Violence, Crimes, and Other Bad Behaviors of Athletes, Coaches, and Management

VIOLENCE, CRIMES, GAMBLING, AND OTHER BAD BEHAVIORS
of Athletes, Coaches, and Management ©
AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY©

Think before you act

List of Essays Found on This Web-Page

Introduction
Geo-Politics In Pro Golf & Tennis Promote Sportswashing, Greed, And Even Poor Sportspersonship
Predictably Baylor Escapes NCAA Sanctions for the Worst Sexual Abuse Scandal in College Football History
Surprise-- Not So Much-- Sports Gambling is Out of Control
The NFL's Hierarchy of Personal Conduct Offenses: Victimized Women and Children Come Last
Academic Integrity in Intercollegiate Sports Is a Big Fat Lie
Locker Rooms, President Trump, and Sexual Offenses
Under the NCAA's Watch: Sexual Crimes, Academic Fraud, Drugs Etc.
Sports Gambling Is Here To Stay

Introduction

Reports of violence, crimes, gambling offenses, and other off-the-field transgressions by athletes, coaches and even owners have been escalating in our most popular sports. In professional and intercollegiate football, where numerous publicized sexual and domestic assaults against women and children have been proven or persuasively alleged—including the Ray Rice, Darren Sharper, Josh Brown, Penn State, Florida State, and Baylor University controversies—the number and extent of those offenses reveal an underlying subculture of malevolence. Yet, recent revelations about sexual abuse allegations by young elite female athletes against coaches and even team doctors that went unreported for years are no less shocking. Paralleling the rest of American society, almost all of these criminal charges and offenses have involved male athletes, male coaches, and male doctors, although a few female athletes have achieved notoriety as well.

Much of the time, these sports-inspired transgressions have been obscured, covered up and/or marginalized by leagues, sports organizations, teams, teammates, universities, and sympathetic law enforcement officials creating scandals of another kind. Occasionally, because these athletes are high profile celebrities and many are of color or ethnically different, their transgressions have received greater scrutiny from the justice system, but that tends to be the exception, not the general rule. The antiquated notion that boys will be boys continues to mar our professional leagues, university and college administrations that have big time athletic programs, law enforcement, and even the past behaviors of our President.

Images of violence and actual violence are everywhere in our society. No post-modern industrial nation has struggled more with the negative effects of violence and guns than has the United States. From cradle to grave, Americans—particularly boys during their most vulnerable developmental years—tend to be immersed in violent and antisocial behaviors. The overall mental health of America has been further undermined by the violence, crimes, and other bad behaviors spawned by our most popular spectator sports. In recent years, two famous former NFL players, Aaron Hernandez and Rae Carruth, a major league baseball player, a NHL hockey player, and a Baylor basketball star have all been convicted of murder. In addition, dozens of former elite athletes have serious felony convictions on their resumes, while many more have been accused of sexual assault or domestic violence.

Although it can be argued that organized sports may play a minor role in providing cathartic outlets for the violent propensities of some athletes, coaches, and fans, our most popular sports have played a much larger role in teaching and encouraging aggression, violence, and abuse, most notably against girls and women. Too many of those who participate in our favorite spectator sports, their families and friends, and their fans have contributed in significant ways to overly aggressive, abusive, and violent propensities that pervade our society. Furthermore, there are many other bad behaviors that our favorite spectator sports have incubated and facilitated, including widespread cheating, misuse of drugs, and unsavory and addictive gambling practices.

GEO-POLITICS In PRO GOLF & TENNIS PROMOTE SPORTSWASHING, GREED, And EVEN POOR SPORTSPERSONSHIP:
Saudi Arabia and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
By John Weston Parry, JD

Professional tennis, like men’s professional golf, is being tarnished by geo-politics inflated by sports greed. In tennis, it is both the professional men and women who are acting badly. Not only has professional tennis, led by the great Raphael Nadal, begun to embrace Saudi Arabia’s blood money, but Ukrainian tennis players, as a political protest, have been breaching a minimum standard of tennis sportspersonship—shaking hands after a match—if their opponent was born in Russia or Belarus.
While these two very different sets of behaviors are not really comparable in terms of moral turpitude, both threaten professional tennis and its players. One is a clear and present danger; the other a symbolic protest that by itself may seem harmless, even justified, but could lead to multiple problems should it be replicated by players of other nations as the world becomes increasingly more unstable and acrimonious.

An important lesson to be learned by the tennis world, however, before it is too late to change direction, involves the upheavals in men’s golf after the Saudis tried to buy and subsequently control the PGA Tour: popular professional sports should closely scrutinize the negative implications of all of these geo-political influences well-before they are allowed to take hold and fester.

Saudi Arabia’s Blood Money

Saudi Arabia has been infiltrating professional sports in order to sportswash its abysmal human rights record, while hoping to make a great deal of money in the long-run. Popular professional sports are being tempted to sportswash Saudi Arabia’s oppression of women and their LGBTQ+ communities, apparently for the opportunity to accumulate more wealth. With a reported $700 billion plus treasure chest and political leverage over U.S. and European governments because of what is happening in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is well-positioned to try to monopolize almost any professional sport, which can be convinced that it needs, and will benefit from, the Saudis tainted money.

LIV Golf vs. McIlroy and Woods vs The Also-Rans on the PGA Tour
The most notable example of sports infiltration by the Saudis so far is the PGA Tour. Men’s golf has become deeply divided, as more and more of its top golfers have left the Tour to accept huge amounts of Saudi money to participate in the unpopular LIV golf, which, so far, has attracted few spectators. The only television network that has been willing to broadcast LIV events has been the CW, which is second rate in most respects.

That division in men’s golf has been magnified and muddled by a proposed deal, reportedly orchestrated by Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, to have American billionaire sports owners invest at least $1.5 billion and as much as $3 billion into a third men’s professional golf entity, which will be called PGA Tour Enterprises (PGATE). If that deal goes through as described in the New York Times and Washington Post, PGATE would subsume the PGA Tour and become the sole bargaining entity for the PGA Tour, including any negotiations with the Saudis in order to potentially harvest billions of more dollars from them.

The main sticking points are two: (1) What will happen to LIV golf, which the Saudis still very much want to operate as a rival tour to whatever the PGA Tour becomes? And (2) which existing PGA Tour members stand to benefit most financially, and which stand to lose out, under the reported restructuring of the Tour into two tiers?

For the moment, it appears like the McIlroy and Woods faction of the PGA Tour have outmaneuvered the Saudis by potentially pulling in enough money from a collective of billionaire American sports owners to probably match all the money Saudi Arabia may be willing to spend on controlling men’s golf, especially if the Saudis decide to invest in the PGATE themselves. However, if the Saudis want to go all in order to make a point and gain leverage for their future sports investments, even these American billionaires will find it tough to match the financial resources that could be available to underwrite LIV Golf.

Assuming that normal economic principles are followed, the most rational outcome for most of the major players in men’s professional golf is for them to come to some type of meeting of the minds that they all can live with, even if it may be begrudgingly. That is how the new PGA Tour and the tour’s most popular golfers will benefit most. This is probably why McIlroy now insists that none of the golfers who have deserted the Tour for LIV golf be punished in any way, but instead be welcomed back, which brings me to the second problem that needs to be ironed out.

McIlroy has been the most notable and vocal supporter of the notion of creating a champions league of golf comparable to what they already have in professional soccer in Europe and Great Britain. This would allow the very best golfers to compete against each other for much of the golfing year. The proposed PGATE, which he and Woods strongly support, is based in large part on the notion that certain professional golfers would be given an equity share of the Tour based on their lifetime accomplishments.
In other words, the best and most popular players would have the biggest, and possibly the only, shares. How far back in time those accomplishments will be allowed to stretch would determine what share a player like Woods, arguably the greatest in history, but no longer a factor on the tour as a player, would be given. Similarly, LIV golfer Phil Mickelson would be in a similar situation.

The creation of a champions league of any sort would inevitably divide the men’s golfing world into at least two tiers: champion golfers; and the rest of the PGA Tour professionals who would be forced to play in lesser tournaments, much like the professional golfers who already participate in the various satellite tours in the U.S and around the world. Another question is whether the best LIV golfers like Jon Rahm and Dustin Johnson would be merged into that champions league or whether there would now be three major professional tours with LIV golf remaining as one of them. Lastly, what will happen to the fading superstars of golf like Woods and Mickelson? Would they get special exemptions to play in the champions league when they felt the urge to compete or their sponsors insisted?

All of these thorny questions, the resulting geo-political tumult, and more could await professional tennis should the WTA and ATP insist on playing footsie with Saudi Arabia, while continuing to ignore the longer-term implications of the protests by Ukrainian tennis players.

Nadal vs Evert and Navratilova
With regard to the Saudis, its Public Investment Fund (SPIF) has made two significant moves effecting professional tennis to date. First, it has lured Raphael Nadal, who has earned hundreds of millions of dollars throughout his tennis career in prize money and endorsements, to be the ambassador for Saudi tennis in a payout that has yet to be confirmed. If it is anything like the payouts made to other topflight athletes in golf and soccer, that amount could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

What possessed Nadal to risk his reputation is difficult to fathom, other than building upon his existing wealth. So far, the tennis legend has not provided any specific reason for his decision. While there has been scattered criticism of Nadal in the media, among the tennis community there has been mostly silence or acquiescence, both regarding Nadal’s tennis ambassadorship and Saudi Arabia’s attempt to use women’s tennis to sportswash its oppressive policies.

Second, the SPIF has been trying to convince the WTA to hold its year end finals in Saudi Arabia. Originally, the deal was reported as having been finalized, but an official announcement of where the 2024 finals will be played has been delayed as the WTA sorts through the negative implications of making such a deal. So far, however, most of the admonitions to say hell no have come from the media, not the current players.

Among active players, only two—both superstars—have addressed the matter at all. Caroline Wozniacki takes the view that professional tennis agreeing to accept billions of dollars from the Saudis treasure chest is inevitable, while Iga Swiatek remains on the fence. Former tennis superstar and now television commentator, John McEnroe, though, calls the WTA’s plan “laughable” and strongly disagrees with Nadal’s stance.

The most nuanced response to the Saudi Arabian infiltration of tennis has come from two former female tennis greats, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. They were once iconic tennis rivals; now good friends, who have battled cancer together, while trying to maintain their tennis broadcasting careers on different networks. The two of them also are very smart ladies with their own well-developed points of view. The one thing they have agreed upon for years, as they wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece, is the importance of “building” the WTA tour, which in their words was “founded on equality to empower women in a male-dominated world.”

The WTA itself will jeopardize that progress should it go through with this commercial alliance with Saudi Arabia. Such an arrangement will undermine the equal rights pillars on which the WTA was founded by Billie Jean King and then built upon by Evert, Navratilova, and so many other socially conscious women tennis players. It would be difficult to choose a more inappropriate place for women’s professional tennis to showcase one of its premier events than in Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women as a matter of law.

As Evert and Navratilova point out, among the legal outrages in Saudi Arabia, which have continued for decades and show no significant signs of being ameliorated, one of the worst examples compels women to “have a male guardian [in order] to marry” and once they do marry, the “guardianship passes to [the] husband.” The husband as the new guardian—after paying a dowry to the original guardian, typically the women’s father—has the power to dictate whether his wife must “travel [with him], where to live, and the frequency of sexual relations.”

Moreover, if Saudi women “protest” these injustices, they can be “indefinitely” imprisoned because they must secure their “male guardian’s permission to leave prison” even after their political “sentences” have been served. It was not until 2018, that Saudi women were even allowed to get a driver’s license, but little else has changed since then in terms of mitigating the oppressive guardianship powers that Saudi men hold over their women.

The two women tennis greats opine that the “WTA must stand for human rights so long as inequality for women exists in the world.” They believe that tennis “is not just a sport but an ethic. It embodies a code of decency and respect among athletes and among people generally.”

The Invasion of Ukraine and the Protest by Ukrainian WTA Members

In a different way, Ukrainian professional tennis players, most of whom are members of the WTA tour, also undermine that aspirational “code of decency and respect.” As a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’ support for that invasion, they refuse to shake hands with any opponent, who happened to have been born in Russia or Belarus, regardless of that opponent’s lack of complicity or views regarding the invasion.

The WTA and the Association of Tennis Professionals independently decided that players who are Russian or Belarusian citizens should not be identified as such. On telecasts and video feeds, where a player’s country is normally listed, there is now only a blank. Those blanks were readily apparent throughout the recent finals of the Australian Open where the Russian Daniil Medvedev and Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka competed in the men’s and women’s finals, respectively.

Both Medvedev, who lost his match and Sabalenka who won for the second year in a row, are on record as not supporting the war. In addition, two-time Australian Open champion Victoria Azarenka, who was born in Belarus, was the victim of such a protest after she lost to Ukrainian tennis player Dayana Yastremska in the fourth round. Even though Azarenka officially moved her residency to the U.S. in 2002 and has condemned Russia’s invasion, Yastremska refused to shake her hand after their match. This has happened to Sabalenka in other tournaments.

Yastremska and other Ukrainian professional tennis players certainly have a right—and arguably a moral obligation— to protest the Russian invasion of their country. Furthermore, both the WTA and ATP tours have no business prohibiting these symbolic protests after matches, even though it demonstrates poor sportspersonship. Nonetheless, the WTA and ATP and their players should point out to these Ukrainian players that this type of protest against tour members ultimately undermines professional tennis.

If Ukrainian players refuse to play Russian and Belarusian players who actively support the war, of which there appear to be none, that would be perfectly understandable. But, once a player decides to compete in a match against a member of their respective professional tours, she or he should be strongly encouraged to conform to normal expectations of being a good sport. Or in Evert and Navritolova’s words, encouraged to adhere to the “code of decency and respect among athletes.”

BAYLOR ESCAPING SANCTIONS FOR The WORST SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL In COLLEGE FOOTBALL HISTORY RESULTED FROM An UNCONSCIONABLE NCAA PLOY To PROTECT ITS SUPER CONFERENCE MEMBERS
By John Weston Parry

As outlandish as the NCAA’s latest failure was in not sanctioning Baylor for the widespread sexual assaults and other violence that its football players committed against numerous female students over many years, which the university actively covered up, it should not come as a surprise. Protecting privileged super conference revenue-generating schools is what the NCAA has been designed to do.

True to form, the NCAA lightly penalized Baylor, but only for its blatant recruiting violations, which included using female students to service the needs of football recruits and players. Rather than the once feared so-called death penalty, the football program received four years of probation, minor recruiting limitations, and a paltry $5,000 fine, in other words, a slap on the wrist.

This was despite the fact even the NCAA Committee on Infractions found “the conduct that occurred on Baylor’s campus between 2010 and 2015 was unacceptable. Young people were hurt… because the campus leaders they trusted to provide a safe campus community failed.” Remarkably, the NCAA continues to block rules governing how its members should address these sordid behaviors involving athlete-students. Consequently, “in the absence of NCAA legislation, the [organization governing collegiate sports] does not have a role to play… in investigating and sanctioning institutional responses to sexual and interpersonal violence.”

Baylor also is avoiding NCAA sanctions for its deliberate refusal to meets its federal Title IX enforcement obligations. Incredibly, the NCAA found that since Baylor discriminated against all of its female students under Title IX, regardless of whether they were being assaulted by football players or other male students on campus, there were no special impermissible benefits given to male athletes that other male students did not receive. In fact, a special religious exemption that the university insisted upon under Title IX permitted the school to treat its “unchaste” female students more harshly for behavior violations, including drinking alcohol and engaging in sex, than its male students, especially football players and other male athletes.

While Baylor may be the very worst example of a super conference college football or men’s basketball programs under the NCAA’s jurisdiction covering up sexual abuse and other violence, it is hardly the only one. That sad legacy dates back to the travesty of young boys being molested in the Penn State football program’s showers. It also encompasses the deliberately botched rape investigation against the then all-American Florida State University quarterback, Jameis Winston.

In addition, there have been numerous other sexual violence cover-ups in recent years, involving other NCAA football and men’s basketball programs, including at the Naval Academy, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Minnesota, Oregon, and Michigan State. Further complicating these internal university investigations that are supposed to be conducted under federal Title IX guidelines is the perception of racial bias when African American athletes are accused, which unfortunately is quite often given the percentage of big-time college football and men’s basketball players who are Black.

Yet, the NCAA still refuses to become involved by instituting sound monitoring and reporting requirements, much less investigate and sanction those schools that facilitate and cover-up these sexual crimes, or, for that matter, engage in racial bias when conducting their Title IX inquires. When it comes to football-related accusations of violence against females, the NCAA and its member super conference college presidents imitate Colonel Klink in the 1960’s World War II TV comedy, Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing.’”

The Legacy of the Penn State Sexual Abuse Scandal

The NCAA’s sleight of hand and abandonment of responsibility for sexual abuse and other violence involving athlete-students and others associated with athletic programs has a significant history behind it, including all that has happened at Baylor. That disgraceful legacy begins with the Penn State fiasco, which Maureen Dowd of The New York Times rightly called an “American horror story.”

While the numerous sexual crimes against young boys in Penn State’s football team showers were committed during the 1990’s, the cover-up and other failures in leadership helped keep this sordid affair secret until 2011. The NCAA’s subsequent mishandling of this national travesty created a template for how sexual assault, sexual abuse, and domestic and dating violence charges against players, coaches and other men in major college sports programs have been handled since.

The NCAA refused to become involved in this scandal until former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had been convicted of multiple sex crimes and former FBI Director Louis Freeh issued his damning investigative report about what had been allowed to happen. Only a few days after that report was released to the public, NCAA President Mark Emmert announced—yes, he was President back then as well—the signing of a consent decree with Penn State University. A legal agreement between those two parties had to be manufactured because, as is true today, nothing in the NCAA’s bylaws actually prohibited these types of behaviors. In that case, however, the public pressure on the NCAA demanded that it appear like the organization was trying to do something.

Penn State’s football team was prevented from participating in the post season bowl games for four years and it lost a total of 10 scholarships over a number of years. In addition, head coach Joe Paterno’s victories during the 14-year period that he had become aware of the allegations against Sandusky, were erased from history. Tim Layden opined in Sports Illustrated: “Games were played, score was kept. Stripping the victories was a punitive act with no connection to Sandusky’s crime.” The punishment also penalized Penn State football players, who were children when these sexual offenses were committed and had nothing to do with the subsequent cover-up.

More importantly, this slick side-show did not produce meaningful reforms in the NCAA rules to help prevent these types of sexual crimes from occurring again. Instead, the NCAA instituted self-serving organizational changes to protect itself and its super conference members from scrutiny. Going forward these offending universities and colleges largely have disciplined themselves and their athletic programs, even when these schools are involved in covering up allegations of sexual crimes, other serious sexual misconduct, and violence.

The Naval Academy

The West Point cheating scandal involving Army’s football team in the early 1950’s was an early indication that the military academies, for all their honorable traditions and character-building reputations, had fundamentally flawed football programs, much like those at other big- time football colleges. In recent years, sexual assault scandals, which have brought shame to the military more generally, have brought dishonor to the academies as well.

A particularly disturbing episode occurred at the Naval Academy in 2013 involving three football players. They eventually would be charged with the gang rape of a heavily intoxicated female midshipman who had blacked out. The alleged sexual assaults had occurred off campus in April 2012 at a house frequented by Academy football players. The complainant stated that she only learned that she had been sexually assaulted by those players when one of them bragged about his conquest on social media.
It took a long time for the Navy to even hold a basic Article 32 hearing to determine whether the accused players should be court-martialed. For nearly a year, whether to go forward with an investigation appeared to be a matter of debate within the Navy’s chain of command. The football coach took no disciplinary action, earnestly claiming his program teaches athletes “to do what's right.”

Unlike on television, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) had dropped the ball impeding any subsequent investigation. Navy investigators had not been inclined to go forward since the accuser had been drunk when the alleged rapes had taken place. Thus, the Navy had disciplined the accuser for underage drinking, while the players were given a pass. That type of double standard would also characterize the rape culture associated with Baylor University’s football program.

Under mounting pressure from the media and female members of Congress, naval prosecutors eventually reopened the matter. By then, however, the evidence was stone cold. Charges had to be dropped against two of the three accused athletes on procedural grounds, including an inexcusable failure to read one of the defendant’s his Miranda rights. A third player was tried for aggravated sexual assault, but acquitted. The allegation that he had made false statements to investigators was sent back to the Naval Academy to decide, administratively. The defendant resigned from the Academy and all criminal charges against him were dropped.

As with other prominent football programs in which players have been involved in sexual or domestic violence against female students, there was no NCAA investigation, much less the imposition of sanctions. The Navy’s flawed, effectively slanted, and self-serving command decision-making process was deemed sufficient to avoid NCAA scrutiny.
Vanderbilt University

A second elite institution of higher learning became embroiled in a similar sexual assault scandal about the same time as the Naval Academy investigation was first announced in 2013. Four Vanderbilt football players were charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual battery involving a female student who had blacked out. Those crimes occurred just after the university had dedicated itself to establishing a winning football team in the super competitive Southeastern Conference.

Thus, despite the seriousness of the criminal charges, The New York Times reported there was minimal concern shown by the university or its student body. Female students were being urged to take precautions to protect themselves from sexual assaults by male students, including members of the football team. After the 2013 season, Vanderbilt’s head coach James Franklin left for a similar coaching position to rebuild Penn State’s football program in the wake of that school’s mega sexual abuse scandal. He received a huge increase in pay.

Several months later, though, Franklin’s reputation and integrity were called into question. An attorney alleged in a court document that the former Vanderbilt head coach and a strength coach, who left for Penn State with Franklin, had tried to pressure the female victim in the Vanderbilt rape case at the hospital where she had gone to have a medical exam after she had been sexually assaulted. Franklin admitted approaching the woman, but denied doing anything wrong.

The two football coaches contended that they had been at the victim’s bedside to provide her with support. The 21-year-old neuroscience major vehemently disagreed. She asserted that the two men had been there trying to persuade her to be silent.
Whatever remaining credibility Franklin may have had was further diminished when he admitted not telling the truth about a key detail in the case. After the coach was placed in legal jeopardy of being sued for his role in allegedly trying to cover up these sexual assaults, he admitted that he had deliberately lied to his team about what had happened. Originally, he had told his players that he seen a cell phone video of the sexual assaults. He now contended that he had invented the video story in order to stress to his team the seriousness of what the guilty players had done.

Eventually all four accused ex-Vanderbilt football players were convicted of aggravated rape or facilitating rape. As is typical in these matters, nothing happened to Coach Franklin, to Vanderbilt’s athletic department, or the school. The NCAA did not even investigate the matter, since no improper benefits had been involved.

Notre Dame University

Notre Dame has a deserved reputation of being a fine academic university with noteworthy football and religious traditions. The combination of academics, football and Catholicism, has made Notre Dame one of the nation’s most respected undergraduate colleges. A number of years ago, though, according to Tom Layden’s extensively researched report in Sports Illustrated, the emphasis on winning football games had eroded academic values for members of its football team.

This began when then Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis—who had been a successful NFL assistant coach under Bill Belichick—objected to the way his football players were being disciplined. Weis contended that in order to improve football, there had to be “softer discipline” on players because “boys will be boys.” Many fighting Irish fans and alumni agreed. The scapegoat was the associate vice president for resident life whose strict enforcement of disciplinary rules was being blamed “for repeated failures on the athletic fields.”

When the current head coach Brian Kelley took over in 2010, his employment was accompanied by two shocking changes. First, without any public explanation, the long-time vice president for resident life was summarily dismissed. Second, the university gave Kelley final authority to determine how his players would be disciplined, much like the type of discretion the NCAA bestows upon its super conference members.

Shortly thereafter two Notre Dame football players were accused of sexual assault. In one case the victim committed suicide. Her death occurred ten days after she had told campus police that a football player had raped her, but no investigation had been launched. That woman also had received a threatening text message from another football player, which read: “`Don’t do anything you would regret. Messing with notre dame football is a bad idea.’”

Reportedly, the second alleged sexual assault victim had been too intimidated to take any formal action. She told the “student who drove her to the ER afterward… [that she had] decided to keep her mouth shut at least in part because she’d seen what happened to the first woman.” Melinda Henneberger, a Washington Post columnist—and a Notre Dame alumnus—wrote in detail about both sexual assault accusations. Henneberger opined that she would not be “cheering” for Notre Dame in the upcoming college football championship game because her investigation had convinced her that the accused players had “committed serious criminal acts.”

After both alleged assaults became national news, Notre Dame reluctantly held a disciplinary hearing behind closed doors, but only in the second case. That accused football player was acquitted of any wrongdoing without explanation. Neither the university nor the NCAA bothered to investigate the allegations of sexual assault by the female student who had taken her own life.

The school’s duplicity was underscored by the lengths to which the athletic department had gone to protect the reputation of another football player, Manti Te’o when he tried to deceive the media in order to promote his Heisman Trophy chances. Te’o had told reporters on several different occasions he had a girlfriend, who had tragically died of leukemia.

Notre Dame’s Athletic Director held a press conference claiming the fabrications were not the player’s fault. Te’o had been the victim of an online hoax. Te’o admitted, however, that he had known for some time that this love story was a lie. Henneberger excoriated her alma mater for shedding “[s]o many tears for a fake dead girl, but none for a real one [who had committed suicide.]”

Florida State University

Florida State University, its football program, and the City of Tallahassee were mutually complicit in arguably the most egregious cover up of a sexual assault allegation against a college athlete in NCAA history. Jameis Winston, who quarterbacked the school to a national championship, was accused of raping another student in December 2012 when he was a freshman. The accusation drew little public attention until nearly a year later, when Winston became the leading candidate to win the Heisman Trophy.

Whether Winston committed the alleged rape became unknowable with any criminal certainty. Both Tallahassee law enforcement and university officials acted in ways that made a proper investigation impossible. Furthermore, due to Winston's escalating fame and the importance of a national title for the FSU football fans, his accuser became a pariah on campus and her allegations were effectively sabotaged. Police reportedly told her that if she pursued these allegations, “her life [would] be raked over the coals and …[she] made miserable.”

The alleged victim told the police that Winston had taken her from a bar to his apartment, forced her into a bathroom, locked the door, and raped her. Winston claimed that the sex between them had been consensual. Reportedly, there had been a smart phone recording of the incident, but the police never asked to view that video, which later was deleted.

For nearly a year there was no official statement by law enforcement about the accusations against Winston, nor were any actions taken by Florida State University. In December 2013, just before the Heisman vote, the state’s attorney called a press conference to announce that the quarterback would not be prosecuted, citing the lack of evidence needed for a conviction.

The outcome of the short-circuited investigation and how it had been handled precipitated a national discussion about whether the Tallahassee police and FSU community had covered up the allegations and conspired to favor the football super star over his alleged victim. Her lawyer strongly implied that state officials had altered critical evidence. In particular, the lawyer pointed to serious “discrepancies” in the “hospital records… provided...by the state.”

The New York Times conducted an extensive independent investigation, which confirmed that there had been many disturbing aspects to the case. First, FSU had kept the rape allegations secret for nearly a year; then once the accusation against Winston became public, the university concluded its investigation in less than three weeks. Second, obvious leads were never followed, including the failure to view the videotape of the “sexual encounter.” Third, FSU had violated “federal law” by failing to “investigate … the rape accusation.” The school had allowed Winston “to play [a] full season without having to answer any questions.”

The federal government, through the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, eventually initiated its own Title IX investigation. This led to a wider inquiry into how FSU had been handling sexual assault claims made against other football players as well. The FSU employee, who had been in charge of counseling rape victims, revealed in a deposition that football players accused of sexual assault had received special treatment. Most of the 20 female accusers had decided not to pursue student misconduct charges, administratively. They felt intimidated and lacked faith in the school’s process.

In the case of Winston’s accuser, the university had not even responded to her rape allegations. FSU head coach Jimbo Fisher asserted that there was no university policy requiring him to report sexual assault allegations, except to the athletic director. Nor did Fisher believe that there been any basis for him to discipline Winston. Despite all the official denials, the university paid Winston’s accuser a reported $950,000 in a confidential settlement agreement, in which FSU did not have to admit wrongdoing. Instead, FSU President John Thrasher insisted that his university had been the real victim. Thus, football boosters had agreed to pay for almost all of the legal fees, which exceeded $1.5 million.

The NCAA did not investigate FSU for trying to cover up the sexual assault allegations against Winston or the other football players. Nor did the NCAA even investigate whether football players had improperly benefited from the boosters paying for their legal fees, which clearly would have been an improper benefit.

The University of Minnesota

The home state of George Floyd, the now celebrated Black victim of a police murder, was also the site for racially charged Title IX investigations of University of Minnesota athletes, all of whom were African Americans, legitimately accused of sexual assaults. The NCAA did not become involved in either case or their aftermaths, leaving school officials to sort it all out, which they did with mixed results under trying circumstances.

In the fall of 2016, the university’s athletic department became embroiled in a controversy over a series of Title IX sexual assault inquiries involving football players, all African Americans. A woman alleged that several football players had raped her and several other team members were in attendance. The teammates all claimed the alleged victim had consented to have sex with the participating players. None of those athletes, however, disputed the fact that the accuser had been all alone and ten players were present when these sexual acts had occurred.

Following a criminal investigation, the local district attorney declined to prosecute the players’ “deplorable behavior” because he lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction. Unlike FSU, Notre Dame and Baylor, this university promptly conducted a Title IX inquiry under a lower standard of proof. That December University officials concluded that all 10 players had violated the university’s sexual harassment policies and four had engaged in sexual assault. All of the players were suspended from team activities pending final resolution of their cases.

At a meeting held at the law office that was representing the suspended players the team, apparently with head coach Tracy Claey’s blessing, threatened to boycott the Holiday Bowl game that Minnesota was scheduled to play, unless the suspensions were lifted. Some in the sports media hailed the team’s collective action to obtain justice for their African-American teammates.

Many journalists, though, castigated the team for its lack of empathy for female students and other women who have been victimized by sexual assaults and domestic violence. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post put it this way: “What’s missing [in their protest] is any recognition that campus officials have the right to hold students to a higher standard than simply being non-felons… There are a million good social-justice causes over which a major college football team could boycott. This isn’t one.”
The team called off its boycott. Of the ten players who had been suspended initially, four were expelled, two were suspended for one year, one was placed on probation and three others were exonerated. The head coach was fired.

The University of Minnesota, unlike most schools with big time football programs, appeared to be making meaningful Title IX policy changes. In 2018 under its new head coach P.J. Fleck, the team suited up for its spring practice game wearing inscriptions on their jerseys that read: “It Ends Here” in order to bring awareness to sexual assaults and other violence against female students.

Unfortunately, not everyone associated with Minnesota college sports got that message. Ray Buford, one of the expelled players, after spending a year playing for a community college in Kansas, received a full football scholarship to play at New Mexico State University (NMSU). His first Division I game was against Minnesota. NMSU’s athletic director explained that Buford had come to his school with “high-character references,” including four from former University of Minnesota football coaches. Under NCAA policies, there is nothing to prevent players found guilty of sexual assault from obtaining athletic scholarships at other universities or colleges.

A year later, Minnesota’s athletic department was back in the news because three different women had accused the basketball team’s star center Reggie Lynch of sexually assaulting them. Questions were raised as to why Minnesota officials had waited so long to take any action against Lynch, even though he had been arrested three different times for sexual assault during a two-month period beginning in April 2016. Two of the accusers were students. Prosecutors dropped all of the criminal charges.

The two female students, however filed Title IX complaints. In January 2018 the university preliminarily decided Lynch had committed sexual assaults in both cases and recommended that he be expelled. Lynch indicated he was going to appeal to the Student Sexual Misconduct Subcommittee. Head coach Richard Pitino permitted Lynch to practice with the team, but not to play in any games until the matter was resolved. In February, after Lynch elected not to go through with his appeal, he was expelled.
The NCAA took no action against him, or Coach Pitino and the athletic department for letting him play after his arrests and during the Title IX inquiry.

University of Oregon

The university of Oregon’s basketball program and its head coach Dana Altman became involved in two different sexual assault inquiries, which ensnared four former Duck players during a three-year period from 2014-2016.These cases revealed fundamental weaknesses in how Oregon was handling Title IX inquiries involving prized athletes, which was a problem at many colleges. The university, the athletic department, and the head basketball coach all manipulated the Title IX process, which conveniently resulted in all four of these athletes playing basketball, while they were being investigated for serious allegations of sexual assault.

In March 2014 an Oregon student alleged that she had been gang raped by three Oregon basketball players: Brandon Austin, Damyean Dotson, and Dominic Artis. All three athletes admitted having sex with the alleged victim, but each claimed it was consensual. Later it was revealed that before he transferred to Oregon from Providence College, Austin had been under investigation after a female student had accused him of sexual assault.

The local Oregon district attorney elected not to prosecute any of those basketball players. “[W]hile there is no doubt the incidents occurred,” he said, they were “unprovable as a criminal case.” All three players eventually were kicked off of the team and suspended from school, but only after the basketball season and post-season, including the Pac-12 championships, had been concluded.

Oregon was widely criticized for waiting so long to initiate a Title IX inquiry. The university through a spokesperson could provide no explanation for the delay. Making matters worse, under NCAA’s rules all three of those expelled athlete-students were permitted to receive scholarships to play basketball at other schools.

Oregon reached an out-of-court settlement with the alleged victim. She received $800,000, plus four years free tuition, room and board at the university. There was no NCAA investigation and Oregon did not have to accept any responsibility for what had happened.

Instead, Oregon University promised to improve its Title IX process. A year later, however, the newly instituted protocols failed to work in a case involving another a star basketball player. National Junior College Player of the Year and future NBA player, Kavell Bigby-Williams, had transferred to Oregon from Gillette College in Wyoming. In mid-September 2016, before the basketball season had begun, Bigsby-Williams had returned to Wyoming. A Gillette student accused him of rape. Like the three other Oregon basketball players accused of sexual assault the year before, Bigby-Williams was permitted to play the entire season for the Ducks.
According to Sports Illustrated, the alleged victim said she had “blacked out… after drinking whiskey and vodka, and … did not remember the identity of her attacker.” Bigby-Williams, however, later admitted having sex with her, but claimed it was consensual. The basketball player was allowed to go back to Oregon without even speaking with the Wyoming police. In July 2017 the county attorney in Wyoming dropped the case. Consistent with NCAA rules, Bigby-Williams was permitted to transfer to Louisiana State University a few days later.

Head coach Dana Altman implausibly denied having had any knowledge during the basketball season of the rape allegations against Bigby-Williams. Oregon officials supported Altman’s story. They contended it was not the university’s practice to inform coaches when their athletes are “accused of sexual assault so as not to risk `tainting investigations.”

Based on all the circumstantial evidence, though, it appeared likely Altman had been told from the beginning that his star player was being investigated for a serious crime. As Sports Illustrated reported, during the first two days the Gillette campus police were conducting their initial inquiry, Altman had called Oregon’s deputy Title IX coordinator, who also happened to be Oregon’s “senior associate athletic director,” five times. In addition, Altman spoke to Bigby-Williams’ coach at Gillette four times. The university contended that in none of those conversations had the Oregon head coach been specifically informed about the Title IX inquiry against the future NBA player. Altman claimed that all of his conversations with Gillette’s basketball coach concerned “whether the Wyoming police… had pressed charges and did not cover details of the underlying investigation.”

The university accepted Altman’s version of events. The NCAA did not investigate Bigby Williams, the head coach, the athletic department, or the university.

Michigan State University

At Michigan State, while the university was still reeling from its pivotal role in the Larry Nassar scandal involving the sexual abuse of dozens of female gymnasts, ESPN’s Outside the Lines released a report based on its own investigation of the university. It found “a pattern of widespread denial, inaction and information suppression of sexual assault, violence and gender discrimination complaints by officials ranging from campus police to the MSU athletic department.” This pattern of Title IX violations included “reports of sexual or violent incidents involving members of the MSU football team and Tom Izzo’s storied basketball program.”
Not long thereafter, MSU basketball player Brock Washington was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault for allegedly groping a female student. Another female student sued MSU for having created a “hostile educational environment” after she had told campus counselors in 2015 that three members of the basketball team had raped her.

In 2019 the NCAA launched an investigation into MSU’s basketball program, but not because of those sexual assault issues. According to the Detroit Free Press, head coach Tom Izo had taken “a high school team on a tour of Michigan State’s locker room and practice facility,” and then allowed the high school players “to watch the Spartans practice.” In addition, he “had impermissible off-campus contact with two recruits after a high school basketball game.”

Typically, the NCAA chose to ignore the alleged sexual offenses by four different members of the basketball team and how those case had been mishandled. The NCAA also ignored the university’s complicity in the Larry Nassar scandal.

Baylor University

It is in the context of these other sexual and domestic violence scandals at other super conference universities, that what the NCAA did about the even worse abuses involving Baylor should be evaluated. Baylor is a private Baptist university that prides itself in teaching and enforcing Christian religious morality. Baylor was committed, in the words of its athletic director Ian McCaw, “`to glorify God through athletics.’” To accomplish that vision, the university reportedly spent more than a half billion dollars to substantially upgrade its athletics.

This included hiring celebrated head football coach Art Briles in 2008 for a reported $6 million a year. The university also installed Kenneth Starr as its new president. He was a high-profile lawyer and religious liberty expert, who—ironically as it would turn out—gained national fame for his relentless pursuit of President Clinton on charges of sexual improprieties.

Baylor’s monumental sports upgrade had been deemed necessary to overcome the severe damage to the university’s athletic reputation in 2003. Its vaunted men’s basketball team became the center of a horrific scandal after one of the player’s had murdered a teammate. The ensuing investigation revealed widespread drug use by, and illegal payments to, a number of team members. The inappropriate benefits, not the murder or drugs, led the NCAA to impose harsh penalties, just short of the so-called death penalty.

Rather quickly, though, with the infusion of so much money, the athletic department rebounded and the football team began winning most of its games. Robert Griffin, the team’s star quarterback, won the 201l Heisman Trophy. In addition, the university became dominant in both men’s and women’s basketball. The women’s team won the 2012 national championship.

That same year, though, both the women’s and men’s basketball programs were placed on three years of probation for serious recruiting violations. Around the same time, stories began to circulate around campus about numerous sexual assault allegations against members of the football team. As S.L. Price document in Sports Illustrated, the football-inspired scandal involving Baylor had two interrelated elements.

First, there had been complaints that female students, who engaged in religiously inappropriate sexual and drinking behaviors, were being disciplined far more harshly than football players who had done the same things, or worse. Typically, those athletes were not even punished, but female students were being suspended and expelled. This double standard was incorporated into the university’s Title IX religious exemption that permitted Baylor to discriminate against female students who engaged in what was vaguely described as “premarital unchastity.”

That gender-based double standard also was reflected in Baylor University’s attitude towards the numerous female students who alleged that they had been sexually assaulted by various football players. Apparently at Baylor “unchaste” female students were not entitled to their civil rights under Title IX. After a defensive lineman on the football team was accused of sexually assaulting a freshman girl, nothing happened.

Even though Baylor University had received a letter from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in 20ll informing all universities and colleges that they must implement Title IX sexual assault protocols, Baylor did not bother to even designate a Title IX coordinator until the end of 2014. The university lawyer who handled Title IX matters took the legally unsupportable position that the school did not have to investigate sexual assault or domestic violence allegations until there had been a criminal conviction, which, of course, would make Title IX largely irrelevant.

That pattern of ignoring the victims of sexual assault would be repeated when other Baylor football players were accused of such crimes. One of the most flagrant Title IX abuses occurred in 2013. It was set in motion when an athletically talented defensive end was allowed to transfer to play on the Baylor football team, even though he had been kicked off of the Boise State team for undisclosed rules infractions. The player’s ex-girlfriend alleged later that he had “choked and struck her.”

A few months after that athlete-student had transferred to Baylor, a freshman female Baylor soccer player accused him of sexually assaulting her. Once again Baylor did nothing, summarily concluding that there was insufficient evidence of an assault to investigate. Nearly two years later, however, that player was convicted and sentenced to jail for that same sexual crime.
Baylor did what many sports enterprises do when athletic scandals get out of their control. They hired a law firm to carry out what was misleadingly characterized as an independent investigation. It was neither independent, nor thorough. Baylor controlled its scope and the information that would be disseminated to the public.

The law firm did not even make a written report. The findings were presented to university officials in private. Nevertheless, even those carefully culled details were extremely damning. According to the New York Times, University officials acknowledged that the law firm had found “`failures at every level of Baylor’s administration.’” This included “`discourage[ing] complainants from reporting’ crimes” and “`retaliat[ing] against a complainant for reporting a sexual assault.’”

From 2012-2015 football players had committed no less than four sexual assaults or acts of domestic violence. The university also had tried to cover up those crimes by these football players. There was a “secretive football culture… in which officials concealed charges of sexual abuse against players. Female accusers were further traumatized by “‘conduct that could be perceived as victim blaming.’”

As a result of that report, Coach Briles was fired. Nonetheless, he reportedly received a $15 million severance package. Kenneth Starr also was relieved of his position as president, but was able to retain his titles as chancellor and tenured law professor. He received a severance package reported to be $4.5 million, even though he was still being paid handsomely for his two other university positions.

Despite what Baylor’s Board of Regents chose to reveal about the law firm’s investigation, much damning evidence had been omitted. Board members later told the Wall Street Journal that the university’s “mishandling of sex assault reports involve[ed] 17 women and 19 football players between 2011 and 2015, including four alleged gang rapes.” In addition, Baylor had allowed its football program to pay for a so-called hostess program to sexually entertain football recruits when they made campus visits.

As bad as all that sounded, what really happened probably was worse. As part of a federal lawsuit, one of the assault victims alleged in court documents that there had been no less than “31 football players at Baylor University” who had “committed at least 52 `acts of rape’ over four years – including five gang rapes, two of which involved 10 or more players at the same time.” In addition, allegedly certain players had “videotaped the rapes on their phones and passed the recordings to teammates.”

The NCAA’s Baylor Decision

One would have hoped that after Penn State, Florida State, and all the other sexual and domestic violence fiascos involving athletes and coaches in college football and men’s basketball, the NCAA would have established strict protocols to prevent, investigate, and punish these crimes and cover ups. Yet, even after Baylor University became the site of what appears to have been the most widespread football-related sexual assault scandal in collegiate history, the NCAA and its super conference constituents have continued to do almost nothing in a systemic way to address these types of abuses against women.

The awful national optics surrounding what happened at Baylor forced the NCAA to pretend to be investigating, even though under its own bylaws the organization continues to lack the authority to issue any sanctions for these sexual crimes and cover ups. As Mac Engel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram explained to Baylor fans at the time, “[e]rratic investigations are not necessarily new from the NCAA. And that gives Baylor reason to be optimistic – and skeptical – of its future.”

The strong likelihood, though, was, as Engle concluded, either no penalty would be imposed or Baylor would receive a penalty proportionate to the relatively minor Level III infractions that the university and Coach Briles were finally charged with. Those infractions had nothing to do with the sexual assaults committed by football players and the deliberate attempts to cover them up.
Baylor decided to adopt the feeble, but ultimately successful legal defense that there were no special benefits bestowed on any football players in Baylor’s mishandling of the numerous sexual assault and domestic violence accusations female students made. The university discriminated against its unchaste female students in God’s name, whether or not the male students who attacked them happened to be football players.

Conclusion

Many years after the cover ups occurred, once much of the outrage had dissipated. the NCAA issued its fait accompli decision that there was nothing in the NCAA bylaws to address such awful behaviors by the athletes or university officials. This is the same message the NCAA has delivered to victims of athlete sexual abuse, other types of violence and the ensuing cover ups, ever since the horrors in the Penn State football showers were first revealed.

Major college sports programs, especially those in the football and basketball-driven super conferences, have unbelievable power within the NCAA’s badly compromised leadership structure. Furthermore, these collegiate athletic powers have become increasingly adept in managing their public images and insulating themselves from accountability with layers of plausible deniability and fractured lines of responsibility.

As a result, there have been repeated incidences of sexual and domestic violence in college sports committed mostly by male athletes with relatively few significant penalties. While Baylor has been supposedly beefing up its Title IX protocols hoping to reinvent its image, the NCAA has done almost nothing to beef up its hands-off policies. The organization has made only two minor improvements, but neither includes effective mechanisms to enforce compliance.

The NCAA, which is supposed to oversee college sports, now requires school presidents and athletic directors to annually “attest” that athlete-students, student-athletes, coaches, and athletic department administrators have been “educated in sexual violence prevention.” These campus officials also must “attest” that their athletic department is actually aware of its school’s policies governing sexual violence and “is prepared to respond to acts of sexual violence.” It is difficult to imagine requirements designed to have less of an impact than these.

The failure of the NCAA to impose rigorous prevention and reporting requirements, with penalties for noncompliance, on college athletic departments became especially worrisome after the Department of Education in the Trump Administration took steps to substantially dilute Title IX enforcement. That left college sports in an even worse position with regard to preventing sport-related sexual crimes and other violence against female students than in the years before the #Me Too movement gained national prominence.

This vacuum in leadership led a group of women, including three athletes, to file an historic lawsuit against the NCAA for “fail[ing] to protect them from alleged sexual assaults by male college athletes, despite having an obligation to do so.” The plaintiffs accused the NCAA of failing in its duty “to supervise, regulate, monitor and provide reasonable and appropriate rules to minimize the risk of injury or danger to student-athletes and by student-athletes.”

The NCAA’s failures, the suit explained, included allowing athletes “accused or convicted of sexual assault or sexual violence to evade responsibility by transferring to other schools.” Despite the hundreds of pages of rules that are in place to prevent recruits and college athletes from receiving improper benefits, including the “use of their own likenesses…, [the NCAA has] no specific penalty for student-athletes who commit sexual assault.”

In so many ways, the NCAA has shown itself to be morally bankrupt and irretrievably broken. It should be disbanded and replaced, not only to protect female college students, but whatever integrity remains in collegiate sports.

SURPRISE—Not So Much—SPORTS GAMBLING IS OUT Of CONTROL
John Weston Parry

Norman Chad, the syndicated Washington Post columnist, who—after contracting long haul Covid 19 last summer—is on hiatus from writing his tongue-in-cheek musings about the sports world. His repeatedly warnings, though, that unregulated sports gambling would create a basket full of problems for fans and the American public have come to fruition. Chad has skin in this game because he is a recovering sports gambling addict.

His respected colleague at the Post, Barry Svrluga, points out that it would be futile to try to put the genie back in the bottle by trying to prohibit sports gambling altogether. Prohibition of vices rarely if ever works well, whether it is alcohol, recreational drugs, or gambling. “[P]eople are going to bet on sports. Let’s get it out in the open and make sure it’s done properly.” Many of the problems sports gambling creates can be addressed through “regulation,” Svrluga concludes.

Unfortunately, enacting comprehensive and effective regulatory solutions is no easy task, especially in an American sports world that is suspicious of big government and resists outside controls almost reflexively. Look how difficult it has been, for example, to convince federal authorities to enact meaningful laws to protect the health and welfare of elite athletes, especially young American female Olympians and Olympic hopefuls who have been the victims of widespread sexual abuse in gymnastics and other Olympic sports.

At the same time, expecting major American sports enterprises to police themselves effectively when it comes to sports gambling, which has become a major source of revenues and wealth building, is a pipe dream. As Svrluga explains, sports gambling “has gone from sketchy and in the shadows to ubiquitous and in broad daylight.” Fantasy leagues are looked upon by most American sports fans as family entertainment.

This transformation has been so complete that every American who watches television or social media programming is being bombarded with sports gambling commercials and promotions, when, until recently, there were none, or few and far between. Furthermore, the coverage of almost every major sport on television, as well as sports talk radio, devotes significant time and resources to fantasy sports and other forms of sports gambling. That is what a significant proportion of the viewing and listening fans seem to crave, including many who are minors.

The embrace of sports gambling in order to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, comes with significant risks. In the rush to generate those once illicit and illegal revenues—which has been further propelled by the economic squeeze on almost every major sport because of the coronavirus pandemic—the risks have been largely ignored. This has inflamed three broad areas of ongoing concern: (1) harm to the sports themselves and their fans; (2) the exploitation of the sports betting public; and (3) the lack of uniform regulatory guidance and controls.

Harm to American Sports Themselves

In the past, the major gambling risk that monopolized the rules and regulations governing American sports was the fixing of the outcomes of games, races, and other competitive sporting events. In other words, the integrity of the game as viewed mostly from the point of view of the fans. As with performance-enhancing substances, preventing athletes, coaches, and teams from cheating has dictated what those sanctions should be. While the potential for cheating by fixing games and events remains a serious problem, due to almost instantaneous communications and many new ways to place bets, it has morphed into a panoply of opportunities to fix sports-related outcomes, well-beyond just fixing scores, games or events.

Gamblers can now bet on virtually any sports outcome no matter how athletically trivial it may seem, instantaneously, as well as on how many points teams and players earn based on calculations derived from a limitless number of possible “fantasy” criteria that are divorced from the outcomes of the competitions themselves. Yet, all of these newfangled bets can be fixed by athletes, coaches, managers, teams, owners, and other hangers-on without actually cheating in a traditional sports sense, or cheating only a little.

The main victims are the corporations and other entrepreneurs who own and invest in these sports gambling businesses, as well as the perceived integrity of the games and athletic events in question because of the slippery slope implications of allowing any form of cheating. Thus, the sports rules aimed at eliminating the fixing of games and events must now somehow account for an expanding and almost limitless universe of opportunities for athletes, coaches, and other people closely associated with these sports to manipulate play in order to fix a seemingly trivial bet with a lucrative payout.

Moreover, as a number of informed commentators have observed, even if the rules and regulations in place appear to satisfactorily address sports fixing—which may be no more than an illusion—the impact of legalized gambling on how these sports are played and covered in the media is also changing to accommodate bettors—but hardly for the better, As the revenues generated from these gambling-related sports activities have skyrocketed, so has the influence of gambling on those sports. As Svrluga opines, we appear to be approaching a “point at which professional leagues will make decisions [based] on what’s best for … the gamblers… rather than lifelong fans.”

More importantly, though, athletes themselves are buying into the idea that gambling interests in sports should be encouraged. The collective bargaining agreements between players and owners have been reworked in recent years to ensure that athletes receive a fair share of the revenues that gambling generates for the sports leagues and their franchises. This includes, in the case of the NFL, revenues from “the operation of gambling-related businesses located in or physically attached to an NFL Stadium.”

Last year, the NFL hired an executive to oversee betting and other gambling activities for the league. As Norman Chad explained then, “[s]ooner or later, fans will be placing bets on NFL games while in NFL stadiums.” And similar arrangements are likely to pop up at stadiums and arenas that host MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS, and maybe even NCAA college games. Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals, Wizards, and Mystics, has been a strong proponent of setting up similar arrangements for his franchises in the NHL, NBA, and WNBA.

All these gambling-related accommodations from America’s major sports are apt to make them more like horse racing, professional wrestling, fantasy sports, and other less like serious athletic competitions. It also will further increase the potential that these games and events will be subject to manipulation to benefit bettors in the know or with advanced technological capabilities.

Exploitation of the Public, Bettors, and Gambling Addicts

Many, and probably most, Americans have made their peace with sports gambling. At the very least, they are resigned to the reality that once a legal and social prohibition on a popular vice is lifted, the odds of reasserting that prohibition are small, if not nearly zero. Nonetheless, there are several important public policy reasons why this widespread embrace of sports gambling remains a bad idea, especially since there are inadequate rules and regulations in place to control its impacts, which go well-beyond the potential harm to the participating sports themselves.

To begin with, the house almost always wins at the expense of the bettors, unless they are among the few bettors who find ways to cheat and/or take advantage of other bettors. That is why gambling remains so profitable for betting parlors and online sites, no matter what misleading advertisements—often with sincere sounding, attractive female shills—encourage mostly male sports bettors to believe about how many people are winning at gambling.

Gambling can be entertaining and only somewhat addictive like chocolate, peanut butter, or the stock market, but the price to play to be thrilled, on average, tends to be exorbitant. While there always will be gamblers, the difference now is that these sports gambling enterprises have become mainstream businesses. Like tobacco firms, they target the most psychologically vulnerable populations. High on that list are male sports fans for whom winning appears to be the easiest or only path to prosperity in difficult times, members of economically depressed communities, and immature and reckless male adolescents.

For a significant number of people, gambling also can be compulsively addictive, obsessive, and out of control like alcohol or drugs. According to the National Council of Problem Gamblers three to four percent of the American population have this disorder. Since around 60 percent of the population gambles, this means that of those who do, about five to seven percent are affected in this way. While this addiction disorder can be treated, only about 25 percent seek treatment, and, as with any addiction, there is no lifetime cure. Relapses are typical, particularly where the addicts are surrounded by sports gambling temptations and promotions.

While it is better than nothing. that many sports gambling sites encourage bettors with a gambling problem to seek help, the fact of the matter is that far more problem gamblers are enabled by these sports gambling operations, than are helped. Around the country, gambling addiction hotlines and referrals are reporting huge surges in sports gambling addictions and other related problem behaviors

Finally, what makes sports gambling so insidious is that it appeals to adolescents and even younger children, particularly males. This is because they are exposed to so much sports-related advertising for these types of gambling products on television and social media, as well as to negative role-modeling from their parents, relatives, older siblings, and athletes who make bets on regular and fantasy sports. According to the Guardian, researchers in the United Kingdom have found—as one might expect—not only that there are more children being exposed to “gambling promotions,” but they are more likely “to gamble in the future.”

This type of gambling inculcation is likely to be particularly effective in the United States with adolescents and children—mostly males—when it is closely tied to sports, including through increasingly popular video games marketed as esports. During the coronavirus pandemic, when so many of these children were forced to be inside by their parents or state and local governments, their exposures to these sports gambling promotions undoubtedly was much higher than usual.

In the past year, the NFL and Nickelodeon teamed up to create a website that has as one of its major purposes to provide kids with opportunities to predict NFL-related outcomes for fun and to win non-cash prizes. This is much too much like adults betting on various football outcomes for the thrill of it and cash prizes. Keith Whyte, the executor director of the National Council on Problem Gambling—which the NFL is a member of and contributes money to—acknowledged that “there’s a grooming or habituation aspect [to NFLNickPlay.com]. He went on to say that the combination of the NFL prediction games featuring sports gambling terminology and the Nickelodeon brand was “jarring”—and he should have added totally irresponsible.

Lack of Uniform Rules and Regulatory Guidance and Controls

What Dan Okrent, once said about Rotisserie Baseball—the game he is credited with establishing—seems eerily applicable to sports gaming in general today: “[I]f I’d only known [about] this plague that I’ve visited upon the world….” Despite such warnings about the harms that sports gambling could cause to the public, as well as to America’s favorite sports themselves, the United States has gone from mostly prohibiting or strictly regulating these forms of betting to allowing them to spread like weeds or guns, with few if any rules and regulations. This laissez-faire approach is doomed to failure.

Each sport has its own sports gambling structure and supposed internal monitoring and controls. There is virtually no federal presence that is regulating any of these activities. States and their localities are all over the map in terms of how they want to deal with sports gambling, except most of them want to ensure that their jurisdiction generates the most revenues and jobs possible, regardless of the negative social consequences.

For about twenty-five years, the Professional and Amateur Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) governed gambling interests in the U.S., including those involving sports. Sports betting was limited to Las Vegas—which made Atlantic City and New Jersey particularly unhappy—and to specific activities that were viewed as being more socially acceptable forms of betting, notably horse racing, Jai alai, and most recently a broad array of online fantasy sports.

Whether deliberately or not—and certainly it must have been intended by many members of Congress—PASPA created gambling monopolies with obvious inequities. At the same time, this political arrangement established a workable framework for the balancing of opposing views about the morality of sports gambling. In particular, the five most important domestic sports enterprises—NFL, MLB, NBA, NBA, and NCAA—were comforted by the limited federal presence, which was, and continues to be, important to the interests of many American politicians.

The four major professional leagues and their teams used to be most concerned about how the corrupting influences of gambling, particularly game fixing and point shaving, could negatively affect the integrity of their individual sports in the eyes of their fans, sponsors, and the public. The NCAA also was worried about this type of corruption, mainly due to the national point-shaving scandal in college basketball during the early 1950’s.

More importantly, though, the NCAA’s most influential university and college members—those with big time athletic programs—did not want sports gambling on college games to further erode the illusions supporting their amateurism business model, which generates so much wealth to them at the expense of athlete-students. Ultimately, though, as with the professional sports leagues, the so-called integrity of these revenue-generating collegiate sports had less to do with morality and much more with how public perceptions would negatively affect corporate sponsors, alumni donations, and the bottom line of super conference athletic departments. Now that the bloom is off of the college amateurism rose forever, sports gambling looks far more attractive to these revenue-generating college sports programs.

On the other side of the sports gambling divide were those individuals, gambling businesses, state governments, and sports like the PGA, MLS, and NASCAR, which believed that the expansion of sports betting would provide golden opportunities to generate revenues. Integrity could be managed they believed. The biggest sports gambling influence, though, turned out to be fantasy sports.

By the mid-1990’s, there were a slew of fantasy games of chance which, in addition to baseball Rotisseries leagues, soon involved a variety of professional and college athletic activities, especially football, basketball, and international soccer. What made this type of gambling different was the camaraderie among many of the participants, the competitive connections to professional and college sports, the vast expansion of those games of chance on the Internet, and the illusion that it was all harmless fun.

These fantasy gaming pursuits began as leagues of individuals, but soon became online competitions of chance managed and manipulated by corporations utilizing off-shore accounts to avoid American taxation and regulation. Of the nearly 60 million North Americans, who it is estimated gamble on these virtual sports, about two-thirds play fantasy football, mostly tied to the NFL.

A mishmash of gambling interests pushed to have PASPA overturned in order to open the floodgates for these revenue generating sports gambling activities. Even the supposed supporters of PASPA in the sports world, now understood the financial advantages to them of doing away with the law. Eventually in 2017 the dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn, et al the Justices struck down PASPA as being a violation of states’ rights. Six members of the Court, including Chief Justice Roberts, signed onto the majority opinion written by Justice Alito. Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, joined by Sotomayor, filed noteworthy dissents.

The decision was consistent with many other court opinions in the U.S., which have endowed spectator sports enterprises with special privileges when it comes to enforcing antitrust and related laws. Significantly, both the Trump Administration and its Department of Justice chose not to oppose the over-turning of this federal law, which, as expected, result3e in the expansion of sports gambling throughout the United States and into almost every major American sport.

While such a legal outcome appeared to be very popular, PASPA was not really unconstitutional. Thus, a legal fiction had to be devised to justify striking it down. As Justice Ginsburg explained in her dissent, “[o]n no rational ground can it be concluded that Congress would have preferred no statute at all… Congress legitimately sought to … [stop] sports gambling … while making it clear that the stoppage is attributable to federal, not state action.” Congress intended to prohibit sports gambling, but not in all jurisdictions; nor in all sports. The path it chose allowed federal legislators to balance competing political interests.

Justice Alito argued successfully that it should have been obvious all along that PASPA was unconstitutional, even though the law had thrived for over 15 years and all the other federal courts that had reviewed the legislation had upheld it. “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own.” Apparently Congress’ original sin was acting indirectly, which it has done on countless other occasions without any Supreme Court interference.

Alito then revealed the majority’s overriding agenda: “It is as if federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the authority to stop legislators from voting on any offending proposals…. A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine.” For most members of the Court, this case was not about sports gambling or even individual rights. It was about whether or not to enhance states’ rights long-term at the expense of the federal government.

Conclusion

This peculiarly American outcome has left sports gambling—like abortion, transgender rights, and guns—in the hands of numerous and too often short-sighted state legislatures, unless and until Congress chooses to become directly involved. This may or may not happen and, even if it does, there is no consensus about what the new federal presence should look like, or how federal courts will view it. So far, there has only been congressional silence, as states and localities engineer more ways to reap the benefits from sports gambling for themselves and their most influential constituents.

In this laissez-faire environment, the opportunities for corruption continue to multiply. As the Senate Report supporting PASPA warned in 1991, and Justice Breyer reiterated in his dissent, “widespread sports gambling w[ill] `threate[n] to change the nature of sporting events from wholesome entertainment for all ages to devices for gambling.’” A myriad of individuals and businesses—including major professional leagues and other sports organizations—are trying to leverage their political influence and accumulate the greatest profits and wealth possible from these sports betting activities and schemes.

Making matters worse, it is likely that the vast majority of these newly-spawned sports gambling-related corrupt behaviors and offenses will never be uncovered, or uncovered too late to make a significant difference. The major sports enterprises involved in these gambling activities will do everything they can to obscure any damaging information that would reveal the existence and true extent of such corruption. This is what they tend to do with any bad publicity that might threaten their revenue streams and wealth building. Internal policing in professional, Olympic, and college sports never seems to work out well. Sports gambling already presents those enterprises with a multiplicity of temptations and challenges that they are not equipped to handle by themselves.

   THE UNOFFICIAL HIERARCHY OF NFL PERSONAL CONDUCT OFFENSES:
A Public Relations Lottery In Which Victimized Women and Children Come Last
By John Weston Parry

The NFL has no shame when it comes to determining player punishments. How the league has manhandled discipline for Colin Kaepernick, Myles Garrett, and Tom Brady compared to its weak actions against players accused of domestic and sexual violence against women and children, is appalling. Since Roger Goodell was installed as Commissioner in 2006, investigations and penalties for player crimes, misdemeanors, and other bad behaviors, have been erratic, subjective, arbitrary, and against the public interest—often all at once.

So many of the high profile punishments in recent years—whether imposed explicitly or secretly behind closed doors—appear to be public relations ploys based on the optics or owner self-interest, rather than reasonable attempts to be fair and just. Most of the worst inequities emanate from the Commissioner and the owners, but the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) and the sports media are partly to blame as well. There is an obvious double standard when it comes to player violence against other players as compared to player violence against women and children. There also is a double standard when it comes to alarming player behaviors that happen to be caught on video.

The NFL’s unofficial hierarchy of player offenses seems to place leading a movement to kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality at the top of the list, followed in order by: (2) deliberately hitting a quarterback in his unprotected head with a helmet on live television, even if there is no injury; (3) deflating a football to gain a negligible competitive advantage; and (4) committing or facilitating sexual or physical violence against women or children.

Colin Kaepernick: NFL Owners Public Enemy #1

As the leader of a political movement in which mostly African-American NFL football players began kneeling during the national anthem in order to protest racial injustice and police brutality, star San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick became a polarizing national figure. The division over Kaepernick’s actions roughly reflects the American political landscape: those who oppose Donald Trump and his policies; and those who support him, including most NFL owners. While no sanctions could be legally imposed on Kaepernick, or any of the other NFL players who joined him in this protest, reportedly behind closed doors the owners spoke with President Trump, who demanded that there be stiff punishments for the players’ actions.

Apparently the owners’ compromise solution was that no team in the league would be allowed to sign Kaepernick, who had become a free agent. This presumed boycott was being imposed even though Kaepernick remained a highly successful first string NFL quarterback and more than a few teams were in desperate need of any competent quarterback. Many in the sports media, though, tried to make excuses for the NFL’s apparent collusion in blackballing Kaepernick by downgrading the quarterback’s skills and implausibly suggesting that he was over the hill, although he was 30 and in his prime..

Eventually the NFL reached a settlement with Kaepernick in which he received millions of dollars. This was strong evidence that indeed the league had been guilty of collusion and wanted to avoid that fact becoming public. Around this time, the NFL led by its Commissioner and Jay-Z had entered into a partnership to promote the league among African-Americans and younger fans. An important step in doing that wrote Ken Belson of The New York Times was ensuring that these prospective NFL consumers did not “continue to view Kaepernick as a victim, a talented player blackballed for a peaceful protest.”

The proposed solution was to offer the former quarterback a tryout so he could display his skills for NFL teams and prove that he still could play at a professional level. Unlike players who were signed almost immediately or shortly after being involved in serious allegations of domestic violence or sexual assault (see below), Kaepernick was being offered a one-time, take it or leave it tryout which the NFL would control for its own benefit. .

All-pro safety Eric Reid, who had been Kaepernick’s teammate in San Francisco, was a leader of the players’ protest, and has been continuing to kneel during the national anthem, observed that the tryout “feels like a PR stunt” to make it appear that the NFL was giving Kaepernick a real chance. Reid noted that it was suspicious that the tryout was being scheduled on a Saturday when most head coaches and general managers are focused on Sunday’s games, rather than mid-week. In addition, Reid noted that teams had contacted the league about their interest in Kaepernick, rather than engaging in the normal process of contacting Kaepernick directly. That end around suggested that, despite the settlement, the NFL’s collusion against the quarterback was ongoing.

Doubts were raised in media whether Kaepernick, who is now viewed as a cultural icon and influential public figure, was sincerely interested in returning as a football player where his ability to speak out freely about social issues would be diminished. In addition, there were indications that Kaepernick was going to profit merely by participating in a tryout. Nike, which has a contractual relationship with the NFL, reportedly was going to run a commercial featuring the quarterback on the day of the tryout, or shortly thereafter.

Given the tensions between the two parties, it was not surprisingly that on the day of the proposed tryout nothing went as planned and apparently the Nike commercial had been unilaterally cancelled. Based on Belson’s report in the New York Times, the NFL seemed to be placing restrictive conditions on the tryout. To begin with, the league refused to provide Kaepernick with a list of attendees. It also objected to the quarterback allowing the media to attend the workout and to hire a film crew to record the event. In addition, the NFL objected to the waiver the four NFL wide receivers who Kaepernick had chosen for the workout had signed to “indemnify the league if they got injured.” The NFL momentarily postponed the tryout until a new waiver document with non-standard restrictions could be delivered and signed.

At that point Kaepernick took matters into his own hands. He unilaterally moved the tryout from the Atlanta Falcons training facility to a high school stadium “an hour away. While most of the reporters and cameramen in attendance drove to the new site, many of the NFL scouts decided not to attend. One of the scouts who did go to the new site to view the workout was impressed with Kaepernick’s performance, as were many of the football reporters in attendance. Eric Reid remarked later that “Colin [had] proved he can play this game.”

According to the quarterback’s agent, even following the successful workout no NFL team offered Kaepernick an individual tryout, much less a new contract. But perhaps that is not what Kaepernick was really after.

As columnist William Rhoden reported in the Undefeated: “Kaepernick outmaneuvered the NFL. No matter what the league had in mind, it failed.” The Washington Post’s Kevin Blackistone agreed. He also opined that when Kaepernick took his stand three years ago he “became his own man.” The columnist urged other NFL African-American athletes to do act similarly in their dealings with the league.

In the end, Kaepernick had the last word. He decried the fact that after having “been denied [by the NFL] for three years,” he was still “waiting for the 32 owners, the 32 teams, [and] Roger Goodell… to stop running from the truth, stop running from the people”—and by implication, stop lying.

Myles Garrett’s Televised Meltdown

Cleveland Browns star rookie defensive end Myles Garrett, in a fit of pique on live television, lost control during a Thursday night game, leading to an on-the-field brawl. Garrett tore the helmet off of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph and hit the opposing player in the head with his own helmet. Even though Rudolph had not been injured, the sports media condemnation of Garrett’s actions was widespread and mostly self-serving.

The Washington Post’s Jerry Brewer, losing all sense of perspective, proclaimed that the incident was “one of the scariest physical confrontations in the history of athletics.” Adam Kilgore, on the Post’s front page no less, attempted to rationalize why in the brutal game of football Garrett’s momentary outburst was so heinous. Kilgore argued that there is an unstated “agreement between players. They may destroy each other but not on purpose and not outside the mayhem that happens during plays. It is a gladiatorial contract that should make you wince, but it is an understood agreement participants enter with full understanding.” Kilgore’s rationalization sounds plausible, but anyone who follows NFL football knows that for many, if not most, of the players, this ideal is not followed.

A number of outraged football commentators insisted that Garrett should be criminally prosecuted. Inevitably, even if such a prosecution were to be pursued, the resulting disposition would be far less severe than the NFL’s proposed punishment. If Ray Rice received probation for knocking his girlfriend unconscious, what would likely happen in the criminal justice system to a high profile NFL player being charged with hitting an opponent with a helmet, which did not even result in injury? Absolutely nothing.

Despite Garrett’s initial profuse apology to all concerned, which was issued in a press release through the Browns organization, Commissioner Goodell imposed what appears to be the stiffest penalty ever for a player’s on-the-field actions. Garrett was indefinitely suspended for at least the remaining six regular season games and playoffs for this year and must petition to return next season. The Cleveland Browns said the incident was regrettable, but chose to stick by their 2019 early first round draft choice.

The optics of this incident was damaging to the NFL, as well as those in the sports media who profit from professional football. In an era in which (1) so many former players are being diagnosed with brain damage after they die, (2) current players are cutting their careers short, and (3) the league not so long ago had been involved in a national scandal called “bounty gate” where teams were rewarding players for deliberately injuring their opponents, the image on national television of a player striking an opponent in head with a helmet well after the whistle had blown was disturbing. It is important to remember, though, that none of the New Orleans Saints players who had been caught accepting bounties after they deliberately injured opponents was penalized. All their proposed suspensions were overturned on appeal.

The indignation about what Garrett actually did on the playing field has been way overblown, not only when compared to other deliberate attempts to injure opponents in the NFL with vicious shots to the head or knees, but also the even more dangerous deliberate injuries in hockey and baseball involving sticks to the head, smashing players heads into the ice, and throwing a 100 mile an hour pitch directly at a batter’s head. The NFL and its supporters are trying to establish the misleading narrative that by doing little things to make the game incrementally safer to play, the game has become reasonably safe. This simply is not true, but presenting the right optics remains critically important in making the public believe this false narrative.

Soon even the players understood that Commissioner Goodell and the league had overreacted and began backing off their condemnation of Garrett. His victim quarterback Mason Rudolph apologized for his own role in starting the brawl and was conciliatory towards the defensive end who he previously had labeled as “bush league” and “cowardly.” Upon further reflection Rudolph claimed in a written statement to have: “[N] no ill will towards Myles Garrett. Great respect for his ability as a player. And I know that if Myles could go back, he would handle the situation differently.”

The détente did not last long, though. As part of his appeal, Garrett suddenly introduced the unsupported accusation that Rudolph had uttered a racial slur as part of the argument why the defensive end’s suspension should be reduced. Rudolph’s lawyer called the allegation a lie” that was “reckless and shameful.” Garrett’s appeal was denied.

Tom Brady and Deflategate

Next to Myles Garrett’s recent televised outburst, the second worst on-the field offender, as measured by the sports media’s reaction, is the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, after he was deemed guilty of having used footballs that had been intentionally deflated during a 2015 playoff game. Deflategate, which became the source of national headline news for days, was a great deal to do about almost nothing.

The evidence against Brady specifically and regarding the actual physics surrounding the deflated footballs in question was at best inconclusive. The impact on the playoff game’s outcome was miniscule. The final score was the Patriots 45 and Indianapolis 7. Nevertheless, Commissioner Goodell suspended that year’s Super Bowl MVP for four games beginning the next season. At the time, that was equivalent to being caught for the first time using performance-enhancing drugs and considerably worse than having engaged in domestic violence.

The suspension had little to do with deterring possible cheating, which the league had been ignoring and then minimizing for years when it came to players’ use of illicit substances. Nor did it have much to do with justice and due process. A salient consideration for the media-schooled Commissioner, whose career had been based on public relations rather than corporate law like his predecessor, appeared to be the optics, once again. The Patriots had been found guilty of cheating in the past by stealing opponents signals in a far more serious scandal dubbed “Spygate.” Furthermore, the Patriots as the NFL’s best team in recent years were the most hated as well.

More importantly, though, the Commissioner and the owners were trying to control and dominate the process for administering penalties against the players. Unfortunately, Roger Goodell has little appreciation for the value of due process or much knowledge about the law. Thus, when Brady appealed his suspension Goodell decided that he would hear Brady’s appeal himself. The NFLPA, Brady, and his lawyers all insisted that the Commissioner should recuse himself because he had an obvious conflict of interest.
The Commissioner’s decision to hear the appeal simply compounded the arbitrary and unfair nature of the NFL’s personal conduct proceedings. Despite the bad look, Goodell—with the support of the owners—doubled down on his contempt for due process by citing the collective bargaining agreement, which he said provided him with the authority to “serve as hearing officer in any appeal involving conduct detrimental to the game.”

The NFLPA reiterated that the Commissioner had a conflict of interest, since he was the one who had suspended Brady, and might even have to appear as a witness as to what had happened during the administrative proceeding. Regardless, it seemed clear that the NFL’s disciplinary procedures were in shambles.

As sports lawyer Michael McCann wrote in Sports Illustrated, the NFL was shooting itself in the foot by inflating a minor scandal into a national investigation and then basing its initial punishments on an inconclusive report. McCann opined that the suspension “appear[ed] arbitrary, precedent [was] nonexistent, and justice fe[lt] more rooted in public opinion than legal underpinnings.” Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post opined that Goodell had “turned an unimportant misdemeanor into a damaging scandal as part of a personal power play to shore up his flagging authority.” Subsequently she would add that the Commissioner “uses his office as if he is a blackjack-wielding tough from the 1920’s … Every other league has seen fit to go to a mature, modern system of neutral arbitration in player discipline cases.”

Domestic Violence and Sexual Assaults

As compared to the severity with which the Commissioner has punished on-the-field actions of players that challenge the owners’ political, economic, or labor interests, how the league and the NFLPA have continued to largely ignore or marginalize the seriousness of domestic violence and sexual assaults against women and children by players is extremely disturbing.

In June 2018 Deborah Epstein, a professor of law and co-director of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic, resigned from the NFL Players Association’s commission on domestic violence. She had become convinced that the NFL and its players were only giving “lip service” to these issues. Epstein was concerned, among other things, about the large number of college players who had been charged with domestic and sexual violence, and were still being drafted into the league. “The NFL Players Association is no longer interested in even making public show of concern about violence against women,” she wrote in a Washington Post Op Ed piece.

In the relatively short time since Epstein resigned in protest, the NFL has demonstrated its lack of concern in three more cases in which star players were involved in domestic violence and a fourth case in which a superstar was accused of sexual misconduct, which included allegations of rape. Three of those players had significant behavioral problems before being drafted out of college.

Reuben Foster: Repeated Domestic Violence

Linebacker Reuben Foster was a high first round draft pick of the San Francisco 49ers in 2017. He was taken at the top of the draft, despite what the SF Chronicle described as his “history of trouble.” At a nightclub, while he was playing for the University of Alabama, one of his friends was gunned down along with two other people. Foster was later banned from the NFL players combine because of a “verbal altercation” and also failed a draft-related drug test. Following his first season with the 49ers, he was suspended two games after being arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor.

In February 2018 Foster was arrested again, this time for reportedly pummeling his girlfriend with a series of punches. Neither 49ers nor the league took any action. Foster was allowed to practice, served his two game drug suspension, and began playing again. Late that November Foster was arrested once again for physically attacking his girlfriend, this time in a Tampa hotel where his team was staying for a road game.

The 49ers finally decided to release their talented, but troubled, linebacker. Three days later, though, Washington’s football team claimed Foster off of waivers. The league placed the player on an exempt list, which barred him from practicing with his new team or attending games, but still allowed him to be fully paid. The Commissioner and the NFL implicitly approved Washington’s decision to sign Foster to a new contract.

That decision set off a firestorm of criticism in parts of the sports media, especially in Washington. The task of explaining the franchise’s decision to sign Foster did not fall to the owner Dan Snyder or team president Bruce Allen, but rather to Doug Williams the franchise’s only senior African American front office executive. Williams claimed the team understood “the severity of the … allegations against Reuben [and] if true…[they] are nothing our organization would ever condone.”

The next day Washington’s head coach Jay Gruden tried to shield both Snyder and Allen from further criticism. He asserted that the signing of Foster had been a “`team decision… we all had our hands in it.” For good measure Gruden claimed that a number of Washington players who had been Foster’s teammates at Alabama were “overwhelmingly supportive’ of adding the player.” Yet, when two of those players were asked whether they had voiced their support for Foster, they replied that no one in the front office had talked to them about Foster. Georgetown law professor Deborah Epstein condemned the team and the league for conveying the clear message: “If you’re a talented player with athletic ability, you can get away with perpetrating violence against women.” Ultimately the league only fined Foster the equivalent of two games pay, but he was never suspended.

Kareem Hunt: Another Ray Rice Moment

Around the same time that Washington was signing Foster, the Kansas City Chiefs released their star running back Kareem Hunt, just after the NFL had put him on administrative leave with pay. A few months earlier, Hunt had been involved in an altercation with a woman at his hotel. At the time, he had not been arrested or faced any NFL or team discipline. As in the Ray Rice scandal, though, a TMZ video emerged later in which Hunt could be seen kicking that woman.

In light of the bad publicity that had accompanied Washington’s signing of Foster, no team signed Hunt, initially. Nevertheless, questions arose as to why the league and the Chiefs had not acted sooner. An NFL representative explained that “it had been investigating the incident… since February,” but had been stymied because the NFL’s investigators could not obtain the necessary evidence. Law enforcement authorities, hotel management, and the victim herself had all refused to cooperate. As it had done in the Ray Rice case, the league characterized the TMZ video as “new information.”

Hunt later admitted to having lied to the Chiefs about the incident. For nine months, though, the NFL had not even interviewed Hunt about the matter. League officials said they wanted to gather other unspecified evidence first. When asked, Commissioner Goodell noted that it was against league policy to pay for video evidence documenting the incident.

The Washington Post in an editorial quoted Kathy Redmond, the founder of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes: “`These are non-investigations. It goes back to willful ignorance, and arrogance and hubris on the part of the NFL.’” The Post added: “That Washington’s football team saw no problem – only opportunity – in claiming star linebacker Reuben Foster… speaks volumes about what the league really values.”

Nonetheless, the Cleveland Browns, following Daniel Snyder’s lead in Washington, signed Hunt to a contract. Many months after the attack, the NFL suspended Hunt for eight games. The initial length of the punishment was curious since Foster had only been fined. The one major difference, though, appeared to have been the impact of the TMZ video on the NFL’s image, especially since Hunt had lied to his former team. Nonetheless, like Foster, ultimately Hunt will be rewarded with a multi-million dollar contract.

Tyreek Hill: Another Adrian Peterson Moment

While the Hunt matter was still being concluded, another Kansas City Chief star player, wide receiver Tyreek Hill, became the suspect in an Adrian Peterson moment. Someone in the Hill household allegedly broke his son’s arm. The investigation focused on both Hill and his fiancée. Previously police had been called to that home regarding a child abuse or neglect complaint, but no arrest had been made. Previously in college Hill had been dismissed from Oklahoma State’s football team for what the Washington Post described as “punching and choking his pregnant girlfriend”—the mother of the injured boy. At the time, Hill had pled guilty to domestic violence, but was placed on probation rather than in jail.

In the current case, prosecutors declined to file criminal charges because they could not determine whether it was Hill or his fiancée who had injured their child. Neither parent would cooperate with the police. The district attorney said he was “deeply troubled by this situation and [was] concerned about the health and welfare of the child… We believe a crime has occurred.” A few months later Hill signed a 3-year, $54 million extension with the Chiefs.

The NFL’s decision to take no action against Hill was alarming. Hill’s prior history of domestic violence; and his apparent unwillingness to cooperate in the investigations by law enforcement and the NFL should have been unacceptable. Without further explanation, which has never been offered, the strong implication is that either Hill committed another act of domestic violence, this time against his son, or his fiancée did and Hill was protecting her from prosecution. Either way his actions were placing his child in serious jeopardy. The Commissioner should have demanded that Hill explain what happened and then suspended him indefinitely if he refused to cooperate.

Antonio Brown and Rape Allegations

How the New England Patriots and the league mishandled rape allegations against super star wide receiver Antonio Brown was disappointing, especially since that team’s owner Robert Kraft had recently been in the national news due to his own sex scandal. Yet, as Michael Powell wrote in The New York Times the response was “perfectly on brand,” meaning it exemplified how that team and the league conduct their business.

Unlike many awful behaviors by NFL players, which have been ignored or marginalized over many months, this episode was resolved in less than two weeks, but the outcome was no less concerning. In September 2019 a woman filed a civil lawsuit in a Florida federal court accusing Brown of repeated sexual misconduct, including rape. The alleged victim was his former personal trainer, who said in her complaint that she had informed three other people about those incidents. Brown’s lawyers categorically denied the allegations. They argued that any sexual activity between the two was “entirely consensual” and said the accuser was in it for the “money.”

Brown had just been traded to the New England Patriots from Oakland the day before, following a week in which the super star had been making bizarre statements, followed by a demand that he be traded. The Patriots issued a press release asserting that the NFL would be investigating the sexual misconduct allegations against Brown. Jerry Brewer of the Washington Post captured many football fans reaction to this NFL melodrama. Brown, he wrote, was being “`misunderstood’” He needs compassion. Most importantly, though, let him “[j]ust play football – and give us back this NFL season.” Missing from Brewer’s concern for Brown was any mention of the alleged rape, much less concern for his accuser.

Brown continued to practice with the Patriots and played in the next game. A few days later, though, the New York Times reported that another woman had just met with NFL security officials to complain that two years ago she had “endured unwelcome sexual advances from Brown.” Brown recently had sent her texts that “she found intimidating.” In light of the mounting bad publicity surrounding the player, the Patriots released Brown saying only that the team felt it was “best to move in a different direction.” His agent Drew Rosenhaus, understanding how the NFL operates, tweeted “unfortunate[ly] things did not work out with the Patriots, but Antonio is healthy and looking forward to his next opportunity in the N.F.L.”

To date, Commissioner Goodell has not decided whether Brown will even be suspended. The only thing that seems certain is that if he wants to, Brown will be signing a multi-million dollar contract to play in the NFL again.

THE NCAA DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH, METHINKS
Academic Integrity in Intercollegiate Sports is a Big Fat Lie

Introduction

Academic integrity, which for decades has been promoted as a pillar of college sports, suffered another blow with disturbing revelations that an unknown number of college head coaches have been bribed to designate sub par and even fake privileged athletes for acceptance at an unknown number of elite universities and colleges. Once again the NCAA and the affected university and college presidents and administrators, along with their athletic departments, had no clue about the stench of academic corruption wafting underneath their deliberately stuffed noses.

Those who plan and implement these types of vile scenarios to defraud others on behalf of the wealthy correctly surmised that college sports and their coaches would be easy pickings. It would be almost as easy—and unconscionable—as their schemes for having high school students pretend to have disabilities in order to cheat on SAT and ACT exams.

Given the alarming probability that this type of academic fraud and bribery in college sports programs is widespread, one would hope that the NCAA will take constructive actions to comprehensively address this situation by: (1) sanctioning the offending college programs; (2) initiating a more in-depth investigation to determine how pervasive this type of corruption is; and (3) putting protocols in place to prevent this from happening again, and again, and again. If the past is any indication, however, the NCAA is likely to do almost nothing in response to these latest disclosures about academic corruption in college sports.

Instead, the NCAA, which is run by the college presidents and athletic departments that are the biggest offenders, will simply wait for the FBI’s investigations and isolated federal prosecutions to run their course before acting, obsequiously. That delay will allow all the privileged parties directly benefiting from college sports programs at these elite universities and colleges to embrace some sort of pathetic defense of their actions, such as: (1) the universities and colleges are the real victims of this admissions fraud; (2) the American legal process has acted aggressively in uncovering academic fraud; and/or (3) academic integrity remains a key principle of college sports.

At the same time, the NCAA and its privileged university and college members will start preparing for the next academic corruption scandal associated with their sports programs, having gained new insights on how such matters can be better hidden from view. Serious academic fraud in college sports has been uncovered, repeatedly, for decades at many different types of public and private universities and colleges. This corruption has enveloped academic elites like Yale, Harvard, Stanford, North Carolina, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, and Wake Forest, and the not so elites like Auburn, Oklahoma State, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse, Baylor, Georgia Southern, and Missouri.

For many years, sports-related academic fraud in higher education has been described as an “epidemic” with few signs that it is letting up, or being treated aggressively. Yet, year after year after year the NCAA does little or nothing or, as with the Rice Report recommendations, chooses to focus on one relatively small part of the overall disease, while letting most of the plague escape detection and serious treatment. The NCAA and its member schools have been conducting an elaborate shell game, which has made it nearly impossible for those trying to protect academic integrity to be successful.

During this endless epidemic there have been three major areas that have incubated academic fraud and bribery in college sports: recruiting; admissions; and maintaining the eligibility of those athlete-students who gain admission. The corruption and related abuses infect almost every institution of higher learning that does not intentionally de-emphasize the value of college sports by banning athletic scholarships and the far less rigorous admission standards that are applied to these mostly privileged athletes.

Academic Fraud in College Sports Has Been An Epidemic for Nearly a Century

The college sports scandal of the moment has been especially newsworthy because it publicly reveals a much neglected form of athletic corruption that focuses on academically elite universities and colleges. This revelation should not have been a surprise because since the early 1900’s, the devastating effects of intercollegiate sports on academic integrity have been documented, repeatedly, without producing lasting improvements.

In 1906, for example, the famed historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, blasted college football as a business “carried on … by professionals, supported by [public] levies… [that brings] in vast… receipts, demoralize[s]… ethics, and confus[s] the ideals of sport, manliness, and decency.” Subsequently many other alarming sentiments have been voiced and echoed over a multitude of generations about almost all intercollegiate sports, not just big time football and basketball.

Carnegie Study in 1929

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching extensively documented the rapid growth and increasing importance of college athletics in its landmark study published in 1929. This voluminous report catalogued the evolution of intercollegiate sports and athletics from the end of the Nineteenth Century until the Depression. As W.H. Cowley described many years later in the Journal of Higher Education, even then “the struggle for control” of intercollegiate athletic events had become critically important to colleges and universities in order to compete “academically” for the best students. Major college sports, especially football, had acquired enduring professional and commercial characteristics in order to achieve athletic success, promote their universities and colleges, and, above all else, to make money.

Among educators the fundamental concern was whether this commitment of time and resources to sports was diluting the pursuit of the “intellectual-life,” which was sanguinely viewed as the “primary purpose” of colleges and universities. The question the Carnegie report asked was not whether college sports should exist, but whether “a university that foster[ed] professional athletics [could fully] discharge its primary function?”

The report found that intercollegiate sports were corrupting essential academic values. Competitive sports interfered with student studies, encouraged colleges to hire coaches who had “an undesirable cultural influence upon their charges,” and produced a “demoralizing and corrupt” system in which athletes were recruited and subsidized like professionals, especially in football. The only major college to drop football was the University of Chicago in 1939.

Undoubtedly the reason other elite schools did not follow this righteous path was self-evident in the Carnegie report itself. Sports were a boon for those overwhelmingly privileged college students who played them “[I]n the race for life” intercollegiate athletes did as “well” as everyone else with a college degree. In those days, a vast majority of student-athletes graduated—even the football players. “Life” with a college degree was likely to be far more lucrative and cushy than becoming a professional.

The Knight Commissions’ Futility

Throughout the rest of the Twentieth Century, journalists and scholars frequently warned about the steady decline in educational values at colleges and universities attributed to intercollegiate sports, particularly football, and some years later, basketball. Nevertheless, after the Carnegie report, no organized academic response was forthcoming until the Knight Commission on the Future of Intercollegiate Athletics was convened in the early 1990’s. During the intervening decades, commercial values, corruption, and other abuses had become an ever-present part of the operations of big-time college athletics. The problems had grown much worse.

The university and college presidents, who dominated the new Commission, made a seemingly persuasive argument that would have grave consequences later. They convened under the premise that if the presidents of the worst offending schools controlled their athletic departments that would fix most of the problems that had been identified. From the outset that type of quick fix was too easy, too convenient, and implausible.

More importantly, the Knight Commission’s approach substantially downplayed the corrupting influences of all the money that television was injecting into the NCAA and the universities that sponsored and profited from these big time college sports programs. The NCAA then brazenly adopted only part of the Commission’s recommendations by placing even more control of the revenue-producing sports in the hands of the presidents of the Division IA universities and colleges that produced the lion’s share of the revenues, corruption, and abuses.

Instead of providing the worst offending programs with heightened, independent scrutiny, the NCAA gave the presidents and chancellors of those universities and colleges increasing power to make decisions that collectively benefited their privileged institutions. Not surprisingly, the various boards of regents and other comparable entities that did the hiring of presidents at these Division IA schools were finding individuals to fill leadership positions, who believed that when it came to promoting big-time sports and the revenues and donations they generated, athletic interests should override academic values.

The new role for the presidents and chancellors at these schools was to provide support and cover for high profile head coaches and their athletic departments, while espousing nonsense, deceptions, and half-truths about their universities’ devotion to academic values and the academic progress of student-athletes. Thus, these university leaders became a major part of the sports corruption problem, rather than the solution. As Ohio State President Gordon Gee would famously remark years later when asked whether he would fire Jim Tressel, after the head football coach had become embroiled in a NCAA rules violations scandal, “I’m just hoping the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”

In 2001 the Knight Commission reconvened and issued an even more discouraging report. Its members publicly acknowledged that their original premise had been misguided. The Commission’s revised recommendation was to leverage cost containment strategies to ameliorate the corruption. The idea was to try to deter the majority of universities and colleges that were not making a profit on their athletic programs from wasting more money and further undermining academic values. The truth was that most college athletic departments were losing lots of money. The fundamental problem with this approach, though, was that their recommendations, like those of the Rice Commission, could not be implemented without the consent of the NCAA and its Division IA members who were benefiting the most.

Moreover, the abuses were not just confined to Division I sports. As William Bowen and James Schulman, two scholars with Ivy League ties concluded in The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (2002)—based on a comprehensive survey and analysis of intercollegiate sports at colleges and universities throughout the country—student-athletes were less prepared academically than other students because their priorities were different. Too many of them were athletes first and students second, if at all.

As has been pointed out frequently since then, the term student-athlete is too often a misnomer. Many of them should be called athlete-students, who function as pseudo-professionals, but without a salary and other monetary benefits that their athletic talents and images generate.

Many of the most pernicious academic scandals in history have occurred since the second Knight Commission issued its report, which was aptly subtitled “The Arms Race” to highlight the competitions among college athletic programs for athletes, dollars, and victories. The escalating transgressions have centered on three areas of campus life: recruitment of athletes; maintaining eligibility of athletes; and lax and unsavory admission standards for athletes and pseudo-athletes

Recruiting Offenses

The FBI investigation of the endemic bribes and fraud in the recruitment of college basketball players, which seems to be ending with a whimper rather than a bang, did reveal one of the most sordid aspects of recruitment that went beyond just money. Apparently Louisville and a number of other universities and colleges, through their athletic departments, had been enticing recruits by offering them call girls and other “hostesses” for the evening.

While the FBI investigation was confined to basketball, the shenanigans that have been reported about the football programs at schools like Miami, Oklahoma State, Baylor, and Tennessee suggest that these entertainment options are not confined to high school basketball players alone. Nor is bribery and fraud confined to college basketball. The list of football schools that have been caught engaging in criminal and other illicit recruitment activities could not fit on one typed sheet of paper. A much shorter list would be of those super conference schools that have not been caught cheating in the recruitment of football, basketball, and other players and athletes.

So given this legacy of recruitment-related corruption that has been going on for decades what have been the official responses as of late? The federal presence has been typical of its infrequent prosecutions of sports figures: make big headlines with the rare investigations, but dole out minimal or no punishments to the white collar offenders, especially the high profile individuals and institutions most responsible for creating the cultures that allow this type of corruption to be so rampant. While there may or may not be some trials in the future, including one tied to LSU head basketball coach Will Wade, the major federal college basketball prosecution in New York City has turned out to be a dud.

As Barry Svrluga concluded in the Washington Post, “this FBI investigation – announced with such fanfare in September 2017 – has hardly blown up college basketball. Yeah, Rick Pitino no longer coaches Louisville. But no other coaches have lost their jobs. If college basketball was supposed to be shaken to its core, it ended up registering a 1.0 on the Richter scale.” In addition, the only individuals tried for a crime—a global marketing manager at Adidas, a low level Adidas employee, and an aspiring agent—all received sentences of nine months or less, which could be further reduced for good behavior, or as a result of appeals.

The NCAA has dealt with these recruiting problems by circling its wagons around the anemic Rice Commission recommendations that mostly pertain to college basketball, all but ignoring football and other revenue-generating sports. Also, the major thrust of those basketball recommendations is to preserve the NCAA’s archaic notions of amateurism, rather than to snuff out rampant corruption. Making matters worse, once again the NCAA is relying on its presidents and chancellors to fix these problems, even though they have enabled these recruiting abuses in the past. This time these NCAA empowered leaders are required to “certify” that the athletic programs at their schools comply with NCAA rules—or else?

Maintaining the Eligibility of College Athletes

If students overcome the challenges of poverty, race, and/or disability and gain admission into four-year colleges, but receive special assistance to help them adjust and thrive in foreign environments, this is looked down upon by many of the same people who support expensive special programs, cheating, and even outright academic fraud to keep talented athletes eligible to compete for their schools. Yet, what disadvantaged students from challenging environments receive is only a fraction of the “assistance” that talented athletes are showered with while they are in college.

To begin with, in order to compete for the most talented athletes, it has become a given that a university or college must have special athlete-specific academic programs, which are not supervised too closely, except to determine whether eligibility is being maintained. Many universities and colleges with big time sports programs have buildings, a variety of tutors, computers, and other support services that only designated athletes may utilize. In these lax, athlete-only academic environments, the ends pretty much overwhelm any concerns about the means. Too often this type of privilege is also accompanied by deliberate cheating and academic fraud.

In 2011, for instance, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Stanford University, which is known globally for its academics, had been publishing lists of easy classes for athletes to take as part of the services its provides athletes through the Athletic Academic Resources Center. According to the university’s website, the Resources Center was “equipped with a computer cluster, large study tables and comfortable seating…for student-athletes who come for academic advising, to study, to check e-mail or course assignments on line, to be tutored, or to relax between class time and practice.”

The Center was staffed by the Academic Director for Student-Athletes and the Assistant Academic Director for Student-Athletes. Among other benefits, it provided “a study table open to all Stanford student-athletes. On hand …are experienced math, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, and writing tutors ready to assist athletes with any of their academic needs.” In addition, student-athletes are divided into study groups and each group is provided with “an undergraduate mentor and a graduate student mentor, [who] are likely to be current and former student-athletes.”

One outraged Stanford professor observed in the SF Chronicle, the school “accommodates athletes in the manner that they accommodate students with disabilities.” Even this criticism, though, misses the mark. Students with disabilities often have to fight to receive legally-mandated assistance, which is bestowed upon privileged athlete-students as a means of ensuring that they sign with Stanford and stay eligible to compete.

The many advantages Stanford has long provided its athletes are now not only considered academically tolerable, but have been copied and exceeded at many other universities and colleges with big time athletic programs. Since 2013 the University of Maryland has had the Gossett Center for Academic & Personal Excellence. In April 2018, Barry and Mary Gossett donated an additional $21.25 million to fund that Center.

As Maryland’s athletic director Damon Evans explained, because of the “Gossett Center, we will be positioned better than ever to recruit and retain world-class athletes.” The Center’s vision as expressed on its website “is to be the best intercollegiate athletics program… Each team is assigned… counseling staff to meet with throughout their tenure at the University of Maryland. In addition, each student-athlete has an academic advisor within their declared major department... [These] academic counselors … address the unique academic and career development needs of student-athletes.”

If this type of academic privilege is not bad enough, the cheating and fraud around its margins has been both appalling and never ending. Many people now know what happened at the University of North Carolina for twenty years and about the blatant athlete-related academic violations at numerous schools including Oklahoma State, USC, Syracuse, and Missouri. Yet, these academic offenses and related transgressions are not confined to super conference programs. In recent years major academic athletic transgressions have polluted a wide variety of prestigious academic institutions. Harvard and Binghamton University in New York are two glaring examples.

While the 2012 academic scandal at Harvard focused on its basketball team, it was reported in the New York Times that “dozens of varsity athletes” appeared to have been involved “in a widespread academic cheating scandal” including football, baseball, and hockey players. At Binghamton, the offenses were limited to the basketball team, but repercussions were felt throughout the New York university system. Pete Thamel in the Times described it as a story of “how a runaway sports program can poison campus life, make a mockery of academic values and leave the administration’s reputation in ruins.” Unfortunately, “runaway sports programs” at colleges and universities are less the exception than the rule.

The Binghamton scandal began after the university had decided to upgrade its intercollegiate basketball program to Division I. In order to maintain eligibility for academically unqualified athletes cheating became second nature. When the university asked an official representing the athletic department about players’ class attendance, he replied ‘[w]hy do you care if we take six players who don’t attend classes?’” Despite all the academic violations, the NCAA was only concerned that a player may have received an improper benefit because an assistant coach had provided him “with money for gas and… [for] a court fine after [the player’s] arrest on charges of stealing condoms from a Wal-Mart.”

College Admissions Violations

Given all the crimes and other transgressions that have been uncovered related to recruitment and improperly maintaining athlete eligibility, it was almost inevitable that a college sports scandal involving the admission of unqualified athletes would become national news. The playbook for the latest spate of academic offenses may well have emerged from the largely successful attempts to subvert Title IX by recruiting unqualified female athletes to make it appear that college athletic departments were providing equal opportunities for athletes regardless of sex.

A corrupt college sports program environment exists in which fraud can be perpetrated for a long time without consequences, and even then the penalties are slaps on the wrists, rather than strong deterrents. Division I schools have long engaged in subterfuges to create the appearance that they are making substantial progress under Title IX when in many ways they have been losing ground. Congresswoman Donna Shalala as president of the University of Miami warned that “universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught.”

One of the more blatant, but widespread, deceptions university and college athletic departments have engaged in is what has been loosely referred to as “roster management.” According to a 2011 New York Times study, a large number of Division I programs were “padding women’s team rosters with underqualified… athletes… [and]… counting male practice players as women.” Forty-eight programs were actually caught “double-and triple-counting women… to mask the fact that they have fewer female athletes.” It is a safe bet many more programs were implementing similar schemes, which were never publicly identified.

One of those deceptions has been the admission of non-competitive and fake athletes of privilege under lax admission standards intended for elite athletic performers. Like gender equality fraud in college athletics, admissions fraud at universities and colleges that reject a vast majority of non-athlete applicants has focused on non-revenue generating sports. It has been well-known in recruiting circles that both scholarship and non-scholarship athletes designated by coaches for admission, all other factors being equal, have a substantial, and sometimes huge, advantage in being accepted by a university or college. Designated athletes, who meet minimal academic requirements, are likely to be admitted at these schools, while highly qualified non-athletes are often rejected.

The key to any successful fraud scheme is to pick an approach that is not likely to be scrutinized or raise red flags. Admissions fraud utilizing athletic programs was a near perfect match for criminal entrepreneurs. Intercollegiate sports are ripe for fraud, other crimes, and corruption. The NCAA enforcement model encourages university and college officials and athletic departments to look the other way when bad things happen. The audacity of the coaches and other officials at the universities and colleges implicated in the FBI’s limited investigation is only surpassed by the lack of institutional controls in place to catch and deter such blatant transgressions.

Schools that the FBI investigation ensnared included super conference members, such as Stanford, USC, UCLA, the University of Texas, and Wake Forest, as well as academically-oriented private institutions, like Yale, Georgetown, Boston University, and Northeastern. The infected sports were mostly those that are played by white athletes of privilege, such as tennis, water polo, soccer, and volleyball. As described in the New York Times, USC quickly “emerged at the epicenter of an unfolding college admissions scandal involving federal charges of bribery cheating and parents who were willing to pay thousands of dollars to get their underperforming children into some of the nation’s top universities.”

About half of the 50 underperforming students, whose parents face charges of paying bribes to create fake admissions credentials for them, were admitted to USC, no stranger to athletic scandals. All of them were accused of gaining their acceptances by pretending to be elite athletes when they clearly were not. Four USC athletic department officials were charged, including a top administrator, Donna Heinel. As the department’s director of admissions and eligibility, Heinel allegedly shepherded the applications through the special acceptance process reserved for designated athletes. Because she preached and even taught adherence to the NCAA rules governing the admission of athlete-students, Heinel’s recommendations to the admissions office were rarely questioned. It was more like a rubber stamp than a legitimate academic review.

Ultimately from a college sports point of view, this latest admissions scandal turned out to be about how privileged athletes, or privileged students masquerading as athletes, are able to game the system to be admitted to elite universities and colleges without satisfying the academic standards most other applicants must meet. It also is about the systemic lack of scrutiny that university and college athletic programs receive from the NCAA and school officials in the recruitment, admission, and education of athlete-students and student-athletes.

Unfortunately, nothing seems to change much in college sports until the academic transgressions become too glaring to ignore. Thereafter the recommended improvements tend to be empty promises or wholly inadequate to deter future schemes. Academic integrity is never restored, at least not for very long.

  FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, SPORTS GAMBLING--
   LIKE MARIJUANA USE—IS HERE TO STAY©
John Weston Parry

Overview

It was practically inevitable that gambling would stage a massive comeback in sports, as long as the costs and potential penalties for doing so became manageable. This pleasant dream or nightmare—depending on one’s view—may be fully realized soon, if either: the U.S. Supreme Court sides with the state of New Jersey to legalize sports gambling; or Congress repeals or amends the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA). PASPA prohibits sports gambling, but curiously not in all jurisdictions, nor in all sports. Congress apparently continues to believe that equal coverage and protection of our laws need not apply to sports or gambling.

For years betting or gaming either in Las Vegas or on horses, Jai alai, and fantasy sports has been treated differently than other forms of gambling. Recently several of our major professional leagues, most notably the NFL, have decided that it is now okay to allow teams to locate in Las Vegas, the sports gambling center of the Western World. These leagues are using their entry into the “sin city” as a global marketing opportunity, in part because domestic television sports viewers seems to be shrinking. NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, who continues to be viewed in the media as more of a saint then a sinner, has been leading the sports gambling legalization charge.

If that were to happen, our major professional team sports will make huge amounts of easy money. Our major professional leagues, like many state governments, want a share of those fast accumulating profits.

A Brief History of Sports Gambling in America

The reason sports gambling became so controversial is that it once threatened to destroy the integrity, community standing, and funding streams of our most popular team sports. (Certain individual sports—especially boxing, horse racing, and Jai alai—had less integrity to lose, so the threat was not perceived in the same way.) Two of the nation’s most publicized sports gambling scandals occurred some thirty years apart in professional baseball and college basketball, respectively. Both scandals involved the fixing of games, which helped give rise to the creation of strong executive authorities to protect those sports from the potential ravages of organized crime. Judge Keenesaw “Mountain” Landis became baseball’s first commissioner in 1920 and Walter Byers assumed the reigns of the NCAA in 1951.

The Black Sox Scandal, also known as “The Big Fix,” proved to be the most notorious sports gambling episode in our history. Not only did the scandal involve baseball, America’s pastime in those days, but its fame would be resurrected in John Sayles 1988 movie Eight Men Out. As with several modern day scandals in which criminal law was applied to major professional and collegiate sports in highly publicized cases—O.J. Simpson, Penn State, and Jameis Winston, for example—many implausible or inexplicable circumstances mysteriously intervened, producing legally unsatisfying results.

While previously there had been numerous rumors about gamblers using baseball players to obtain inside information to hedge their bets, what transpired in 1919 when a number of Chicago White Sox players allegedly took bribes to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Red Legs was a quantum leap worse. The sacrificial lambs for this broken trust turned out to be the now infamous slugger, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and seven other White Sox players, all of whom were indicted for conspiracy after confessing to a grand jury that they had received bribes from gamblers. Yet, all of those players were found not guilty when their written confessions vanished into thin air. A number of historians have speculated that Charles Comiskey, the White Sox’s owner, and the gangster, Arnold Rothstein, who ran sports gambling as one of his many operations, had hired individuals to steal the key evidence to protect their respective business interests.

Baseball Commissioner Landis, sensing the pulse of the nation and a growing threat to baseball, defied Comiskey, who was one of his most influential bosses, by ruling that “`[r]egardless of the verdict[s]… no player who throws a ballgame…, promises to throw a ball game… or sits in conference where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed …will ever play professional baseball.” All eight players were banned from baseball for life, even though the evidence was equivocal that they had actually thrown any games. Shoeless Jackson’s most persuasive defense was that he had hit a lofty .375 during the Series. Nevertheless, Landis never relented. The precedent he set probably played a significant role in Pete Rose’s lifetime ban from baseball in 1989 for gambling on games involving the team he had played for and was now coaching, the Cincinnati Reds.

In many ways the second most famous sports gambling scandal was considerably more pernicious. It involved the widespread fixing of college basketball games. From 1947 through 1951 nearly three dozen players were accused of taking money to shave points and occasionally to even lose games. The most shocking accusations surrounded the University of Kentucky, the nation’s best college basketball program at the time, and its Hall of Fame coach, Adolph Rupp. Much like today, too often the worst offenses in collegiate sports are committed by the teams that are most successful.

The charges against Kentucky were so damning that the university decided—with a push from new NCAA executive director, Walter Byers—to suspend its basketball program for the entire 1952-53 season. Nevertheless, even though two of his players admitted accepting bribes throughout their collegiate careers and that they had deliberately caused their team to lose the then very prestigious National Invitation Tournament, Rupp refused to accept any responsibility. He, as did other college basketball coaches in that era, blamed society. Rupp contended that since this type of corruption was widespread in business and politics, it was inevitable that it would be present in basketball and other sports as well. It was a clever, if not a logically persuasive, defense for bad behaviors that over the years collegiate coaches and other sports figures have adopted repeatedly.

Fantasy Sports Rejuvenate Sports Gambling

Since the collegiate basketball point-shaving and game-throwing revelations of the late 1940’s and early 50’s, gambling crimes, with a few notable exceptions, have been well-contained in major team sports. The few public instances of gambling-related criminal associations and behaviors with professional and collegiate athletics have involved single individuals, most notably Pete Rose and former NBA referee Tim Donaghy. The game-changer in terms of redefining America’s tightrope act with sports gambling has been the advent of fantasy leagues, which originated in the early 1980’s as a quaint pastime known as Rotisserie baseball.

By the mid-1990’s, though, there were a slew of fantasy games of chance involving many other sports as well, especially football and basketball. What made this type of gambling different was the camaraderie among participants, the virtual competitive connections to professional and collegiate sports, and its vast expansion on the Internet. It began as leagues of individuals, but soon became online games of chance managed and manipulated by corporations, many utilizing off-shore accounts.

As with most types of gaming for dollars there is a substantial element of chance in fantasy sports, but to win consistently many of these games require focused intelligence and/or access to not widely circulated information, similar to card-counting in poker or twenty-one. Unlike card-counting, though, no one has their legs broken or can be arrested for playing the game too well. In that sense fantasy sports are a shark’s dream, especially if the shark owns a website devoted to allowing competitors to play against a house that almost always wins.

Fantasy sports are heavily weighted in terms of participants towards young, adult, college educated, Caucasian males. In other words, people who are comfortable with risk and have money in their pockets to burn. Of the estimated nearly 60 million North Americans who gamble on these virtual sports, reportedly two-thirds play fantasy football, which is more popular than all the other American fantasy sports combined. These gambling games are becoming a global phenomenon as well, especially fantasy soccer, basketball, golf, and tennis.

The largely unregulated expansion of gambling through fantasy sports is insidious. Dan Okrent, the individual who is credited with founding Rotisserie baseball, has famously lamented: “I feel the way J. Robert Oppenheimer felt after having invented the atomic bomb: if I’d only known this plague that I’ve visited upon the world….”

What has made this particularly gaming industry so challenging, domestically, is that it has existed largely outside the scope of state and federal laws that regulate other gaming enterprises. As with professional and collegiate sports, few politicians have been willing to pass measures to place restrictions on this increasingly popular industry. Sports networks cover the fantasy elements of football—and other popular sports as well—as if the virtual reality is as meaningful as the games themselves. This new gambling element, which is supported in many different ways by the NFL and ignored by the NCAA, helps ensure that even with professional and collegiate football match-ups that have little consequence in terms of the winning or losing titles or championships, there is a core group of concerned betters and gamers who are likely to be tuned-in.

The popularity of fantasy sports leagues and websites has dramatically altered the moral calculus when it comes to sports gambling. In particular it has muted the negative association of gambling and gamblers with professional and collegiate sports. This is one important reason why politicians are now willing to push for measures to expand the legalization of this type of betting, and professional leagues are maneuvering to increase their gambling-related market shares by moving to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas Was a Red Line No Major Professional League Would Cross, Until It Wasn’t

Major professional leagues deciding to locate in Las Vegas has altered the political climate towards sports gambling, almost as much as fantasy football. For years league commissioners warned of the hazards of Vegas, even though players, coaches, and owners were known to visit the sin city on more than the rare occasion. Las Vegas has become one of the most publicized vacation destinations for high profile professional and collegiate athletes, in large part because of its readily accessible vices. If one wants to gather inside gambling information about players on various professional teams, Las Vegas is a very good place to be. Loose lips not only sink ships, but they also can affect the betting odds. This is why until recently the idea of marrying sports teams with Vegas was viewed as being reckless. It was a red line no major professional league was willing to cross.

That all began to change, though, after the sin city started to court professional franchises promising huge public subsidies. In addition, those sports leagues realized that being in Las Vegas was no longer a public relations nightmare. More importantly, Vegas could provide them with a global presence since relatively wealthy individuals from around the world flock there for a good time. The first coordinated attempt occurred in 2014 when the Las Vegas mayor attempted to attract a Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise by promising to publicly finance the building of a $200 million soccer stadium. The underlying motivation for spending so much on soccer appeared to have been that local politicians believed having an MLS team would make it easier to attract more established leagues, most notably the NFL.

Many city residents mired in far more serious social problems that needed immediate attention, including a woeful public education system, voiced their strong opposition to such an expenditure of public funds. MLS, after gauging local resistance and the potential for bad publicity, decided to pass on Las Vegas as the site of one of its new franchises. Nevertheless, a few month later the National Hockey League approved a Vegas expansion team to be run by a consortium of owners, two of whom—the Maloof brothers—had substantial financial ties to a local casino. The league and consortium were so eager to capitalize on being the first professional team in that city they did not even demand a substantial public subsidy. Their eagerness soon turned to envy, anger, and market-share concern, however, when the NFL engineered a sweetheart deal to relocate the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas in 2020 for many hundreds of millions of public dollars to be split by the team and the remaining league owners.

The Las Vegas sports gambling red line seems to have been obliterated when America’s favorite sports league decided to warmly embrace what had once been forbidden. For sin city gaming interests, though, the NFL’s move actually may result in more competition, especially if either the Supreme Court or Congress decide to permit the expansion of sports gambling into virgin jurisdictions. Yet, all of the various sports gambling interests are likely to see their profits rise in the wake of any substantial judicial and/or political victories. As noted earlier, “the house almost always wins,” meaning sports gamblers almost always lose, too often in repetitive, reckless, or addictive ways.

LOCKER ROOMS, PRESIDENT TRUMP, AND SEXUAL OFFENSES IN THE SPECTATOR SPORTS WORLD ©
  John Weston Parry

Introduction

While members of the movie business and the spectator sports world tend to be on different sides of the political spectrum—more liberal vs. more conservative—they are both part of male-dominated entertainment industries in which sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and other abuses of females have been rampant for decades. Harvey Weinstein now represents the egregious behaviors in the movie industry, while many athletes, millions of fans, and President Trump convey a predatory locker room mentality.

In many ways, though, the sexual harassment, abuse, exploitation and denigration in sports is worse because it seems to include more acts of physical violence and implicates a much larger segment of the American male population. This social cancer goes far beyond the boundaries of the newly-named “Me Too” movement, which in sports is exemplified by multiple allegations that a team doctor sexually molested numerous American female gymnasts, including Olympic medalist, McKayla Maroney.

Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post articulated, with resounding clarity, that it is not only the men and boys who commit these offenses that are at fault. It is every male who does not challenge predatory behaviors when they are committed and denigrating words when they are uttered. This obvious, but understated principle of engagement, applies to sexism in all its forms.

If one were to measure invidious discrimination in male spectator sports according to the number of people who are victimized and the seriousness of the offenses, sexism—including harassment and physical and sexual assaults—would constitute the worst type of discrimination. There is a natural physical imbalance between males and females as well, which makes it easier for boys and men—especially athletes who tend to be bigger, faster, and stronger—to physically overwhelm girls and women. Also, too many athletes and former athletes continue to denigrate female athletes and other women who are trying to gain entry into the male-dominated sports professions.

It can no longer be reasonably denied that male spectator sports are incubators of bad behaviors towards females. Football has been at the epicenter of the most publicized transgressions, but these transgressions occur in almost all male spectator sports, especially those in which locker rooms and segregated meeting places play a central role. Like fraternities and boy’s and men’s clubs, there is something pathological about the locker room mentality, which precipitates bad behaviors against females.

Due to the higher levels of testosterone and machismo, these sexist attitudes tend to be even worse in locker rooms and other private areas for male athletes. Those attitudes tend to be taught and then fester in these insulated homogeneous environments. One of the worst insults for a male, especially an athlete, is being called a pussy,” while female athletes who happen to have a natural over-abundance of testosterone continue to be viewed as cheaters. Not surprisingly, the resulting bad behaviors that target women and girls remain widespread. They extend not only to the sports world, but boardrooms, offices, professions, religions, the military, law enforcement and other American social institutions. Like guns and violence, this aggressive form of sexism has become a serious public health problem.

Male Locker Rooms Are Sanctuaries for Sexist Behaviors

In the enthusiasm to publicize the sordid legacy of Harvey Weinstein and the movie industry, the sexual exploits of our President, which should be even more disturbing, have escaped a comparable level of attention and scrutiny. President Trump’s sexual bad behaviors can be directly tied to his locker room mentality. What follows is an updated version of an essay that was posted on this website page last February with an emphasis on bad behaviors in sports that target women and girls.

Locker room morality took center stage, vanished, and reappeared during the 2016 presidential elections. This happened after excerpts of a 2005 taped conversation were revealed in which then private citizen, Donald Trump, reveled in his sexual misbehaviors and conquests. So far the alleged victims of the President’s exploits—unlike the women and girls Harvey Weinstein allegedly sexually harassed or assaulted—have not been taken seriously enough to ensure that President Trump is being held accountable.

An overriding issue—beyond the disqualifying nature of Trump’s words and actions for a President of the United States—should be the role of locker rooms, not only in facilitating and inculcating such beliefs, but also in tolerating and often embracing the bad behaviors that result. As the highly offensive and much publicized incendiary words of the academically privileged male student-athletes at Harvard, Washington University, and Columbia have demonstrated, there is a disquieting connection between locker room talk and sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and other related offenses that sully professional, college, and even high school athletics. Unfortunately, the President and his administration still appear to embrace this sports-related pathology, even while they threaten professional athletes, who dare to protest against racial injustice by symbolically kneeling during the National Anthem.

During the presidential election, the best response that candidate Trump thought he could give, in light of the emergence of his predatory words on tape, was to assert that he never had engaged in the sexual misbehaviors and crimes that he could be heard bragging about. The President claimed that his unfiltered comments were locker room banter. Boys will be boys he earnestly argued. Although not an elite athlete himself, President Trump has had a long and close relationship with sports, especially professional football and golf. On MTV he once bragged, “I was always a good athlete. I played football, baseball, soccer. I wrestled.” He also apparently dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player. In the 1980’s, he owned the New Jersey Generals, an unsuccessful team in the now defunct United States Football League. In recent years, he frequently has stood on the sidelines at New England Patriots games, and his golf empire appears to have made him a favorite among PGA players.

The President understands locker rooms and how they relate to one of his largest and most loyal constituencies: male sports fans. During the elections, Trump took advantage of the widespread perception—which was boosted by his victory—that what goes on in locker rooms must be praiseworthy because it represents the opposite of being politically correct. This aspect of the male-dominated sports culture may be distressing to many or even most Americans, especially women and girls, but, nonetheless, locker rooms remain a hallowed bastion of bravado and secrecy.

Apparently the President correctly calculated that his largely conservative male following would exult in his sexual exploits, while undecided women and evangelical men would give him the benefit of the doubt, if they could be convinced that his abhorrent words were challenges to political correctness, rather than a confession to having engaged in sexual assaults himself. The best way for Trump to accomplish that sleight of hand was to create the lasting impression that what he said he had done was similar to what many athletes reportedly say in locker rooms all the time—and should be encouraged to say. This was the President-to-be cleverly embracing innocence by association in order to concoct a conceivably plausible explanation for his reprehensible behaviors.

Initially, the presidential candidate’s locker-room defense seemed to misfire badly. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post skewered Trump’s hypocrisy. His words, she wrote, were “not the talk of leaders; it’s the talk of bandwagoners and wannabes who are trying to make some invisible Man Team.” Yet, in the end, Trump’s team won. It also turned out that the content of Trump’s words were little different than the mean-spirited and disparaging remarks that the relatively cerebral Harvard and Washington University soccer players and Columbia University wrestlers had been making about female students and female student-athletes.

While many male athletes and sports commentators quickly responded that what had happened at those elite universities was not typical of locker-room chatter, the argument was not particularly convincing. It is hard to believe that the values of most professional or major collegiate athletes tend to be more civilized than those of the implicated athletes at three of the most distinguished academic universities, which give out no athletic scholarships. In any case, the question of whether or not such degrading words represented typical locker room banter obscures a more fundamental issue: What tends to go on in these locker rooms and in the minds of these athletes?

One certainly would expect that most team leaders and their followers have evolved sufficiently—and are also aware enough—to understand, in a world of smart phones and a multitude of social media venues, that type of derogatory and predatory talk, if it becomes public, can diminish athletic incomes and create a firestorm of bad publicity. The almost instantaneous toppling of former Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, several years ago underscores the advisability of sports figures not engaging in socially reprehensible talk, even in their off-the- record conversations.

Today’s locker room privacy protocols were not so deeply ingrained in the sports culture a number of years ago when Donald Trump uttered his infamous predatory words. At the same time, the spectacle of male athletes in our most popular spectator sports sexually and physically assaulting women and girls continues to be a relatively common occurrence. Yet, it still has not become a normal practice for teammates or coaches to condemn those athletes who embrace such aberrant behaviors.

It is one thing to kneel during the National Anthem as a symbol of protest or solidarity, and quite another to call out a teammate in a way that might disrupt team chemistry or cast aspersions on a fellow athlete. Being a good teammate by withholding criticism in the face of offensive language and behaviors extends well-beyond the physical and mental space known as the locker-room, especially if the perpetrator is viewed as a valued contributor to a team. Typically these locker room dynamics are imprinted in high school, and sometimes earlier than that. Those unwritten rules and practices are reinforced and strengthened in college athletics and the professional ranks.

Revealing the sexist sins of a teammate is normally viewed in a much harsher light than the sins themselves. Predictably, many athletes and much of the spectator sports world deemed what President Trump said on tape as something that rarely would be expressed in a team locker room today, especially if anyone was able to record such a conversation. Even if that were generally true—which seems dubious in light of what male student-athletes in prestigious bastions of academia have been heard saying—that would be of little solace to those women and girls who have been harassed, abused, or assaulted as a result of the sexist behaviors our favorite spectator sports seem to cultivate.

Conclusion

One of the problems in trying to deal with sexual harassment, sexual crimes, and other forms of sexism has been the terminology, which often lacks specificity, leading to ambiguity, confusion, and due process equivocations. If anything a male does that a female does not want constitutes harassment and every type of non-consensual sex is classified as rape, then the ability of society and the law to draw meaningful distinctions tends to be marginalized to everyone’s detriment. There also is a logical difference between acknowledging that too many—or perhaps even a majority of—men and boys have engaged in some form of sexually harassing, violent, or denigrating behaviors towards women and girls and presuming a specific male is a sexual offender because one or more females have accused him of such a transgression. That determination should be left to the courts to decide, rather than in the media. Human nature is just too fragile, our sexual mores too ambiguous and confused, justifiable distrust and even loathing of men too widespread, and due process too important to presume—without rigorous scrutiny—that accusations should be equated with truth and reality.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that this country has a serious public health problem when it comes to sexism, sexual harassment and sexual abuse, especially in the spectator sports world. There is a malevolent culture that infects football and other American spectator sports played by men and boys. That malevolence negatively influences too many fans, young athletes, ex-athletes, and athlete “wannabes” like our President.

Transparency will not solve this growing social problem by itself, but it can lead to public revelations that will bring about changes that our courtrooms could never advance. Male athletes and coaches at all levels of play, and those who have unfiltered access to locker rooms and other private areas where athletes congregate, should speak out. In addition, the media should be fully engaged in uncovering and condemning sexist and violent attitudes and behaviors towards females in the sports world. This pathology that infects our sports culture needs to be transformed, and the sooner the better.

Under The NCAA's Watch: Sexual Crimes, Academic
Fraud, Drugs, Cover-ups, and Other Abuses©
 By John Weston Parry

While extravagant head coaching salaries, professionalizing athletic departments, unfair rules on amateurism, chaotic conference realignments, and the College Football Playoff have all raised legitimate concerns about the businesses of major intercollegiate sports, nothing has been as disturbing as the sexual crimes, widespread corruption, academic fraud, and cover-ups under the NCAA’s protective umbrella. Penn State was a human tragedy that highlighted bad behaviors throughout big-time intercollegiate sports.

What became lost in the firestorm of outrage against Penn State university officials, however, was the critical role the NCAA played in allowing this travesty of justice to occur. Since then the NCAA's lack of institutional control has become painfully apparent, time and time again.

For years, except for its arcane and self-serving rules on amateurism, the NCAA has largely: ignored or obscured bad behaviors, until after they have been publicized; provided cover and excuses—including for the worst offenders; favored what are now called the super-conference schools; and maintained an inept and arbitrary investigative and enforcement structure that often is directly influenced by the powerful athletic departments that the NCAA is supposed to be disciplining. More recently, there have been numerous, well-respected universities and colleges that have promoted themselves as being bastions of learning and integrity, which have looked the other way, pleaded ignorance, and/or deliberately obscured what was happening when their athletic departments and favored teams committed serious offenses.

Officials at these universities and colleges frequently have facilitated, participated in, or even engineered cover-ups. In this distorted world of major intercollegiate sports, plausible deniability masquerades as the truth. Numerous scandals involving various forms of malevolence—well after the child sexual abuses involving Penn State finally were revealed—have implicated football, basketball, and other key athletic programs at such schools as Baylor, Rutgers, Florida State, the Naval Academy, Vanderbilt, Miami, Notre Dame, Southern California, Ohio State, Minnesota, Oklahoma State, Auburn, North Carolina, Syracuse, Duke, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New York State University at Binghamton, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and many other universities and colleges.

Making matters worse, it appears likely that there have been numerous instances of serious transgressions, corruption, and cover-ups in various collegiate athletic programs that have never been revealed, at least not publicly. Given the lax and biased enforcement that often occurs when major intercollegiate sports programs are involved, the incidents that have been uncovered probably are only the tip of the iceberg. In addition, there has been a multiplicity of stories—almost daily—about alleged criminal, antisocial, and boorish behaviors by major college athletes, especially football and male basketball players. Sexual assaults and other types of violence appear to be regular occurrences.

Sadly the lingering question is whether, as certain die-hard intercollegiate alumni and other athletic supporters contend, the popularity of football and basketball help to identify these transgressions more easily or, as the mounting evidence strongly suggests, the cultures surrounding major intercollegiate sports breed such behaviors. There can be little doubt that too many of these elite athlete’s lack maturity—even when compared to other male college students—because they have been coddled, glorified, and regularly allowed to break rules without taking full—and sometimes any—responsibility for their actions.

They also have grown up in locker room cultures that condone and even embrace these bad behaviors and adolescent excesses. What teammates do in front of each other, no matter how vile, normally remains hidden by a gang-like code of silence. As discussed elsewhere, there is little or no transparency in this locker room culture.

The NCAA has addressed these serious behavioral problems in ways that seem to vacillate between being oblivious and self-serving and arbitrary and unfair, depending on the university, college, or individual that the organization has in its purview, and the type of offense or transgression that is involved. While far more serious crimes and bad behaviors have been going on—many of them undoubtedly undiscovered—the NCAA often has chosen to make examples of certain individuals and universities, who have done little wrong in a moral or legal sense, but have been caught up in the arcane rules and investigatory procedures that underscore the NCAA’s proclivity towards arbitrary, erratic, and face-saving enforcement.

The NCAA’s mantra appears to be: punish the defenseless and more vulnerable severely, so the more powerful athletic programs can pretty much violate the rules with impunity, or at least with a manageable cost of doing business that does little to hinder the generation of revenues or reform bad behaviors. With the NCAA in charge there is little or no due process for anyone, but especially the victims.

Incubating The NFL Culture of Violence and Sexual Assault in Super-Conference Football Programs

Unlike professional baseball, hockey, or basketball, which have their own minor leagues, for professional football the primary training grounds for NFL players is in college, mainly on the teams that now comprise the super conferences that are part of what is called the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). Thus, it should be no surprise that most of the same bad behaviors that are found in the NFL flourish at the major collegiate level as well. The difference is that there is no Personal Conduct Policy for collegiate players; nor a Commissioner, who at least attempts to enforce those policies, albeit too often ineffectively or arbitrarily.

Also, local law enforcement and university officials have tended to be circumspect or even hands-off when high profile college athletes are involved in criminal matters as was documented so thoroughly with respect to several Florida State football players, especially Heisman Trophy Winner Jameis Winston, and the Baylor football team. This is much like what happened when professional athletes were involved in criminal behaviors before the Ray Rice episode outraged women’s groups and much of the public.

Super-conference football, basketball, and certain other high profile sports programs and the athletic departments in which they reside are primarily responsible for their own discipline and enforcement. The exceptions are when crimes and other bad behaviors collide with the NCAA’s antiquated and typically hypocritical rules on amateurism, or the universities or colleges are so publicly embarrassed by an incident that they are compelled to do something about it. Usually, though, the NCAA and college presidents have been like Colonel Klink in the late 1960’s World War II comedy, Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing.’”

Columnist Norman Chad writing tongue in cheek about the high “rate of criminal activity among [college] football student-athletes…,” has explained that these FBS Division I “football scholars [were majoring] in criminal justice and earn[ed] class credits serving time in jail.” The direct connection between big money college athletics, diminished educational and academic values, and frequent charges of criminal-like behaviors is one of the main reasons why it makes sense for universities and colleges to separate themselves from their major sports programs. Not only are many of the so-called student-athletes being exploited, but too many of those players have victimized their college communities, particularly the girls and women who have been in close proximity.

In recent years the number of reported college campus rapes, sexual assaults, and domestic violence has indirectly implicated the entire male populations of our nation’s colleges and universities. Campuses have been described as “hunting grounds” for rapes and other types of sexual violence against women, with male student athletes comprising a disproportionate percentage of those alleged offenders. Thus, it is not surprising that the most publicized criminal allegations against intercollegiate athletes involve football and basketball players being charged with rapes and sexual assaults. Often those charges are followed by stories about how such allegations have been mishandled or largely ignored by those in charge, to the benefit of the athletes being investigated, as well as to protect the reputations of those institutions of higher learning at which these alleged crimes have occurred.

Highly publicized sexually-based criminal allegations also have been lodged against intercollegiate athletes in other major collegiate sports, including men’s lacrosse, soccer, and hockey. Moreover, male varsity athletes at academically distinguished Division III colleges and universities—most recently Harvard, Columbia, and Washington University in St. Louis—have been involved in scandals in which sexually disturbing and alarming messages were being posted online about female students and student-athletes.

A major part of the problem is that because these intercollegiate athletes generate substantial revenues and publicity for their athletic programs and universities, when they are accused of rapes, sexual assaults, domestic violence, and other antisocial behaviors, the internal investigations and resulting sanctions have tended to be biased at the expense of the victims and in favor of those players. Making matters worse, local authorities often defer to the universities in these criminal matters, who then defer to the athletic departments, especially the head coaches of the accused players.

According to a 2014 survey that U.S. Senator Clare McCaskill’s staff conducted at her request, in over 90 percent of the schools which responded, the athletic departments had a significant role in the investigations of alleged sexual assault cases involving athletes. At one fifth of those schools the athletic departments were placed directly in charge of athlete oversight and discipline. At two-fifths of those universities and colleges students were involved in adjudicating these sexual assault cases, which is a major problem when popular athletes are being accused.

Stanford, for instance, has a three-student tribunal that decides such cases. The vote must be unanimous for there to be any disciplinary measures taken. While unanimity makes sense from a due process standpoint, the idea of student-run tribunals trying criminal matters does not.
,
Furthermore, despite the high prevalence rate of sexual assault cases on campuses, McCaskill’s survey documented that there had been no investigations of sexual violence for the past five years at 40 percent of those schools. Such widespread enforcement deficits have inevitably encouraged and emboldened those who commit campus sexual assaults and abuses, especially when the alleged perpetrators are high profile athletes. Unfortunately, as was demonstrated so outrageously at Florida State and Baylor, the NCAA and its university and college members have learned little of value from the Penn State travesty—and implemented even less—except for strategies on how to manage these moral and legal crises more effectively to benefit themselves.

NCAA IS DELIBERATELY IMPOTENT AND DERELICT IN
OVERSEEING TOXIC COLLEGE SPORTS, AS THE MARYLAND FOOTBALL AND FEDERAL BASKETBALL PROBES PROVE©
John Weston Parry

Even federal and state investigators, prestigious law firms, and governors are unable or unwilling to deter, much less police, the myriad of crimes, corruption, abuse, and immoral behaviors associated with revenue-generating college sports that university presidents, who control the NCAA, help facilitate and cover-up. There is something rotten to the core in big time college sports and the impending infusion of sports gambling into this crooked, money-obsessed, non-academic mess can only make things worse in a hurry. Fundamental changes need to be made now.

Reasonable accountability cannot exist when legal and moral accountability is intentionally diffused and those who benefit by covering things up are in charge of overseeing the investigations and issuing penalties. The under-compensated athlete-students, wealthy and entitled coaches, and wealthy and corrupt athletic departments run amok, except when the athletes try to obtain a share of the profits that they generate. Then, and only then, does the NCAA spring into action with its hypocritical brand of educational values, moral outrage, and self-serving rules and penalties. Almost every other serious offense is intentionally beyond the NCAA’s purview and control.

Following the Rice Commission charade, this delusional and disreputable fact of college life has been replayed twice more, once with the state of Maryland’s staged investigation of its most lucrative college football program, and also with the New York federal trial to half-heartedly prosecute shoe company corruption in major college basketball programs. As anyone paying attention could have predicted, no major sports or university figures involved in these scandals were subject to jail time, serious NCAA penalties, or fired, except for a misguided head coach who was reluctantly terminated, but will leave with millions of more dollars in his pocket.

That is how it now works in Twenty First Century super conference, college sports when lawyers and public relations professionals teach university presidents, athletic departments, coaches, and shoe company executives how to profit from corruption and athlete-student exploitation without much risk of being caught—much less being held accountable. The way the Penn State sexual abuse, football scandal and its aftermath were managed marked the beginning of a new age of sophisticated corruption, which has become increasingly more venal ever since.

Arguably both North Carolina’s academic fraud and cheating scandal and the sexual abuse of female gymnasts at Michigan State were even worse than what happened at Penn State. And yet both those school’s athletic departments and responsible sports programs—along with Penn State football—continue on their merry ways making money hands over fists as if nothing criminal or abusive ever happened. A similarly disgusting scenario was playing itself out at the University of Maryland, but may have been interrupted at the last possible moment when Maryland President Wallace Loh, defied his Board of Regents and finally fired football coach DJ Durkin.

University Maryland Football: A Culture of Malevolence, Chaos, and Confusion

As previously documented in “Maryland Football’s `Dysfunctional Viper Pit’ Is Part of an NCAA Culture of Avarice and Neglect, Which Rice Commission Recommendations Cannot Change” (See Cartels page), since Maryland left the ACC to become a member of the better-financed Big Ten and the athletic department and University accepted Under Armour as its financial and recruiting partner—relationships which President Wallace Loh helped to effectuate—alarming transgressions have occurred. The football program has been riddled with scandal and a lack of institutional control, which also has carried over to the vaunted basketball program. A player’s tragic death, sexual assault allegations, alleged recruiting payoffs, violent hazing and abuse of players, and an institutional cover-up have led the parade of outrages.

The university’s response was strategic inaction, even while Jordan McNair lay in a prolonged coma before his eventual death. That was followed months later with a politically unpopular mea culpa by University of Maryland President Loh. Loh was immediately silenced and removed from any decision-making role in the affair. To fill the vacuum the state of Maryland orchestrated an investigation and a report, which was compromised by politics and readily apparent conflicting interests. All the while the NCAA, as it has done so many times before in recent decades, said and did nothing.

The “Independent” Investigation Was Badly Compromised

The careless, senseless, and mean-spirited death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair and the ensuing cover-up represented the pinnacle of depravity in the University of Maryland’s football program. It also was a reflection of everything that has gone wrong since Under Armour and its underlings and acolytes asserted their financial and political influence over big time Terrapin sports.

That influence goes straight to the Governor’s mansion, which Larry Hogan now occupies, and is very likely to occupy for several years to come. The Governor and Kevin Plank, the Under Armour CEO, have been involved in a number of mutually beneficial development projects. The Baltimore Sun reported that Governor Hogan “raised more than $2.5 million” in one night this past August (2108) at a campaign function held at the Under Armour Performance Center.

For many months the Governor was content to allow University of Maryland President Wallace Loh to manage the scandal. When Loh finally accepted responsibility for the university—but not himself—and apologized to the victim’s family, however, creating potential legal liability and bad publicity for the state and football program, Governor Hogan stepped in. It was no surprise that when the state of Maryland decided to assume this responsibility the Governor did not recommend an independent body be created to do so.

Instead, Hogan placed that task in the hands of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents, a political body, 13 of whose 17 members, he had appointed, including its Chair James Brady, his former campaign manager, and two members of his current administration: Health Secretary Robert Neall; and Agriculture Secretary Joseph Bartenfelder. It appeared that they were to be his political eyes and ears on the Board.

Brady garnered notoriety in recent years by publicly opposing President Loh’s efforts to rebrand Maryland’s football stadium, which had been named in honor of the die hard segregationist, Harry Clifton “Curly” Byrd. In addition, the Board’s vice-chair and chair of its working group on intercollegiate athletics is Barry J. Gossett, one of Maryland football’s most prominent boosters, after whom the team’s athletic facility was named. He was a prominent supporter of Coach Durkin, even after the ESPN article about Maryland football’s toxic culture had been released.

The role of the system wide Board of Regents would soon become clear: control the so-called “independent” investigation, manage the results, protect the state of Maryland from liability and bad publicity, and above all else protect the football program and its head coach. To do this the Board appointed eight individuals to sit as Commissioners and hired two law firms to actually conduct the investigation. Seven of the eight Commissioners had various potential conflicts of interest. This included: having strong ties to the University of Maryland—Bonnie Bernstein and Tom McMillen; benefiting professionally from keeping valuable clients from the sports world happy—Frederick M. Azar, M.D., Charles P Scheeler, and Hon. Alexander Williams, Jr, and Doug Williams; and like former Republican Maryland Governor Ehrlich, being interested in protecting and promoting the state of Maryland and its most lucrative college sports team.

The most obvious potential conflicts of interest were the two Commissioners, who are members of the law firms that were hired to carry out the investigation behind the scenes. Most of the lawyers came from DLA Piper where Commissioner Scheeler is a member of the firm’s Media, Sports and Entertainment practice. That practice holds itself out as “a preferred choice among parties involved in … sports… who demand superior representation and client service… ” In this case the clients were the Board of Regents and the State of Maryland.

The other law firm involved in the investigation was Silver, Thompson, Slutkin & White LLC, where Commissioner Williams is a member of its Sports & Entertainment Law practice. That firm promotes itself as providing “legal services to …collegiate coaches… The firm’s lawyers currently or have previously represented clients in business and legal matters with both professional and collegiate sports leagues, including the NFL and NCAA…”

The Board’s mandate for the Commissioners, and by implication the two law firms, was deceptively simple:

"to determine whether the culture of the football program was `toxic as alleged in the media reports;
"to investigate the specific incidents of player abuse as alleged in media reports, and any other incidents we might uncover; and
"to make recommendations for improving the program."

The Commission was specifically prohibited, though, from “recommending or deciding whether any University employees should be retained or terminated.” It also was barred from examining what happened to Jordan McNair, except “whether a toxic football culture caused his death.” In other words, all the important decisions would be left to the Board—or other state actors behind the scenes, like the Governor—to make or influence based on their subjective interpretations of the investigative report and how the political winds were blowing. In addition, for some unexplained reason none of the assistant coaches, except the strength and conditioning coach, were referenced in the findings.

More importantly, though, if the Commissioners arbitrarily determined that whatever happened in the football program fell short of being toxic, the critically important death of McNair would become a secondary concern, at best. As a legal matter the state of Maryland could continue to try to shield itself from the responsibility that President Loh had publicly acknowledged, as long as the Commission did not categorize the football culture at Maryland as “toxic.” This had the appearance of a legal strategy that probably came from the law firms hired to manage and direct the investigation. That is how this legal game normally works to shield the clients as much as possible without actually lying or acting unethically as a lawyer. None of the lawyers involved were prosecutors or former prosecutors.

Finally, despite being in control of the investigation, the system wide Board of Regents also did not have the power to make personnel decisions, except that its members were in charge of hiring, firing, or retiring presidents of Maryland colleges. Ultimately this created what turned out to be a fortuitous dynamic in which the board lacked the authority to retain or fire the head coach and athletic director directly. That was the job of the University of Maryland’s president.

The Investigative Report: Findings and Limitations

The final report was nearly 200 pages long and included conflicting statements of dozens of players and other people associated with the football program. As has become typical in these so-called independent investigations of college and professional sports, responsibility for what happened in the University of Maryland football program was as the Washington Post explained “spread around.”

No blame, however, was placed on the unsavory influence politically well-connected Under Armour has had over the football program. In fact, Under Armour and its University of Maryland graduate CEO were not even mentioned. In addition, many crucial facts that any competent prosecutor would have included were omitted from the report.

The report protected Coach Durkin and President Loh to a large extent. It was the out of control athletic department that “did not provide adequate oversight of the football program and failed to provide [Coach] Durkin with the tools, resources, and guidance necessary to support and educate a first-time head coach in a major football conference.” According to the University’s ombudsperson, that department was full of “chaos and confusion.” In large part this was due to what the report described as “a chasm” between the former athletic director Kevin Anderson and his deputy Damon Evans, who would become the acting AD. What the report conspicuously failed to mention was the deeper chasm that existed between Anderson and President Loh.

Much of what President Loh had concluded in his own self-serving investigation, except his mea culpa to Jordan McNair’s family, was reiterated in the Commission report. Performance/Strength Coach Rick Court was mainly responsible for the despicable—but non-toxic—actions taken against the players. On “many” occasions he “engaged in abusive conduct… This included challenging a player’s manhood and hurling homophobic slurs.” It also included physical violence against players and subjecting them to dangerous and inhumane conditions. Court “would attempt to humiliate players in front of their teammates by throwing food, weights and on one occasion a trash can full of vomit.” He “allegedly choked an injured player with a lateral muscle pulldown machine,” which normally would be a criminal offense if it was not committed in a big time football context.

This deviant culture was not that different from what most players in super conference football programs experience. As the report emphasized, “[w]hat would be deemed unacceptable in most workplace environments is the norm in many weight rooms, particularly during football training periods.” The report claimed this was not toxic—just a little over the top, and entirely reprehensible. Thus, by definition Jordan McNair’s death was not caused by Maryland’s toxic football culture.

Instead the report found that Maryland’s football program had a “culture where problems festered because too many players feared speaking out.” Nevertheless, even though many players complained of abuse, Durkin’s “concern for his players’ welfare is genuine.” The report concluded that “[i]f the culture had been `malicious or harmful,’ Mr. Durkin would not have earned the loyalty and respect of many of his student-athletes and coaches.”

What the report failed to account for, which the ESPN investigation had documented, is that the reason certain players complained and others did not was due to the favoritism displayed by the head coach and his maniacal assistant, Rick Court. Those who were disfavored received the lion’s share of the abuse. They were devalued and accused of cheating the program by continuing to benefit from their football scholarships.

Sally Jenkins in her Washington Post column was amazed that Coach Durkin had not yet been dismissed, along with President Loh and Athletic Director Evans, who had “presided over an athletic department of `chaos and confusion.” In this toxic environment, “Durkin’s program operated like a pledge-initiating frat house with hazing rituals…. As a result, [Jordan] McNair died from an easily preventable case of heatstroke.” Nonetheless, “because … McNair died at the hands of a football program backed by high-dollar donors, everyone seems confused about what needs to happen.”

The Final Outcomes

What was believed to be the final outcome, initially, was not only a disgrace for the University of Maryland, but it was a perfect microcosm of everything that is wrong with big time college sports and the NCAA, most especially football. New York Times columnist Marc Tracy was entirely correct when he wrote: “At modern American universities, it is not unusual that the head coach is the most powerful, and highest paid, individual. That has rarely been more clear than it was …when the governing board of the University of Maryland … allowed the head coach and athletic director to keep their jobs, while accepting the unexpected retirement of the school’s president, Wallace D. Loh.” (Coach Durkin was paid $2.5 million a year, while President Loh receives $675,000.)

The Regents also recommended that the university retain the services of the two athletic trainers whose alleged negligence has been blamed in the death of Jordan McNair, even though the Commission report did not specifically address what had happened to McNair. In essence, the Board told President Loh, who intended to fire Coach Durkin and the two trainers, that the popular president would be jettisoned if that happened. Instead, Loh appeared to have backed down in order to prevent his university further embarrassment. He then took what seemed to be the most honorable course of action left to him, which was to stay, steward Maryland through this mess, and resign when his current contract expired in June 2019.

James Brady, as Chair of the Board of Regents, went into a damage control mode calling Durkin a “good man and a good coach who is devoted to the well-being of the student-athletes under his charge.” The coach was “unfairly blamed.” Brady also scoffed at the idea that athletics was controlling academics. “I can tell you without equivocation, the idea that academics is not first and foremost at the University of Maryland is absolutely and unequivocally wrong.”

President Loh has been more circumspect and forthright in his view of the power of athletics on campus. In 2017 he presciently observed that an “athletic scandal… blows up the university, its reputation… [and] the president.” During the North Carolina academic fraud and cheating scandal he was the only big time university president to speak out, calling for the NCAA to impose the “death penalty” on his former rival’s athletic programs. Ultimately the NCAA did nothing.

Almost immediately after his brief reinstatement Durkin went to the Gossett Team House, which is named after Board of Regent’s member and Maryland booster, Barry J. Gossett, to address his team. It was there that the ensuing avalanche of outrage began to gain momentum.

The Washington Post reported that “three players walked out of the meeting…, underscoring the deep uncertainty that Durkin’s return will bring.” Reportedly, other “players and staff members were stunned by Durkin’s return.” One “person close to the team” noted that Durkin “has lost all his power. Nobody respects the guy.” The Student Government Association at Maryland said it was “outraged by the decisions made by the Board of Regents” and called for a student protest. Many Democratic state politicians openly criticized the decision, including Senator Ben Cardin, state Senate President Thomas Miller and Ben Jealous, Hogan’s opponent in the gubernatorial election.

Jordan McNair’s father said that the Board’s decision made him “feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach and somebody spit in my face.” Previously he had been adamant that Durkin “shouldn’t be able to work with anybody else’s kid.” The McNair’s lawyer Hassan Murphy observed that President Loh “remains the only person thus far who has accepted moral and legal responsibility and has spoken from his heart about what happened.”

Washington Post columnist, Barry Svrluga, lambasted the University of Maryland, which he said “ought to be ashamed of itself.” Svrluga opined that “[t]hey’re hiding behind their tributes to the dead offensive lineman now, making hollow promises to create a better path forward by `honoring’ his legacy. It’s disgusting.”

Some of Svrluga’s harshest words were reserved for the new Athletic Director Damon Evans. Evans, he said, was “the guy who had his head in the sand while Durkin and his subordinates created their reprehensible environment right under his nose.” Making matter worse, this was Evans’ second chance and he “failed. Evans “was damaged goods when he arrived” at Maryland. He had been fired when he was the athletic director at the University of Georgia.

Evans had been relieved of his duties after being arrested for drunk driving. Reportedly, police also had found a pair of lady’s panties between his knees that belonged to a woman in the car who was not his wife. Svrluga observed that as Maryland’s assistant AD, one of Evans major “duties was overseeing football. Somehow, he missed all the practices that he and Durkin now… agree must be changed… Did he lack good judgment..., was he too embroiled in petty office politics in a dysfunctional department… [o]r was he, flatly, asleep at the wheel?”

The Post columnist concluded that “the University of Maryland in its entirety—is delusional.” The fact that “Durkin remains the football coach… defies common sense and common decency. That Evans remains his boss… means Maryland has installed a leader who is defined more by his mistakes than his successes.”

The same day Durkin met with his team, Athletic Director Evans, who was acting at the direction of President Loh, relieved the head coach of his duties, permanently. Reportedly Durkin was not dismissed for cause. This means he will receive everything due on the remainder of his contract, which is more than $5 million. No final decision has been made about the two athletic trainers, who appear to be still employed, more as a matter of trying to limit the state’s legal liability, than a vote of confidence in their professional competencies.

Governor Hogan, who felt the political winds changing into a hurricane of protest just before election time, paved the way for the coup d’etat when he complained: “I am deeply troubled by the lack of transparency from the Board of Regents, and deeply concerned about how they could have possibly arrived at the decisions announced.” The next day Hogan’s close politically ally, James Brady, resigned as Chair of the Board of Regents. The Governor’s spokesperson told reporters that Hogan had known nothing about the Board’s deliberations, even though two members of his current administration sat on the Board.

Several days later the two athletic trainers, who had been on extended administrative, had their employment terminated. Once again it was not for cause, implying that both had received settlements to leave without a fuss. Also, Linda Gooden the regent, who was appointed the new chairperson of the Board, proclaimed that "everyone on the board now understands that the ... personnel recommendations were wrong."

The NY Federal College Basketball Trial Comes to a Disappointing Close

Around the same time the Maryland football scandal was brewing, there also was a headline grabbing development that may eventually implicate the men’s basketball program. Three guilty verdicts were returned in the first of what could be several federal trials around the country prosecuting a few of the individuals who have been involved in all those schemes to pay—or otherwise improperly benefit the families of—high profile recruits so they will play basketball at big time college programs sponsored by shoe and apparel companies like Under Armour.

Those New York verdicts, however, like most of these types of sports prosecutions, were returned against relatively minor figures at Adidas and ASM, a sports agency. No coaches or former coaches have been indicted, at least not yet. As has been the pattern in the relatively few federal sports corruption prosecutions there have been, the shoe company that was implicated in this initial prosecution is foreign rather than American. While the crimes that these individuals were convicted of—wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud—appear on their face to be serious, the likelihood that these first time offenders will serve lengthy prison sentences is remote.

In addition, the so-called crimes were a bit of a stretch even by the expanding standards for federal prosecutions. Thus, appeals are likely, unless agreements for lesser sentences are agreed upon and no appeals are filed. These so-called criminal offenses were based on a false or at least misleading narrative that the bribes of up to $90,000 to recruits or their families defrauded the universities, who were able to sign these stellar players as a result.

This NY federal court allowed, and the jury bought, the flimsy argument that by violating NCAA’s rules against players sharing in the revenues they generate, North Carolina State, Louisville, and Kansas had been defrauded. Thus, but for the criminal activities involved, these clueless universities would never have awarded valuable scholarships to those now ineligible athletes, even though most big time basketball schools have been doing exactly that for decades.

John Feinstein, who has written extensively about college basketball over the years, opined in his Washington Post column that the prosecution’s case was “rather laughable.” More importantly, the result is unlikely to “lead to changes” in the college game because the NCAA and its staff “have almost no power to bring about change…, and that includes NCAA President Mark Emmert.”

Ultimately the sneaker and apparel companies remain in control because they dole out all this money to the coaches and the university athletic departments. Unfortunately, as Feinstein points out, these companies “are a pox on all college sports houses….They’re in the business to make money, and if that means directing players by hook or by crook to the schools they’re interested in, so be it.” Legendary head coaches, like Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, even after seeing so many corruption scandals over many decades, continue to emphasize “all the good the sneaker companies [have] done for basketball.”

One can be confident that a similar level of duplicity applies to Under Armour at Maryland. In this corrupting environment, Maryland athletics will need competent leadership to avoid another scandal should the FBI choose to seriously investigate what happened in the Terrapins’ basketball program. In February the university was implicated as part of the FBI’s nationwide collegiate basketball corruption scandal, due to apparent irregularities in the recruitment of five-star, one and done center Diamond Stone. He had unexpectedly chosen Maryland over his home-state Wisconsin Badgers.

In July the Baltimore Sun reported that the university had received and “responded to two grand jury subpoenas” as part of that FBI investigation. Reportedly, these inquiries involved Stone and another player, who chose Kansas over Maryland. In the second case, it was reported that the FBI had a tape in which the player’s guardian can be heard saying that he had to return $20,000 to Under Armour after his charge had rejected Maryland.

The director of the Center for Sports and the Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law opined that “[t]his is just another [example] of Maryland playing on the big stage in college athletics…They went to the Big Ten and they’re trying to become that powerhouse athletic program.” The biggest concern for Maryland basketball, though—if one believes much of the local sports media—is not the possibility that corruption will be documented and prosecuted, which in these types of cases is relatively rare, but rather the negative effect the ongoing FBI investigation will have on recruiting, especially in tandem with the football scandal.

VIOLENCE, CRIMES, GAMBLING, AND OTHER BAD BEHAVIORS of Athletes, Coaches, and Management © ​ AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY©

Think before you act

VIOLENCE, CRIMES, GAMBLING, AND OTHER BAD BEHAVIORS
of Athletes, Coaches, and Management ©
AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY©