"From a college and NBA standpoint, it’s often too late — by the time the rules allow us to first engage the players — to do anything in terms of skills and personal development. There’s a morass of rules, some Byzantine, that we’re just beginning to understand. We’ve never done that kind of a thorough investigation into the layered rules and don’t yet have an understanding of what we could do, or what others could do.

"We’re not as concerned that we get involved, as long as there’s a system that produces American players that can compete at the highest levels by the time they’re of NBA age. That’s what our concern is. We just don’t want to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that somehow players will arrive miraculously as fully developed adults when there’s a screwed-up system all along the way."

"Why did the players leave? To train for the draft or a career in Europe. Who allowed the players to leave? Their parents. Well, then, what do you want me to do? If the parents say that is OK, what can I do?"

"The sleaziness of the college-sports business, its exploitation of young people — especially members of ethnic minorities — under the pretense of preparing them for life, is a symptom of a culture where skirting the letter of the law without getting caught is taken to be the highest form of political and business acumen.

"With a society so strung out between its affirmed ideals and its actual practices, and especially those practices that are necessary for success in the business world, it would be strange indeed if college sports were any less corrupt than their ‘real world’ equivalents.

"Small wonder that ‘performance enhancers’ are the drugs of choice in both professional and what were once known as ‘amateur’ sports. Performance is all that counts in society, in politics, in the arts, in business and in our entertainments. Why shouldn’t it be all that counts in our sports?"

"Rather than praising athletic performance, intellectual discourses on sports today belittle and sometimes flatly denounce what athletes do. When scholars, even scholars who love sports, apply the tools of their training to athletics events, they often wind up feeling obliged to interpret sports as a symptom of highly undesirable tendencies — denouncing them as conspiracy or seeing their popularity as a sign of decadence. But the most obvious explanation for the widespread popularity of sports is their aesthetic appeal, as powerful as the experience of a beautiful work of music or art. ...

"That is why I believe it matters, more than ever before perhaps, that we keep open the possibility for events where physical intensity and intellectual intensity can come together — that we keep such occasions open for those among our students who want to perform music, create art and play sports, as well as for their readers, listeners and spectators. ...

"Those whom we encourage to experience such moments will almost instantly know that they are like islands of survival in an everyday of abstraction, distance and solitude. To betray, in our teaching and in the development of college education, the longing for such moments would be as irresponsible as banning the spirit of critical analysis, whose importance I do of course not doubt for a minute."

"Why would you risk (being caught)? In college, it’s all about the team, and the last thing you want to do is let down your teammates. And I take that further. I don’t want to let down my family, even my hometown."

"People think because (steroid abuse) is happening in major league baseball that it’s happening in all of baseball. And I don’t think that’s the case. ...

"Sitting out a season (as a result of a positive test), that’s almost a lifetime. Then it’s out there that you’ve tested positive, and your school knows and your community knows you’ve cheated."

"We do not play well together when it comes to money. We compete, and that means holding money close to the vest."