College football continues to corrupt our universities. At least we could pay the players

More than ten years ago, I wrote that it was time to get football out of our universities because the sport was corrupting the universities’ mission. Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback about that, but I’ve continued to make this point, both here at Forbes and in The New York Times.

This weekend, I watched a college football game for the first time in years. I was struck by how much worse things are–and by worse, I mean driven by money.

Don’t get me wrong. Football is entertaining for its millions of fans, and college football is extremely popular, especially for those who live in cities without a professional team. I’m not so naive as to think people will give this up.

The problem is that major college football is a professional sport where everyone makes money except the main participants: the players. Worse, the players are being told by their coaches, assistant coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents that they’re getting a great deal. We give you free education! And you get to play football for our great team, and everyone will cheer for you!

If this is really so great, then why don’t the coaches work for free? College football coaches are paid multimillion-dollar salaries, usually far higher than anyone else at the same university, even the university president. The average salary of NCAA Division I coaches this year is $1.75 million, and some coaches make over $10 million. In most states, a football coach at a public university is the highest-paid state employee.

But the players get zero. This situation, to put it bluntly, is unethical. Universities with large football programs are profiting handsomely off the unpaid labor of their own students.

Universities have been told this before. In 2011, civil rights historian Taylor Branch wrote a ground-breaking cover story in The Atlantic titled “The Shame of College Sports,” As Branch wrote then:

“Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.”

That was 11 years ago. The situation has only gotten worse.

What’s striking about watching a college football game on television, as I did this past weekend, is the degree of commercialization of the sport. The game is interrupted constantly with advertisements from sponsors, and the stadiums are decorated with ads as well. ESPN has a large, professional team of announcers covering every aspect of the game. The television work is highly coordinated and professional, with many cameras covering every angle of every play.

There is a LOT of money in college football.

I listened to interviews with some of the (winning) players after the game. They were excited, and they praised their coaches and fellow teammates as they were supposed to. They seemed to believe that the game they’d just won was supremely important, and that their performance (an upset victory) was meaningful and even “historic” (as one player said).

But it wasn’t. Football is just entertainment.

What’s especially sad, to me, is that nearly all of these players are getting short-changed on their education. They spend most of their time on football for a good portion of their year, despite the laughable pretense by the NCAA that these are “student athletes.” They’re athletes, certainly, but they don’t have time to be students, not during football season. The universities (and especially the football coaches) just don’t seem to care, despite their continual protestations to the contrary.

Only 1.6% of college football players make it into the NFL. Or to put it another way: at the end of their college years, 98.4% of college football players will be spit out into the real world, with poor job prospects because they didn’t focus on their education.

And it’s actually even worse than this. We’ve learned in recent years that football carries serious risk of permanent neurological damage, due to repeated blows to the head that happen to many players. It’s a violent contact sport, and the ever-greater size of today’s players has made it much more dangerous than in its early years in the mid-20th century. (I wrote about this too, back in 2019.)

Universities could start to fix this unethical situation by paying the players what they’re worth. Here’s one idea: if universities are seriously concerned about the education of these young men, they should separate their football programs from their education programs. Teams could pay to license the university’s name, hire and pay players, and pay fees to use the football stadiums. (Football fans claim that the sport makes a profit, and if this is true, the teams should do just fine in this scenario.) The athletes could be offered full 4-year scholarships that they could use after their playing years were over, or perhaps in the off seasons, so that they would be able to truly focus on their education.

But meanwhile, as The Atlantic‘s editors put it over 10 years ago,

“the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves.”

Pay the players. That’s the only way to fix this.

College football season is starting up. Why do universities support a sport that harms their student athletes?

For those of us in academia, September means a new school year, and all of the excitement and energy that students bring as they return to campus. Strolling around, you can feel the energy in the air.

September is also the beginning of the college football season (in the U.S.). For many students, alumni, and other fans, watching the game each week is one more fall activity they look forward to.

But now, thanks to a rapidly growing body of new research, we know that football can severely harm and even kill its players. Not right away, but years later, through a brain disease called CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This is a frightening disorder that gradually destroys brain cells, causing memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, and progressive dementia. Many former players die very young, in their 40s or 50s, after first suffering for years.

CTE is caused by repeated blows to the head, events that are common to football. It has grown worse in recent decades as the players have gotten bigger and stronger. Improvements in helmet technology haven't helped, and they might even have made CTE even worse, because the helmets allowed players (by their own admission) to use their heads as battering rams.

Two years ago now, a large medical study of football players' brains showed that an appallingly high percentage of those players had CTE. In that study, Boston University scientists led by Jesse Mez and Ann McKee found CTE in the brains of 110 out of 111 former NFL players (99%), and 48 out of 53 college players (91%).

As the BU scientists themselves pointed out, the former players and their families may have suspected something was wrong, and that may have motivated them to participate in the study. Thus the extremely high proportion of deceased players showing CTE in this study is certainly an overestimate. But as I wrote at the time:

"is it okay to ask young men to play football if the risk of permanent brain damage is only 50%? What if it's just 10 or 20%? Is that okay? Is football that important?"

Clearly, the answer should be no. University presidents are constantly, even obsessively, worrying about the safety of their students. Campuses have many programs in place to protect students from crime, from sexual harrassment, from emotional distress, and more. And yet every fall, they willingly–no, enthusiastically–subject the 100 or so students on their football teams to a serious risk of lifelong, life-threatening brain damage. This simply should end.

For an especially poignant story, watch this short video about Greg Ploetz, who played on the 1969 national championship football team at the University of Texas, and who died in 2015 after years of worsening dementia:

As his daughter says in the video,

"If [today's football players] knew what he went through, and what we went through as a family, there's no way that people would decide to keep playing." 

Perhaps universities could take a cue from former Baltimore Ravens player John Urschel, widely considered the smartest player in the NFL, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT while simultaneously playing pro football. Two years ago, Urschel quit, because he was worried that brain damage would destroy his ability to think clearly. And just one week ago, Indianapolis Colts' star quarterback Andrew Luck retired early because football had "wrecked his body and stolen his joy."

Brain damage may be happening to much younger players too. A study from the University of Washington last year found that 5% of youth football players aged 5-14 had experienced concussions each season. Three years ago, a mother sued the Pop Warner youth football organization after her son committed suicide at age 25. An autopsy showed that he had CTE, and the mother argued that his brain damaged was caused by his years playing youth football. The Pop Warner organization settled the suit for close to $2 million, but other lawsuits have been filed since.

As I and others have written, football and its promise of big-money television contracts has corrupted our universities. While universities build ever-bigger football stadiums and pay coaches exhorbitant salaries, they force the players to play for free. Now we know that players face a much more direct threat: long-term brain damage.

Let me ask university presidents this question as bluntly as I can: how much brain damage is acceptable for your football players? If your answer is "none," then it's time to get football out of our universities.

Football has corrupted our universities. Time for it to leave.

The University of Maryland, College Park began their first
game of the season by honoring their teammate Jordan
McNair, number 79, who died during a May 2018 practice.

The University of Maryland, where I was a professor for six years, is embroiled in a football scandal that started with the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair, who died of heat stroke during practice. On an especially hot day in late May, the coaches were driving the players too hard, and when McNair collapsed, they failed to immerse him in cold water, which might have saved his life.

This past week, as the results of a 192-page inquiry were being leaked to the press, the university's Board of Regents has been meeting this weekend to decide what actions to take. According to the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, the board is considering whether to fire the coach, DJ Durkin (who has been on administrative leave since early September), the president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, and the athletic director, Damon Evans.

The University of Maryland has made one mistake after another with its football program, as I've pointed out again and again. Let's look at a timeline:

2010: in virtually his very first major decision as president, Wallace Loh approved the hiring of a new coach (Randy Edsall) and a $2 million payout to the old coach (Ralph Friedgen), who was pushed out a year early. This was at a time when the entire university system was in the midst of a 3-year hiring and salary freeze, which included unpaid furloughs (basically, pay cuts) for almost all employees. Not for football, though.

2011: UMD doubled down: in order to invest more in football, the university eliminated 8 other varsity sports, all of them sports that are healthy for students and that don't carry any risk of permanent brain damage. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo. Loh's argument at the time: "should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?"

It pains me to read these words again. Is this what "successful" means for a major university? That its football team wins a few more games? Meanwhile, hundreds of students who played those other sports, all of which likely enriched their lives and their health, were left without teams.

2012: Maryland left the ACC, to which it had belonged for over 50 years, and joined the Big Ten conference, a move that was supposed to make more money. Never mind that it would require the players to travel much longer distances for games at other schools in the Big Ten. Never mind the $50 million exit fee to leave the ACC.

2015: Deja vu! Maryland football was still losing, so they fired the coach again, giving him a $4.7 million payout from state funds, to hire another new coach, DJ Durkin. The coach they fired, Randy Edsall, was the guy who was supposed to take the Terrapins "from good to great." That worked out well, didn't it?

2017: How is that team doing, anyway? Overall record 4-8, tied for dead last in the Big Ten's eastern division. What was it that president Loh said again about being successful at the highest level?

2018: Under coach DJ Durkin, a team practice on a very hot day causes the tragic death of a young player, Jordan McNair.

This slow-moving disaster illustrates what I've pointed out before:

• Universities have no business trying to run a big-time sports entertainment business–and make no mistake, that's what NCAA Division I football is.
• They're often very bad at it, as Wallace Loh and UMD have illustrated.
• Universities treat players as indentured servants: they refuse to pay the players for their work, and they often spit them out after four years without even providing a proper education. This undermines their core mission, which is educating and nurturing their students. (Read Taylor Branch's compelling exposé in the Atlantic for much more on this topic.)
• Making matters even worse, we now know that there's a serious risk that football players will suffer chronic traumatic encephalopathy later in life, a permanently disabling form of brain damage.

The bottom line: football is corrupting our universities, and it needs to go. This doesn't necessarily mean that fans must lose their favorite college teams. Here's one possible solution.

Football fans, including state legislators and university administrators, like to claim that football makes a profit. Let's suppose that's true: then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get football out of the universities, and make it a privately-run minor league for the NFL (which it already is, in effect). Let each team pay fees for use of the university's name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it will have to pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money. Even better, universities won't have to pretend that they are providing a first-class education to the players, while padding their coffers at the players' expense.

Let's end the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

I'm not naive: I don't think any major university is going to get rid of football any time soon, despite the growing evidence that football carries a major risk of brain damage to the players. This has only happened once, when the University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Board of Regents is trying to decide what to do. If they read the timeline above, they'll know what I think: get rid of the whole lot, including the football program, and get the university back to its real mission.

How much brain damage is too much? NFL players head for the exits.

The smartest player in the NFL just quit.

Not because he was unable to play, and certainly not because of his age–he's only 26. No, Baltimore Ravens' player John Urschel decided to quit because the risk of permanent, irreversible brain damage is just not worth it.

Urschel is a very smart guy. He's currently pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT, one of the best and most demanding science universities in the world. Until this summer, he was (impressively) balancing his studies with being a full-time NFL player.

But when Dr. Ann McKee and colleagues published a new study showing that 110 out of 111 former NFL players had suffered serious brain damage, Urschel could no longer pretend he wasn't putting his future at grave risk. McKee's study, the largest study yet of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), showed alarmingly high rates of CTE in college and high school players as well (91% of former college players).

Let's get one point out of the way: everyone involved with the study, including Dr. McKee, knows that it was biased. The scientists examined brains of deceased players that had been donated to the study because family members–or the players themselves, before they died–suspected something was wrong. So perhaps the true risk of brain damage is lower than 99%. Maybe it's only 50%, or 20%. Do young men playing football want to take that risk?

John Urschel isn't the first player to quit because of the growing realization that football may cause irreversible brain damage. In 2015, San Francisco 49ers player Chris Borland retired at the age of 24, and in 2016 Kansas City Chiefs player Hussain Abdullah retired at 30, both over concerns about concussions and brain damage.

The NFL has been denying or downplaying the risk for years. A few years ago, after the suicide of former player Junior Seau, they announced a $30 million partnership with the NIH to study the risks of football on the brain. As results started coming in, showing that the risk was far more serious than most people knew, the NFL backed out of the deal with $16 million still unspent.

Meanwhile, the chorus of warnings has been growing steadily louder from the medical community. Last year, a former team doctor and a former football player and coach wrote in JAMA that

"unless there is a way to reduce the number of TBIs [traumatic brain injuries] caused by the sport, football will remain a threat to the brains and health futures of the players, including impaired cognitive function and reasoning, memory loss, emotional depression, and other sequelae that profoundly erode quality of life."

Earlier this year, a study out of the CDC reported that "3 high school or college football players die each year from traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries that occur on the field," most them as a result of being tackled during games.

Over the years, football players have grown ever larger (the average NFL lineman today weighs over 300 pounds) and the intensity of the violence on the field has grown with them. It's not just in the NFL, either: last year, three high school teams in the state of Washington forfeited their games against a local team out of a legitimate fear that players would be badly injured by the opposing team's 300-plus pound linemen. Their fears were justified: the human head simply wasn't built to withstand the repeated blows that players endure.

All players might do themselves a favor by listening to John Urschel. He explained his decision–and his abiding love for the game of football–in a lengthy interview on the Freakonomics podcast a couple of weeks ago. That interview should be required listening for young players, and even more so for parents who might be dreaming that their sons have a future career in football.

Will this be the end of college football? The risk of brain damage is startlingly high.

Parents send their kids off to college with high hopes and great expectations. Universities, in turn, have a responsibility to provide an education in an environment that supports and also challenges the students.

Universities are not supposed to encourage activities that may result in permanent brain damage.

And yet, they do. As revealed in a new report by Jesse Mez and colleagues from Boston University, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a shockingly high number of former football players, from both college and professional teams, suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) later in life, likely as a result of their years playing football.

The study authors looked at 202 deceased former football players whose brains had been donated for research, and found that 87% of them had some degree of CTE. The highest rates of CTE were among former NFL players, which affected 110 out of 111 players. CTE was nearly as bad in college football players, though, with 91% of them (48 out of 53) suffering from CTE.

Over half of the high school players (27) had "severe pathology." The authors noted that in deceased players with severe CTE, the most common cause of death was neurodegenerative disease. As they also explain:

"There is substantial evidence that CTE is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease."

In other words, CTE is a death sentence.

The authors of the study stated their conclusions carefully, noting that the study was not randomized, and that players and their families may have been motivated to participate because they were concerned about a possible link between football and CTE. Nonetheless, even if the risk of CTE is much lower than found in this study, universities should be taking a very hard look at the risks that they are exposing their students to.

Or to put it another way, is it okay to ask young men to play football if the risk of permanent brain damage is only 50%? What if it's just 10 or 20%? Is that okay? Is football that important?

Readers of this column know my answer: no. College is not about football, and if it disappears completely, universities will be just fine. The University of Chicago eliminated its football program in 1939, and brought it back in decades later as much-reduced program, now in NCAA Division III. The university itself has remained a powerhouse, routinely ranked in the top universities in the country academically.

As I've written before, football is corrupting our universities, blinding them to their true mission (education and research) in the pursuit of a profitable entertainment business. University presidents seem helpless to stop or even slow down the enormous machine that is big-time college football. For example, in 2015 the University of Maryland (where I used to be a professor) paid millions of dollars to buy out the football coach, so that he could quit a year early and the university could pay millions more to a new coach. Ironically, Maryland had done exactly the same thing in 2011 to buy out the previous coach, at a time when the entire state had hiring and salary freezes in place. None of these actions benefitted the university or its students.

All the while, universities pretend that they are educating the players. Here's a quote from Bleacher Report's interview with star UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen:

"Look, football and school don't go together. They just don't.... No one in their right mind should have a football player's schedule, and go to school."

This from one of the top college football players in the country. (On this topic, Taylor Branch's 2011 exposé in The Atlantic is particularly worth reading. Or this article by a disillusioned former Michigan fan.)

Universities now face an ethical dilemma far more serious than merely taking advantage of athletes' skills to entertain football fans and pay inflated salaries to coaches. The JAMA study reveals that by running a football program, universities are not just robbing young men of four years that might be better spent getting an education and preparing for life: they might be robbing their students of life itself.

This could be the end of youth football

The end of a lawsuit this month might also signal the end of youth football. The plaintiff in the suit, Debra Pyke, claimed that her son suffered brain damage from repeated head injuries in his youth football league, which caused chronic traumatic encephelopathy, or CTE. Just a couple of weeks ago, the youth football league Pop Warner settled the $5 million case, reportedly for under $2 million.

Debra Pyke’s son, Joseph Chernach, committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 25. He had played youth football for four years, from the ages of 11 to 14, and her lawsuit claims that he suffered from CTE as a result. CTE has been in the news a great deal of late, after it was discovered by Dr. Bennet Omalu to be the cause of early dementia in an alarming number of NFL football players. (Actor Will Smith plays Omalu in the recently released movie, Concussion.)

Pyke’s lawsuit holds nothing back in its claims about the damage of football. She argues that tackle football is a "war game,” and provides copious examples to back it up, including these:

“Football is not a contact sport. It’s a *collision* sport. Dancing is a good example of a contact sport.” (from former Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty)

“Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.” (from Frank Gifford, former NFL player and long-time football broadcaster)

The lawsuit includes multiple arguments about why children are more vulnerable to head injuries. Their brains are still developing, and have less myelin to protect their brain cells from damage. Until the age of 14, children's are disproportionately large, and their necks are weaker than adults’ necks, making them prone to greater rotational forces when hit in the head.

Just looking at pictures of young boys wearing football helmets makes many of these points obvious. The idea that young boys are intentionally crashing into one another, often involving their heads, should give any parent cause for concern. Slate writer John Culhane described this as a “bobblehead effect” in which “their brains crash back and forth in their skulls.”

When Pyke’s lawsuit was filed last year, Culhane called it “The Lawsuit That Could Threaten Kids’ Football.” Despite the title of his article, he concluded that

“even in the unlikely event that she [Pyke] wins her case, youth football isn’t going anywhere. But a finding that Pop Warner is carrying on an abnormally dangerous activity would surely drive up the cost of insurance, and therefore make the sport more expensive for participants. It might also make more parents question whether they want to risk their children’s safety.” 

The “unlikely event” didn’t happen, but only because the league settled the suit.

Pop Warner football has a dedicated safety section on its website. It includes pages devoted to their concussion policy, and articles that argue that “rewards outweigh risks” and that “the relationship between developing CTE and playing football remains unclear. The link between the number of concussions a person sustains and the risk of developing CTE is also uncertain.”

Using words such as “unclear” and “uncertain” seems to me to be a classic example of sow confusion rather than admitting the obvious: youth football can be dangerous. Consider the “pee wee” league game in 2012 where five boys got concussions in a single game. The coaches were suspended afterwards, but the damage had already been done. At the time, the NY Times pointed out that “Pop Warner has done more than perhaps any other organization to try to protect young players from head injuries,” but the fact is that football is a violent contact sport.

(Pop Warner did not respond to my request for comment.)

As the New York Post reported when the settlement was announced, Pop Warner had $2 million in liability coverage for players in Wisconsin at the time of the lawsuit, in 2012. They now carry $1 million per player and allow individual chapters to add another $1 million.

Think about that for a second. Why would you want your son to play in a youth sports league where the league feels the need to carry a $2 million insurance policy on every player?

Parents: you and your kids have other options besides football. Youth sports are a great way for kids to exercise, have fun, make new friends, and learn the value of teamwork. Your kids can choose soccer, tennis, baseball, or basketball, all of which have large networks of youth leagues. Many regions of the country have other sports as well. There’s no reason to suit up a child with a helmet on his still-growing head and send him out on a field to be knocked around and possibly concussed.

Joseph Chernach suffered a tragedy, and his family’s suffering will never go away. We’re now learning that even powerfully built grown men suffer permanent injuries on the football field. There’s no reason to expose children or teenagers to similar risks.

Alabama versus Clemson prediction: both teams will lose

Monday evening's college football championship game features two powerhouse teams: undefeated Clemson (14-0) versus perennial football power Alabama (13-1). With all the media attention on this game, expected to be one of the most-watched college football games ever, it's easy to find predictions for the winner. CBS has six experts all predicting an Alabama victory. SBNation lists Alabama as a one-touchdown favorite.

My prediction is different, and I'm 100% positive that I'm correct: both teams will lose. Don't get me wrong: the teams will play each other, and one of the teams will score more points, so the game itself will have a winner. But in this money-washed extravaganza, with coaches, schools, and television networks hauling in tens of millions of dollars, none of the players will be paid a single dollar.

Imagine this: the 100 players on each team's roster have spent their year entertaining millions of fans. They have played their hearts out on the field, risking injury (including the possibility of a life-altering concussion) in every game, all while pretending to be full-time college students pursuing an education. The pretense that they are "student athletes" is what allows the NCAA and the universities to maintain the fiction that players should not be compensated for their efforts on the field.

Don't get me wrong: there will be plenty of winners in Monday's game. The coaches, conferences, and colleges have already won. Alabama's head coach Nick Saban will be paid $7,087,481 this year. Clemson's coach Dabo Sweeney makes $3,305,200. Alabama and Clemson's assistant coaches make $1,500,000 and $1,404,807 respectively. USA Today calculated the total payroll of the football coaching staff for the four teams in the final two playoff games: $35,981,491, not including bonuses.

It's not just the football coaches who have won big. Athletic directors and their staffs have cashed in handsomely too. As the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago,

"In a decade, the non-coaching payrolls at the schools [in the five wealthiest athletic conferences], combined, rose from $454 million to $767 million."

The Post also compiled numbers showing that 34 football teams had staff payrolls above $1 million for non-coaching staff. Clemson has created an "associate athletic director of football administration" who alone makes $252,000.

But wait, there's more. The athletic conferences in which Alabama, Clemson, and the other major football powers play have been rewarding themselves handsomely, paying their commissioners from $2.0 to 3.5 million. As the Washington Post put it:

"As a reward for making an industry fueled by unpaid athletes more lucrative than ever, the men who run these conferences have enjoyed staggering pay hikes doled out by the leaders of many of America’s largest universities."

Much of this money comes from television contracts; the Wall St. Journal explains that the ACC (Clemson's conference) has a $3.6 billion contract with ESPN that lasts until 2027. ESPN is paying another $7.3 billion to televise the playoff and bowl games. None of that money goes to the players upon whom the entire enterprise depends.

When you watch the game on Monday (or any college football game), think about all that money going to the coaches, administrators, conference commissioners, and staff, while the players get nothing. The universities participating in this lucrative enterprise should be ashamed: they are making millions off the backs of unpaid athletes, while hiding behind the pretense that they are providing the athletes a fair return in the form of a college education. As I've written before, this is nonsense. Universities have been corrupted by the lure of cash, and they seem to have forgotten that they are in the business of educating students, not providing sports entertainment.

So yes, you will see some winners on Monday. They're the guys on both sidelines wearing headsets, making multi-million dollar salaries. After the game, they'll drive their expensive cars to their multi-million dollar homes. The players will return to their dorm rooms.

As for me, I find it increasingly difficult to enjoy watching college football. Every time a player gets shaken up by a hard tackle, I'm reminded that their playing careers are woefully short, and this might be the last time they have the chance to play in front of such a large audience. I think about how they'll feel 10 or 20 years from now, when they're limping around on bad knees while their former schools have long forgotten about them.

Colleges need to pay the players. And while they're at it, they can take steps to make sure that these students get a real education, such as offering free tuition, room, and board to the players for at least four years after they stop playing football. Until they do, all the players lose.

Football is still corrupting our universities. It needs to go.

(In which I again take on the football-industrial complex, and get myself in trouble with fans.)

It's happening again. The University of Maryland is about to pay millions of dollars to its football coach so they can fire him a year early, and proceed to hire a new football coach and pay him millions of dollars. All this at a time when the university is desperately strapped for cash, after years of hiring freezes, salary freezes, and unpaid furloughs for its employees.

What's truly astonishing is that U. Maryland did exactly the same thing just four years ago, and it has been a complete disaster. Here's how I described the scenario in 2011, when I was still a professor there:

• Pay $2 million to buy out the old coach, Ralph Friedgen, and hire a new one, Randy Edsall who will presumably boost attendance and revenue.
• Hire Edsall for $2 million per year, who then produced a losing season (2 wins, 10 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than before.
• Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

Yes, they really did eliminate 8 other sports in order to invest more in football. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

None of this produced any tangible benefits, either financial or academic.

Now let's look at what U. Maryland is about to do now, after several embarrassing blowout losses this season:

• Pay $4.7 million to buy out the current coach, Randy Edsall. That's $2.1 million for the rest of this season and $2.6 million for next year. 
• Hire a new football coach and pay him at least as much as the old coach.
• Continue to impose unpaid furloughs and pay freezes on academic staff across the board.

Wow, this investment in football really seems to be working for U. Maryland.

What the heck is the U. Maryland president, Wallace Loh, thinking? 

Loh originally hired Edsall just a month after he (Loh) joined the university. One might attempt to explain this as a rookie error made by a new president. But this time he has no such excuse.

U. Maryland is by no means alone in its misguided emphasis on football. In 2012, the University of Florida announced it was eliminating its Computer Science program while simultaneously increasing the football budget. The ensuing outcry (spurred in part by my Forbes blog) convinced the administration to back down, but at the time they saw no irony in their plan to cut science education and spend more on football. 

Listen, sports fans: football is not the reason we have universities. Universities exist to provide education, no matter what the (sometimes rabid) football boosters may say. Some American universities (hello U. Chicago!) do extremely well without having a team at all. Outside the U.S., universities have no major sports programs at all–the students enjoy sports, as all young people do, but the universities focus on what they do best.

Yes, I know the arguments on the other side. “Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?

But just for the sake of argument, let's accept the premise that football is profitable. Great! In that case, we can spin off the teams as private corporations, and let them pay to use the university logos, stadiums, etc. The teams can pay the players, as any professional team must, and the students and alumni can continue to cheer on "their" teams, just as residents of Baltimore cheer for "their" professional, privately owned Ravens team. 

Let's face it: university administrations are simply not equipped to run a major sports and entertainment business, which is what college football has become. The spectable of U. Maryland spending $4.7 million simply to buy out its current football coach, when the university is desperately trying to save money for its core mission, demonstrates how corrupting the influence of football has become.

Even worse is the shameful abuse of the players, who serve as unpaid laborers while their coaches make millions. "We give them a free education," administrators and coaches respond. Yeah, right. College football is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which the athletes at the center of the game are prohibited from taking any money. Just pay them, and they can decide if they want to pay tuition with their own money.

If we make college football private, everyone wins. Universities keep their football revenue, the fans get their team, and the university no longer has to pretend that it's educating its unpaid football players. We could even set up the system so that players were given a proper academic scholarship after their playing days were over, which for most of them is just a few years. And perhaps best of all, the players would earn the paychecks they deserve. 

Otherwise, expect me to write another article in about five years, in which I will describe yet again how the University of Maryland (or some other school) is paying millions of dollars to buy out the contract of their football coach, while the school's academic mission is ignored.

Maryland puts football ahead of academics - again

It's holiday season, and here in the U.S. that means one thing: football!  Right?  I mean, what could be more important than football? 

At least that's what the president and regents of the University of Maryland seem to think.  This week, they announced that after 60 years, UMD is leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference, to join the Big Ten.  (Note to non-football fans: the Big Ten has 12 teams.  Yes, I know.)

The president of UMD, Wallace Loh, announced the deal just after the Board of Regents approved it a few days ago, in a secret meeting.  "Today is a watershed moment for the University of Maryland," he said.

Wallace Loh is an accomplished academic, but he is turning out to be a disaster for the University of Maryland.  His first action, just a month after joining the University in 2010, was to announce a wasteful $2 million buyout of the football coach, who had another year left in his contract. Eager football boosters couldn't wait to replace him, so Loh went along with that deal, spending over $2 million to bring in a new coach who, I should mention, has had two lousy seasons so far.  Not that it should matter.

Then, less than a year later, President Loh announced that he was eliminating 8 other sports teams to save money for football, basically doubling down on his big-time football bet.  Well, there goes any pretense that he's doing this for the student-athletes.

To see how deeply confused UMD's Loh is, consider what he said in his press release announcing the move to the Big Ten:

"We wanted to join this athletic conference because we also wanted to join its associated academic consortium. The extensive opportunities ... for collaborations with our peer AAU and flagship universities in education, research, and innovation will boost the University of Maryland's ascendancy in academic excellence."

Oh really?  Let's look at the evidence, shall we?  The ACC has 12 schools including UMD, and has just added 3 more.  Using the U.S. News rankings of national universities, we can calculate that the average ACC school is ranked 48th in the country.  The average Big Ten school is ranked 58th.  (UMD is tied for 58th nationally.)  So although the Big Ten isn't bad, a move to the Big Ten from the ACC is clearly a move down academically.

Dr. Loh is a smart man, and I doubt he truly believes that joining the Big Ten will help Maryland academically.  But he does claim it will help the athletes.  He claimed that:

 "We will have the capability to support better our student-athletes -- in the classroom and on the field -- and compete successfully at the highest levels."

Never mind that the Big Ten schools are, on average, much further away from Maryland than the ACC schools, which will require more travel from the athletes. But travel is educational, right?  

Obviously this is all about the money.  USA Today's headline got it just right: "Maryland leaves ACC for more money."

Here's a question for Dr. Loh: since Maryland will make more money in the Big Ten, will you pay your athletes higher salaries?  Oh right, these are "student-athletes": they mustn't get paid!  Never mind that their coaches make the highest salaries in the university. 

Why does no one seem surprised that a university president, a highly educated scholar with both a Ph.D. and a law degree, is spending so much time on football?  Why is a university spending any time at all running a big-time sports entertainment system?  As I wrote last year:

The football-industrial complex has too much power over our universities. Nothing else can explain how we spend so much money and time on football, which contributes almost nothing to students' education, while academic departments are cutting faculty and staff. The culture of football worship has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely.

It's not just UMD.  For instance, just last spring the University of Florida proposed to eliminate its Computer Science department to save $1.4 million, while simultaneously increasing its athletic budget by $2 million.  After my article about this plan went viral, UF's president reversed that decision.

Stated simply, football has corrupted America's universities.  Top administrators have completely lost sight of their academic mission, and instead seem to believe that their primary job is to provide sports entertainment for the TV-watching public.  There is only one way to fix this: get rid of football.

But wait!  Football fans don't have to lose their beloved teams.  I have a better proposal.  Each university can spin off its football program as a for-profit, separate enterprise.  The team can pay license fees for the use of the university's name and pay to rent the stadium.  Then it can pay its coaches whatever it wants; after all, they won't be university employees.  More important, these minor-league professional teams (which is what they already are) will have to pay their athletes.  We should get rid of the current system, where the athletes are basically indentured servants. (For more on this problem, see Taylor Branch's remarkable piece, "The Shame of College Sports", which sportswriter Frank DeFord called "the most important article ever written about college sports".)  

Let's remind university presidents, and boards of regents, and everyone else involved in running a university that their mission is to provide education, research, and training for their students and the world. They should get out of the business of providing television entertainment.  And they should most certainly put an end to the practice of profiting off the labor of unpaid student athletes while neglecting their education.

University of Florida eliminates Computer Science Department. At least they still have football.

Wow, no one saw this coming.  The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 $1.4 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Let's get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?

Students at UF have already organized protests, and have created a website dedicated to saving the CS department.  Several distinguished computer scientists have written to the president of UF to express their concerns, in very blunt terms.  Prof. Zvi Galil, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, is "amazed, shocked, and angered."  Prof. S.N. Maheshwari, former Dean of Engineering at IIT Delhi, calls this move "outrageously wrong."  Computer scientist Carl de Boor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and winner of the 2003 National Medal of Science, asked the UF president "What were you thinking?"

(Note to the students, if you need more quotes for your site: I think this move is shockingly short-sighted.  The University of Florida is moving backwards while the rest of the world moves ahead.)

Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $99 $97.7 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would more than offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

Now, I'm not saying that UF has chosen football over science. Actually, the real villains here are the Florida state legislators, who have cut the budget for their flagship university by 30% over the past 6 years.

Meanwhile, just two days ago, Florida governor Rick Scott approved the creation of a brand-new public university, Florida Polytechnic University, to be located near the city of Tampa.  In an unintentionally ironic statement, Gov. Scott said

"At a time when the number of graduates of Florida's universities in the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields is not projected to meet workforce needs, the establishment of Florida Polytechnic University will help us move the needle in the right direction."

Heads up, Gov. Scott: no one is going to believe that you're supporting technical education when your flagship university is eliminating its Computer Science Department. Since cutting support for universities seems to be a major agenda item for you and the legislature, why stop at 30%?  With just a bit more cutting, you could get rid of those annoying universities entirely.  Let the rest of the country worry about higher education! Florida can focus on orange groves and golf courses. Oh, and football.

[Update 25 April 8:30pm: After my Forbes blog post on this topic went viral, UF President Bernie Machen announced that they are dropping their plan to eliminate Computer Science.  See my followup post here for details and a link.]

Football has corrupted America's universities

(In which I take on the football-industrial complex again.)

Big-time college football is no longer a sport. It's a very expensive entertainment industry with commercial sponsors, big-money television contracts, and highly paid executives. Its proponents have corrupted the mission of almost every university with a large football program, especially those in the NCAA's top division. It's time to acknowledge that this large, expensive entertainment business should be expelled from campus.

No, I'm not talking about Penn State. (Not this week, that is. I wrote about Penn State's scandal in a New York Times forum last week.) This week we have another scandal, which illustrates all too well how football will crush any forces that might try to rein it in, including university presidents. Here's the scenario:

1. Pay $2 million to buy out the old coach and hire a more exciting one, even though the team is having its best season in years.
2. Hire that new coach for another $2 million, who has now produced a losing season (2 wins, 10 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than last year.
3. Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

This is a bad joke, right? No! This is exactly what the University of Maryland just did. Last week, U. Maryland (where I was a professor until this past summer) announced it was eliminating 8 varsity sports teams to make up for the fact that football was losing too much money. I kid you not. Here's what they are cutting: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

The president of U. Maryland, Wallace Loh, issued a report that he sent to all students and faculty, describing the tortured reasoning that led to this sorry state of affairs. In it, he illustrates how he and his administration have completely lost sight of their real mission. Poor Dr. Loh: he came into the job only a year ago, with good qualifications to run a major educational institution, but no qualifications to run a football program. After all, why should he?

It's not because football is good for the university, despite the claims of some fans. Just to check, I compared the rankings of the top 25 football teams to the academic rankings of their universities. This graph shows the result.

As you can see, there is no correlation at all - the football team's ranking gives you no indication of the overall academic quality of a school.

So why cut eight other teams when football is failing? Dr. Loh explains:

"In a time of constrained resources, we have to choose: should we have fewer programs so that they can be better supported and, hence, more likely to be successful at the highest level? Or, should we keep the large number of programs that are undersupported compared to their conference peers?"

There you have it. We can't keep all these programs around if they're not winning! "Successful at the highest level" - such broken logic, such nonsense from the president of a major university, is almost enough to make me cry. Obviously, Dr. Loh thinks that "successful" means we beat the other schools' teams. But his own report says that a university's core mission is "education, research, and the arts." Did he evaluate these sports teams based on how well the students are educated? No: what matters is whether a team wins.

And of course there's money: if the football team wins, then the university can make money from oh-so-lucrative television contracts! Dr. Loh acknowledges this:

"If we believe—as I do—that intercollegiate athletics is an integral part of the college educational experience and not only commercialized mass entertainment, then we must come together to reform this financial model …. We have to reset the balance between academics and big-time athletics."

I'll say. But despite these nice-sounding phrases, Dr. Loh's "reform" consists of eliminating eight other varsity teams. Nothing about reigning in football's costs, and certainly nothing about making sure the players themselves get a good education and have a future after college. This is the essence of how big-time football has corrupted America's universities. We pay the players nothing, we give them a lousy education (many of them don't even graduate), and then the university spits them out and moves on.

I've heard the cries of protest from football supporters: football makes money! It subsidizes all the other sports! Oddly, even Dr. Loh makes this claim in his report, despite admitting that football at Maryland is losing millions of dollars per year. To this I have two responses:

1. Fine, let's suppose that football makes money. Then it will do just fine as an independent business. Get it out of the universities, and let each team pay fees use of the university's name, the stadium, practice fields, and parking on game days. Then the football club can pay its coaches whatever it wants, and it can pay the athletes, who are disgracefully paid nothing right now. And the university will still have its team, but without the corrupting influence of money.
2. So what if football does make money? Since when did universities run an entertainment business? Should they open casinos next?

So get football off our campuses. If athletes want to train for the NFL, let the NFL pay for a minor league, the way baseball does. Universities can have a team if they must, but make it independent, and let's stop the farce of having university presidents try to manage large, commercial sports programs. Let them get back to focusing on research and education, topics on which they actually have some expertise.

As for the athletes: let them play. They can play football if their studies leave them enough time. If they just want the exercise, they can go out for other sports that provide great physical training and far lower risks of injuries. They can try the track team, or maybe the swim team. Oh, wait….

[Note: for those who will criticize me as a football-hating weenie, I'll have to disappoint you. I grew up watching and loving college ball, before it become so commercialized. My father played varsity football all through college, and he taught me the game in our backyard.]

Get football out of our universities

(In which I take on the football-industrial complex, and get myself in trouble)

The Super Bowl is over, finally. The college football^* season is over too. Now we can be spared the breathless, hyperbolic stories about football for a few months, at least until next season. The culture of football in American universities is completely out of control. It is undermining our education system and hurting our competitiveness in technology, science, and engineering. If we keep it up, the U.S. will eventually be little more than the big, dumb jock on the world stage - good for entertainment on the weekend, but not taken seriously otherwise.

Too harsh? I don't think so. I think we need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world's scientific and technological leader.

Why do we need to get football out of our universities? I've watched over the years as football has taken an ever-more prominent role in our high schools and colleges, as football coaches have been paid ever-higher salaries, and as football staffs and stadiums have been super-sized. All of this effort goes to the care and feeding of a very small number of (exclusively) male students, most of whom get a poor education and almost none of whom succeed as professional players. Our universities are providing a free training ground for the super-wealthy owners of professional football teams, while getting little in return.

This has got to stop. The core mission of our universities is to educate our students, not to entertain them with big-time sports events. Our political leaders, and all too often our university presidents, seem to have lost sight of this fact.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when President Obama, in his State of the Union speech on January 25, put in a plea for science over football:

"We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair."

Wow, not bad! Of course, as a politician he has to support football, so he argues only that the science fair deserves equal footing with football. (Even that is pretty radical for a politician.) I'll go a big step further: the winner of the science fair deserves far more praise and celebration than any winner of any football game. If football disappeared, we could get our entertainment from another sport, as we do every year after the football season ends. But if we stop producing scientists, other countries will make the discoveries that solve the technological, medical, and engineering problems of the future, and that form the basis for great civilizations.

Now that I've gotten myself in trouble with football fans (and there are many of them), let me get myself in even more trouble, with an example from my own university.

At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn't exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you'd think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.

Nope. The brand-new President of the university, in office just one month, announced the hiring of a new coach, along with a $2 million payout to the old coach.

What a bad move. That $2 million should have been spent on, well, how about educating the students? (And don't get me started on football coaches' salaries - they often make 3-5 times more than their own presidents.)

Do we want our universities to be known for their football teams? Or do we want them to be known as educational powerhouses? Apparently, the U. Maryland administration is more interested in building a better football team. Not surprisingly, many of the professors disagree. I can only hope that the students would side with the professors, but I honestly don't know.

Yes, I know the arguments on the other side. "Football makes a profit," some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too - should they do that? If football is so profitable, then spin off the teams as private corporations, and let them pay the university a licensing fee to use the university logo. But let's stop pretending they have anything to do with education.

Don't get me wrong. I love sports - I've played them all my life - and I think students should participate in them. It's healthy and fun, and it's part of the college experience. But universities don't need big-time, pseudo-professional athletic teams with outsized coaching staffs. Look at the Ivy League, which comprises 8 of the best universities in the country. They play sports against each other, they don't award athletic scholarships, and their academic programs are the envy of the rest of the world.

The football-industrial complex has too much power over our universities. Nothing else can explain how we spend so much money and time on football, which contributes almost nothing to students' education, while academic departments are cutting faculty and staff. The culture of football worship has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely.

I don't expect any university to take my advice. But I'll end with another excerpt from President Obama's State of the Union speech, which we should take as a warning:

"Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became the home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.

So, yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us. .... We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on Earth."

President Obama is right: students do come from all over the world to study in our universities. But they don't come because of the football teams.

^*Note to my friends in other countries: by "football" I mean American football, that game with the peculiar oblong-shaped ball - not the wonderful game of soccer, which almost all other countries call "football."

ADDENDUM: I've done two radio interviews about this blog post, which you can listen to at the following links: 670 The Score, a Chicago sports radio program, and 1560 The Game, a Houston sports radio show.