, the positive attributes of student-athleticism lost.

No, the painful truth is that collegiate sports are, for all intents and purposes, too far to turn back, the smoky back room powers' grip too strong, the NCAA's own hypocrisy rooted too deep.

We can lambaste the Kellers and the Floyds and the Mayos of the world all we want, but until we turn our attention to the head honchos at the top, the NCAA will continue its ever-accelerating slide away from what made us love college sports in the first place.