More great NCAA-related journalism

There must be something in the water in NCAA Journalism Land, because suddenly there's a whole raft of well-reasoned and well-written treatises coming out as the 2011 season gets underway. It started with Spencer Hall from the EDSBS blog, with a great piece that I excerpted here, and now Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch has chimed in with a long-form journalism piece for The Atlantic that is exceptionally well-crafted and incredibly damning, even if it sheds little new light on the topic.

Yes, Branch's piece is essentially an example of the very journalism that Hall railed against in his EDSBS piece ("We know this. This is not news. Please stop acting like it is. That's very ingenious that in the bombed-out church of football, you have figured out that there is no God, and someone is running out the door with the coffers."), but that doesn't make it any less a brilliant piece of writing. Read the Branch piece, then go back and read the Hall piece, and consider yourself fully versed on the world of collegiate athletics. What you choose to do from there is, of course, up to you--I just think it's valuable to be well-informed.

Yes, the Branch piece is long (if you don't like Grantland, you won't like this piece), but I insist that it's worth a read. At the very least, you can read the Deadspin Cliff Notes of it, if you're feeling lazy. But know that if you skip the real thing, you're missing out on gems like this (which, incidentally, is the article's lead):

“I'm not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.”

Yikes. That's one of the greatest takedowns in history, and it takes huge balls to look a group of powerful people in the eye and call them out like that. But then, it's easy to talk tough when you know you're right.

[The Atlantic]
(h/t Deadspin)

Oh, ESPN...

Hey, it's been a while since I took a shot at my old favorite punching bag (no, I don't mean Krugman), so let's have at it, shall we?

Erin Andrews, who signed an endorsement deal with Reebok last month, is not the only ESPN personality or member of its “College GameDay” team to have a contract with a major shoe company. 

Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso have deals with Nike that Corso described as a joint arrangement that largely involves speaking engagements for the athletic shoe and apparel company. 

After an inquiry to ESPN about the announcers’ Nike contracts, Josh Krulewitz, an ESPN spokesman, said that Fowler, the host of “GameDay,” is “ending his minor association” with Nike “to avoid any potential perception issues.” Fowler was not made available for an interview. 

In defending the announcers, Krulewitz said: “By any objective measure, Chris, Kirk and Lee’s on-air work is unassailable. Their content has not been compromised by this relationship.” 

Corso, Fowler and Herbstreit’s deals with Nike were never announced or disclosed to viewers. “We were unaware of these deals,” Krulewitz said...

ESPN and Nike are major forces in college sports. ESPN has numerous contracts to carry games and Nike has sponsorship agreements with dozens of universities, to which it supplies shoes and apparel. So it is not a surprise that Nike has aligned itself with announcers from a marquee program like “GameDay.”...

Still, Nike’s tie to the “GameDay” announcers creates potential conflicts of interest, said Bob Steele, the director of the Prindle Institute for Ethics and a journalism professor at DePauw University. “It’s not just what’s said or written but what stories are covered and the frame for the story,” he said. “It’s the questions that are asked and not asked in an interview, and who gets interviewed.” 

He added, “You do have to wonder why a sports journalist, or any journalist, would wander in this kind of ethical minefield without recognizing the consequences.”

I'll give Fowler--who, incidentally, seems like the most level-headed and intelligent member of the bunch--credit for terminating his relationship, though he never should have had it to begin with, at least not without disclosing it to his viewers.

But at ESPN, it's pretty clear that journalistic integrity takes a significant back seat to promoting the network's programming schedule. Journalism, then, is merely a vehicle by which to advertise and increase the value of the rest of the company's assets--and increasingly, I'm afraid that's what journalism has become across the board.

[New York Times]  
(h/t reader Ted)

A.J. Green and the flawed concept of "amateurism"

With college football now underway and the NFL season kicking off tonight, I couldn't be more excited (especially since football takes my mind off the Red Sox, who I hear are still playing baseball games...good to know). But then along came the A.J. Green story, and (once again) a renewal of the age-old debate over amateurism in collegiate athletics.

This issue is far from new (as the legendary Brian Bosworth demonstrates so well in the below picture), and the Green story sheds no real new light on it. But as revenues in collegiate athletics continue to rise, it simply seems like incidents like this are happening more frequently--and will continue to do so. The clash between the NCAA and its athletes may be inching ever closer to an inevitable boiling point.

Green, for those who don't know or didn't feel like clicking on the above link, is a junior wide receiver at the University of Georgia. Yesterday, following a lengthy investigation, he was suspended 3 games by the NCAA for selling one of his game-worn jerseys to someone who "qualifies as an agent" under NCAA bylaws. On the surface, this is a clear violation of NCAA rules regarding amateurism. But Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples points out the clear hypocrisy of the situation.

If you're looking for a Georgia No. 8 jersey direct from Green, you're probably out of luck. Fortunately, you can buy 22 different variations of Green's No. 8 directly from the Georgia athletic department's official Web site. Want the white replica? That'll cost you $59.99. Want the ladies' version in white and pink? That'll run you $55. Want the red authentic -- a grass stain-free version of the one Green sold? That'll be a cool $150.

For selling one A.J. Green jersey to an agent, Green will miss a third of his junior season, including key SEC games against South Carolina and Arkansas. For selling thousands of A.J. Green jerseys to the masses, the University of Georgia will get a boatload of money.

I've personally done a full 180 on my opinion regarding collegiate athletes' amateurism. I once believed, as the NCAA seems to, that the value of a free education (via athletic scholarships) was far greater than any royalties or benefits that a player might otherwise receive. The learnings and lifetime earnings potential from a college degree were no small benefit, and this seemed just compensation for services rendered. Those athletes who insisted on being paid (or at least allowed to work part-time jobs) seemed to be belly-aching about semantics.

But things have changed in the past 10 or 20 years. ESPN and Nike have taken over the collegiate athletics universe, with explicit permission from the schools in question. A perfect example is Monday night's Boise State-Virginia Tech football game, in which both teams wore "special" Nike-manufactured jerseys during an ESPN-televised game (commemorated, in a nice circular logic sort of way, by ESPN.com). Both ESPN and Nike stood to make boatloads off this marketing bonanza, none of which will accrue directly to the players on the field.

At the same time, graduation rates among student-athletes have plummeted. Only 46% of University of Georgia football players actually graduate, and this distinction somehow manages to qualify for best in the Southeastern Conference. It is hard to imagine that the other 54% are actually realizing any of the benefits of their "free" education.

There is, of course, an argument in defense of the continued practice. For all the money that ESPN and Nike make, so too do the colleges and universities that these athletes represent. These earnings allow those schools to invest more into facilities and faculty, raising the level of education for all concerned, athletes or otherwise. For the athletes' part, they choose to play NCAA athletics with eyes wide open, many of them recognizing it as a necessary apprenticeship toward a (possible) multi-million dollar professional career.

But the options for the high school athlete with professional aspirations are severely limited, as neither the NFL nor the NBA will allow a player to sign a contract directly out of high school. Court challenges against these policies have gone nowhere (hello, Maurice Clarett), as the courts have essentially ruled that collective bargaining agreements negotiated by professional athletes (and their unions) trump all else. Baseball, for its part, has no similar restrictions, but revenues for college baseball are nowhere near as high as those for football and basketball.

I'm certainly not pro-union by any means, but it seems our student-athletes are at a significant disadvantage because they lack a central lobbying organization of their own. ESPN, Nike, and the NCAA are very powerful bodies, and the individual athletes are currently subject to their whims without a clear central voice to defend them. That may change.


[Sports Illustrated]

Not all innovation is progress

While I was training for this past April's Boston Marathon, multiple people recommended that I read Born to Run, Christopher McDougall's fantastic best-selling book about distance running--which I then did. The story itself is entertaining enough to make it a must-read, but the more lasting legacy of the book has been the interest it created in the barefoot running craze. Openly questioning the design of the modern running shoe, McDougall issues a stern rebuke of Nike and other manufacturers for having created a generation of injuries among distance runners. This recent Harvard study lends credence to McDougall's criticism (emphasis mine):

Habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers.

The study continues to suggest that by making heel-strikes more comfortable, modern running shoes are encouraging runners to run in a manner that actually maximizes the impact on their feet and legs. Running shoes make it easier to run improperly, rather than training runners to run in a manner that makes injury least likely. Therefore, despite all of the technological advances of the last 30 years, injury rates have remained stubbornly high, and in fact by some measures increased.

"Innovate or die" is a common refrain in the business world, and in many ways it is accurate. But from the consumer's standpoint, it is important that we understand that just because something is "new" does not necessarily make it "better".

Not all innovation is progress--some innovations simply make it easier for us to do things improperly. This cannot be considered a net positive for us as a consumer or for society as a whole. I'm reminded of the many "innovations" that car companies have made in recent years--the self-parking Lexus, the self-stopping Mercedes--and I wonder if these are really good things. Do we really want our roads to be filled with people who don't know how to park, or who have a built-in excuse not to pay attention to the road?

These kinds of "innovations" can indeed be good sellers, and huge money-makers for the companies who create them. But they do not necessarily drive our society forward. Does this mean I'll be going out tomorrow and picking up a pair of Vibram FiveFingers? No, probably not. But I certainly won't be shelling out $125 for a pair of AirMax shoes that will end up causing an injury.