The NCAA News - Comment
October 7, 1996
Student-athlete view -- Football players unfairly painted by broad brush
BY MATT RUSSELL
University of Colorado, Boulder
When I was asked to write about college football's link to violence off the field, I wasn't sure where to start. I dug up a few articles and talked with a few people, then gave myself a little time to digest that information with some of my own feelings.
I also took into account a study I recently heard about where some sociologist is going to link the pair -- college football and violence -- with a high degree of certainty.
Here's what I came up with:
Sociologists can do all the studies in the world on all types of behavior, but my opinion is that people are born individuals and have individual faults and failings. Certain people in our society have a difficult time controlling their tempers. Certain people have drinking problems.
In the search to explain and treat those problems, however, you can't just say, "He's a football player" and be satisfied with that. Sure, some football players can't control their tempers and, sure, some have drinking problems. But it's not because they're football players -- it's because they're human. Other people have those same problems, people who aren't football players.
I have way too many friends who are way too good a people to be seen as violent individuals just because they happen to be football players. In fact, football players often are accused by their coaches of being too passive. How does that fit with the theory of automatically increased violence in the psyche of football players?
Why, then, are football players always splashed across the headlines and highlighted in the five-second soundbite for committing violent acts? The answer is simple: It's because we are one of the most visible groups in society.
Take a fraternity, for instance. Members of a fraternity houses may be involved in similar incidents, but the public doesn't react the same way because the fraternity members don't have the same notoriety. It's cliched and overblown at times, but it's also often true: College athletes, whether they want to
be or not, are constantly under a microscope. As a college football player, you can certainly choose not to recognize that, you can choose not to be careful about everything you do, but it's only going to hurt the team.
For my own part, I enjoy going out. I enjoy going to clubs. I am 23 years old, and that's certainly my right. But I am always very mindful and conscious of my behavior. Morality dictates it, ethics dictate it and, almost just as powerfully, a fear that I'll screw everything up for the team or myself dictates it.
Sometimes your judgment is messed with in places like a club. But you've got to stay away from fighting. You've got to stay away from trouble. You've got to be afraid of doing anything that can hurt the team. If a coach or a team doesn't have that fear, they're more likely to get out of control.
Let me make sure I get absolutely one thing across: While I can sympathize with athletes who do nothing to deserve the criticism they receive simply for being an athlete, I do believe suspensions and punishment (beyond any civil penalties) should be dealt out and adhered to for college athletes who actually have crossed the line.
In closing, my advice to college athletes is to be very careful in every facet of their lives, both on and off the field. It may not be right, it may not be fair, but it is a fact: We're under a microscope. Anything we do has consequences that can ruin teams and scar individual careers.
On the other side, my advice to those sociologists or others who are so intent upon linking football inextricably with off-the-field violent behavior is to wake up and take a look at what is really going on. This isn't something that needs to be studied: It's common sense. People are different and they do different things.
They can throw statistics at me all they want, but that's what I believe.
Matt Russell is a football player at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Letter to the Editor -- Too much business, not enough education
Milton Richards' remarks in The NCAA News (September 2) are reasonable, sensible and suggest other reasons why "pay for play" is a bad idea.
Many faculty members have been concerned for some time about the gradual intrusion of so-called "business values" into the academy. The number of administrators whose education and training is in management and who do not view the university as a special place has greatly increased in recent years, with the result that many of the traditional values of higher education have in many places been totally lost.
Many of us recall our university years as a special time, when we began to understand what the word "education" really meant and understand that the achievements of the great minds of the past were a legacy too important to put a price on, like the water we drink and the air we breathe. It's ironic to note that, as universities turn away from the concept that they are special places where special things happen to glorified job-training agencies, public support for them has steadily eroded.
Athletics departments were among the first segments of the universities to "privatize," to be "run like a business." And predictably, the more this tendency has accelerated, the more it has undercut the traditional justifications for the inclusion of athletics as an integral part of university life. Athletics departments on many campuses are now small businesses operating in nonprofit structures. The "pay for play" zealots are one of the clearest indications of how far this process has eroded what ought to be the real place of athletics in a university. We have reached the place where it is possible to argue that athletics is no longer a student activity, intended to supplement what goes on in the classroom, but just another "job" -- a job that ought to pay better than it does.
The saddest part of all this is that universities themselves are following the same track trod by athletics departments. More and more, we are told that the "public" no longer is willing to pay for funding universities and that to succeed in the future, "everyone must become a fund-raiser."
Even though, according to NCAA figures, fewer than one percent of the total number of athletes who participate actually are able to make a living at it, each sport is treated as if it was the student's real "major" -- every sport is now a "year-round" activity, with extensive conditioning and mini-practices in between. I often think that if the average student spent as much time studying biology, or literature, or history, they would be so much better off.
Excessive specialization is one of the worst features of intercollegiate athletics, but it demonstrates just how far academic thinking has yielded to business thinking. Excessive specialization is also one of the worst features of many university curricula, and it is partially the result of the same kind of thinking -- you are at the university for one thing (play basketball, get a job) and one thing only.
It's an old cliche, but this "pay for play" question once again reminds us of how many people there are in the world who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Michael Wenzl
Faculty Athletics Representative
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Opinions -- Experts not comfortable with trend toward skyboxes
Edward J. Blakely
Dean of the planning and development school, University of Southern California
International Herald Tribune
Discussing the proliferation of skyboxes at Division I-A football stadiums:
"It's a creeping and disturbing trend. It used to be the regular guy at the ballpark could sit next to the corporate CEO. Not anymore. This is the privatization of public space."
Robert Baade, economics professor
Lake Forest College
International Herald Tribune
"Stadiums have a finite amount of space. If you devote more and more seating to preferential customers, what do you have left for the ordinary public? I think it means sports spectating is becoming a far less democratic activity."
Jeff Tsai, student-body president
University of Texas at Austin
International Herald Tribune
"Skyboxes are an alternative that could benefit students because they could alleviate the burden they pay for athletics."
Bruce Madej, sports information director
University of Michigan
International Herald Tribune
"We have had many people come to us and ask if they can build skyboxes for us. And there have been unbelievable offers on the table. But we are trying to make sure that this is a college atmosphere and not a professional atmosphere."
Measuring who's best
Michael Farber, columnist
Sports Illustrated
"Sports isn't rocket science, though if the present trend continues, it soon will be. There is almost nothing in our athletic toy chest that nowadays isn't measured, quantified or overly explained. The simple pleasures of the 1950s argument over who was the best centerfielder in New York -- Willie, Mickey or the Duke -- couldn't exist now, at least not without computer printouts. Knowledge is good (Faber College's motto), but are we really better off when the magician tells us how he pulls off that business with the saw and the assistant?
"The unexamined life might not be worth living, but here's one vote for a little more ambiguity. If we are drawn to sports by its sense of order in a gold-silver-bronze universe, it's the gray, open-ended areas that engender the passion. Bonds or Griffey Jr.? Elway or Marino? Gretzky or Lemieux? Bailey or Johnson?
"Let's argue. For two weeks every year we should declare a holiday from sports facts, beating the sabermetricians into plowshares and trusting instead the inconclusive evidence of our eyes and our instincts and our loyalties.
"(College football) seems happy enough to swap tradition for certitude as it revamps the bowl system in its lurch toward crowning a national college football champion.
"Of course there is nothing wrong with tournaments -- they serve the NCAA well in other sports -- but there was also nothing wrong with the bowls, charming anachronisms that guaranteed some rousing intersectional matchups and a chance to lull away a New Year's Day hangover. If every few years the bowls offered No. 1 versus No. 2 in a Game of the Century, it was a treat. If every few years the student body at unbeaten Penn State whipped itself into a froth because a president or a panel of sportswriters said that another school had the best team, it enlivened the debate.
"We analyze. We compute. We pronounce. The NBA crowns a champion three-point shooter at its All-Star Game weekend because it thinks we must know who has the deadliest shot. The NHL times its skaters in races around the rink during its All-Star Game festivities because it thinks we have to know who is the swiftest.
"The U.S. Tennis Association posts the speed of every serve on the main court during the U.S. Open because it thinks we must know who hits the ball the hardest.
"Does it matter? Has anyone devised a test to tell us who is the best three-point shooter with a hand in his face and 1.2 seconds on the clock in a two-point game? Is it important to know which Russian is the fastest skater if he shoots wildly while streaking down the wing in overtime of a Stanley Cup playoff game? What difference does it make that Mark Philippoussis has a 137-mph serve when Pete Sampras wins the tournament on guts?"
Football playoff
John Junker, executive director
Fiesta Bowl
Arizona Republic
"College football is the only sport we have left where every regular-season game is meaningful.
"As an example, if you had said before last season that the Northwestern-Miami of Ohio game would have national-championship implications, they'd have thrown a net over you. But if Northwestern had won that game it might very well have wound up No. 1 or 2."
Parity
Spike Dykes, football coach
Texas Tech University
Omaha World-Herald
"As coaches, we talk about it all the time but no one seems to be listening. Parity in college football is to the point that if you don't play well on Saturday, you're going to lose. We get caught up in all the other things, but the bottom line is that it can happen to almost anybody."
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