The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football
Read The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Online
Authors: Jeff Benedict,Armen Keteyian
Tags: #Business Aspects, #Football, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Sports & Recreation
Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Benedict & Associates, LLC, and Lights Out Productions, LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
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and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, LLC.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photograph © Steve Bronstein / The Image Bank / Getty Images
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
is on file with the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53662-2
v3.1
To our wives, Lydia and Dede
,
who endured the two-year journey with us
F
rom the blimp’s-eye view high above sold-out Sun Life Stadium the helmets looked like metallic gold dots, bank after bank of thousand-watt halide lights adding an almost ethereal glow. As the view compressed, more colors came into focus—first the crimson, then the white, and finally the navy blue. It was January 7, 2013, a perfect night for football in South Florida—a balmy seventy-three degrees with winds out of the northeast at five miles per hour. A record crowd of 80,120 erupted as four Wings of Blue paratroopers stuck landings on the field. Another 26.4 million fans were tuned in at home, making it the second-largest audience of any program in cable television history.
On paper, the Discover BCS National Championship game was a match made in football heaven: No. 1 and undefeated Notre Dame (12-0) against No. 2 and defending national champion Alabama (12-1). After six weeks of analysis and hype the big boys were finally getting down to business. It had all the earmarks of a storybook ending to a wild, crazy roller coaster of a season that had driven the popularity of college football to dizzying new heights.
For fourteen consecutive Saturdays in the fall of 2012 college football
owned
the sporting public’s attention from noon till deep into the night. Click and there was Johnny Football, on his way to Johnny Heisman, performing magic tricks for Texas A&M; click and there was Bill O’Brien’s gritty Penn State squad rising from the ashes of the soul-crushing child abuse sex scandal to go 8-4; click and there was Ohio State bruising its way to an undefeated season while barred by NCAA penalties from competing in a bowl game; click, click, click, click, and there was Oregon, Stanford, West Virginia and K-State taking their turns on the national stage.
Off the field the news wasn’t so good. A dozen programs were on probation for major NCAA violations, including USC, Ohio State, Tennessee, Boise State, LSU and Texas Tech. Graduation rates for African-American
players continued to lag behind, highlighted by 2011 national champion Auburn, where only 49 percent of black athletes graduated, compared with a majority of white players. A 2012 study found that student-athletes in top football programs are more accurately
athlete-students
, averaging 41.6 hours per week preparing for football, compared with 38.2 hours in the classroom.
The economics of college football were upside down, too. The latest figures showed only 22 of the 120 top-tier programs broke even or made a profit in 2010–11. “If anybody looked at the business model of big-time college athletics, they would say this is the dumbest business in the history of the world,” said Michigan’s athletic director, Dave Brandon, the former CEO of Domino’s Pizza. “You just don’t have the revenue to support the costs. And the costs continue to go up.”
Another study, released in 2012, found that Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools spent more than $91,000 per athlete compared with just over $13,000 per student. Yet students across the country faced steep tuition hikes and increased fees. As colleges and universities absorbed painful cuts in funding and went deeper into debt to stay afloat, a nationwide building boom—an arms race—was under way when it came to stadiums, premium seating, weight rooms and football facilities.
At the same time, a seismic shift in conference realignment had schools bolting conferences and abandoning long-standing rivalries in order to capture a greater share of the multibillion-dollar television contracts. “I don’t know where this all ends,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in early December 2012. “But it does make clear that those moves are, if not entirely about money, predominantly about money.”
The result, said Emmert, was the erosion of friendship and trust that existed for decades among college presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners.