Tony Barnhart prepared a great piece that identified the problem that has become modern college football, but through civility and restraint failed to adequately describe just how bad it is. College football is no longer a "sport." It's no longer a way to get a college degree and represent a school on a football field and add to a rich tradition. It's a business. It's a corporation. It's become a college's primary source of income.
Universities reluctantly, and privately, realize that revenues from tuition and books published by professors and academics don't build dorms, sell tickets, ensure TV contracts, or add to the sizes of stadiums. Football builds campuses and attracts athletes. All other collegiate matters, including academics, have become, or are becoming, a collateral aspect to its operations. To cash in on this trend, colleges don't hire coaches, they hire corporate CEOs - Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, etc - to manage these money-making machines.
To monitor this corporate profit model, colleges hire "compliance teams," whose sole purpose is to ensure no NCAA rules are violated in its daily operations. Compliance personnel have exploded in size, complexity, expertise, and importance in the last decade in response to the spiraling importance of profit over all other pursuits. In a modern college football program, compliance personnel are as important, if not more so, than the head coach.
Throw in the social changes associated with college football - a general degradation of family and social values, increasing numbers of low income athletes from sketchy neighborhoods and backgrounds without any real parental mentorship, players focused solely on football and a football career with little or no interest in completing a degree program and graduating - and the situation becomes an explosive powder keg. College football is becoming nothing more than a corporate NFL mill in which to train the few future football professionals it will produce. League officials are contemplating paying college athletes above and beyond a free education that many don't receive, based on how much the program supports the budget - which should be none of the athlete's business. Athletic departments do almost anything to cover-up misconduct that might impact football profits. Rules violators that 20 years ago would have been immediately fired or severely punished in other ways, are given slaps on the wrist, allowed to stay if successful, and the issue is swept under the rug. It all boils down to this: universities used to base responses to misconduct on accepted social and moral principles, but now base them solely on profitability and financial analysis. Greed is king...morality is extinct.
It's true that Paterno was fired in a very sudden and public fashion. But he was fired in 2011. The incident upon which it was based occurred in 2002, and has been going on since. He was kept around because of his name brand, his number of college wins, his success, his recruiting, and his ability to secure TV contracts to air Penn State games. Paterno also made a relatively modest salary, which also may have played into the school's financial equation. No one is immune. Paterno was fired. Bobby Bowden is suing Florida State for millions based on a contract dispute. Other higher-name coaches are still involved in litigation years after the incident upon which it is based was concluded.
College football is sick. The symptoms started in the 70s, and have increased in severity ever since. Now, the situation is terminal. The bad news is that there's no going back. Now that colleges have abandoned principle and morality for greed and profit, and even the academics realize that college football profits cannot be ignored or marginalized, the taste of money is too sweet. Pooh stuck his hand a few too many times into the honey pot, and now, instead of learning his lesson and simply getting his hand out and never doing it again, he's looking for a bigger pot and experts to get him out of that one too.
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