Blog Archives: June 2009

[Ashlen]

Justifying bad ethics
06/28/2009

Ron Morris, columnist for The State newspaper, recently commented on South Carolina’s head football coach, Steve Spurrier, offering a scholarship to a high school sophomore.  The article discusses the pros and cons of offering scholarships to underclassmen.  While this is a worthy discussion topic for this blog, the part I found most interesting in this article is what South Carolina’s athletic director, Eric Hyman, thinks of the situation:

Eric Hyman, USC’s athletics director, says making offers to freshmen and sophomores in high school violates the spirit of college athletics. Yet Hyman understands the competitive edge gained by making such early offers.“There are things we do that I don’t agree with,” Hyman says, “and that’s one of them. I struggle with that. I struggle with being involved with young people at that age.”

Even though Hyman says he has ethical concerns with offering scholarships to underclassmen, he still allows it to happen.  This quote perfectly describes the problem with college athletics.  The people involved in college athletics are (for the most part) fully aware of the ethical problems with college athletics, but they freely commit ethical breaches in order to be more competitive.

The day before Morris’ article was posted, South Carolina awarded Hyman with a five year contract extension worth a minimum of $422,000 a year.  No wonder Hyman ignores his ethical concerns.  The State article describing Hyman’s new contract also discusses new potential bonuses for Coach Spurrier:

In any year USC's NCAA multi-year Academic Progress Rate for the team falls between 925 and 934, Spurrier will receive a $50,000 bonus. The bonus is $75,000 if the APR is between 935 and 949 and jumps to $100,000 with an APR of 950 or higher.

Keep in mind that an APR score of 925 is the minimum compliance point.  In order words, Spurrier gets a bonus for merely being compliant with the NCAA‘s academic progress rules.  Getting the equivalent of a D on a report card has never looked so good.  Although I am sure that South Carolina isn’t the only school with such a bonus, the University of South Carolina is sending a loud message about their academic standards.

[Ashlen]

Does racial paternalism exist in sports?
06/29/2009

AOL Fanhouse blogger Clay Travis published an interesting piece today where he tries to understand why baseball players are not forced to go to college in order to play professional ball while football and basketball players are essentially forced to attend college to get to the highest professional level.  Travis cites recent research from the Wall Street Journal that found only 26 players and coaches in Major League Baseball with four year college degrees out of a pool of 1,042.  I was shocked when I read those numbers.  I did not expect the number of major leaguers with college degrees to be high because of the high percentage of non-United States born players, but I expected it to be more than 26!

Travis posits that racial paternalism may explain the draft policies of MLB, NHL, and other mostly non-black sports as compared to those of the NFL and NBA.  I’m not sure if I buy that.  MLB has had a minor league system for decades now.  Perhaps NFL and NBA owners saw that having minor league affiliates with rosters of players on the payroll was not such a brilliant business idea and decided to add a filtering level (college) to further determine major talent from potential busts.  Also, the policies were the same when baseball had a higher percentage of black players.  Thus, I really don’t see racial paternalism being a factor here.  Perhaps a bigger question is how different the college graduation rate for NFL and NBA players are from MLB players.  I would think the NFL and NBA would have more graduates, but I don’t think the number would be very high. 

[Ashlen]

School district saves sports, but loses some teachers
06/29/2009

Like many public institutions in California, the East Side Union High School District near San Jose is suffering from budget problems.  The district is suffering from a $23 million budget shortfall.  One of the proposed ways to deal with the budget problems was to eliminate all sports programs.  Not surprisingly, this proposal was not popular with some parents.  To that extent, parents and kids did some fundraising and agreed to required “donations” from students to play sports.  That, in addition to a $800,000 insurance settlement, was used as budgetary justification by the school board to keep sports in the schools.  Unfortunately, the board could not find money for 80 teachers that will lose their jobs. 

Unfortunately, the details of this story are a bit sketchy after that.  Although it is possible, it seems unlikely to me that the fundraising and additional fees will cover everything to make sports break even or make a profit.  In fact, it is probably still running a large deficit, but that is hard to say without any numbers.  Also, it is entirely possible that the 80 teachers being laid off were poor quality teachers that needed to go, but it is difficult to determine this from the outside.  Perhaps this district has great student to teacher ratios or declining enrollment, but it is more likely that the opposite is true.   

This case is certain to bring up questions about the priorities of schools.  It is quite possible, though it is hard to know for sure, that this district could have scraped sports entirely (while keeping physical education) and retained many of the laid off teachers.  In theory, that would have been the academic thing to do.  If schools exist to promote education, the decision would have been obvious.  Although many talk about the benefits of youth sports, the research shows that the benefits are certainly not automatic and can even become negatives.  On top of that, there is no reason why sports has to be administered by the education system instead of other alternatives.  In fact, I see very few reasons why varsity sports should be run by the education system.  Of course, it seems like parents are willing to support sports just as much, if not more, than academics in many situations.  Until that changes, school boards will be forced to do the popular thing instead of the logical thing.