Prostitutes. Strippers. Pay-for-play scandals. Drug trafficking operations. Payoffs for athletes and their parents. Test-cheating. Coaches being enamored with warped salaries. College football and sports athletics has spun out of control. It has been out of control for a long time.
Accepting a scholarship to attend school now comes with a string of salacious benefits for the college student-athlete that makes attending an after hours party for a private sector company look like going to kindergarten class.
SMU. Oklahoma. USC. Ohio State. Auburn. The University of Minnesota. Michigan. The University of Washington. Arizona State. Miami. And the list goes on and on. Our nation’s college campuses have now become a culture of muck instead of institutions of learning.
According to published reports, college recruiting trips for the prospective student-athlete have been rendered into nothing more than binge-sex parties and wild escapades of anything goes.
Talk about anything goes, the University of Miami athletics program, particularly its football team, would fit nicely into that category. Miami’s student-athletes, it appears, went from one party to the next, according to a stunning report put out by Yahoo! Sports.
According to Yahoo! Sports report, renegade booster Nevin Shapiro, who now sits in a jail cell for operating a $930 million Ponzi scheme, supplied 39 current and former Miami players with women who provided monetary sexual services for the athletes. The alleged women Shapiro paid to have sex with the players were either prostitutes or strippers.
The report also outlines Shapiro’s frequent trips to strip clubs with Miami football players, alcohol, bounty pay (players would get paid to take out an opposing team’s star), and coaches in the know about the alleged improprieties. All told, at least 72 current and former Miami players have been implicated of being part of Shapiro’s surreal world of illegal activities from 2002 to 2010.
All the while the school’s administrators-compliance officers to the university president-stood idly by and did nothing.
This is the problem with big-time college athletics. There is no real oversight. With all of the money that is being passed along and passed down between the outrageous bowl game sums (2011 Rose Bowl participants Wisconsin and TCU were awarded $21.2 million each), outlandish coaches salaries (For an example, Alabama football coach Nick Saban earns nearly $6 million annually), stupendous athletic budgets and beyond belief television revenue, college athletics have become the Rome of our time.
It’s too big with very little or no control.
No one has had the guts or moxie to take the helm to steer the ship back on its course. But it’s time someone did. And that starts with the folks in Congress, who are probably too politicized or too out of touch to do something about it. But if there is a way to get this NCAA mess straightened out it’s going to take act of Congress to make that happen.
The people that run the NCAA have shown they are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Those in charge of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) are only there for the money and don’t seem to be too interested in ethics and integrity. Congress has the powers to fundamentally change the landscape of corruption that is now place in college athletics.
It’s time they make that move. Members of Congress need to move the same way they did when they put Major League Baseball on the hot seat with its rampant steroid and drug problems.
The corruption stems from the fact that student-athletes are being prostituted by the very institution (NCAA) that suppose to govern them. Student-athletes are human. They’re better educated and more savvy now. They know and understand their monetary worth.
They see the millions of dollars made off of their likeness and names. They see the billions of dollars being paid to their respective colleges and universities from conference payouts and television and radio deals.
Yet the current conditions of a student-athlete contract spells out that they are not allowed to hold down a job to make money while on an athletic scholarship. At its base this is unconstitutional under the law.
The NCAA has stripped away a fundamental right of the student-athlete by contractually saying they do not have the basic right of any other American citizen in this country, and that is a right to earn money. The fact that every other student on campus can get a job, but a student-athlete cannot while he or she is on scholarship is asinine at the very least.
With no income coming in, the student-athlete, especially at prime-time athletic programs, is then prone and vulnerable to shady folks and social status-grabbing sleaze buckets like Shapiro, who are more than happy to oblige them with whatever vices their taste buds are hungry for.
If seasoned elected officials who lead our country can fall prey to the trappings of success, surely eye-opening encounters of illicit sex, booze and money can seductively entice an eager 18-year-old man or woman. This is where Congress needs to step in and do its part.
Make people accountable. Congress should hold hearings about what’s going on in college athletics. If they can have hearings on baseball, they can do the same when it comes to the betterment of our kids.
This is not a black and white problem. It’s not a Democratic Party issue. Nor is it a Republican Party matter. It’s an American crisis that appears to be getting worse by the day. At some point, members of Congress has to take their heads out of the sand and move to ensure that our college campuses are places of learning, not an atmosphere of distortion and destruction.
Dennis has covered and written about politics, crime, race, sports, and entertainment. Dennis currently covers the NFL, MLB, NBA, NCAA, and Olympic sports. Dennis is the editor of News4usonline.com and serves as the publisher of the Compton Bulletin newspaper. He earned a journalism degree from Howard University. Email Dennis at dfreeman@news4usonline.com
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