Big-time college sports' misdeeds have many enablers

"And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we're neglecting football for education."

-- Groucho Marx as Professor Wagstaff in "Horsefeathers"

Why now?

Critics of the controversial, well-done series this week in The Seattle Times detailing the misdeeds, mayhem and miscarriages of justice around the University of Washington's last good football team, the 2001 Rose Bowl winners, keep asking the same question.

Besides accusing the newspaper of being mean, biased and agenda-filled, many Huskies fans claim that because of the passage of time and the fact that nearly all the perpetrators are gone from the Montlake scene, the series is irrelevant. I beg to differ.

From a national perspective, the stories didn't go back far enough. The big-picture issues are more than a century old. "Horsefeathers" was made in 1932. Groucho knew his sarcastic comedy would play because the corruption around college football had been a fact of American life for decades.

In Seattle, the little picture is that football-program scandals in 1993 and 2003 cost the head coach his job and precipitated the current slide, worst in the sport's local history. Of the two principal hires made to clean up the mess, athletic director Todd Turner lost his job last month and coach Tyrone Willingham nearly did, perhaps saved only by the bullet Turner took for him.

The Times doesn't need me to defend its journalism. But it is worthwhile to consider what wasn't much discussed.

The UW has been annoyed anew by program and community malfeasance of which few were aware, just at the time President Mark Emmert is about to hire Turner's replacement, whose task is almost solely to see to it that games are won and money is raised in rarefied numbers.

Emmert was quoted as saying, "You can win, and you can win properly." Good for him, and best of luck. Since national change has been modest in college football since the days of Groucho's mockery, and since so little was appreciated by fans and boosters in the recent local effort at cleanup, the task ranks just behind the passing of a camel through the eye of a needle.

As a longtime follower and frequent critic of big-time college sports, I'm neither surprised by the UW misdeeds nor the misdirection of the backlash.

Things haven't changed, because next to Congress, the NCAA sports machine, of which the UW is a part, is the most reform-resistant institution in America.

That's because many of us want it that way.

Whether it's Washington or Florida State, USC or Notre Dame, 1900 or 2000, despite a century's worth of investigations by commissions, prosecutors, panels and newspapers, protests from academics, searing indictments from within the industry and condemning books from outside the industry, and laments from U.S. presidents to raped coeds, nothing fundamental has changed with the national scene:

We want our big-time college football and men's basketball, we don't much care what it costs, who or what it hurts or what it says about the culture. The enduring mythology is that college and big-time revenue sports ennoble each other and make great fun for us.

To argue otherwise is to poop the all-day party on fall Saturdays, which at the Don James Center usually includes many, sometimes most, of the region's power brokers. Below, in the student section, are the drunken frat boys, some of whom are destined to move up 30 rows to the Tyee Club as the next generation's boosters.

So far, nothing has broken the national cycle of the booster subculture that is at the heart of the rot, which, as Turner put it in Thursday's Seattle P-I, makes jock-factory donors think they are "team owners" who want the "keys to the locker room." The Times on Wednesday quoted one of them, former Walla Walla mayor William Fleenor: "It wasn't just Tyrone, but Todd as well, they didn't really care about the boosters like the old guys did."

Isn't it enough to tend to the care and feeding of 85 heavily hormoned scholarship athletes, many of whom already are lost in a college environment? No, the boosters also must be patted on the head, told secret stories and get their cocktails freshened.

I know. It's easy to satirize boosters. Just as it is easy to demonize and isolate player miscreants such as Jerramy Stevens, Jeremiah Pharms and Curtis Williams as a few bad apples. But a main point of the series is that player misbehavior was often enabled by institutional mythmakers that include the NCAA, university, cops, prosecutors and media. It takes a village.

When such an enduring mythology is debunked, it's easier to attack the attackers than it is to accept the idea that one's beliefs have been made to look foolish.

In 1986, when James was UW head coach and I was the P-I's Huskies football reporter, I wrote a story detailing a spate of criminal misdeeds among football players at the UW and Washington State that included felony charges at both schools.

James and his WSU counterpart, Jim Walden, defended their programs and procedures, yet lamented the difficulty of managing an enterprise that then included about 150 man-children per team.

"We just haven't done a great job as a team," James said, "coaches and players."

James and I talked of the bigger picture. I suggested the system was designed to fail numerous players because, entering college, they were not equipped to manage academic and personal obligations as well as a 40-hours-plus job that was the primary, if not only, reason they were at a university. James politely disagreed. We went back and forth.

Finally, he said, "If I believed everything you said, I couldn't keep coaching football."

James was dead-on.

He, and all of his peers as well as fans, have to hold tight to the belief that more good than harm comes from the industry. Fortunately for them, it's usually true. Lots of players make it through without bad headlines and with an education, friends, contacts and great memories. A handful get to live an NFL dream for a few years.

But the issue is the gap between those helped and those co-opted. It is too narrow. As TV revenues, attendance and coaching salaries grow, the pressure to cut any corner to win grows more intense.

At the UW, the pressure is even worse, because policy has been that football revenues, not general fund money, must pay for all 23 sports, 700 scholarship athletes and the salaries of more than 100 coaches, administrators and staffers.

And don't forget the boosters.

The UW hasn't. That's why the boosters are getting a new AD. Groucho has been heard.