He’s Sold on Concept He Never Used to Buy

You have to understand, for years Walter Byers was the bete noire of college football. The Avenger. The Punisher. The Hanging Judge. Its Conscience. Its worst nightmare.

As the head of the NCAA, his job was to police the campus game, to seek out and expose and punish wrongdoing on the part of the schools’ athletic departments and sometimes the schools themselves.

He was the Super Cop. The NCAA’s enforcement squad.

Coaches loathed him. University presidents feared him. He perceived it his charge to keep the collegiate game the simon-pure amateur entity the professors thought it was. Or should be.

He couldn’t, of course. He was working with an investigative staff that wasn’t big enough to police a couple of city blocks, never mind about 900 member institutions.

His adversaries were mainly football coaches. As a group, they had the highest stake in the proceedings, half-million dollar salaries, shoe contracts, their own TV shows, speaking engagements, expense accounts, high-rent living.

To keep all this, they had to dip into the talent pool of probably 200 players nationwide whom they identified as “blue chip” performers. And they had to get them any cheating way they could--and without Walter Byers finding out about it.

“I was in conflict . . . with coaches,” writes Byers. “When they sought more grants-in-aid, I campaigned for fewer. As they steamrolled their way to platoon football, I battled for limited substitution. When I backed stronger enforcement, prominent coaches ridiculed the rules and damned the NCAA police force.”

Byers won battles. But never the war. He even imposed a “death penalty,” i.e., banishment from competing in intercollegiate athletics altogether.

But he only had a finger in a dike.

College football had originally been played by students. It was recreational. They paid to attend school and showed up for football practice only when lab courses permitted.

This changed slowly but surely over the years. It began when coaches perceived that the best athletes had no interest in academia. They had to be smuggled into colleges using a variety of subterfuges. It began with “scholarships” but progressed to grants-in-aid, Pell poverty grants and the various legal hypocrisies that pretended an individual was in school to learn not to earn.

Cheating grew till it was impossible to find a pure student in a football uniform. Coaches didn’t look in school libraries or chem labs for players any more. They looked in coal mines, cane fields, pool halls, in some cases, night courts.

The NCAA was the thin blue line expected to, somehow, keep this from getting out of hand. With a skeleton staff but the might of righteousness on their side, Walt Byers and his crew set out to keep a lid on the depravity.

He couldn’t, of course. He was sued, excoriated, accused of elitism, bias against certain institutions. After he levied one punishment, the coaching staff put a huge photograph of him in the office and took turns hitting it with darts.

To some, he was Himmler running an evil secret police. To others, he was Eliot Ness trying to contain organized crime.

Whatever he was trying to do, it was television that finally sacked him in the end zone. “Television was commercializing all of America’s values,” Byers writes. “Everything had a Nielsen rating and advertising price--from God’s messengers preaching from an electronic pulpit to beefy, 285-pound wrestlers performing in a roped-off square.”

And beefy, 300-pound football players performing in the Fiesta Bowl.

When Walt Byers first contracted with the great god television, the NCAA had full (and exclusive) rights to sell the college game. His first Game-of-the-Week contract with the network called for a rights fee of $1,144,000. The last contract he signed with TV 30 years later called for a multiyear fee of $281,196,000. And that is only part of the money video trucks in each season. Cable rights, individual colleges rights (Notre Dame’s, for example) and regional telecasts put the eventual take up around the billion-dollar mark.

Byers and the NCAA became increasingly irrelevant in the face of that kind of wealth to the colleges.

Still, nothing could quite prepare the sports world for the publication of a new book this month by that longtime former foe of collegiate commercialism, the longtime protagonist for a return to the ethics of yesterday.

Guess who is in favor of doing away with most of the institutional restrictions he helped put in place in the first place?

Walt Byers!

His new book titled “Unsportsmanlike Conduct--Exploiting College Athletes” is a step-by-step chronicle of the quixotic battle against runaway commercialism and exploitation. It was tilting at windmills, Byers concludes.

He stops just short of recommending college athletes get paid the same as, say, Green Bay Packers. But he writes as if it is a good idea.

It’s as if J. Edgar Hoover went over to the Mafia, Castro registered Republican, a Hatfield married a McCoy. Byers has defected. Gone over to the enemy.

“The colleges are already paying the athletes,” he writes. “The grant-in-aid established that.”

The college athlete fills the stadiums, sells the television rights, ministers to institutional esteem. For this, he gets paid off in the dark, in unmarked bills and untraceable goods.

Byers acknowledges that his organization sought for 40 years to stamp out this hypocritical activity. But he adds, “Our efforts, sincere though they might have been, were overrun by the pervasive influence of big money, national publicity and entertainment excitement.”

Everyone got rich but the athletes--unless they were the relative handful who went pro. He suggests that athletes be treated as employees of the university with workmen’s compensation, living wage and other benefits of above-the-table employment.

He notes that even the Olympic Games have become professionalized, with Dream Teams and sprinter payoffs where once Olympic czar Avery Brundage would kick athletes off the team for even showing ski logos in news photos. Tennis is professional. The last stand of amateurism is the gridiron.

Byers believes college players should even have agents if they so desire. It’s part of the American Dream.

The colleges should even pay taxes on their football revenues. “They and the NCAA are taking in staggering sums of money. When no taxes are paid by an industry that generates annual income of $230 million from sanctioned football bowl games and one basketball tournament, Americans paying higher gasoline taxes, increased property taxes and 6.5% sales taxes have a legitimate query: Why not?”

His old colleagues couldn’t be more shocked if they caught him posing for Playboy. Their view is, Byers couldn’t beat ‘em; so he joined ‘em.

No matter what the point of view, the message is clear: Frank Merriwell is dead. Bring on the salary cap.