William Harper and the Emergence of Modern College Football

Since college presidents moved to assert “institutional control” over football in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the sport has not been an end unto itself. Football might well have been banned by the elite eastern colleges from which it originated. In its formative years, football was extracurricular activity directed first by students and then alumni. The early game’s violence and its perceived incompatibility with the academic mission of the university eventually prompted the move towards institutional control.

Not every academic, however, considered football an anathema to higher education. In 1891 industrialist John D. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago and hired a 35-year-old Yale professor, William Rainey Harper, as the school’s first president. Harper had witnessed the impact of football firsthand at Yale, where alumnus Walter Camp emerged as an early pioneer. Harper invited another Yale alumnus, Amos Alonzo Stagg, to start a football program at Chicago. Stagg became the first person specifically hired (and paid) to coach college football. John Sayle Watterson wrote of Stagg in his 2000 history of college football:

Stagg was promised not only an ample salary but also support for the athletic program at the University of Chicago. In keeping with his belief in institutional athletics, Harper made Stagg a tenured faculty member, placed him at the head of the athletic department, and encouraged him to build a prominent football team. “I want to develop teams that we can send around the country and knock out all the colleges,” Stagg later recalled Harper proclaiming. “We will give them a palace car and a vacation.” In other words, he wanted to send the team on the road to advertise the school.

Harper, Watterson wrote, saw football as a means of instilling “the school tradition his new institution would inevitably lack.” Chicago football was certainly not conceived of, at least initially, as a standalone for-profit business. For instance, in 1894, Stagg took his team out west to play Stanford on Christmas Day (Chicago’s 19th game that season). Attendance was so sparse the team needed to play three more games–a rematch with Stanford and two contests against semi-professional clubs–just to earn enough money to make the return trip to Chicago.

Two years later things were starting to look up financially. Chicago had played a Thanksgiving game against Michigan annually starting in 1893. The 1896 game boasted a then-record gate of almost $300,000 in today’s dollars. This early rivalry game, John Sayle Watterson reported, “became a late-autumn society event that attracted the wealthy and prominent acquaintances of William Harper, potential friends and patrons of the fledgling university.”

In January 1895 Harper and six other university presidents met in Chicago to discuss the regulation of college football. This gathering, which preceded the NCAA’s founding by a decade, led to the creation of what is now the Big Ten Conference and provided the blueprint for modern intercollegiate athletics. The principles approved by the group included (1) restricting athletics to full-time students in good academic standing; (2) institutional control of athletics; and (3) no player should be paid for his participation in any athletic contest.

From Marketing to Cultural Identity

While most of us associate “college football” with the high-quality product produced by the SEC and a few dozen Division I FBS programs, there are over 650 NCAA members that sponsor football in all divisions. On top of that there are non-NCAA football programs that belong to groups like the NAIA and the National Junior College Athletic Association. It’s safe to say that well over 90% of intercollegiate football programs earn no substantial revenue. And even the revenue-producing programs often spend well beyond their means, as Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie recently observed with respect to his alma mater, future Big Ten member Rutgers:

According to a database compiled on an annual basis by USA Today, Rutgers’ athletic department spent just over $60 million to field all its teams, pay its coaches, etc. in 2011. The school generated about $9 million in ticket sales, $7.6 million in alumni and corporate donations, $8.8 million in rights and licensing fees, and $6 million in other revenue. The school also sucked a whopping $9 million in student fees and another $19.4 million in school funds. When all is tallied up, USA Today calculates that Rutgers is subsidizing the operation of its athletic department to the tune of 47 percent of its expenses. Let’s underscore that: This is money that is overwhelmingly going to field football, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports teams. It’s not going to create new sections of Biology 101 or English 251 or underwrite the discovery of the next Streptomycin or publish the next Economics and the Public Interest or anything that remotely comes close to education or research.

So why spend all this money subsidizing football and other non-academic athletics? There’s still the concept that athletic spending is a marketing expense. But the football market is far more crowded than it was in William Harper’s days. It’s difficult for a university to advertise itself through football superiority when the sport’s top echelon is well defined. (Even Chicago lost its zeal for football and abolished the program in 1939; it was revived in the 1970s as a Division III program.) College basketball has surpassed football to some extent in this area as marginal schools can gain short-term notoriety through the basketball lottery known as NCAA tournament (see Florida Gulf Coast). But that still doesn’t explain why schools like Rutgers spend millions on mediocre football and a gaggle of other sports.

There are two broad answers. First, intercollegiate athletics project a physical presence that remains integral to the university “brand.” The Nick Gillespies of the world may dream of smaller centers of higher learning that focus exclusively on the production of knowledge, but the existing college market remains the province of large institutions competing for undergraduate student-loan dollars. In this context, football is an amenity. It’s not that every student plays or attends games. It’s that the mere presence of a football team–and the accompanying constellation of non-revenue sports–serves as a sign of the school’s permanence and legitimacy. This applies to SEC and Division III schools alike. A small college may not have international notoriety, but if it has an athletic department, it’s still considered legitimate in the eyes of most people, certainly more so than a mere trade school or for-profit online college.

The second factor is what William Harper identified back in the 1890s as “school tradition.” Another way to describe this is cultural identity. This is not a college-only phenomenon. Sports has proven to be the most potent source of cultural identity in modern times outside of language and nationality. Even professional teams with a long history of losing maintain devoted fan bases. Fandom is not a product of economic exchange or cost-benefit calculation. It’s a statement of one’s identification with a larger community. College football has always been in a prime position to exploit this because, unlike professional sports, teams are tied to fixed universities that won’t simply pack up and move to another city offering a better stadium deal.

Bureaucracy Is An Inevitable Part of College Football

There is still the age-old question of “amateurism.” For the handful of schools that have managed to convert football from student amenity into commercial product, must the athletes remain bound to the convention of receiving no compensation, aside from scholarships, in exchange for their services?

First let’s note that amateurism itself has undergone a number of refinements. In William Harper’s time there was no such thing as an athletic scholarship. It was not until the mid-20th century that the NCAA formalized and regulated such grants. So it’s not as if the system is incapable of changing with the times.

It’s equally important to reject the hyperbole from NCAA critics that the present system uniquely places student-athletes outside the purview of the free market. Just talk to any graduate teaching assistant or medical resident. Higher education is filled with such non-traditional employment relationships.

We know that universities are structures as nonprofit entities. The meaning of this is sometimes obscured by the commercial success of football. The critical distinction, as noted by the 20th century Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, is that a for-profit firm is subject to entrepreneurial management while a nonprofit organization relies on bureaucratic management:

In profit-seeking business the discretion of the managers and submanagers is restricted by considerations of profit and loss. The profit motive is the only directive needed to make them subservient to the wishes of the consumers. There is no need to restrict their discretion by minute instructions and rules. If they are efficient, such meddling with details would at best be superfluous, if not pernicious in tying their hands. If they are inefficient, it would not render their activities more successful. It would only provide them with a lame excuse that the failure was caused by inappropriate rules. The only instruction required is self-understood and does not need to be especially mentioned: Seek profit.

Things are different in public administration, in the conduct of government affairs. In this field the discretion of the officeholders and their subaltern aids is not restricted by consideration of profit and loss. If their supreme boss–no matter whether he is the sovereign people or a sovereign despot–were to leave them a free hand, he would renounce his own supremacy in their favor. These officers would become irresponsible agents, and their power would supersede that of the people or the despot. They would do what pleased them, not what their bosses wanted them to do. To prevent this outcome and to make them subservient to the will of their bosses it is necessary to give them detailed instructions regulating their conduct of affairs in every respect. Then it becomes their duty to handle all affairs in strict compliance with these rules and regulations. Their freedom to adjust their acts to what seems to them the most appropriate solution of a concrete problem is limited by these norms. They are bureaucrats, i.e., men who in every instance must observe a set of inflexible regulations.

The idea of “institutional control” espoused from the days of WIlliam Harper through today’s NCAA is merely a synonym for the bureaucratic management Mises described. Since the goal of college football is not to make a profit for its own sake–as there are no owners to pay dividends to–bureaucratic management becomes necessary to ensure the proper functioning of the system. A nonprofit organization does not ultimately answer to consumers but is a sovereign unto itself. That’s true even of a small charity, where the goal is to serve the greatest number of people using the available resources. The point of intercollegiate athletics is to provide amenities for the greatest number of students and student-athletes possible, including those in non-revenue sports.

None of this should be construed as an unqualified defense of the NCAA or any specific policy. If you think players should be paid a stipend, or receive a percentage of licensing revenues, or be classified as full-time employees, then so be it. Such propositions can be debated on their own merits. The critical thing to understand is that so long as college football remains an auxiliary to the nonprofit university system, bureaucratic management in some form must exist. If the goal of reform is to spin off the top tier of college football into a standalone, for-profit entity, then you’re no longer talking about college football at all but some new type of business firm whose prime directive would inevitably be to directly compete against the NFL. And we all know how well previous competitors have fared against the Shield.

The NCAA does not consider insurance a violation of amateurism rules and in fact has offered ESDI policies since 1990. According to a 2010 article in the Villanova Sports & Entertainment Law Journal, about 75% of first round picks in the NFL Draft have purchased ESDI policies through the NCAA program. The same article said between 75% and 80% of all ESDI policies were issued to football players. ESDI policies are only available to players who have demonstrated high draft potential, in the case of football within the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. ESDI policies are also available to potential first-round Major League Baseball, NBA and WNBA draft picks, as well as any men’s hockey player projected to go in the first three rounds of the NHL Draft.

HCC Specialty Underwriters is the exclusive underwriter of the NCAA’s ESDI policies, which are administered by ASU International, Inc. As noted above, the maximum benefit for football players is $5 million, although the specific amount of a player’s coverage may be lower depending on his projected draft status. The policy only applies to “permanent total disability,” meaning he suffers an illness or injury (while insured) that prevents him from ever signing an NFL contract. “Total disability” does not imply the player must be a paraplegic in order to collect; the policy defines disability to include the “irrecoverable loss” of a hand or foot or sight in either eye.

By restricting ESDI coverage to “total” disability, however, college players receive no protection from a potential drop in projected draft status. So if South Carolina’s Clowney–who many believe would be a top-three pick in this year’s NFL Draft–suffers a major knee injury that requires a year or more of rehabilitation, and as a result he falls to the late first or even second round of the 2014 Draft, then ESDI coverage is useless.

Furthermore it’s the players, not the NCAA or member schools, who must pay all ESDI premiums. For every million dollars in coverage, ESDI premiums can run $10,000-$12,000. So Clowney and Manziel may be on the hook for upwards of $60,000 for their respective $5 million policies. Perhaps not surprisingly, the NCAA has an arrangement with U.S. Bank, N.A., to offer athletes loans at “competitive” rates (reportedly 1.5% over prime) to help them pay ESDI premiums. The loans are repayable when the player signs a professional contract, receives a payout following total disability or simply stops playing college football.

Athletes are not restricted to the NCAA’s ESDI program. Non-NCAA insurers also offer coverage, usually at much higher premiums. Since the NCAA program is restricted to projected first-three-round picks, the majority of future NFL rookies are forced to look elsewhere for insurance. Even athletes like Manziel and Clowney who are covered by the NCAA program may seek supplemental coverage from a second insurer if their projected career earnings–which can include endorsements–exceed the $5 million cap.

1. The Conference Schedule
2. Enter The Playoff
3. Conference Alliances
4. The Stadium Bubble
5. Television
6. Re-Defining The Season
7. Conclusion

The Pac-12 and Big 12 will play nine-game schedules in 2013. The ACC, which adds Syracuse and Pittsburgh this season, originally planned to go to nine games but reversed course last October, citing “scheduling tensions” for schools like Clemson and Georgia Tech that want to maintain intra-conference rivalries. The 14-member ACC will employ an eight-game schedule similar to the SEC with six division games, a fixed cross-division “rival” and a rotating cross-division opponent.

The Big Ten is poised to adopt at least a nine-game conference schedule after the league expands to 14 schools with the addition of Maryland and Rutgers in 2014. Last week Commissioner Jim Delany said the league’s presidents will consider a future nine- or ten-game schedule in June. A nine-game schedule seems the likelier option. Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez noted in response to Delany’s statement, “If you go to 10 [conference games], you can forget about seven home games.”

Alvarez and the other Big Ten athletic directors have already agreed not to schedule future non-conference games against Football Championship Subdivision (aka I-AA) opponents. This should take effect in 2014. Eliminating these games facilitates the move towards at least nine conference games.

The obvious drawback to a nine-game schedule is the inequity of some teams having five home conference games while others have four. This has been the major stumbling block towards an SEC move to nine games. Coaches and athletic directors are understandably reluctant to cede any competitive advantage in the nation’s top football conference. Commissioner Mike Slive said last November that members spent “a lot of time” considering nine games after Missouri and Texas A&M joined the league—and that “there was an overwhelming majority” opposed.

A nine-game schedule would only increase pressure on coaches, who are judged by fans and administrators primarily on conference record. And as Wisconsin’s Alvarez noted, the extra conference game means losing a (normally) guaranteed home win against a lower-quality opponent. There’s a danger that a more intense conference schedule will simply cannibalize the league and produce greater coaching turnover on a year-to-year basis.

But the counter-argument is that increased intra-division play is good for the product, and thus good for fans. Alabama playing South Carolina is better than Alabama playing Troy. And as conferences continue to expand—there’s no reason to think the SEC won’t eventually move to at least 16 schools—it’s important to provide sufficient cross-division games so as to maintain a cohesive identity. If SEC schools only play each once a decade, are they really in the same conference?

The SEC may ultimately be forced to abandon the eight-game schedule when the new playoff format is introduced in 2014. Commissioner Slive admitted as much, saying that when the playoff arrives, “[W]e have to at least be sensitive and alert to make sure that our model, our formula, works for us in the way in which we want it to work.” In other words, the SEC won’t stick with eight games if it gets in the way of winning national championships.

There are still many details to be hashed out regarding the new playoff. But strength of schedule will no doubt be a critical factor in deciding what four teams participate each year.

The Big Ten’s move to ban FCS opponents is an acknowledgment of this. SEC schools will likely be compelled to take similar action. At a minimum, FCS opponents will have to be replaced with major-conference schools, if not a ninth conference game.

This is where the coaches may realize a nine-game schedule can work to their benefit. A flaw in the present bowl system is the extended dead period in between regular season and post-season. Notre Dame had 44 days off between their regular season finale against USC and getting blown out by Alabama in the BCS title game. More to the point, Notre Dame, which obviously schedules all of its own games, only played a single ranked opponent between the end of October and the championship. SEC coaches may take note of this and come around on the importance of a stronger in-conference schedule, both to help qualify for the playoff and prepare their teams for the big finish.

Recently the SEC acknowledged it has reached out to the Big 12 about a “partnership” that would include coordinated regular season scheduling. These talks appear very preliminary and few details have been publicly discussed. The Big 12 has said it is looking into potential alliances with a number of conferences, including the ACC and Big Ten. Previously the Big Ten and Pac-12 explored, but ultimately abandoned, a multi-sport scheduling alliance.

If such alliances do materialize, we could be seeing the end of decentralized college football scheduling in favor of a more centralized, NFL-style approach. Conference commissioners would replace athletic directors in determining non-conference schedules, which in turn would lead to a regular rotation of intra-conference games.

The NFL’s schedule ensures every team plays one another at least once every four years. There is a fixed rotation of cross-division matchups, i.e. the AFC East will play the NFC South and AFC North in 2013. This enables teams and fans to know years in advance who most of their opponents will be (the NFL still schedules two “strength of schedule” opponents based on the previous year’s record). Such an approach may have a strong appeal to college athletic departments—and fans—looking for a measure of cost certainty when it comes to travel.

Fixing intra-conference schedules would also mark a logical final step in the realignment/contraction process. Once the major conferences unite their schedules, they’ll no longer have any need to carry the smaller conferences as dead weight. There will simply be four or five conferences, encompassing 60 to 70 total schools, with predictable scheduling patterns.

Another NFL practice that could find its way into college is the use of smaller divisions. NCAA rules mandate round-robin division play as a condition of staging a conference championship. This has prevented leagues from considering alternate arrangements like the NFL’s eight four-team divisions. The 14-team SEC has effectively pushed the two-division model to its breaking point. Once a conference crosses the 16-team barrier, it would make far more sense from a scheduling a competitive balance standpoint to realign the league into four divisions (which would perhaps require the addition of a conference semifinal game).

The NFL may also influence college football scheduling by attracting even more games to debt-ridden professional stadiums. Arlington’s Cowboys Stadium and Atlanta’s Georgia Dome have regularly played host to regular season games featuring SEC teams, such as the Alabama-Virginia Tech season opener scheduled for this August. And with the NFL’s insatiable thirst for cheap credit and taxpayer subsidies, there will continue to be new and renovated stadiums in need of additional events. In many of these places, such as Atlanta and Charlotte, college football will prove even more attractive than second-rate NFL teams.

There’s also the noticeable decline in post-season bowl attendance, a problem that’s only going to get worse once the playoff arrives. Much like the Chick-fil-A Bowl has done with adding its kickoff game, other bowls may transition to bidding for attractive regular season matches—which, again, will be much easier to do if the leagues coordinate their schedules. The bowl system might then shift entirely away from the post-season towards a unified “Kickoff Week,” where the games serve as a Labor Day marketing hook. (Remember, bowls were originally started largely to lure Holiday travelers.)

Additional neutral-site games could also be a way to resolve concerns over losing a home date to a nine-game conference schedule. In the end, everyone can’t play seven home games in a contracted super-league. But you could split the difference by allowing an NFL stadium to host a game.

Ultimately, all scheduling comes down to producing inventory for television. ESPN and the other networks are always in the market for more programming. Most of the potential changes discussed above work to television’s benefit—they’ll make the product more marketable, which is to say, more like the NFL. Certainly ESPN and CBS won’t say no to more SEC conference matches or a fixed rotation with the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12. Additional conference inventory is also needed because of proprietary networks like the Big Ten Network and what will inevitably be the SEC Network.

The additional wrinkle introduced by television, however, is the drive to have games outside the traditional Saturday window. Thursday night games have already become an ESPN mainstay. League-owned cable networks will find off-nights especially attractive in helping to generate demand among cable subscribers. This was the NFL’s strategy when it adopted a full slate of Thursday night games on the NFL Network.

One constant underlying all of this is the 12-game regular season. This is fixed by NCAA bylaw. Any change would require the consent of the NCAA bureaucracy and the college presidents, the majority of whom would strenuously object to adding games. Beyond the additional cost there is legitimate concern about further exposure to liability if and when the NCAA and its members become defendants in the concussion class actions. Unlike the NFL, which has pushed for additional regular season games to help prop up its declining stadium-revenue model, there has been no significant stirring for more games in college football. Of course, if the major conferences were to leave the NCAA altogether and form a new, football-only regulatory body, everything would be on the table, including the addition of a 13th or 14th game.

Even if the 12-game schedule remains a fixture well into the future, there may still be efforts to spread things out more, in part to eliminate the extended gap between season and playoff, and also to reduce the pressure on coaches and athletes. The present SEC schedule runs 13 weeks between the start of September and the end of November.

This allows for a single bye week. It wouldn’t be a radical change to add a second bye week—a nod to concerns about player health—and move up the conference championship games to create a 14-week season.

Or things could go in the other direction. The season could begin earlier. In lieu of adding a 13th regular season game, college football could introduce a “pre-season” game against a token opponent from the minor conferences or the FCS—in effect reviving the game now being phased out, but without any consequences for coaching record of playoff strength-of-schedule calculations. Coaches would certainly welcome another opportunity to test their players against live competition, even if it’s only half-speed.

There’s no question that traditional scheduling principles are falling by the wayside. Forty years ago the eastern seaboard was dominated by independent schools that saw little need for conference affiliation. The SEC was once a small club of schools united by a compact geographic footprint. The Big Ten actually had ten members. Television brought about two great waves of realignment, in the early 1990s and today, that redefined the nature of the conference. Full round-robin schedules are no longer the norm except in the ten-member Big 12. Now we’re in an age of consolidation, contraction and maximizing financial returns.

That said, not all traditional principles can or should be ignored. For most fans, their biggest question about possible scheduling changes is, “Will this affect our traditional rivalry game?” The suspension, hopefully temporary, of the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry still daunts Aggie fans despite the overwhelming success of the move from the Big 12 to the SEC. Rivalries are at the core of college football’s appeal, and any future scheduling alliances or arrangements that lead to their further decline would be a self-defeating act.

Of course, the NFL rules don’t force Clowney to play college football during this three-year waiting period. Some have suggested Clowney sit out his junior season to preempt a catastrophic injury that would either hurt his draft status or possibly end his NFL career before it can begin. This argument is particularly appealing given today’s announcement that Nerlens Noel, a freshman basketball player at Kentucky, is done for the year after suffering an ACL injury in a game against Florida.

Like Clowney, Noel has been projected as a top draft pick. The NBA imposes a one-year waiting period for graduating high school players, leading Noel to play for Kentucky this year. Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports commented, “If this injury compromises Noel’s draft status, it’s on David Stern and his league’s minimum age requirement.”

Forde’s statement omits the fact that neither Stern–nor his NFL counterpart, Roger Goodell–can unilaterally maintain any draft eligibility restrictions. In both leagues the rules are incorporated into a larger collective bargaining agreement with the union representing the league’s players. Indeed, the NFL Draft rule cited above is taken directly from the text of the CBA signed by the NFL Players Association following the 2011 lockout. That rule further establishes the length of the draft and the compensation terms for rookie players.

Sotomayor Lays Down the Law

If Pat Forde and others are seeking a scapegoat for the plight of Clowney, Noel, et al., they might try Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She was a crucial figure in two cases that established the absolute supremacy of the collective bargaining process in sports. In 1994, as a trial judge on the federal district court in Manhattan, Sotomayor issued an injunction preventing Major League Baseball owners from unilaterally imposing new labor rules following a strike by the players union. More relevant here, in 2004 as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, she authored an opinion rejecting a challenge to the NFL’s three-year waiting period on antitrust grounds.

The case involved former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett. Clarett attempted to enter the NFL Draft after his freshman year, and when the league refused, he went to court. Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin initially ruled for Clarett, holding that the eligibility rule was a “naked restraint on competition for player services because it excludes a class of players from entering the market.” Scheindlin said that while federal labor law generally exempts collective bargaining agreements from antitrust review, that exemption didn’t apply here because “those who are categorically denied eligibility for employment, even temporarily, cannot be bound by the terms of employment they cannot obtain.”

On appeal, Justice Sotomayor disagreed. Overruling Scheindlin, Sotomayor emphasized that under federal labor law, Clarett and other college players had no right to negotiate the terms of their own employment with the NFL, which was delegated to the monopoly authority of the NFLPA:

The players union’s representative possesses “powers comparable to those possessed by a legislative body both to create and restrict the rights of those whom it represents.” In seeking the best deal for NFL players overall, the representative has the ability to advantage certain categories of players over others, subject of course to the representative’s duty of fair representation. The union representative may, for example, favor veteran players over rookies, and can seek to preserve jobs for current players to the detriment of new employees and the exclusion of outsiders. This authority and exclusive responsibility is vested in the players’ representative “once a mandatory collective bargaining relationship is established and continues throughout the relationship.” For the duration of that relationship, federal labor law then establishes a “`soup-to-nuts array’ of rules, tribunals and remedies to govern [the collective bargaining] process.”

In other words, the self-interest of current players looking to protect their jobs overruled any self-interest college players might have in jumping to the NFL early. It’s also worth noting that at the time of Sotomayor’s decision, the CBA then in effect did not expressly include the draft eligibility rule. Rather, Sotomayor noted it was incorporated as part of a catch-all provision in the CBA whereby the union waived its right to challenge any existing NFL rules not otherwise covered in the agreement. This included the three-year waiting period, which is part of the NFL bylaws. The NFLPA later agreed to include the draft provision as part of the 2011 CBA.

Conclusion

Since the current CBA runs through 2020, there’s little chance of relief for Jadeveon Clowney–or, for that matter, any player now in the sixth grade–unless federal law is somehow amended to override Sotomayor’s decision (unlikely) or the NFL voluntarily moves to change the rule (even more unlikely). Even if the NFL wanted to abolish the three-year rule, it would also need the NFLPA’s consent to amend the CBA. And while many in the media might cheer an end to age restrictions, there would be political resistance in other corners, both from people who view NFL-level football as too dangerous for teenagers and those who wish to protect college programs from additional early departures.

Photo Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

What does it mean as a society that we are willing to allow individuals to risk their health and well-being in order to be entertained? What does it mean that professional leagues exploit the bodies of athletes for profit without concern to protection in the long haul?

On the other hand there’s The Daily Beast’s Megan McArdle, who had this response to a lawsuit filed by the family of the late Junior Seau, alleging concussions suffered playing football ultimately led to his suicide:

Junior Seau can’t possibly have been unaware that football caused head injuries. Nor even that multiple concussions are probably bad for you. Note how many people are still playing, even though we now know this all too well.

Even President Barack Obama has weighed in, taking a more nuanced view:

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.

Obama still endorses the paternalist idea that college players are exploited due to their lack of compensation (relative to the NFL) and the absence of a union. The latter is curious given that the NFL Players Association has been just as lethargic as the league in responding to concussion and safety concerns. For example, at his pre-Super Bowl press conference last week, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith complained the NFL’s 2011 referee lockout was “one of the most deliberate disregards of player safety that I think has occurred in the National Football League since our inception.” Yet the union took no action, such as threatening a walkout, that might have prompted the NFL to resolve the lockout any quicker. Smith simply complained after-the-fact.

Smith also said he wants to negotiate amendments to the NFL collective bargaining agreement to provide for a “chief safety officer” and other bureaucratic protections. So why weren’t these items dealt with during the CBA negotiations that occurred just one year ago? Keep in mind, Smith agreed to an unprecedented ten-year CBA with no opt-out provision for the players.

The point here is not that Smith is bad at his job. The point is that unions are a poor mechanism to promote player safety, especially when dealing with a large group of players with different preferences on the subject. Unions ignore individual preference in favor of collective action—the type demanded by paternalists—and end up becoming subservient to the larger bureaucracy of the employer, in this case the NFL. Similarly, the class action litigation now promoted as a remedy for decades of NFL “exploitation” will, if successful, not result in a safer game so much as a more bureaucratic one, as lawyers will assume greater regulatory authority within the sport. Such litigation is also structured to maximize the benefit to the class counsel—the functional equivalent of union bosses—while depriving individual players of any meaningful say in the process.

This is a warning for those who would promote unionization or litigation as a step towards enhancing the safety of college football. Collective action is not the answer going forward. But nor is it sufficient, as Megan McArdle and others suggest, to simply declare “players are fully informed” and leave it at that. This ignores a common defect in the structures of both the professional and college games that inhibit players from truly taking responsibility for their safety—the restriction on labor movement.

College football players are significantly freer than their professional counterparts in that they can choose which university to attend, while NFL players are assigned through a common draft. But college players may not earn any income related to their skill outside of their scholarship and any other NCAA-approved benefit. Nor may college player engage the services of an agent to assist them at any point during their collegiate eligibility. This restriction in particular demonstrates bad faith on the part of the NCAA. If two people negotiate a business deal and one says to the other, “My lawyer will send you a draft of the contract, which you must then sign without ever consulting a lawyer yourself for the duration of the agreement,” the second person would almost certainly smell a rat.

As other commentators have noted, the Olympics have transitioned to a model where athletes are not compensated as employees by the games themselves but enjoy no restrictions on hiring agents or earning outside income. Such a model could easily be adopted by the NCAA. The association continues to hide behind the mantra of “amateurism,” which has become a broad claim of patent rights over anything having to do with the commercialization of football players not yet eligible to play in the NFL.

Eliminating restrictions on agents and outside income would enable players to do two things. First, it would allow them to retain experienced advocates to help address potential safety abuses by coaching staffs and athletic departments. Second, by maximizing outside income during their college careers—when many are at the peak of their marketability—players would be less dependent on making it into the NFL to secure their long-term financial interests.

College is only one side of the coin, however. If the NFL is serious about player safety, it must also eliminate its restrictions on labor movement, starting with the draft. Assigning player “rights” to a single club deprives the player of the ability to negotiate the terms of his potential employment—including safety concerns—with all interested teams. Safety is no different than compensation or any other working condition. We’ve already seen that collective bargaining has produced a system of weak protections for labor (not to mention several thousand concussion-related lawsuits). Individual bargaining, which is the market norm absent government policies that promote unions and collective action, is the best way to empower players to take responsibility for their own long-term health interests.

In the end, it’s about ranking preferences. The NCAA has to decide if safety is more important than “amateurism.” The NFL has to decide if safety is more important than the “competitive balance” supposedly maintained by the draft. And individual players must be left to decide—without the paternalist hand of collective action—whether the potential damage to their health is more or less important than playing football.

Built in three phases between 2006 and 2010, those changes cost more than $130 million. The athletic department continues to investigate ways to upgrade Neyland, whether it’s more premium spaces or more chair-back seats, measures aimed at improving the fan experience and driving more revenue, while reducing capacity. Tennessee also brought in IMG Learfield Ticket Solutions to help with sales beginning in 2011.

Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart, who came to the job 18 months ago, insisted that the solution was simply to “get football healthy” and winning again under new coach Butch Jones. Hart also expects upwards of $10 million annually when the SEC renegotiates its television contracts with ESPN and CBS.

Tennessee’s woes mirror that of Maryland, where costly stadium renovations—followed by a nosedive in the football team’s performance–drove the athletic department to cut non-revenue sports before ultimately receiving a bailout in the form of an invitation to the Big Ten. Changing conferences won’t help Tennessee, of course, but it’s not clear that even additional television money will improve the school’s long-term fiscal stability.

While it’s easy to say this in hindsight, Tennessee shot itself in the foot with the Neyland Stadium renovations. It’s a classic example of malinvestment during an economic boom fueled by easy access to credit, not to mention the inability of Hart’s predecessors to assess their economic reality. Tying long-term capital improvements to the football team’s win-loss record is a shaky proposition at best. Every school has a down period (Let’s not forget, even the vaunted Alabama is less than seven years removed from Mike Shula). And when you struggle as Tennessee has to maintain a top management team—Jones is the school’s fourth head coach in six years—there’s little reason for fans or donors to expect a drastic turnaround in on-field performance.

The bigger problem is that renovations to facilities like Neyland Stadium are based on a false perception of the overall economy. College and professional teams have spent the past two decades attempting to, in effect, replace their loyal customers with a more affluent group that will spend a premium for the “stadium experience.” But to the extent such a group ever existed, its disposable income for entertainment has eroded with the economic collapse. This is a problem that doesn’t just confront struggling football programs like Tennessee. We’ve already seen its impact on bowl attendance and even non-conference SEC games against second-rate opponents.

People still love football and want to watch it. Even Tennessee fans remain highly enthusiastic. They’re just not willing to spend as much money and time to actually attend games. A couple of good seasons under Butch Jones may temporarily mask the symptoms but not the underlying disease. As long as people can watch high-quality game broadcasts at home, they have less and less incentive to go out to the stadium. Tennessee’s “fiscal cliff” should serve as a warning to other SEC and major college programs that the era of easy-credit-fueled stadium expansion and renovation should be coming to an end. There’s no sense shackling your program to chase a premium customer that will become scarcer and scarcer as the economy continues to be an issue for so many fans.

The existing rules limit “recruiting coordination functions” to the coaching staff. In the bowl subdivision, a school cannot employ more than nine assistant coaches and four graduate assistants—and only seven of these coaches may recruit off-campus. Proposal 11-4 eliminates the off-campus limit, while 11-2 removes any reference to “recruiting coordination,” meaning those functions no longer have to be performed by one of the 14 coaches (the head coach and the maximum 13 assistants).

Proposal 11-4 only eliminates the off-campus recruiting distinction with respect to coaches, however, so non-coaching staff still cannot watch a potential recruit play in-person or conduct home visits. But under Proposal 11-2, staff can do just about everything else, including make telephone calls or send e-mail and text messages to recruits. As NCAA rules expert John Infante noted last August when the proposed changes were announced, this is already taking place in spite of the existing prohibitions:

If you were to rank which rules are broken most often, I would put [limits on “recruiting coordination functions”] right near the top, especially in football. If you asked most non-coaching football staff if they can watch film of a recruit or call a recruit’s coach, they would almost universally say they could. That especially applies to schools with large and sophisticated recruiting operations which heavily involve non-coaching staff.

In conjunction with another measure adopted last week, Proposal 13-3, we’re seeing a significant retreat from the NCAA’s traditional micromanagement role. Under 13-3, there are no longer limits on the number of telephone calls or electronic communications a school can make to a recruit. As with recruiting coordination, the NCAA acknowledges it’s simply become too difficult to police every school’s calls and messages.

It’s certainly too early to know how the new rules will transform recruiting, but as Infante suggests, we may be looking at the early development of NFL-style personnel departments at the college level:

The potential model of recruiting that develops is very clear. A general manager/director of player personnel will have a staff of recruiting coordinators who do much of the early grunt work in recruiting. They’ll watch film, gauge interest, rank prospects, and evaluate needs. The coaching staff will go see top targets in person, invite prospects on visits, and go see recruits at home or at school. The player personnel staff and the coaching staff will then meet to make decisions and send offers.

This would alter not just the relationship between schools and recruits, but also the colleges and the NFL. Building new personnel infrastructure will naturally lead many schools—especially in the SEC —to lure away scouts and personnel evaluators from the NFL. Just as we’ve seen significant movement by coaches from the pro to college ranks (particularly among assistants), we may now find eager young front office talent looking for better opportunities with Alabama or LSU instead of the lower tier of the NFL. And we may see an even greater exodus of assistant coaches from the NFL as one of the biggest drawbacks to working in the college game—recruiting minutiae—is shifted to a full-time personnel department.

Of course, this also means schools spending even more money on football, something the NCAA bureaucracy and smaller conferences constantly fear. This new “deregulation” is clearly an attempt to appease the football and basketball powers: We’ll cut out the rules we can’t enforce anyway, and you promise not to cause any more major scandals. More likely, we’re witnessing the first stages of NCAA breakup. Now that the bureaucracy is in full retreat on recruiting, the SEC and its sister conferences have every incentive to seek further deregulation.

It’s also important to note that the conferences may step into the void and adopt new regulations themselves. There’s nothing to stop the SEC, for example, from limiting the potential growth of outside recruiting staff. Now that the conferences are free to experiment with such rules, it may facilitate development of a new college football alliance that will eventually displace the NCAA altogether.

Photo Credit: Tyler Kaufman-USA TODAY Sports

Dr. Andrews recently co-authored Any Given Monday with former Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger. While partially autobiographical, the book is primarily designed to serve as a guide for parents, coaches and athletes on how to identify and manage common sports injuries. Dr. Andrews surveys over two dozen sports, providing a broad overview of the sports medicine landscape. Unlike a lot of the recent reporting on football players and concussions, Dr. Andrews does not resort to sensationalism or scare tactics. Rather he tries to present a professional analysis based on decades of experience.

There’s nothing groundbreaking in the chapter on football. Dr. Andrews notes that it does produce the most sports-related injuries—over 920,000 at the high school level in 2007, according to one federal government report—and that concussions are the most serious and common injury. The chapter also covers Dr. Andrews’ specialty, ACL injuries requiring surgical reconstruction, and more basic issues of player exhaustion and dehydration.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is one dealing with an activity many would not consider a sport—cheerleading. Dr. Andrews notes that there are over 3.5 million cheerleaders in the United States, and that with “the complexity and competitive nature that cheerleading has developed, both the injury rates and the potential for severe injury have increased.” In fact, Dr. Andrews notes that “the total health insurance costs associated with collegiate cheerleading make up fully 25 percent of the overall medical costs.” (Football takes up 57%.)

Dr. Andrews also addresses a number of popular myths regarding sports medicine, notably the idea that surgery can improve athletic performance. He notes that many young pitchers believe Tommy John surgery will improve their throwing arms. In fact, he says, the reason pitchers tend to improve following surgery is the subsequent rehabilitation, where the player can “work his arm in a controlled, carefully supervised and monitored environment” thereby avoiding the fatigue associated with normal in-season practices.

Another myth, according to Dr. Andrews, is that there is adequate medical supervision at the lower levels of organized sports. While SEC schools can afford the best care for football players, “At the high school level, general athletic trainers are usually not available for all of the sports, and there are not always emergency medical teams present at games and competitions.” Paradoxically, the doctor notes,

[I]f more medical resources were made available to children when they were younger, the need for such extensive treatment options at the professional level would greatly decrease because the athletes would already know how to protect their bodies and recover from injuries, and they would not be working around the ambient pain from older injuries. The upside-down medical care for athletes should not be turned around to favor the young who are, unfortunately, more vulnerable to injury due to their developing bodies.

Dr. Andrews calls for stricter standards such as certified medical trainers in all public schools. He doesn’t get into how to pay for such care, which is beyond the scope of this book. However, as the concussion issue continues to worm its way through the courts—and eventually impact college and high school football, not just the NFL—the sports medicine community may find itself even further deprived of resources as scarce capital is allocated to class action lawyers and so-called expert witnesses.

Dr. Andrews generally avoids discussion of legal and political issues in Any Given Monday aside from a brief chapter on Title IX. He laments the “unforeseen negative consequences” of schools cutting men’s sports programs to meet federal gender-parity mandates. He says the law fails to account for the “varying degrees of interest in sports” (emphasis his), and that parents should take an active interest in learning about their children’s schools’ Title IX policies to ensure men’s teams aren’t unfairly eliminated.

Indeed, parental responsibility is the overriding theme of Any Given Monday. He says that parents not only have to be able to identify symptoms of serious injury, but also know when their children are simply tired of playing a particular sport. Dr. Andrews says that many of his younger patients actually research injuries and fake symptoms in order to get out of practice rather than confront their parents. As we all know, the majority of high school athletes will never play at the SEC or NFL level, and excessive parental pressure may increase the risk of injury, negating the general health benefits of playing a sport in the first place.

These are all common-sense observations, but coming from someone of Dr. Andrews’ stature it should resonate with most parents. More than anything, Any Given Monday provides useful medical context for the ongoing football concussion “epidemic.” Dr. Andrews explains that every sport involves risk of serious injury and that, particularly for high school and younger athletes, there’s no substitute for parental vigilance. That’s an important message in the current climate, where lawyers and their media lackeys want you to believe that litigation and long-winded columns about the horrors of football are the solution.

***

Dr. James R. Andrews with Don Yaeger, Any Given Monday: Sports Injuries and How to Prevent Them, for Athletes, Parents, and Coaches—Based on My Life in Sports Medicine, Scribner, 2013 (New York), 270 pages, available in hardcover and electronic form from Amazon.com.

There’s a growing sense in some quarters—by which I mean a handful of white, Northern sportswriters—that football has now begun its march into oblivion. Clearly, the critics maintain, the increased knowledge of brain injuries and their impact on player health cannot be ignored. Inevitably, fans and players will move away from this barbaric sport towards more nobler pursuits. The fact that critics have made such predictions for well over a century, without accuracy, should lead the average person to take such doomsday warnings as seriously as the Mayan calendar.

The other eternal debate with respect to college football is the proper role of the sport within the university system. This argument may in fact be reaching a tipping point—but not for the reason most critics believe. While media conventional wisdom holds football undermines the university’s academic integrity, a new reality is becoming clearer every day, namely that its the university itself that undermines academic integrity, not football.

Just as we’ve seen with the housing and technology sectors, higher education is awash in malinvestment and debt-fueled spending. Critics may decry football as wasteful, but certainly at the major powers it’s at least financially self-sustaining. The same can’t be said for the rest of the university system, which is just as addicted to spending and bureaucracy as any other government agency.

Consider this recent account from economist Joseph Salerno about a controversial proposal by Georgia’s Emory University to eliminate money-losing graduate programs:

Graduate programs are enormously costly to maintain because graduate students receive huge subsidies in the form of a tuition waiver plus graduate or teaching assistantships that pay stipends that reportedly can run as high as $30,000 per year. In most cases, the taxpayer is footing a large part of the bill. Not only are most large research universities with graduate programs state-owned institutions, but the Federal government also subsidizes low cost loans to graduate students and bestows huge grants on faculty at research universities that are used to hire graduate assistants. Not surprisingly this massive government subsidy leads to artificially prolonged stays in graduate school, which cause an enormous misallocation of resources and loss of productivity in the economy as many students who will never complete their doctorates delay the start of productive careers for many years. According to a recent study, only 25 percent of Ph.D. students complete their doctorates in 5 years and only 45 percent in 7 years. Completion rates are even lower in the social sciences and the humanities.

That final sentence is particularly revealing. We always hear complaints about the supposedly low graduation rate of scholarship football players; yet the press never says much about graduate students who fail to complete their degrees, even though in many cases these students receive greater subsidies than athletes.

Graduate programs are hardly the only source of university waste. In an effort to attract and retain revenue-generating undergraduates, schools are spending more and more on non-academic amenities. It’s impossible to justify present tuition levels on academics alone. Technology has made teaching and learning virtually cost-free. The typical student does not require a four year residency to acquire basic vocational skills. And thanks to rampant grade and curriculum inflation, few degrees guarantee entry-level employment anymore. Here, again, football players have a decided advantage. Not every player, even in the SEC, will go on to the NFL, but Nick Saban has helped a lot more kids find some level of work than probably any professor at Alabama.

Most of college football’s problems exist because of government and bureaucratic interventions. Just as Salerno alluded to government incentives to prolong graduate study, the NFL and NCAA use their state privileges to maintain the three-year waiting period before players can “turn pro.” The NFL has no incentive to pay for a more comprehensive development system lest it offend the politicians who are tied to the fortunes of state-run universities. Federal tax laws also create enormous distortions by pigeon-holding athletics into “non-profit” structures that create a “consumption for the sake of consumption” mentality. This has been the principal factor driving conference realignment.

Despite all this, football endures, not because of some misplaced cultural lust for violence, but because it is one of the last places where young adults can actually learn about the value of work. Critics claim football is a mere “child’s game,” yet there’s nothing childish about it. Like any economic activity, football requires entrepreneurship, specialization of labor, and yes, risk management. From the day a player attends his first practice, he understands the need to perform, to contribute towards the success of an organization. In contrast, the typical undergraduate or graduate has no sense of economic purpose, only a sense of consumption fueled by a combination of their parents’ savings and student loan debt.

Football’s continued success serves as a painful reminder to the university system—the faculty and their subsidy-driven graduate students—that they are on the wrong side of economics and history. In the next few decades, many schools, including prominent major-football colleges, will go out of business. The same technology disruptions that have transformed other information-based industries will finally conquer the four-year baccalaureate college. But the end of college as we know it will not mean the end of college football. If anything, the sport will be liberated from the tyranny of the academic bureaucracy—or in the NFL’s case, the kleptocracy—allowing a new entrepreneurial class to flourish.

Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman told the same IMG gathering that federal antitrust law would almost certainly thwart any attempt by schools to collectively restrain coaching salaries. “[T]here’s really two options,” Perlman said:

One is to figure out a creative way to do it within the antitrust laws. Or, second, is to get the antitrust laws changed. I know there’s great reluctance, but there’s been conversations within the NCAA about going before Congress and doing something about this.

The NCAA isn’t about to go to Congress, as that would open the door to a wide-ranging inquiry into college football’s business practices, including conference realignment and amateurism. Even attempting to find a “creative way” to circumvent the antitrust system, as Perlman suggested, would invite greater regulatory scrutiny. (After all, antitrust laws, like NCAA rules, are written so that only the regulators know if something is a violation after-the-fact.) It’s also far from clear how many other college presidents share Emmert and Perlman’s malaise over the current market. While Perlman’s Big Ten colleagues may welcome a new price fixing regime, it’s hard to imagine the SEC—which has just poached the top coaches from three of its rival conferences—would go along with such a proposal.

It’s also quite laughable that men as educated as Emmert and Perlman actually think price controls—and that’s what they’re proposing, let’s not kid ourselves—will actually work in practice. All price controls do is create further shortages while encouraging people to find, ahem, “creative ways” to circumvent them. Say the NCAA decrees no coach can receive a salary of more than $2 million per year. Does that apply to outside income from camps, media, alumni groups, et al.? If it does, good luck trying to enforce that. We’ve already seen how well the NCAA polices its price controls over player compensation.

The larger message from Emmert and Perlman’s statements is that they view rising coaching salaries as a bureaucratic problem in search of a bureaucratic solution. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What we’re really seeing here is an epidemic of mismanagement among Division I schools, particularly with respect to presidents and athletic directors.

Take Auburn’s recent hiring of Gus Malzahn. After firing Gene Chizik—who received a $3.6 million per year contract from the administration a year before he was fired—Auburn’s president brought in a “search committee” to recommend a replacement. Think about it. The president needed an outside committee to tell him to re-hire a man who had previously been on the Auburn payroll. This was textbook bureaucratic management. The search committee was designed to absolve the president and athletic director of direct responsibility for the final hire—especially if something had gone wrong and Auburn didn’t get its first or second choice.

Then there was the odyssey of Jeff Long. The Arkansas athletic director threw wild contract offers at every plausible candidate—including a reported $4 million per year offer to Louisville coach Charlie Strong—before pulling off the surprise hire of Bret Bielema, who settled for a mere $3.2 million. Even if Bielema doesn’t work out, Long successfully managed to get Strong and several other coaches, including Les Miles, a raise as a consequence of the rumor mongering that surrounded his actions.

The lesson here is that athletic directors make poor agents. They are ultimately bureaucratic middle managers. Meanwhile, coaches have learned to hire shrewd, entrepreneurial agents to rabidly protect their interests. University presidents should take note. Instead of relying on BS search committees or athletic directors who are looking to make a big hire at any cost, schools should seriously look at hiring their own Scott Boras-type agents. This would do far more to bring “balance” back to the market than price fixing or whatever bureaucratic remedy Mark Emmert might concoct.

Photo Credit: Beth Hall-USA TODAY Sports