STARTING OVER: THE SOUTHWEST CONFERENCE : SWC Commissioner Says New, Clean Era Has Begun

The first thing you want to ask Fred Jacoby is, “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?” He demurs, bureaucratically.

The commissioner of the Southwest Conference, a conference that is kindly acknowledged as the cesspool of college football, would rather focus on the rehabilitation of the outlaw league than on its sorry decline.

Anyway, ever the bureaucrat, he says this could have happened to anybody. And, as National Collegiate Athletic Assn. vigilance increases, it probably will. The SWC--made up of Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, Southern Methodist, Texas, Texas A&M;, Texas Tech, Texas Christian and Rice--has been spectacular in its self-destruction, but, he argues, hardly unique. It has just been a little ahead of its time.

Jacoby, who has commissioner since 1982, when he left the somewhat saner Mid-American Conference, has had a privileged view of what he calls a turning point in collegiate athletics. As a non-Texan (he grew up in Ohio State country), he brings some perspective to a land where, in the last five years, all but three of the SWC’s members--Arkansas, Baylor and Rice--have been in some kind of NCAA jam.

And he offers a cautionary point of view for the rest of the country, which may be playing catch-up with the SWC, if it hasn’t learned from it.

The SWC, which is awaiting sanctions on Texas A&M;, has been a good example of everything that can go wrong with college sports, especially football.

SMU, for instance, was so rife with corruption--which reached into the school’s board of governors--that the NCAA invoked its death penalty and forbade it to play football for a year, along with enough other penalties that SMU decided on its own to lay off another season.

Although the rest of the punished schools were not so flagrant in their violations, the sheer breadth of wrongdoing in Texas football has been compelling. This is as dirty as it gets.

Jacoby, who maintains that resulting safeguards have made the SWC as clean a conference as there is, explains Texas football in a way that makes you wonder why this all didn’t happen sooner. This is no apology, he reminds you, but given the factors at work, there seems to be a certain inevitability here.

“We have a unique situation here,” he begins. “Of nine member institutions, eight are in one state. And, of those eight, they are equally divided between private and state schools. This is unlike any major conference in the country.

“Texas is, admittedly, a large geographical area. There is a rich pool of talent. But there is also a tremendous amount of cross-recruiting. If a conference is spread out like the Big Ten, well, I doubt there’s much Ohio State recruiting in Minnesota.”

Cross recruiting is another way of saying that things are especially competitive when it comes to signing up 18-year-olds.

“But there are other unique factors here,” Jacoby says. “Texas is so spread out, so many remote communities, and they’ve all built their lives, their social identities around their teams. Basketball is far more urban than football. Football is still more small-town.”

Hometown pride goes right into fanaticism, thanks partly to high school playoffs, which don’t wind up until the Saturday before Christmas.

“It just builds to a crescendo,” Jacoby says.

And now here’s how fanaticism became corruption.

“Back in the ‘50s, the powers were (private universities) Rice and TCU,” Jacoby continues. “Then when we got to the ‘60s, the state institutions became the powers, and they maintained that position.

“Now we’re into the ‘80s, when our problems started, and those gentlemen who went to Rice, TCU and SMU, back when their institutions were strong, are now looking at teams that have fallen on hard times. Now, they ask themselves, ‘What do we have to do to get better? Well, we have to get better athletes. How do you get better athletes? You do what you have to do to get them.’ ”

Jacoby makes the observation that these gentlemen are by now in their 50s, in their economic prime. To set up a slush fund of $61,000, as the gentlemen did at SMU to cause their school’s sixth probation, was no great feat of fund-raising.

In Texas, you have enormous enthusiasm for football, a fierce spirit of competition and the successful businessman’s pragmatic approach to the building of a winning institution.

One more thing.

“I’m not being critical,” Jacoby says. “If you turn over a stone and find something there, you should correct it. But I doubt any other conference in the country has the close scrutiny we’ve had.”

In fact, the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald have long been in a kind of newspaper war, the kind that breeds aggressive reporting. Much, if not most, of the wrongdoing was first uncovered by newspaper reports in Dallas or Houston. Even the TV coverage has been unusually hard-nosed.

All the NCAA did was lick its chops and send down sanctions.

If, as you think about this, you wonder why it didn’t happen sooner, you may wonder why it won’t happen again. Boosters are always with us, and Texas’ problems almost entirely come from boosters’ misguided loyalties.

The SWC presidents, however, have surveyed the wreckage of their league and have decided that winning football is not worth the damage. The example of SMU, which cannot be truly competitive for at least seven years or more, is a chilling one. And the image of Texas institutions in general could hardly survive another such pasting.

“The involvement of the presidents was the most significant thing,” Jacoby says. “They worked out, no magic thing, a plan with eight or nine points. They just took greater charge, became very sensitive to it all.”

If Texas football was indeed a runaway train, the presidents decided they at least wouldn’t be asleep at the switch.

Some of the points that the SWC has introduced have been picked up nationwide. One reform Jacoby proposed at a recent NCAA convention was the elimination of everyone from recruiting but staff members of the university.

“No boosters, no alums, no representatives of athletic interests,” he says. “I expected to have to get up and defend it quite a bit. But it just sailed right through.”

Almost all of the SWC’s corrective measures deal with the elimination of boosters from the recruiting process or just making their tasks more difficult if they insist on circumventing that rule.

There is now a policy among SWC schools that student-athletes with cars must disclose loan and lease agreements.

“A coach has to be blind to look out on the parking lot and see all those expensive cars belonging to kids of low socioeconomic background,” Jacoby says. “You either have to face it or turn your back on it.”

In the past, coaches did a nice about-face on that one.

There are rules regarding the kinds of jobs that players can have in the off-season. Texas A& M’s troubles, which the NCAA is expected to act on any day now, stem from a job that star quarterback Kevin Murray was paid to do. There is some question as to how much work he did and for what salary and for what Aggie alumnus.

“The biggest thing we’re trying to do is take the alumni and boosters out of recruiting,” Jacoby says.

Of course, there is no penalty you can assess boosters for violating these points. The SMU boosters who helped bring their own program down are still going about their business, and their only loss is something to cheer for on Saturdays. There is nothing really to prevent them, aside from caution and good sense, from firing this runaway train up again.

Still, the boosters can’t corrupt a program all by themselves. They need coaches and players, who, in the past, have been all too willing. But now the SWC, and the NCAA in some instances, is determined to “terminate” coaches or players who get involved.

“That’s as clear a message as we can send,” Jacoby says.

Moreover, coaches cannot dodge penalties by just changing schools. Gary Moss, a former basketball coach at West Texas State, found that out the hard way this year, when he was fired by Sam Houston State after West Texas State was put on NCAA probation. Jacoby calls this “a landmark case.”

“As of this moment, the conference is in better shape than it’s been in years,” Jacoby says. “The reason is, anytime you have a problem, it gives you the opportunity to make adjustments and to make changes in attitude you might not have. The biggest sin would have been not to have taken advantage of the opportunity.”

He admits that some of the conference schools are paying a stiff price.

“I don’t think anybody on the NCAA infractions committee has any idea what the penalty really is,” he says. “The damage done to the reputation, that will take at least 10 years to repair.”

And he doesn’t kid himself that the SWC image will outlast NCAA penalties.

“You know, in 1980 the Pac-10 was known as a conference of cheaters,” Jacoby said. “But they’ve risen above that, and I’m hoping we can be seen in the same light five years from now. If we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.”

In the meantime, he has the grim satisfaction of watching the rest of the football world catch up with the SWC. He never apologized for the SWC but he always wondered, privately, why so many other NCAA targets remained unmarked.

As awful as the Texas “way of business” was in the ‘80s, he notes, there were a lot of institutions that managed to come in from out of state and compete successfully for these over-recruited athletes.

“Now, how were they competing?” he wonders.

He resists smugness, but he does note that the Big Eight has fully half its members in NCAA purgatory. He suspects that the example of the SWC, and the severity of penalties there, has cooled some of the more rampant enthusiasm across the country.

When Oklahoma State, for instance, learned that the NCAA was investigating its football program, the administration went into a frenzy of cooperation, coming up with a self-investigation that even the NCAA couldn’t have accomplished. This didn’t happen because they were such good guys; it happened because they were scared out of their socks about the possibility of another NCAA death penalty.

“We’re moving into another era,” Jacoby says.

A rash of NCAA actions is helping, no doubt. But the example of the SWC has been instructive, too.

Still, Jacoby thinks there is more to be done, a larger embracing of the concept of “amateurism.” Either you believe in it or you don’t, he says. He says he believes in it and resists the arguments of those who try to blur the lines with things like $50-a-month payments to athletes.

“You know, it costs $64,000 to attend SMU,” he says. “That’s a pretty big scholarship.”

Big enough, he argues.

Any willingness to pay beyond that further confuses 18-year-olds, who are already worldly wise enough to push the limits, Jacoby says. They need to know there’s nothing out there for them. Because, as it is, they are often too willing to be corrupted. Jacoby would like the NCAA rule that makes players ineligible for taking extra benefits to be invoked more often than it is.

“That’s the next step, going after the student-athlete,” he says. “That will do more than anything else, probations, the firing of coaches. You’d only need two-three top guys declared ineligible, and that would be the end of it. The word gets out.”

That’s a high price to pay, putting an 18-year-old out of business because some rich alumnus wanted his school restored to power.

But in the SWC, they are getting used to paying the price.

Jacoby argues, hopefully, that the bill has been settled. And that, he says, is what a guy like him is doing in a place like this.