Point of View / Bob Oates : The Big Steal : In the Never-Ending Scramble to Uphold the So-Called Amateur Code by Catching and Punishing Great Universities, the Student-Athlete Has Become the Forgotten Man

College football has become big business in recent decades, resulting in enormous profits for big schools.

After all:

Large crowds will pay for high-priced seats.

Television companies will pay for exciting programming.

And the nation’s major universities are still using an obsolete concept of amateurism, keeping their players from getting a just share of the revenue.

The first two points seem self-evident, but the third doesn’t appear to be generally understood by sports fans, who might not realize that in the typical instance, a college football player is in position--for the first time in his life--to exchange his most marketable talent for important money.

But the schools discriminate against him at every opportunity, putting the money in their pockets instead of his.

It happened again this fall when the University of Washington, convicted by the presidents of the nine other Pacific 10 Conference universities, was ruled out of the next two Rose Bowls for breaches of college football’s archaic recruiting and performance code.

As harsh as it is outdated, the code forbids student-athletes from accepting anything monetary or material--unless the schools themselves make exceptions, which they decidedly, and consistently, do.

The charade that trapped Washington’s players is a familiar one to those recalling the years when the conference ambushed UCLA, USC and Cal.

Again, as usual, the innocent were punished along with the guilty. Again, blameless juniors and seniors were told that they can never play in a Rose Bowl game.

More significantly, the college presidents who convicted Washington were pointedly prolonging the illusion that college football players are amateurs.

The council of presidents once more was, in effect, telling athletes that the fortune they create annually at Washington and elsewhere is for others.

“The boys go out and earn millions for their university,” Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden said the other day, speaking of college football nationwide. “Everyone benefits except the players.”

The schools, since early in the century, have raised the banner of amateurism to ensure just that.

Their long masquerade hasn’t seemed vital so far to the U.S. sports public. Congress apparently doesn’t care. No state legislature objects.

Nor, evidently, do the universities mind that theirs is a tattered banner, honoring a sham concept.

They walk proudly behind it as they rob their players every week.

THE FORGOTTEN

In the never-ending scramble to uphold the so-called amateur code by catching and punishing great universities, the student-athlete has become the forgotten man.

Despite his unusual talent, his condition is precarious compared to students who are gifted in other fields.

On graduation day, classmates whose area of excellence is electronics, say, or advertising, are ready to start making some hay.

For students who excel in football, though, the future, at graduation time, has passed. Few possess skills in other fields that are comparably marketable. And only a few go on to succeed in the pro league.

Among the overwhelming majority of players, it is a myth that the college game is a farm system for the pros. More than 50,000 play college football. Each year, fewer than 300 move along to the NFL. And most don’t last there.

College athletes are almost the only American citizens who are systematically denied the right to merchandise their talent.

How do the universities do it?

Their principal enforcer is the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., which is nothing more than a coast-to-coast alliance of America’s higher-education institutions, large, medium and small.

Their great weapon is the NCAA Manual, which is the colleges’ answer to Blackstone.

It is a bizarre answer indeed.

It is a surprisingly heavy volume with 478 pages listing about 3,600 rules and interpretations, many on subjects as minor or petty as entertainment abuses or too much meal money.

A respectable university can be caught and condemned if its friends or employees break or bend any of those rules--none of them laws of the land.

And on the day of the trial, the judge and jury are the school’s competitors--other universities--representing either the NCAA or one of the nation’s athletic conferences. It is like General Motors and Ford deciding whether Chrysler is in violation of antitrust laws.

That is college football justice today.

That is what happened to Washington.

$25,000 PLAYERS

Economically, most large universities, Washington among them, reach a peak each fall, when the football team is leveraged into additional millions in alumni gifts after a schedule of big games and big gates.

The schools prosper, as many labor leaders have noted, by using collusive methods that would be judged anti-labor, antitrust and intolerable in other segments of U.S. society wishing to put on similar big-time football programs.

“Unquestionably, the major schools are exploiting their athletes,” said veteran AFL-CIO executive Bill Robertson.

Consider: College players are unsalaried everywhere. The universities deny them even a few cents for spending money. Gifts of any kind are also out. So are personal or career-related loans. And so are in-season part-time jobs--unless the athlete donates his wages to the university in the form of a tuition rebate.

And in the off-season, the player must choose between a temporary job and football. He needs money. Even more, though, he needs spring practice as well as his continuing, exacting physical conditioning program, which is essential today for all players wishing to compete.

Most school administrators, nonetheless, feel good about themselves because, as they repeatedly say, they are giving the young men an education--in the form of scholarships or grants-in-aid.

The athlete who is awarded what the universities call a full ride gets room and board, books and pays no fees or tuition.

At Notre Dame, the value of a football player’s grant-in-aid is about $25,000 a year, according to Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the school’s retired president.

“That’s $100,000 for four years,” he said.

And $100,000 does sound like a great deal of money. But in the actual reckoning, a grant-in-aid, whatever it means to the athlete, costs the university very little.

At most schools, the plant is paid for. The rooms that house the athletes are paid for. And the kitchen is usually paid for.

Although it is true that colleges have out-of-pocket expenses, 95 football players don’t make much of a dent in a student body of 30,000. The remaining 29,905 still have to be taught.

DOUBLESPEAKERS

The truth about the way college people legislate football is that they choose to rest their case on a faulty, outmoded premise.

Ignoring all the evidence, they insist that college football is an amateur pastime, which hasn’t been true for years.

Football originated a century or so ago as a nonrevenue college sport--with few if any spectators--played by whatever students happened to be enrolled. Most assuredly, those old-time student-athletes were amateurs.

In today’s era of huge collegiate football revenue,

high school youngsters are recruited by major universities not as scholars but as athletes. They are recruited for their ability to play football--for precisely the same reason that the NFL drafts a few of them later.

To the universities, and to their students, the difference between the 1890s and 1990s is revolutionary.

To characterize modern college football as an amateur sport, it is necessary for the universities to redefine simple, familiar words.

And that is just how they do it.

For example, readers consulting a real dictionary learn that to “pay” means to “give a person what is due, as for goods received, services rendered, etc.”

To readers of the NCAA Manual, however, “Pay is the receipt of funds, awards or benefits not permitted by the (NCAA).”

In the NCAA dictionary, therefore, a football player on a full-ride scholarship isn’t being paid. How could he be? His pay is “permitted.”

Continuing to rewrite Webster, the colleges, declaring pro athletes ineligible for NCAA football teams, define a pro athlete as one who receives any kind of payment, direct or indirect, for athletic participation “except as permitted by the (NCAA).”

Apart from what the nation’s college presidents are trying to accomplish with this nonsense, what they are accomplishing is plain enough. They are disarming their athletes with linguistics that put the schools on both sides of the central issue in player relations.

On the one hand, the universities use several pages of the NCAA Manual to warn their athletes that there are dozens of ways to descend from amateurism into the pit of professionalism and ineligibility--often without taking a dime.

On the other hand, when college people are asked why they don’t pay the athletes who fill their stadiums on Saturday afternoons, they reply that they do-- with $25,000 scholarships.

That is Alice in Wonderland thinking.

And Orwellian doublespeak.

WAKE-UP CALL

In the policing of modern college football, one problem is that NCAA committees are trying to do the impossible.

They are acting for a far-flung assortment of football-playing schools, about 600 of them, ranging from small-budget colleges to mighty, well-endowed universities.

And they are packing them all under similar blankets of rules.

A more rational and realistic plan would introduce wholly different recruiting and performance rules for America’s top 50 or 75 institutions, the celebrated universities that reap television’s millions and compete regularly for the most coveted bowl invitations and major conference titles.

In recent years, a new coalition of such schools, the College Football Assn., seemed to be moving in the right direction until sabotaged by the Pacific 10 and Big Ten, whose universities refused to join.

Regardless of whether they considered it easier to keep athletes in line using NCAA rather than CFA controls, the effect of their decision is clear: The Pac-10, championing an antiquated amateurism code, took off hard after the University of Washington.

That was the wake-up call that could shortly lead to a more decent life for college football players.

The educators, when responding to public opinion and the more understanding leaders in their own ranks, will discover that they have at least three options:

Plan A: They could enter the free-enterprise system and offer their players salaries--or what some call spending money.

Plan B: They could simply give their football players the same rights that all other students have to loans, gifts, subsidies and in-season job income. Alumni who are free now to support the politicians and churches of their choice would then be free to support the athletes of their choice.

USC President Steven B. Sample resists the second option.

“It’s a defensible position, but it isn’t my position,” he said. “If changes (are necessary), I’d urge that we go to salaries.”

Plan C: College football could follow the example of other profit-making entities in U.S. sports, including pro football, and reserve a percentage of the gross for the players.

The rationale for Plan C:

--A college player’s football-work schedule and conditioning program are about as time-consuming as an NFL player’s.

--The probability of crippling injury is similar.

--On Saturdays and Sundays, students and pros provide similarly professional entertainment for thousands of Americans.

NBA and NFL players are now receiving well over half the gross revenues in their leagues. Universities, however, have many financial responsibilities, meaning, possibly, that their players should get less--perhaps only a third or a fourth of the gross.

THREE RULES PLENTY

The view here is that the universities, to make any real improvement in the administration of football, will have to embrace a new philosophy, which could include these concepts:

* Instead of 3,600 rules, the colleges need only three, each of them aiding not pristine amateurism but competitive balance. They need a rule limiting the number of football scholarships, another limiting the number of eligible players and a golden rule pledging that each institution will maintain the highest standards of good sportsmanship and fair play.

* To implement any new plan--A, B, C, or another--presidents of the participating universities should be summoned to draft a simple good-sportsmanship code, a document as succinct and useful as the Declaration of Independence, replacing the NCAA Manual.

* Each president, as his school’s fair-play guarantor, would judge right and wrong on his own campus, putting an end to the investigations that at any university anytime can turn up big or little violations of NCAA law.

* Exposure of unfair play, if any, can be left to the whistle-blowers on every campus, the many who sincerely believe that big-time football is out of place in a college environment. Their tips lead to most of today’s investigations.

* For wantonly disregarding a Declaration of Good Sportsmanship, punishment need be nothing more than public disgrace: the certain knowledge, widely disseminated, that the university is a cheat.

Putting together a workable honor system might be the labor of several years.

But surely, that is not beyond the grasp of well educated men of good will. Surely, enlightened educators are capable of something more reasonable than the amateurism abracadabra that muddies and hamstrings the logical administration of college football today.