Ole Miss football fans, and fans of collegiate athletics in general, have an ever-developing love-hate relationship with the NCAA. We love the product the NCAA delivers to us. However, we hate some of their procedures, practices, and rules.
College athletics have become embedded in the American culture, especially in the South. Just consider Ole Miss football and our SEC opponents. Accordingly, the NCAA is a billion dollar non-profit organization.
College sports provide an atmosphere that you can’t find in professional sports. For example, athletes, in perception at least, are playing for a program they love. They picked one over all the others, and it shows on the field. The passion displayed in collegiate sports is unmatched.
Collegiate sports are predicated on the basis of amateurism. The idea is that athletes attending college, sometimes on scholarship, should not be compensated.
This idea is completely bogus. You can’t just make billions off of someone putting their body on the line game in and game out without reimbursing them.
Yes, some are getting a free education. Outside of football and basketball, though, most athletes are actually not on a full scholarship. Softball gets 12 scholarships, while baseball gets a lousy 11.7.
It is worth noting that softball gets more to balance out the amount of scholarships between male and female athletes. Most women sports have more scholarships than their male counterparts due to football getting a whopping 85 scholarships.
This means that a lot of these students either collect massive student loan debt, or their parents must try to pay for their college. It is not reasonable to ask families that quite possibly struggled affording high school athletics to pay for college and give the student-athlete everything they need.
If a school, or its boosters, gives an athlete money, it is breaking NCAA rules. The NCAA will investigate, a process flawed in numerous ways. First the investigators are just quidnunc’s with a title. They routinely leak information to the media, while schools must stay silent. Also, the investigations take forever just to reach the allegation of violations stage.
Ultimately, the committee on infractions will hand out the sanctions. These penalties routinely inflict gobs of collateral damage.
Without further ado, I’ll dive into how I would go about fixing the billion dollar industry that is the NCAA.
Amateurism is Dead
Dead, I tell you. Amateurism is an old idea. At least the NCAA’s definition of Amateurism is. We should nuke the old definition of amateurism and start from scratch to make the definition fit the current decade.
Allow Athletes to Get Endorsement Deals
Ole Miss Rebels Football
The vast majority of NCAA student-athletes are just simply playing because they love the game, so they will give it their all every game out.
Yes, some athletes are simply using college as a means to an end. Of course, that end is to go pro in their respective sport. However, a minute fraction of student-athletes will actually make a living playing the sport they love.
Let’s be honest, football, soccer, baseball, golf, basketball, and hockey are the only sports you can make a living doing. Softball, lacrosse, etc don’t have professional leagues playing large salaries. You will not be able to support your family for life as a softball player unless your name is, say, Jennie Finch.
The athletes, however, could get a jump-start on life if they are allowed to sign endorsement contracts. Also, the contracts would be able to teach life lessons. Say an athlete gets a DUI or something, his contract would possibly be terminated.
Of course, the endorsement contracts should be easily available, and subject to FOIA, to the public for reasons. The main one is to combat one major argument: bigger schools with richer boosters will pay more and create even more of a recruiting advantage.
My answer to that is simple, let them. Let them be the yahoo that pays some kid a million dollars to help his school win games. Everyone will know that person is an idiot, and we can enjoy laughing at them together.
Endorsement Examples
With that being said, the popularity of the athletes, while in college, is often at its peak. There are great examples of smaller sport athletes being stars in their respective college town and fan base. An example at Ole Miss include softball pitcher, Kaitlin Lee.
Lee took the sports world by storm this year during the Rebels run to an SEC championship and Super Regional appearance. Despite the sheer mountain of popularity she has gained, Ole Miss will , rather unfortunately, probably be the final stop on her softball journey.
Knowing this, why shouldn’t she be able to cash in on her superior talent and enormous popularity to the Ole Miss fan base and most softball fans across the country. Let some companies throughout Oxford and the state of Mississippi use her to generate business, while she makes money off the endorsements.
Another example is Bo Wallace after Ole Miss beat Alabama in 2014. His popularity was sky-high and he was never going to be an NFL quarterback. Why not let him benefit while he can?
Pay The Kids
College athletics were founded on the premise of amateurism, I get that. Allow me to let you in on a secret, amateurism past high school is ridiculous.
I’ve already mentioned how a good number of athletes are from borderline poverty, or worse. Expecting their families to fund them through college is difficult, especially when many are not on scholarships. Of the 280,000 athletes in Division’s I & II, only about 150,000 are on scholarship. Most of the 150,000 scholarships are only partial, so kids and their families are still left to foot a bill.
So, if you aren’t going to give every athlete a scholarship, then you should be helping the student-athletes purchase necessities such as food and water. And yes, I know they have team meals, that is not a good argument, however.
Simplicity is Key
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The NCAA’s rule book is insane, and I’m not talking about rules of game play. I’m talking about the rules dictating what schools can and can not do.
This refers to recruiting, money, transfers, and whatever else you can come up with.
The ever-diverse transfer rules are absolutely insane. Why have a different set of transfer rules for every sport, that depend on a certain situation. Also, why should a school be allowed to dictate where an athlete be allowed to transfer. I don’t know about you, but I grow tired of seeing a coach tell an athlete that he can not transfer to a certain school.
So, let us simplify the transfer rules by creating a uniform transfer code.
Any athlete who chooses to transfer must sit out one season. The only exception to this rule should be to punish a team for violations of rules, which I will get to later.
Recruiting rules are also weird. There is now a December signing period to go along with National Signing Day in February. While I understand the reasoning, it just added to the odd rules in recruiting.
You can offer a kid a scholarship, have him on a visit then you can’t contact them for certain times. In my opinion, phone contact should be allowed at anytime the recruit is willing. In person contact should be restricted to campus visits and in home visits after the athlete’s season concludes.
Let us Re-design the Punishment’s for NCAA violations
Look, the NCAA has rules and the member institutions must follow them. However, the punishments handed out by the NCAA could be better.
First off, let us stop docking scholarships. I get you want to punish a school by limiting the amount of quality players they may sign, but you are also costing several kids the ability to play collegiate athletics.
Secondly, let us stop throwing bowl bans at recruiting violations, paying players should lower the urge for recruiting violations anyways. Not saying they would disappear entirely, that will never happen as long as humans have anything to do with recruiting.
Anyways, back to bowl bans. Use the ban for academic scandals and when programs are covering up actual crimes, see Baylor. I would be content with recruiting violations being used to increase a bowl ban’s length as it shows an increased pattern of behavior.
Many will say I only want to adjust bowl bans because I’m fan of Ole Miss, that is ridiculous. Ole Miss would still get a bowl ban, of length to be determined by the COI, under my suggestion.
Also, I’m going to rewrite the NCAA’s death penalty.There are other ways you can go after a program without inflicting the collateral damage that occurred at SMU when they received a death penalty.
New Punishments
The NCAA should focus more on punishing the rogue coaches, administrators, and boosters.
Keep the death penalty, just adjust who it targets. The NCAA currently can hand coaches a show-cause penalty, lets bump that up to a straight up ban. That’s right, ban coaches from coaching at any NCAA division for a set amount of time. The length would obviously differ on a case by case basis.
Next, let us add a lifetime coaching ban for coaches that are repeat offenders to breaking NCAA rules. The NCAA claims they want to target coaches and are for the players, well show us.
Force every booster to sign a contract with both the school and the NCAA saying they will not enter into any bribing of potential recruits. If they are found to breach the contract, fine them out the wazoo and obviously bar them from contact with any NCAA university in the future. It is extreme, but I bet it wouldn’t take much usage to get the point across.
Finally, force a school to terminate, with cause, any administrator found to have had knowledge of any wrongdoings, or if they did not do enough to promote compliance.
Let’s also have all member institutions agree to a new rule. We all know the NCAA is not a legal organization, so they currently can’t really drop the hammer on programs like Baylor football. Let’s change that, get an agreement which allows for the NCAA to charge programs found to have covered up crime with Lack of Institutional Control, because well that’s what it is!
Coaches and administrators found to have contributed to the cover-up of widespread crime scandals should be banned from the NCAA for life. Art Briles should never coach again, he just shouldn’t. The man actively covered up RAPE.
Extra Ammunition
As an added way to guarantee a schools cooperation to these new punishments and standards, the NCAA would have the option to essentially beat them into submission.
Simply comply or else. Or else an indefinite bowl ban, heavy cumulative fines, and allowing athletes to transfer with no restrictions or year to sit out. Schools would comply or they would have nothing left.
Additionally, once the school ends their fight the bowl ban should continue for one more season just because they decided to be hard-headed
NCAA Accountability
The NCAA governs collegiate athletics. So, who governs the NCAA, itself? That defeats the entire purpose of guaranteed integrity, or should we just take their word for it? Even our government balances itself with the branches, there is not an absolute power.
NO, I’m not saying the NCAA is like our government. However, there needs to be a way to hold the NCAA accountable to maintaining the highest of standards.
I present my solution. Let’s create a panel designed to watch over the NCAA. The panel should be selected by the schools, not the NCAA itself, duh.
Thus we have the NCAA governing collegiate athletics, a panel keeping the NCAA in line, and member institutions hold the fate of the panel members in the palm of their hands.
In the spirit of keeping the panel from being outrageous, each conference should elect a panel member to represent the respective conference. For example, maybe the SEC would nominate Mike Slive, I’m just brainstorming that.