UCLA’s Donahue Lambasts Agents : College football: Saying they are ‘the No. 1 problem in intercollegiate sports,’ he calls for national action.

When UCLA tailback Karim Abdul-Jabbar rushed for 180 yards in the team’s season-opening victory over Miami, the sports agents came out in force, trying to contact him through intermediaries.

Abdul-Jabbar says he never spoke to them, never so much as acknowledged them.

Another Bruin, linebacker Donnie Edwards, apparently was not so careful. He will meet Pacific 10 officials on Wednesday to answer allegations that he accepted $150 from a sports agent for what is described, in a document obtained by The Times, simply as food.

That has thrown a shadow over the UCLA football program and led Coach Terry Donahue to call for action against sports agents.

“It is the No. 1 problem that exists in intercollegiate athletics today,” Donahue said.

He is not alone. Pacific 10 coaches voted, 10-0, at a general meeting in June to recommend unspecified action be taken by the NCAA nationally to deal with the growing problem of sports agents getting involved with undergraduates.

“This [is] way too big an issue for individual coaches or programs to deal with,” Donahue said. “Indeed, it may be too big an issue even for our own individual conference to deal with.”

It was an issue Donahue was already all too familiar with when the allegation about Edwards surfaced.

“It wasn’t like it all of a sudden popped up, ‘Oh, surprise, surprise!’ ” he said. “I think coaches around the country are generally really concerned about it.”

Donahue maintains that the Bruins deal with the problem in the best way they can, constantly warning their players about the dangers.

“I don’t think there’s anything that we’re not doing that needs to be done,” he said.

But he keeps coming back to the big picture for the ultimate solution.

“You can’t legislate morality,” Donahue said. “But you can certainly have a better situation than you currently have. No doubt about it.

“It’s an issue that needs to be addressed [as much] as the 20-hour practice week or all the other rules that we’ve got. This is a hell of a lot more critical than some of those.”

He isn’t ready to publicly suggest a solution to the problem, but Donahue leaves little doubt he thinks there are solutions.

“There are just ways,” he said. “People who are creative and people who understand the problem and people who have the authority can come up with ways to solve this. And they should. They really should. They should get this out of intercollegiate athletics.”

Athletic Director Peter Dalis isn’t so sure it will be possible to remove sports agents from the college scene.

“It’s America,” he said.

Donahue’s optimism stems from the way alumni involvement in recruiting has been curtailed by NCAA rules.

“Everybody said that would never work,” Donahue recalled. “Everybody said that would be the end of college football. Football would never be the same. [Instead], it’s better than it’s ever been. The alumni have been virtually taken out of involvement with the student-athlete.

“And, I would say, to a huge extent, that greatly affected the amount of cheating involved in the recruiting process. Not that the alumni did it on their own. But coaches no longer had the vehicle to go out and do it that way. . . . Coaches for years would hide behind the alumni.”

Ironically, Donahue concedes, the elimination of alumni has created a vacuum that, in some ways, has been filled by agents.

“Except the school now is not the recipient of the alumni’s work,” he said. “They are now the victim. It’s a little different. But it’s the same theory.”

Dalis says the problem of sports agents has grown considerably in the last decade.

“You’ve got 60 first- and second-round players [for the NFL draft] and 600 agents,” he said. “That’s a lot of competition.”