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There Ain't No Sanity Clause. No Morality Clause, Either

Many neutral observers are mounting their high horses about college football's latest "scandal," the revelation that an agent made significant payments to the family of Reggie Bush, 2005 Heisman Trophy winner, when the Saints rookie was at USC. Mounted on the tallest steed in the corral, the New York Times, coiumnist Selena Roberts used her space in today's paper to link Bush to former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett.

Roberts is a fine writer, but she's swum way too deeply into the murky depths of "sports as a mirror of society" pool. Clarett just pled guilty to aggravated robbery charges and will spend at least the next three and a half years in prison. Bush stands accused of violating NCAA rules and will spend at least the next three and a half years playing for the New Orleans Saints. Pardon me if I fail to see a connection there.

The NCAA has many rules for student athletes, all of which are constantly being violated by most people in the college football and basketball businesses. This is not news, and shouldn't be news. The Times has run excellent investigative pieces into some of these violations which result in no changes whatsoever. The alleged victims, the institutions of higher learning involved, don't care. Many times, they're the perps as well as the marks.

Nobody should care about the charges against Reggie Bush. All he's accused of is violating the NCAA's salary cap.

That is all the "illegal" payments to college athletes amount to. They are limited to scholarship, room. and board to maintain football and basketball's profitability and to prevent bidding wars for players like Bush. Hurting some racket's cost containment strategy doesn't pose a menace to society.

A scholarship athlete is already paid. At a school like USC, they get services equal to perhaps $40,000 per annum, a fine entry level salary for people their age, plus whatever future earning power the athlete gets from the college experience.

In Bush's case, said earning power was large indeed. So if an agent made payments to Bush's family in return for a promise of becoming Bush's business partner, that's an understandable free market transaction.

AND THAT"S ALL IT IS! There is no harm to society, USC, or anyone else here except an NCAA rule that's a manifest violation of justice and common sense. If some USC undergrad was a whiz at gene-splitting, and Merck put him on the payroll while the kid was still enrolled in school, nobody would say boo. That's their business. If Steve Spielberg gives a promising film student $10 K a week to follow the master around, Hollywood doesn't go ape. Why should sports be different?

It bothers me when college athletes are involved in actual crimes due to their sense of entitlement, because that hurts people. It bothers me somewhat less when college jocks are allowed to shirk their academic responsibilities. That's cheating them of future earning power, but they're doing it to themselves, so whaddaya gonna do?

It bothers me not at all whether college athletes get paid under the table and how much they get if they are. That's just business. They're in a business. Their compensation level is nobody else's business.

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:49 AM