Sports Cartels: NFL, NCAA, MLB, IOC, WADA, IAAF, ITF, FIFA, NBA/WNBA, NHL, MLS, PGA

THE UGLY SIDE OF SPORTS CARTELS
NFL NCAA MLB IOC WADA IAAF ITF FIFA NBA/WNBA NHL MLS PGA
AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY ©

The Roman Colosseum

ESSAYS FEATURED ON THIS WEB-PAGE BELOW, AFTER THE INTRODUCTION

The Future of Spectator Sports Part II: Moneysports, Are there Any Other Kind?
Future of Spectator Sports Part I: Mental Health Concerns, Performance-enhancing Drugs, Gambling, and Automated Officiating
Ohtani Gambling Snafu and MLB: A Predicable Problem Affecting Major Professional and College Sports in Similar Ways
The Monumental Sports Greed Hall of Fame for Owners
Republican Politics and Their Sportswashing Engulf the PGA Tour, MLB, and NBA
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Which Is the Most Repugnant Spectator Sports Organization of All? Saudi Arabia's LIV Golf
Happy New Year NFL: If Sports Are a Reflection of American Society, Football Is a Flashing Alert
Picking Mushrooms on Skates, Corruption, Boycotts, Incompetence, and Other Post Olympic Matters       The NCAA Has Been Discriminating Against Female Athletes, Women's Sports, and Women Since It's Inception
Reopening Major Team Sports During the Coronavirus Pandemic and Civil Unrest
Adequate Protective Netting in MLB Stadiums Now
Maryland Football Part of NCAA Culture of Avarice and Neglect
Monumental Mishandling of the Russian Doping Scandal
College Sports Madness that the NCAA and FBI Won't Fix
The NCAA Is Wrong for Big Time Collegiate Sports
NFL's Underlying Problems May be Beyond Salvation
Legal Fictions for Cartels Abound
Public Subsidies to Benefit Wealthy Team Owners


INTRODUCTION©

In recent decades it has become increasingly evident that for all the good we attribute to the enjoyment of our most popular spectator sports, there is a substantial downside that can be very ugly. Our devotion to sports entertainment—with more than occasional fanaticism and underlying malevolence—has undermined community values and contributed to various social pathologies. How this has happened is based in large part on the emergence of powerful sports enterprises—including the NFL, NCAA, MLB, NBA/WNBA, NHL, PGA, IOC, ITF, FIFA, MLS, IAAF, and WADA—that have made financial gain their primary directives. This has become particularly evident during the coronavirus pandemic.

These large sports organizations, which share many of the worst characteristics of corporate cartels, have created or facilitated a host of social problems, both domestically and globally, especially in youth sports. Such pathologies, as exemplified most prominently in the United States by professional and collegiate football, include:

 poor physical and mental health and rampant impairments;
 violence, crime, sexual abuse, bullying, and other bad behaviors;
 invidious discrimination and lack of diversity;
 moral decay in the name of generating wealth and revenues;
 public subsidies and education revenues being used to support increasingly extravagant stadiums and arenas for billionaires or athletic departments at major public education institutions; and
 reopening sports in risky ways during the coronavirus pandemic.

Many of these social ills have emanated from the flawed behaviors of privileged and entitled elite athletes and pretenders, who do not fully understand or care about social boundaries. Such dysfunctions are encouraged and facilitated, if not directly supported, by the businesses and organizations that are in charge of operating these sports. Furthermore, the leaders of international sports cartels-- most prominently FIFA, the IOC, and the IAAF --have been investigated and occasionally prosecuted for engaging in criminal activities intended to unjustly enrich themselves.

Sports cartels have thrived using propaganda, political alliances, and power and influence. They have brought together politicians, Christian religions, the military, and fans to promote their selfish interests. As a result, our most popular professional sports leagues, collegiate sports conferences, and international sports organizations have received statutory and enforcement preferences and exemptions from antitrust and related laws that typically regulate other enterprises doing business in the United States. These special relationships also largely explain why so many billions of dollars of public funds have been used to subsidize the building of extravagant stadiums and arenas when vital community needs are being ignored. It also explains why America's major team sports for men and women are being allowed to reopen despite the real dangers posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

THE FUTURE OF SPECTATOR SPORTS PART II
MONEYSPORTS: Are There Any Other Kind?
By John Weston Parry, J.D.

Michael Lewis’ best-selling book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), recounted how Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane had employed what was then a new and relatively unpopular analytical and statistical strategy to make his team dominant at the turn of the 21st century, even against Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises with much greater financial resources. Today, spectator sports organizations and their athletes have widely embraced increasingly expensive analytic protocols to help them compete at the highest levels.

In many respects, though, financial unfairness in our most popular spectator sports has continued uninterrupted, despite attempts in the NFL and certain other spectator sports to promote the perception of their fostering competitive parity. Analytics have become essential tools in the unending quest of spectator sports, their athletes, and coaches to make more and more money. Moneysports—like “Moneyball”—is a term reflecting that single-minded pursuit of revenues and wealth.

The sports organizations that pursue money the best, tend to win more key competitions and championships, while becoming even wealthier. It should be no surprise then that the two MLB franchises, which according to Forbes are worth the most money—The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers—were the two baseball teams that competed against each other in the 2024 World Series.

Unfortunately, this type of obsessive pursuit of sports money can, and does, have serious negative social consequences. The “love of money,” as the bible explains, is “the root of evil.” On one day in late October, The Washington Post and New York Times published five articles illustrating, in different ways, how the love of money can disrupt and corrupt our favorite spectator sports. Those sports stories covered:

(1) the most recent brain damage to NFL star Tua Tagovailoa;(2) the mental and physical traumas of competitive cheerleading;
(2) the mental and physical traumas of competitive cheerleading;
(3) the paltry salaries and benefits WNBA owners have been paying their female athletes;
(4) the latest buy me an arena or else demand by billionaire team owner Ted Leonsis; and
(5) the disruptive and corrupting influences of NIL on big time college athletics.

Tua Tagovailoa’s Latest Brain Trauma Incident

Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa will be known as the poster boy for star athletes in contact sports being willing to endure repetitive brain traumas in order to reap immediate athletic rewards. Athletes like Tagovailoa, some of whom are women—such as those who ski, snowboard, or do death defying acrobatics—insist on participating in their dangerous sports for the enticing opportunity to make millions of dollars and/or bask in the exhilaration of their frequently short-lived fame.
While recovering from his third severe NFL-diagnosed concussion that reporters have been able to verity, Tagovailoa stated he had no intention of retiring. He tried to explain his thinking process in these muddled words:

There’s a gray area when it comes to [the brain]… [whether] you do know that you’re going to get long-term disease from it [a concussion] or if you’re not…. I just think there is a lot of gray with it. For me, this is what I love to do. This is what makes me happy. And I’m going to do it. That’s it.

While it may be true that this time Tagovailoa is being encouraged to follow the NFL’s revamped concussion protocols, there remain tragic flaws in the way NFL medicine is practiced, especially for their athletes who insist on playing hurt. The NFL’s concussion protections depend on medical providers being able to perceive mental and physical symptoms, which a player must either report himself or be observed by his doctors. Even then, NFL medical diagnoses can be faulty or biased, especially when the team, player, league, fans, sponsors, and even family members push the player to get back on the field as quickly as possible.

The revamped NFL protocols are an improvement over what was allowed to happen to Tagovailoa and so many other players in the past. But that is a very low bar. Twice before, Tagovailoa’s long-term mental well-being was jeopardized, unnecessarily, after he suffered what appeared to be severe concussions on live television and was rushed back onto the field way too soon.

There is no telling how many other jarring hits Tagovailoa—and players like him—have received over their careers playing football in the NFL, college, high school, and in youth leagues, which were never diagnosed—much less treated—as being damaging, or potentially damaging, to their brains. The leading scientific and medical evidence about repeated hits in football and other contact sports like hockey and soccer strongly indicates that it is more than likely, Tagovailoa’s post-NFL career will be marred by significant mental health problems, like so many other former NFL players who died before their time and/or struggled with dementia.

According to Washington Post sports columnist Candace Buckner, “Tagovailoa’s bravado is hard to understand, but not for [his] NFL peers.” In the sportswashed language of the NFL and those who cover the NFL, “[m}any men… are risking everything to keep the privilege [of playing in the NFL]… ‘I think’ [said one player] `people love the game. It’s hard to walk away from it.…’”
As that NFL player concluded about Tagovailoa and many other players like him, “the [perceived] rewards are greater than the [perceived] risks… [in order t]o do something you love and to make enough money to change your family’s life forever. So it’s like, why not, you know, sacrifice me?’”

In the sportswashed minds of many NFL fans, athletes play for the love of the game. In reality, though, playing is mostly about the large sums of money and fame that their mental and bodily sacrifices helps them amass. Professional football players are the American gladiators of the post-modern age. Like the Roman gladiators before them, NFL players are handsomely rewarded when they are able to perform, but quickly become replaceable when they cannot.

Despite previous bouts with severe head traumas, Tagovailoa was still able to ink a four-year $212, 000,000 contract with the Dolphins in 2024, including a $42,000,000 signing bonus. If he should retire voluntarily, in all likelihood he would forfeit most of that money, but keep his signing bonus. In the NFL, a signing bonus has become something akin to blood money. Not surprisingly, though, the vast majority of NFL players, who are not stars, receive very little or none of this type of irrevocable compensation.

The Billion Dollar Plus Competitive Cheerleading Market

Most readers probably would not think of competitive cheerleading as a contact sport, but the pressure to perform “spinning and twisting” acrobatic maneuvers of increasing difficulty, as The New York Times’ David Gauvey Herbert chronicled, can be and often is a dangerous and repeatedly painful athletic endeavor, much like competitive gymnastics. Concussions, and a wide assortment of physical and mental traumas are not uncommon, starting when these mostly female athletes are first driven to try to be perfect their routines as early as their preschool years.

There is a whole “cheerlebrity” apparatus in place to publicize these talented girls’ exploits and motivate them to take greater and greater risks, including the team cheerleading championships culminating in the “Cheerleadings Worlds” for the very, very best team performers. Those who succeed the most are eligible for cheerleading scholarships to pay, or help pay, for tuition to and expenses for college. The catch is that college cheerleaders may have to spend as many as “50 hours a week in training, games, hair and makeup.”

They also may have to endure “late-night, punishing drills” if they make “mistakes on the field.” Such punitive environments can be devastating for cheerleaders, who too often leave their sport with chronic mental and physical traumas comparable to those experienced by male athletes playing violent contact sports like football or hockey.

Nikki Jennings, profiled in the aforementioned Herbert article, was forced to retire “from cheerleading” with a “chronic hip injury,” “intermittent headaches,” and most concerning “occasional slurred speech” that led her to seek treatment for “a traumatic head injury.” It was only after she left her sport, “that she realized… [her] experience—of injury, grueling hours and emotional abuse—[was] not an uncommon one in the vast world of American cheerleading.”

Across America there are at least “a million children, mostly girls, participat[ing] in cheer each year.” It is a lucrative “market,” which requires parents of these young cheerleaders to pay for cheer equipment and training, including “summer camps where children learn to do stunts and perform.” Parents can pay as much as “$10,000 a year per child in competitive cheer.” With a million or more children involved, the total cheerleading market appears to be worth billions of dollars.

One company, “Varsity Spirit,” dominates that market, so much so antitrust experts refer to it as a “giant” monopoly. Jeff Webb, the company’s founder, has tried to “control every facet of the sport… over the course of more than four decades.” He even successfully lobbied “against categorizing scholastic cheerleading as a sport at the high school and college levels.”

Webb did this to prevent cheerleaders from being subject to sports-related regulations by state and local high school officials and the N.C.A.A. More importantly, as a federal court ruled in 2010, by being categorized a non-sport, cheerleading has been able to avoid federal Title IX requirements. As a result, most cheerleaders have had few avenues of relief when they have been emotionally or even sexually abused, including their images being transformed into child pornography.

Nevertheless, some cheerleaders have turned to lawyers and law firms to help them seek justice. According to National Public Radio, as of January 2023, no less than twelve sexual abuse lawsuits against 6 different “cheerleading gyms in 7 states” had been filed by former cheer students.

That litigation has been compared to the sexual and emotional abuse charges filed against USA Gymnastics coaches and officials. Although the alleged criminal behaviors towards cheerleaders are very similar to those experienced by female gymnasts, the publicity and thus condemnation that these more recent charges have generated involving cheerleaders as victims has been much more subdued.

WNBA Athletes Dissolve Their Collective Bargaining Agreement

After being responsible for the most financially successful season in WNBA history by far, the league’s players through their union—the Women’s National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA)— overwhelmingly voted to dissolve the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) they had with league owners. That decision was made in order to substantially increase the paltry salaries and related benefits these female athletes have received playing professional basketball in the WNBA. Those athletes can and do earn much more money playing in foreign countries including China, although nowhere close to what NBA players typically earn.

The WNBPA’s current job action has been months in the making, but came to fruition once the WNBA season concluded. Based on figures supplied by the WNBPA, the current season produced phenomenal increases in live attendance (48%), as well as television viewership, both on ESPN (170%) and CBS Sports (86%). Two thousand twenty-four was a banner year in which WNBA owners, teams, and participating television networks and social media outlets, all prospered greatly, while player salaries and benefits remained depressed due to the terms of the CBA they had agreed to.

Fortunately for the WNBPA, the CBA had a safety valve clause, allowing the players to opt out of that agreement early. Otherwise, contractually, they might have been stuck with this clearly unfair, arrangement until 2027 when the existing CBA had been set to expire.

Few, if any, of the people involved in drafting that CBA had anticipated this explosion of interest in the WNBA, kick-started by the mega stardom of Caitlin Clark during her four-year athletic career at Indiana University, which she brought with her when she signed with the Indiana Fever of the WNBA. Clark’s role as a white female superstar basketball player was unique in sports history. It could be compared favorably to the adulation once visited upon the likes of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson in college and then the NBA when that professional basketball league’s popularity first skyrocketed.

There is little doubt that, as WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert has promised, the owners intend to improve upon the current CBA. In Englebert’s words, the new one will be “fair for all and lays the foundation for growth and success for years to come.” The question remains, though, whether what the owners offer will be fair enough and helps to make up for all the years these female basketball players have been shortchanged?

According to CNN, the WNBA’s media rights agreement set to begin in 2026 will quadruple in value from approximately “$50 million annually” to “$200 million.” Yet, even that huge increase may well be boosted by additional media rights packages. Thus, it would be reasonable to expect that the players will seek a similarly large increase in their future WNBA salaries and benefits.

Billionaire Owner, Ted Leonsis, Tries to Bilk the D.C. Community Once Again

The Washington Post reported that after billionaire many times over, Ted Leonsis, once again threatened to move his Washington Wizards and Capitals to Northern Virginia if his arena demands were not met, District of Columbia (D.C.) Mayor Muriel Bowser enthusiastically capitulated. She agreed to support a new plan in which the city would purchase Capital One Arena from Leonsis for $87.5 million and lease it back to him for a relative pittance. This money would be in addition to the $515 million that the D.C. Council already had approved to renovate Leonsis’ arena, which would not include any cost overruns that too often accompany such renovations.

With his latest proposal, Ted Leonsis now claims, with a straight face, to be rebuilding the trust of D.C. sports fans, who he alienated when he first threatened to move his two franchises to a neighboring suburban jurisdiction. In reality, though, Leonsis is breaching their trust once again by demanding that the city not only pay to renovate his arena, but pay him more for the privilege of his no longer being responsible for much of his arena’s upkeep. As a result, Leonsis will be able to generate even greater annual net revenues for himself, while increasing the future sale values of both of his non-championship quality professional teams.

The Leonsis payoff that D.C. Mayor Bowser is supporting appears to be one of the most lopsided agreements any billionaire sports owner has demanded of his respective community. The city—which has been unable to meet many of the basic needs of its own residents—is about to publicly fund an extravagant arena for the billionaire owner of a dreadful NBA team and a more promising NHL team in exchange for ensuring that Leonsis’ two franchises do not move elsewhere.

This type of professional sports con has been replayed time and time again, even though an increasing number of communities have refused to give in to such threats. Nonetheless, billionaire sports owners, including Leonsis, continue to demand more and more public money for extravagant arenas and stadiums with more and more fancy corporate seating that average fans can afford only rarely, if ever.

Names, Images, and Likenesses (NIL) Dysfunctions and Inequalities in College Athletics

For decades, under the sportswashed mythology that they were amateurs, big time, so-called college student-athletes were exploited by their universities and colleges. They received only a fraction of the value of the revenues and alumni donations that they generated, even star players who were paid under the table. Once American courts finally pierced this amateurism sham, those lucrative university and college athletic programs were forced to find new ways to pay for their most valuable athletes, while still generating even greater revenues for themselves.

Assuming control of payments made to popular college athletes for their names, images, and likenesses (NIL) became the path forward, although not without growing pains and disruptions. Not surprisingly, given the history of college sports, NIL benefits are not being shared equitably among athletic programs, teams, and the college athletes themselves.

As usual, college sports for women get short shrift, as do the less popular college sports for men. The lion’s share of this NIL money goes to football and men’s basketball, as well as to certain other popular college athletes, especially those with large social media followings.

The Washington Post’s in-depth investigation of how NIL benefits are distributed to college athletes at publicly funded schools revealed a number of disturbing trends, including a “lack of transparency that forces many athletes to navigate an unfamiliar economy in the dark.” Most college “athletes have limited information to determine their market value.”

The athletes’ financial interests are often left to “the whims of the powers holding the purse strings” in their respective athletic programs. Much like college sports of the recent past, universities and colleges help to ensure the big money gravitates towards the major college sports for men, especially football and basketball. At the same time, this new NIL money in college sports, particularly from corporations and other private companies, is subject to “little scrutiny.”

In large part, how much NIL money a college athlete receives appears to be based on a “star system” measured by the athlete’s “social media clout,” more so than their athletic prowess or contributions to their teams. Not surprisingly, at the eight public universities that were even willing to send detailed NIL documentation to the Post, football players “received more money than athletes in all other sports combined.”

The NCAA will try half-heartedly to step in “to limit the influence of deep-pocketed boosters in the NIL market,” but realistically it may be “hard to see a world in which motivated donors can’t help their favorite team win.” It is likely that any NCAA rules targeting NIL will be constrained by the laissez faire approach to regulating major college sports that exists now, particularly since the “burgeoning [NIL] economy … operates mostly out of sight.”

At the University of Colorado, for example, its media savvy head football coach Deone Sanders—rather than university officials—reportedly controls most of the NIL payments to his players through Sanders’ association with SMAC Entertainment. That company, as part of a documentary series it continues to produce on Sanders called “Coach Prime,” has paid—so far— Colorado football players who appeared on that program “nearly $600,000. Sanders has great influence in determining which players will receive money and how much.

Similarly, the co-founder of Nike Phil Knight established a “booster collective” that has “funded hundreds of deals for Oregon football players,” the amounts of which that university deliberately “redacted” in the limited information it provided to the Post. Whether similar NIL deals already are common in college football and men’s basketball programs “is hard to say.” These types of NIL arrangements, however, would seem to be a key strategy going forward for major college programs trying to recruit and retain star athletes.

Even though women’s college basketball has been booming, “men still dominate NIL deals.” Moreover, Title IX, especially how it has been interpreted by the courts in recent years, is unlikely to provide a means to alter this obvious gender-based NIL inequity. Most of the NIL economy is carried out by boosters, private companies, and corporations, rather than the complicit universities themselves.

Conclusion

Whether it is concussions in football, abuses targeting cheerleaders, the next WNBA collective bargaining agreement, the building of extravagant arenas and stadiums at public expense for billionaire owners, or the booming NIL economy in college sports, money is, and will continue to be, the driving force behind our most popular spectator sports. These moneysports are primarily organized and operated to generate more and more revenues, not to live up to sportswashed cliches about athletics representing the noblest of community values.

The notable exception, however, are cliches about winning. More victories and more championships produce more money and athletic fame, as well as greater community pride.

Too often, though, that pride is used to successfully excuse or cover up team-related improprieties and corruption. That sad reality about our favorite spectator sports is likely to grow worse before it becomes better, however, now that a clear majority of voting Americans have chosen to elect—arguably—the most corrupt former president in history to be our president once again.

The FUTURE of SPECTATOR SPORTS PART I
Mental Health Concerns, Performance Enhancing Drugs, Gambling, and Automated Officiating
By John Weston Parry, J.D.

While one can reasonably dispute their relative importance and how their likely impacts should be prioritized— which also depends on the particular spectator sport involved—mental health concerns, performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), gambling, and automated officiating will present fundamental challenges for these sports moving forward. Those potentially disruptive developments will be in addition to, and interconnected with, sport dysfunctions that will be produced by the unrelenting quest for more revenues and greater wealth.

American spectator sports of the future will be significantly different from what they are today, just as today’s spectator sports are significantly different from what they were years ago. What they evolve into is difficult, if not impossible, to predict with any certainty, but a number of trends seem readily apparent.

Mental Health Concerns

In The Burden of Sports: How and Why Athletes Struggle with Mental Health (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), I address a variety of mental health and emotional well-being challenges athletes face, as well as obstacles in the way of successfully dealing with those challenges. There are numerous challenges to athletes’ mental health, that go well beyond the mental health concerns any other American might face.

Performance stress and anxiety, including the “yips,” CTE and other forms of brain damage. and drug and alcohol abuse and dependency, including to PEDS, may be a direct result of participating in spectator sports. Intolerance and discrimination in sports based on race, ethnicity, gender, and LGBTQ+ identity all contribute to these mental health conditions, and produce emotional well-being challenges of their own.

Female athletes in particular face emotionally charged, health issues, including pregnancy, abortion, postpartum depression, menstruation, and motherhood, that their male counterparts do not experience or experience in different ways. Intolerance and discrimination also contribute to the mental health challenges athletes face. In addition, Covid and its variants produce health-related risks, including to athletes’ mental health and emotional well-being.

The good news is that in general spectator sports are paying closer attention to the mental health concerns of their athletes, especially when those conditions appear likely to diminish the ability of those athletes to perform in their sports. Unfortunately, such efforts still fall well short of what is needed to make meaningful progress.

To begin with, mental health stigma, as well as financial, and competitive concerns, still pressure most athletes to keep their mental health and emotional well-being challenges hidden from coaches, management, and even most teammates, assuming athletes are willing to admit that they have such a challenge or that the given challenge poses a serious problem. Second, the ability and willingness of sports, leagues, and teams to deal with mental health concerns of athletes remains a problem. Few, if any, of these sports entities have adequate knowledge and resources to address the full array of mental health and emotional well-being-related conditions of athletes and coaches.

Third, mental health and emotional well-being concerns of athletes are vast. The ability and willingness of different spectator sports to deal with each concern varies considerably, from abiding concern to ignorance. There even can be active hostility when athletes who are members of marginalized groups are involved, most notably gay, lesbian, transgender, and female athletes.
Finally, most spectator sports, including owners, management, coaches, and athletes themselves are focused, often obsessively so, on the pursuit of money, wealth, fame, reputation, and athletic perfection, far more so than athletes’ mental health and emotional well-being. Spectator sports also have high priced legal and public relations mechanisms in place to promote the generation of revenues and building of wealth, while trying to obscure and marginalize serious oversights, misdeeds, and wrongdoings. This happens even when the mental health and emotional well-being of their athletes may be jeopardized.

Much needs to be improved systemically for the mental health and emotional well-being of athletes to become a priority in spectator sports. This appears to be a challenge that will not be addressed comprehensively without government intervention, which seems unlikely, given how the American political system has operated in past when spectator sports are involved. Any further improvements will likely be incremental at best.

Performance Enhancing Drugs

The drug culture in most spectator sports is well-entrenched, especially the use of PEDs. Enhancing athletic performance will continue to be a priority for athletes, coaches, and sports enterprises, the sports media, and fans. Thus, the push to maximize athletic performance is sky high, directly tied to the ultimate priority of generating revenues and building wealth for all those involved in these sports.

Monitoring and enforcement of bans against PED use in spectator sports have been half-hearted and disjointed, especially when superstar athletes, like number one ranked male tennis player Jannik Sinner, are the subjects of such scrutiny. Those athletes who have been sanctioned harshly tend to be lesser names in a sport or those trying to break in.

The perception has been created that an independent regulatory agency, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), is in charge. The truth of the matter is that WADA is not independent and delegates much of the actual monitoring and enforcement authority to the spectator sports themselves. This delegation has led to the creation of self-serving entities by the affected sports enterprises that purport to strictly follow and enforce WADA guidelines, but do so with a much greater purpose in mind.

While each of these entities may differ as to how much they actually adhere to these PED rules, there is little doubt that the financial interests of each of them weighs heavily in their decision-making. Regulatory independence is a sportswashed illusion. Most of the PED offenders are never caught, even in the better regulated spectator sports.

The incentives for strict monitoring and enforcement continue to be outweighed by financial and performance-enhancing priorities. Moreover, the underlying rationale for banning these illicit substances is badly flawed. There should be nothing wrong with taking PEDs if every athlete is allowed to do so, as long as the drug in question has no serious negative health effects.
Instead, any PED is now banned if, in the opinion of the given spectator sport as counseled by WADA, it provides what is deemed to be an unfair competitive advantage. What is or is not an unfair competitive advantage, however, is a largely subjective calculation, based on information available to, and outside influences on, anti-doping agents hired to make those determinations.

That calculation is considerably more subjective than determining whether a PED has significant health-related risks.
Going forward, spectator sports, in all likelihood, will continue to be entrenched in this PED mess, unless they dump the unfair competitive advantage apparatus that has hampered them for years. A workable alternative is to emphasize the health of the athletes in making decisions about which PEDs to ban and how to structure monitoring and enforcement protocols.

Sports Gambling

The death of Pete Rose placed renewed attention on sports gambling. When Rose was found to be betting on baseball—including his own team the Cincinnati Reds—there was a consensus that players betting on games or sporting events was bad for baseball and spectator sports as a whole. Thus, Rose’s ban from the game for life in 1989 was hailed not only as well-deserved, but an indication that MLB—like most other American spectator sports—had adequately distanced itself from serious sports gambling problems.

That sportswashed perception endured until 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the bans on sports betting in most states. The floodgates were then opened. It became impossible to ignore the impact of gambling on spectator sports. Gambling became an important way to generate revenues and build wealth in most major American spectator sports.
Placing bets on games and athletic outcomes ballooned from tens of millions of dollars a year to more than a billion dollars, and continues to grow. Sports gambling advertising has infected all aspects of the spectator sports world. Even ESPN has become a shill for sports betting.

The dilemma is that most spectator sports now have some piece of the sports betting financial pie and are energetically seeking to enlarge their gambling revenues. These sports warmly embrace sports gambling, while trying to feed the perception that they are doing everything possible to responsibly monitor and enforce rules against betting on their sports by athletes, coaches, and other officials closely associated with those sports.

The increasing number of gambling infractions, including the fixing of games and athletic outcomes and the selling of inside information to gamblers, by athletes, referees, and other key individuals associated with these sports suggests (1) not enough is being done and (2) the problem, like PEDs, is too widespread to effectively control. The current approach in which teams, leagues, other sports enterprises and media networks increasingly try to generate more revenues from sports gambling, while simultaneously trying to protect the perceived integrity of those sports with minimal or no government intervention will continue to produce more, not fewer, serious sports gambling infractions and scandals.

Hands off federal regulation of major American spectator sports has worked out poorly because those who control and operate these sports are not sincerely interested in revealing and addressing the true extent of their sports gambling problems themseles. Without significant federal involvement these gambling-related problems will continue to grow worse.

Automated Officiating

As Ken Belson, the sports and business reporter for The New York Times writes, “many professional sports are on the verge of a new technological breakthrough: automated referee systems, which get the call right every time and significantly reduce delays from reviews.” While it is a slight exaggeration to claim these automated systems will always be correct, according to United States Tennis Association data, the Hawk Eye system used since 2001 in professional tennis for line calls is 99.9 % accurate, while human line calls, such as those at the U.S. Open are only about 75% accurate, meaning they appear to be incorrect 25% of the time.
Similarly, strikes and balls being called using an automated system with a uniform strike zone would be a substantial improvement over MLB umpires. Not only do MLB umpires make a significant percentage of incorrect calls through human error, but the different strike zones they employ, even by the same umpire in the same game, make it difficult, if not impossible, for baseball batters to reliably predict what the strike zone is or will be. MLB already uses an automated system to more accurately determine whether a hit ball is fair or foul or is a homerun or something less than that.

In professional and college football, accuracy of on-the-field measurements to determine the line of scrimmage, first downs, and touchdowns would be substantially improved by substituting an automated system. In a game where inches forward or backward can be critical, human error in making those judgements can significantly affect field position, the score, and even alter the outcomes of games.

Professional and college basketball, like tennis, already benefit from automated call technology, including what is or is not a three-point shot, which player touched the ball last before it went out of bounds, and whether a shot or a foul occurred before or after a quarter, half, or game ended. These automated systems, though, are only used when a team objects and the number of objections allowed is strictly limited. In soccer and ice hockey offsides calls are much more likely to be made correctly by an automated system than by a referee.

There are many more situations where refereeing accuracy in spectator sports could be substantially improved by relying on fully automated systems. The main obstacle to their full implementation has been human resistance to change, even when such changes appear to be clearly better. The litany of complaints about new automated systems in major American spectator sports are not particularly persuasive. Sooner, rather than later, these changes to improve the accuracy of officiating, while saving owners money, will be adopted.

Much of the recent resistance to automated officiating has been lumped in, indiscriminately, with resistance to artificial intelligence (AI). The commonality between the two is that both of these technologies are intended to improve labor and reduce labor expenses. The major difference, though, is that automated systems are still controlled by human beings, while AI may not be, which is a major added concern.

There also has been the argument made that by making a few mistakes human referees provide an entertaining unpredictability to spectator sports that automated refereeing will remove. This seems akin to arguing we should not use pain relievers because enduring pain makes people stronger. The whole point of these automated systems is to minimize unpredictability and maximize accuracy.

It is likely human referees will still be necessary to oversee sporting events and to handle remaining calls that automated systems are ill-equipped to make. Overall, though, substantially fewer human referees will be needed to oversee sporting events. This will save money, avoid interruptions in the action to review close calls, and provide fans with confidence that calls are being made correctly. The downside is that the unions or groups that represent referees in these sports will push hard to slow down the pace of those changes.

Spectator sports are preparing and providing financial support for the development of new automated refereeing options. It is no longer a matter of whether, but rather when and to what extent this automation will be implemented in each of these sports.

The Future of Major American Spectator Sports

There is little doubt that major American spectator sports will continue to be primarily driven by the pursuit of revenues and wealth building for the leagues, teams, sports enterprises, owners, athletes, coaches, and other individuals who profit from these sports. For better or worse, this is the American way.

At the same time, there are several developments that are likely to affect and be affected by those pursuits. First of all, mental health and emotional well-being concerns in these sports are far from resolved. They will continue to pose a steep challenge. As in the rest of American society, mental health as well as drug and alcohol dependency are among the weakest links in the health care system. American athletes, particularly those who are female or part of LGBTQ+ communities, have negative sports-related influences on their mental health that other Americans will never experience.

Second, the use of PEDS is likely to expand as new technologies produce more effective and difficult to detect drugs for athletes to use. There will continue to be strong incentives to do everything possible to improve athletic performances, especially among the athletes themselves. An underlying question is whether the repeatedly failed unfair competitive advantage prism will continue to dominate anti-doping protocols. Much of the controversy surrounding PEDs could be reduced or eliminated, if the health of the athlete became the primary prism through which drug bans and monitoring and enforcement decisions were made.

Third, gambling-related concerns, infractions, and scandals in spectator sports are likely to continue to increase, unless there is considerably more federal intervention. Unfortunately, the history of spectator sports in America, including the rampant abuses experienced by American female Olympic athletes, strongly suggests that such regulation is unlikely to happen in a comprehensive way.

Finally, widespread use of automated refereeing seems to be inevitable. The question is how soon this will occur and how will resistance to those changes be handled? That process already is well underway.

Ohtani Gambling Snafu and MLB: A Predicable Problem Affecting Major Professional and College Sports in Similar Ways
John Weston Parry, J.D.

Introduction: The Ohtani Snafu and Its Wider Implications

Although the emerging sports gambling scandal dustup involving Shohei Ohtani, Major League Baseball (MLB), the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Dodger employee—and Ohtani interpreter—Ippei Mizuhara, might have had the potential to hit professional and college sports like a tsunami, the more likely result will be business as usual once the initial uproar is contained. So far, Mizuhara has been fired and certain aspects of what may have happened are under investigation.

Ohtani, however, remains mostly unblemished as baseball’s favorite son and one of, if not the, most well-known athletes in the world. He is an extraordinary sports cash cow, not only for the Dodgers, but for MLB.

MLB’s efforts to protect its organizational economic interests at all costs has been repeated in many other popular spectator sports in recent years when serious gambling misbehaviors and scandals have been uncovered. Maximizing gambling profits without running afoul of America’s weak gambling laws has become a spectator sports mantra, as well as a sizeable economic opportunity.

As The New York Times reported, that opportunity comes with “a fundamental danger,” which “could threaten the assumption of fairness at the core of athletic competitions.” If so, these sports could become more “like professional wrestling — which is rigged.”
Reportedly, California is somewhat unusual because it is one of 12 states that still prohibits sports gambling. Thus, finessing Ohtani’s legal liability, if, as reported, he actually helped to finance the illegal sports betting of his interpreter, could be particularly difficult, especially if it were to turn out that Ohtani himself bet on certain games, a charge which, after days of silence, he has vehemently deflected by alleging that his friend and interpreter stole money in his account that was used for sports gambling.

What can be prosecuted as illegal gambling in California is subject to prosecutorial discretion and likely political influences in an election year. If former President Trump’s legal entanglements have taught us anything, it is that what masquerades as justice in the American legal system is subject to various influences—not in good ways—particularly when rich, hugely popular, and privileged defendants, like Ohtani or Trump, are implicated in crimes.

One way for MLB to navigate this whole mess will be if Ohtani’s interpreter agrees to completely exonerate his former close friend in court by admitting that he stole all the money Ohtani reportedly lent him. The major remaining hurdle may be explaining the bank records, which according to ESPN show that about $4.5 million was transferred out of Ohtani’s account. The problem is that an authorized representative for Ohtani had previously explained in a public forum that the money had not been stolen, but had been spent by Ohtani to cover his friend’s gambling debts.

Unless a crime is actually prosecuted, however, those bank records are likely to remain out of the public’s view. Even if there should be a prosecution, a plea deal could mean those records might never become part of the court record. Subsequently, Ohtani—reportedly using notes from a prepared statement and retaining a new interpreter—contradicted the previous statements made by his spokesperson. Ohtani denied ever gambling on sports and accused his interpreter of “stealing money from us and [telling] lies.” Ohtani did not specifically deny having also given large amounts of money to Mizuhara, even though Mizuhara told ESPN later that “Ohtani had not transferred the money.”

The notion that Ohtani was the “victim of massive theft,” as his lawyers claimed, was further undermined when Ohtani’s representatives refused to acknowledge, much less provide ESPN with confirmation, that such a crime had been reported to “any of the likely local, state or federal agencies that could investigate [such] allegations.”

Thus, there are multiple competing narratives that have been thrown out there, none of which may turn out to be entirely, or even mostly, correct, assuming the truth of the matter is ever unearthed. There seems to be no denying, as ESPN has reported, however, “at least $4.5 million in wire transfers [were] sent from Ohtani’s bank account to a Southern California bookmaking operation,” which on its face is illegal.

Moreover, the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security are both investigating some aspects of what happened, but likely this has to do with illegal gambling by the bookmaker involved and possible tax evasion, rather than the alleged theft itself. At the moment, only MLB has committed to do an investigation of the alleged theft, along with Ohtani and his interpreter’s involvement in the reported gambling scandal, but apparently it will be internal and not independent.

Gambling Misbehaviors and Scandals in Other Spectator Sports

Regardless of what happens to Ohtani, this episode provides additional proof that sports gambling, as it is presently allowed to operate with few restrictions and regulations, has and will not proceed smoothly for professional and college sports or the public, if the standard of measurement is based on community values, rather than profits and wealth building. Currently, there are few effective disincentives in place to inhibit the leaking—deliberately or carelessly—of inside gambling information by any athlete, coach, or franchise employee, or even to inhibit payoffs to throw games and matches by any of those athletes and coaches whose income is much less than what the relatively few sports stars and superstars make.

Just about the same time that Ohtani was finally blaming his interpreter, deflecting responsibility from himself, the NBA revealed that it had been looking into Toronto Raptors center Jimmy Porter because of large and suspicious wagers made on that player in multiple games during the current NBA season. That sudden disclosure may well have been tied to the fact that all major spectator sports are now under media scrutiny about possible gambling improprieties due to the publicity the Ohtani affair has generated.
This is not the first time the NBA has been embroiled in a sports gambling controversy. As The Washington Post reported, in recent years under the leadership of Adam Silver, the NBA “has advocated for the expansion of legalized sports betting. It also “has established business partnerships with gambling companies.”

The NBA has done this even though in 2007, Tim Donaghy was found to have been complicit in the fixing of multiple NBA games while he was an NBA referee. Furthermore, in November 2023, it was widely reported that a close business partner of Lebron James had been betting large amounts of money using an offshore bookmaker. The NBA did not even bother to investigate James’ possible complicity in that matter, which was not surprising given his stature as an internationally famous sports superstar and NBA cash cow.

The NFL has had an unsavory history of gambling scandals with prominent players as well, including Paul Hornung, Alex Karras, and Art Schlichter who all bet on NFL games. More recently in 2019, Arizona cornerback Josh Shaw was indefinitely suspended for doing the same thing and has not played since.

In 2022 the NFL suspended wide receiver Calvin Ridley for an entire year because he gambled on NFL games while he was on medical leave due to mental health issues. In April 2023, three NFL players were suspended indefinitely for gambling on NFL games, while two more were suspended six games each for placing bets on non-NFL games while at their team facilities.

MLB has had two previous major gambling scandals that rocked that sport to its foundation. One was the infamous game-fixing scheme involving at least 8 Chicago Black Sox players in 1919; the other occurred years later in 1989 when Cincinnati Reds icon and manager was kicked out of baseball for life and denied entry into the baseball hall of fame for his sports gambling behaviors, which he later admitted included betting on MLB games. After hearing about Ohtani, Rose was quoted as saying, if he had had an interpreter in 1989, he would have gone “scot-free.”

Perhaps the worst and most widespread gambling scandal in professional sports occurred in men’s tennis. In September 2023, journalists documented that for a number of years more than 180 players had been participating in a worldwide match-fixing scheme, which had begun in 2014 in Brussels, Belgium. Eventually that gambling cancer metastasized to 30 different countries, especially in low level professional events. One American, Alexandra Riley, was banned from professional tennis for life.

In professional golf, Phil Mickelson reportedly has lost tens of millions of dollars gambling on sports. There was speculation, but no proof, that his massive gambling debts was a major reason he decided to take the Saudis tainted money to participate in LIV golf, even though he had described the Saudis as “scary mother****ers.” Apparently, because Michelson never bet on golf, the PGA had no grounds to discipline him under their gambling rules.

On the other hand, minor league professional golfers on the Korn Ferry Tour, Jake Staiano and Vince India, were suspended for tangentially betting on golf in 2021. They had made a single bet with each other on who was going to win the 12-hole television orchestrated competition between Byson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka.

Furthermore, this past October the NHL suspended American hockey player and the Ottawa Senators third line forward, Shane Pinot, for 41games based on what was vaguely described as “activities related to sports wagering.” The league stated that his bets did not involve any NHL games.

Finally, it is not only professional sports that have endured gambling scandals and misbehaviors. According to an internal document that The Associated Press discovered, NCAA officials recently acknowledged that there have been “175 infractions of its sports-betting policies since 2018.” In addition, there are 17 more ongoing “investigations.”

Perhaps the most serious college sports gambling controversy in recent years involved seven athletes attending Iowa’s two major state universities. Iowa prosecutors accused each of those athletes of criminally tampering with evidence. This was part of an investigation of athletes at Iowa and Iowa State who violated state law by betting on sports when they were under the age of 21. According to Sports Illustrated, the Iowa gambling investigation involved “111 people” at those two universities, “including 26 athletes and one athletic department employee. NCAA rules prohibit “any athlete or athletic department employee [from betting] on any sport the NCAA sponsors at any level.”

In addition, Sports Illustrated reported in March 2024 that two men’s college basketball programs—Temple and Loyola of Maryland— had become the subjects of illegal sports gambling investigations based on unusual bets placed on their games. Also, in the spring of 2023 the University of Alabama’s baseball team was involved in a “betting scandal… that led to the firing of Crimson Tide baseball coach Brad Bohannon.”

All these recent gambling misbehaviors and scandals, which are probably only a fraction of all the violations that have never been left uncovered, beg three questions: (a) how did we get to this place to begin with, (b) what should be done now to regulate sports gambling in person and online, and (c) what is likely to happen going forward, given the current political, social, and economic environment?

How Did We Get Here?

Sports gambling has been a threat to the integrity of spectator sports for a long time now, but there has been a seismic shift since December 2017 when the U.S. Supreme in a 6-3 opinion struck down the Professional and Amateur Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), which was the only significant federal statute governing this area of the law. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn, et al held that “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own,” which, not surprisingly, ramped up the temptation and opportunities to act illegally and illicitly.

Apparently Congress’ original sin was having acted indirectly a quarter century earlier, which it had done on countless other occasions in regulatory matters without Supreme Court interference. The majority reasoned, in an opinion written by Justice Alito, that PASPA was unconstitutional, even though the law had survived over all those years and many lower courts had upheld the legislation.

Alito soon revealed the majority’s primary agenda while employing a legal fiction. The enforcement of PASPA, he ruled, was “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 those members of the Court who joined him, this case was not about sports gambling or even individual rights. It was about how to enhance states’ rights at the expense of federal preemption and regulation.

The Trump Administration chose not to oppose the spread of sports gambling throughout the United States. This form of entertainment had become popular generally and with Trump’s MAGA base. The Justice Department, however, through an assistant solicitor general, rather than the solicitor general himself, wrote an uninspiring amicus brief in support of PASPA.

Justice Ginsburg explained in a scathing dissent, “[o]n no rational ground can it be concluded that Congress [in 1992] would have preferred no statute at all… Congress legitimately sought to … [control] sports gambling … while making it clear that [any] stoppage is attributable to federal, not state action.” Under PASPA, Congress had taken a politically nuanced approach in deciding to prohibit sports gambling, but not in all jurisdictions; nor in all sports.

It was a familiar way for federal legislators to balance states’ rights with other competing federal interests. Unfortunately, a majority of the Supreme Court, having a very different agenda, preferred to leave sports gambling largely unregulated or regulated less stringently, depending on the gambling laws in each state. Much like Roe v Wade being overturned a few years later this embrace of states’ rights turned out to be a recipe for a federal enforcement vacuum and legal confusion.

Since 2017, major spectator sports organizations like the NFL, MLB, the NBA, the NHL and professional tennis, have gone all in with respect to sports gambling, or have tiptoed in and then looked the other way like many universities and colleges with major sports programs. The epitome of sports gambling greed, however, can be found in team sports where franchise owners and the leagues who are supposed to govern them have prioritized gambling profits.

No team owner has done more to lead the way then Ted Leonsis, who owns the Washington Wizards, the Washington Capitals, and the Washington Mystics. He has been a disciple and promoter of using franchise arenas and stadiums for onsite gambling operations. That in part may explain why he desired to move two of his franchises—the Wizards and Capitals— from the federally-influenced District of Columbia location to the more gambling friendly state of Virginia.

According to the Richmond-Times Dispatch, Virginia allows people to bet on professional sports and is considering whether in 2025 to allow state residents to bet on major college football and basketball games as well. In D.C., people may only bet on sports online or with a mobile app and only if they are near certain locations that the local government has pre-approved for sports gambling. Now that Leonsis has negotiated a sweetheart deal to remain in D.C., rather than screw local residents by moving to Northern Virginia, it will be interesting to see if, D.C,—in addition to contributing over $500 million to Leonsis’ arena upgrades as well as providing transportation, security, and other publicly-financed amenities—has committed to improve Leonsis’ sports gambling prospects and operations.

Greed is at the root of most of what has gone wrong with sports gambling. This is similar to the greed that has encouraged billionaire franchise owners like Leonsis to try to pressure and manipulate local communities into providing them with obscenely generous subsidies to build new state of the art arenas and stadiums. With sports gambling, though, conveniently the profits go directly from the sports fans and other local residents into the pockets of gambling businesses and franchise owners.

Looking the other way may become increasingly difficult going forward in spectator sports, however, as gambling corruption and related scandals become more frequent and well-publicized. It is one thing when a former referee or umpire is accused of having betted on sports or being involved with various gambling interests, or a low-ranked tennis player takes bribes to throw a match, a set, or a point, but it is quite another thing when one of, if not, the most internationally prominent sports superstars, is reported to have paid for his close friends’ gambling debts.

The appearance of impropriety by Ohtani himself cannot be properly refuted until a full and thorough independent investigation is made. Such an investigation cannot be independent, if it is conducted by a team or league law firm, which has become a common practice when sports scandals arise these days.

What Should Be Done Now?

With regard to Ohtani, the whole mess will need to play itself out, or die on the vine. A just result is highly unlikely to occur, unless there is a truly independent investigation and/or a thorough criminal prosecution. The more important question, though, is how gambling should be regulated more generally so that it does not repeatedly corrupt major American spectator sports, as it seems to have been doing ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2017? As the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga has pointed out, “people are going to bet on sports. Let’s get it out in the open and make sure it’s done properly.” That can only be done through “regulation.”

Because most sports engage in interstate and/or international commerce, the only way to control sports gambling in an efficient and reasonable manner is for there to be federal legislation once again. This time, however, a new law should be a measurable improvement over PASPA, which for its limited merits had glaring politically-inspired exemptions and blind spots that favored Las Vegas gambling operations, while pretty much ignoring fantasy leagues and online sports gambling operations. Somehow in 1992, Congress was not too concerned with those gambling issues. PASPA was significantly better than nothing, but a long way from being ideal.

As a threshold matter, a new federal law should be written in a way that makes it crystal clear that Congress means to directly regulate sports gambling by preempting state laws. Otherwise, it is likely to be struck down again, in whole or in part, as being unconstitutional as interpreted by the current U.S. Supreme Court.

Second, sports gambling should be made illegal for minors. Instead of using 21as the age of adulthood, it probably would make more sense to set the age at 18, which would be consistent with the age for military service and federal laws governing gun possession and ownership. How ever adulthood is defined with respect to sports gambling, though, it is important that children be strongly deterred from gambling on sports.

Adults who knowingly or recklessly assist minors to gamble illegally should be charged with a non-violent felony. Minors who bet illegally should be charged with a misdemeanor for a first offense and if found guilty, should receive a sentence of several months of community service. For a second offense, minors should be sentenced to community service until they reach the age of majority. Refusal to complete mandatory community service should result in indefinite detention in a juvenile facility until the minor agrees to complete such service.

Third, a new federal gambling law should provide sufficient funding and resources for vigorous enforcement throughout the United States. Too often, federal criminal laws do not meet their potential, or even largely fail, due to the lack of funding and peoplepower to properly enforce their provisions. The federal tax system is a prime example of how a strong, albeit unnecessarily complex, set of laws and regulations can be substantially marginalized, especially for those who have the money, influence, and resources to avoid paying taxes.

Fourth, the federal law should create a barrier between sports and gambling by prohibiting onsite gaming of any kind at sports arenas, stadiums, and other professional or college sports facilities, especially those sports facilities that do not already have such gambling relationships. Those facilities that have onsite gaming should be given a reasonable amount of time, say a year, to end those gambling relationships.

Fifth, all sports gambling businesses and operators in the U.S. should be required to register their activities and obtain licenses in order to conduct those businesses, legally. Any sports gambling conducted through an unlicensed business or operator should be deemed a non-dangerous felony.

Finally, a federal sports gambling law should cover all sports doing business in the United States and every U.S. jurisdiction, equally.

Conclusion: What Is Likely to Happen?

Without an independent investigation, Ohtani, the Dodgers, and MLB will likely be able to sportswash this scandal away, and/or hire the right law firm to help them do it. That sportswashing process already has begun as a result of the several different narratives that already have been put forth, which contradict each other and obscure any search for truth. Moreover, MLB Commissioner Manfred signaled what is likely to happen when he stated that although the league was committed to doing an investigation of some kind, he hopes it will be a “short’’ one.

It is difficult for the average fan and the public to read between the lines enough to fully appreciate how they are being manipulated by Ohtani’s spokespeople and his lawyers. If MLB manipulates them as well by failing to conduct a serious independent investigation, and there is no criminal prosecution, the truth behind this whole affair is likely to disappear. As The Washington Post put it in a headline: Ohtani is “MLB’s biggest star” with “unprecedented, worldwide power.” The article accompanying that headline brushed aside Ohtani’s gambling scandal almost entirely as if it would have little if any impact on Ohtani, the Dodgers, or the league.

What will happen to sports gambling more generally is likely to suffer a similar fate. Former gambling addict and current poker analyst, Norman Chad, once wrote in his regular Washington Post column that when it comes to betting, the “house almost always wins.” Accordingly, major professional sports and even major college sports under the NCAA’s jurisdiction have been buying as many rooms in as many of those houses as possible. They have been using public relations experts and lawyers to make it happen by sportswashing the obvious deterioration of community values.

Unless the federal government becomes empowered to forcefully intervene, the odds of sports gambling being responsibly controlled, except in a few states, seems to be a very risky bet. Unfortunately, the fix seems to be in on any such comprehensive interventions.

Currently, relatively few regulatory laws are being enacted at the federal level and the resources for the federal government to enforce the laws and regulations that are in place keep getting reduced by funding cuts and inflation. In this current political environment, it is unlikely that any federal sports gambling legislation will be enacted, and if it were, that legislation is likely to fall well-short, in terms of its scope and funding, of what would be needed to be reasonably effective.

MONUMENTAL SPORTS GREED HALL OF FAME FOR OWNERS
By John Weston Parry, J.D.

To be considered for the newly established Monumental Sports Greed Hall of Fame, a now living sports owner must check three boxes: (1) go all in supporting mostly unregulated sports gambling; (2) promote and accept millions of dollars from Mid-Eastern financial institutions, helping one of these oppressive nations—all of whom are on Amnesty International’s human rights watch list—expand their global influence; and (3) convince a local community and/or state to pay for much or most of their new multi-billion-dollar sports arena.

Ted Leonsis, controlling owner of the Washington Wizards, Washington Capitals, Washington Mystics, and the Monumental Sports Network, is well on his way to becoming the first inductee, after beginning his sports tenure as a seemingly generous human being. Leonsis has met the first two requirements easily and has agreed in principle to a plan that will allow him to easily meet the third. No other post-modern American sports owner has sunk to such depths of avarice, at least not yet, but, unfortunately, many are getting much closer. This Hall of Fame is a society that even Dallas Cowboys’ president and CEO Jerry Jones could not join, based on his demerits because he has not yet accepted tainted Mid-East money.

A Sports Gambling Leader

Ted Leonis, who established a foundation to help kids “overcome obstacles and achieve their goals” and worked hard to bring the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games to Washington, appears to have begun martialing his blitz for deplorable sports immortality in the fall of 2019. As Washington Post columnist Jerry Brewer articulated at the time, Leonsis was the first major American sports franchise owner to “[bet] on sports gambling in a big way.”

Leonsis’ “vision,” and the public’s concern, was to “transform” his sports arena “into a year-round sanctuary [for gambling] that would “marry two of his great passions -- sports and technology --[in a] … better-friendly way” to groom more gambling chumps, victims, and privileged rich people. He formed a “partnership with British Bookmaker Willam Hill” and Caesars Palace to allow his sport venue “to function like a vast casino during live events.”

Leonsis wanted Capital Arena to be a “`sports cathedral’” where patrons could “`watch other games on television, do research, [and] bet and wager….’” His full embrace of gambling in this way helps explain why other owners, spectator sports, athletes, and coaches have been embroiled in one gambling fiasco after the other. Where the money is this big and largely unregulated, gambling crimes and tragedies are sure to follow. The U.S. Supreme Court opened the door and the sports world, led by Leonsis, rushed in with few if any safeguards.

In his company’s words on its website,

Caesars Sportsbook at Capital One Arena officially opened in May 2021, becoming the first sportsbook to be located inside a U.S. sports arena. The state-of-the-art Vegas-style sportsbook has wall-to-wall flatscreen televisions, ten betting windows, and 20 betting kiosks. There are ample betting opportunities.

Indeed! The “space is open year-round on both event and non-event days.” One does need a ticket to an athletic contest to get into the Sportsbook or its affiliated Guy Fieri restaurant, which is there to help draw in wealthy betters.

According to USA Today, only nine other major league arenas or stadiums have followed suit so far, including the other two major Washington area franchises, the Commanders (NFL) and the Nationals (MLB). However, owners, teams, leagues, athletes, coaches, and sports networks like ESPN have all found ways to pocket the cash hand over first by promoting sports gambling in one way or another. They all owe Leonsis a debt for helping to pave the way.

Tainted Middle-East Money: Leonsis as a Promoter and Beneficiary

As Washington Post reporter Rick Maese described: in July 2023 Leonis “became the first U.S. sports owner to take on Middle East Investment.” He sold “a 5 percent stake of Monumental Sports to the Quatar Investment Authority” for around “$200 million dollars.” Quatar is on the Human Rights watch list, primarily because of abuse of its migrants and its women. Nevertheless, since 2021, Leonsis has been trying to convince the NBA and its owners to accept money from these disreputable Mid-east nations, including Saudi Arabia. “`I believe other teams and other leagues will all be embracing [these] …sovereign wealth funds,” he predicted back then with the intention of helping to make it more possible.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver smartly responded that he did not anticipate sovereign wealth funds representing any nation “becoming controlling owners of a [NBA] franchise… `in the foreseeable future,’” but added, ominously: “`I don’t want to say what could ever happen, but there’s no contemplation right now.” That is pretty much what Silver said about sports gambling and we now know how that turned out. To be fair, though, Silver has very little influence over NBA owners, who pay his salary and determine whether he goes or stays.

As Maese wrote elsewhere, this trend of accepting tainted lucre is “only poised to accelerate” as sports leagues, teams, and their athletes and coaches find the alure of all this foreign money “difficult to resist.” This seems to be the case with the most-greedy sport in America, NFL football, which is seriously exploring the idea of “chang[ing] its strict ownership rules” to accommodate sovereign fund investments. Thanks in large part to Leonsis, many teams and leagues will use gambling to “prop up the sports economy, giving [those] organizations… and athletes” new opportunities to earn more money.

Teams, leagues, athletes, and coaches that negotiate “deals with [the] Saudis—or other gulf nations,” however, like the badly fractured PGA Golf Tour, will have to “contend with the potential for blowback, grapple with sportswashing accusations, try to reconcile… human rights violations,” anticipate that disreputable country’s global intentions, and deal with all the resulting bad publicity.

Moreover, it may not even be good for business as professional golf and the much-venerated Masters tournament is finding out the hard way. The fields for the PGA’s major golf tournaments are being seriously diluted, while the Saudis’ competing LIV Tour has been pretty much a bust in terms of attendance.

The New Arena Hustle

The crown jewel in Leonsis’ bid for sports greed immortality, though, is his plan to get the District of Columbia (D.C.) and Northern Virginia into a bidding war for his two most valuable sports franchises, the Caps and Wizards, after—in the words of Washington Post columnist Candace Bruckner— deceptively promising D.C. residents "all he ever wanted to do was look out at the people his teams served and see the love reflected back.” Like love itself, sports loyalty too often has a fickle master, mostly operating as a one-way street.

Thus, when D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was cool on the idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a new sports arena for a multi-billionaire, who everyday only gets richer, in a city that has pressing social needs—including poverty, lack of housing and lack of health and mental health care—Leonsis decided to partner up with Maga Virginia Governor Youngkin and threaten to move his teams from D.C. to the Potomac Yard areas of Northern Virginia. He did this even though there is a good possibility that the seemingly essential metro rail system will no longer be able to provide late evening service late at a time when most of the games played in that proposed arena will end.

Nevertheless, Mayor Bowser, fearing political repercussions from her constituents, responded by promising to provide $500 million of the $600 million Leonsis had initially demanded for his teams to remain in D.C. Compared to the $1.55 to $1.6 million Youngkin seems to be promising, however, that appears to be unpersuasive, particularly since Potomac Yards just happens to be near the new Amazon complex, which Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos also owns.

Reportedly, Leonsis and his corporate partners will only have to contribute $400 million of the $2 billion dollar plus arena project if it is built in Northern Virginia. To their credit, the Post and its journalists have been lambasting the proposed move, despite Bezos’ potential pecuniary conflict of interest. On the other hand, Bezos benefits either way this turns out. In one scenario, he enhances his reputation in the newspaper world by being scrupulously independent. In the other, he significantly boosts the worth of his Amazon holdings.

If Mr. Leonsis succeeds in his plan to legally extort hundreds of millions, and maybe even billions, of dollars from the public coffers for his new arena and sports gambling paradise, the multi-billionaire will deserve to be the first inductee into the Monumental Sports Greed Hall of Fame by acclimation. Unlike other halls of fame members, though, such as Jackie Robinson and Chuck Berry, Leonsis will never be revered, except, perhaps, by his increasingly rich spouse and children.

REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND THEIR SPORTSWASHING ENGULF The PGA TOUR, MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, And The NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION In THREE SEPARATE, HIGH PROFILE, POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
By John Weston Parry, J.D.

Former President Donald Trump and his former Vice President Mike Pence may be in opposition to each other as two of the most visible candidates for the Republican nomination for President in 2024, but they share a distinction of being knee-deep in morally corrupt strategies to use sportswashing to potentially deliver themselves votes and campaign donations by denigrating the human rights of oppressed Saudis (especially women), and America’s LGBTQ+ communities, respectively. Trump is doing this by supporting LIV Golf; Pence by criticizing Pride celebrations being held by every Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise, except, not surprisingly, the Texas Rangers.

In addition, the two of them have been obstructing gun control in America, which, in sports, now centers on the National Basketball Association (NBA) after several unfortunate incidents in recent weeks. A total of twelve people were wounded by gun shots while celebrating the Denver Nuggets championship on game night; then again after the parade through the city a couple of days later. Also, one of the NBA’s likely super star African American players, Ja Morant, was suspended for at least twenty-five games, in large part because twice he had posted pictures of himself brandishing a gun, which, in this country, he had every legal right to brandish.

If indeed sports is a “mirror of American life” as so many scholars, beginning with Robert Boyle in 1963 have argued, then Trump and Pence may be walking political tightropes in terms of how their sportswashing strategies will play nationally, beyond their MAGA Republican base. In the short-run, though, Trump is likely to benefit politically and economically by positioning himself to syphon off a significant chunk of cash from the Saudis nearly $700-billion Public Investment Fund for his golf businesses and political campaign, while Pence is likely to be embraced by people who oppose LGBTQ+ rights. Both politicians still will be attempting to garner votes and contributions by supporting the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) gun rights insanity that Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court continue to allow to be perpetuated throughout the United States, except, so far, not on behalf of NBA players, who are predominantly Black.

Trump and The PGA Tour’s Saudis Money Grab

Former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has been a strong supporter of LIV Golf. That is because (1) doing so benefits his golf enterprises and (2) he has close ties with the Saudis, who run and fund this once rogue golf league, which up until now was in direct competition with the PGA Tour, but faring poorly, financially and in terms of fan appeal.
Trumps political support, along with the Saudi king’s treasure chest, however, shifted the economic calculus for the PGA Tour from a free enterprise competition to a legal and political struggle. The Saudis were not going to run out of money for a long, long, time, while the PGA Tour was hemorrhaging millions of dollars hoping for a favorable outcome soon. Furthermore, Trump and his MAGA supporters in Congress, behind the scenes, ensured that the political and legal pressures, despite the Saudi king’s gross human rights violations, would be on the PGA Tour, rather than on them. A frustrated, but apparently conniving PGA Tour Commissioner Monahan, complained vociferously, that he was receiving no support from Congress in battling the King’s representative.

It also may have been a major reason why Monahan and certain other PGA Tour executives began meeting in secret with the Saudis, without the players knowledge or involvement, long before any resolution had been agreed upon. More importantly, perhaps, the Saudis offered to bank role the cash-strapped PGA Tour and presumably—although this has not been independently verified yet—make Monahan a very rich man in the process. In return, the Saudi king’s emissary, Yasir al-Rumayyan, who directs the king’s Public Investment Fund, reportedly worth over $700 billion and has an MBA from Harvard, would be the chairman of the new company running professional golf, with Monahan as its chief operating officer, reporting to Rumayyan and the new company’s board, rather than the PGA Tour players.

Monahan’s betrayal of the players was so unpopular that he was suspiciously absent for the U.S. Open, held for the first time at a relatively easy—by Open Standards—course in downtown Los Angeles. In addition, he temporarily relinquished his role in directing “day-to-day” operations of the Tour with what he described vaguely as a “medical issue.” Thus, if the players revolt and take control of the Tour as certain journalists, including Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post, have urged, he could become a rich man without a job. Even so, it is likely that most of the players would want to embrace the large sums of Saudi money likely to come their way.

Former President Trump, with his vocal support for LIV Golf and the Saudi king’s sportswashing strategy, may be the biggest American beneficiary. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump and his family… aligned themselves with LIV against the PGA Tour,” in part because, in response to the former President’s January 6th effort to improperly reverse the 2020 presidential election and his other incendiary comments and actions, the “United States and Britain had moved to shut Trump courses out of major professional competitions….”

This is not the first-time Trump has gone head-to-head with a major American sports enterprise. Trump’s actions here are similar, in certain ways, to his fight with the NFL years ago, when he owned a U.S. Football League franchise. He lost that battle to be welcomed into the NFL, but appears to have won this recent tour de force, unless Democrats in Congress or the players successfully intervene, which seems unlikely. And even should the Saudis’ sportswashing effort be rebuffed, presidential candidate Trump undoubtedly will have his campaign coffers filled with millions of dollars from the Saudi king and his emissaries.

Former Vice President Pence and His Opposition to MLB’s LGBTQ+ Pride Celebrations

Former Vice President Mike Pence could have made a beeline to Las Vegas to cash in on the anti-gay chants by Mexican-American fans against the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team. However, he will have to be satisfied by joining Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw in making disparaging comments about Major League Baseball franchises holding—sometimes reluctantly—LGBTQ+ celebrations, instead of promoting those Christians, who feel it is their religious privilege and duty to discriminate against and dehumanize LGBTQ+ communities. Unlike pride night for the San Francisco Giants and other teams, except the Texas Rangers who refused to participate, the center of controversy, which motivated Pence to spout historically inaccurate references about the sanctity of MLB over the years, took place in Los Angeles.

The Dodgers had planned their Pride Night for June 16th, but ahead of that event they disinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which for 30 years has challenged the Catholic Church’s intolerance by doing fundraising and volunteer work for LGBTQ+ groups, dressing up as nuns. This perceived afront to Catholicism, led the Dodgers to play it safe by trying not to antagonize their Catholic fans and Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. That strategy backfired when the Dodgers were roundly criticized for their cowardly action and re-invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. At the same time, though, they acquiesced to Kershaw’s insistence that there be, in his words, a “talk about Jesus,” Christian Faith night on July 30th. Kershaw maintained that he only had a problem with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence “making fun of a religion,” not with the “LGBTQ community or Pride or anything like that.”

Similarly, in Tampa Bay, which had arranged for Rays’ players to show support for Pride Night and LGBTQ+ communities by wearing jerseys and caps with a logo featuring rainbow colors, five Rays pitchers chose not to participate because, like Kershaw, they felt it was an affront to their Christian faiths. Rays’ pitcher Jason Adam explained that their religions teach them that Jesus believed LGBTQ lifestyles should not be “encourage[d},” which apparently means they should be directly opposed.

Those Rays’ pitchers were joined by a couple of pitchers from other teams, who made their homophobic leanings public. Former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Anthony Bass, before he was eventually released for sharing a hate-filled Instagram Post attacking LGBTQ+ communities, astoundingly was about to be given an opportunity to make amends by throwing out the first pitch to begin the Jay’s Pride Weekend celebration. In addition, former Boston Red Sox pitcher Matt Dermody was designated to assignment to the minor leagues, after a homophobic tweet he had made in 2021 resurfaced.

It was around this time, former Vice President Mike Pence entered the fray by criticizing Major League Baseball’s Pride nights as soiling the leagues’ “apolitical reputation” and jeopardizing a game that has been an example of “American greatness,” which has united the country across “political, social, and cultural boundaries.” As Kevin Blackistone acerbically observed in The Washington Post, Pence’s historical analysis about baseball deserved “a failing grade.” To begin with, MLB has a great deal to apologize for, especially regarding its awful treatment of African American players, but also its labor stultifying oppression of all its players for years.

With respect to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Blackistone quoted a critic of the Catholic Church who pointed out that it is a “`massive organization that’s got all kinds of… problems [including]… all the stuff that they do to marginalize [LGBTQ] communities.’” Thus, concluded the Post columnist, the Sisters are merely “flipping the script on appropriation… They are using Catholic imagery to challenge the church to do better to live up to its mission, particularly to those who are LGBTQ+.” For Pence, though, dehumanizing LGBTQ+ communities, using Christianity and sportswashing as his main tools, seems to be a desperate and crass political strategy in a presidential run, which right now he seems destined to lose.

The NBA and the Social Insanity of Gun Violence

Trump, Pence, and Maga Republicans are firmly committed to the legally skewed and socially insane Second Amendment interpretation, consecrated by a reactionary United States Supreme Court, that there should be almost no rational limits placed on the possession and hording of assault rifles and rapid-fire revolvers, nor being allowed to brandish such weapons of mass destruction in public places. Only after the guns have been fired recklessly or with deliberate violence may communities act to restrain those who have been responsible for shootings that have caused grave and sometimes catastrophic harm. This is a major reason why the United States has more gun-related homicides per capita, by far, than any other industrialized nations, including Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and China.

How the United States repeatedly and incessantly has failed to effectively deal with gun violence, or allows those in charge to take belated actions in a racially biased manner, was on display in the NBA after the Denver Nuggets won their first championship ever. The night the Nuggets clinched the championship, a city-wide celebration turned violent after, as the Denver Post reported, “at least 10 people… were injured in an overnight shooting that apparently was connected to a fentanyl drug deal.” More than “20 shots were fired” near a major Denver downtown intersection where people were still celebrating.

This did not come as much of surprise to Denver authorities because other major American sport championships in recent years have morphed from celebrations into gun violence and riots. Reportedly, the Denver police had anticipated such a reality. That is why many extra officers were patrolling the streets to respond, if something violent happened, which it did.

A couple of days later, during, and just after, the Nuggets victory parade, three other people were seriously injured. Two were shot and a police officer, providing heightened security for the event, was run over by a precautionarily dispatched fire truck and may lose his leg. These Denver celebration-related shootings and injuries received relatively sparse media coverage, certainly compared to the details about the game itself and the subsequent suspension of Ja Morant for at least 25 games next season. He is being sanctioned for having twice posted social media videos with him brandishing a firearm. It also had been reported in the media that he had displayed, but not used, a gun while physically assaulting an older adolescent boy he had confronted.
Given America’s confused and divided opinions about its epidemic of gun violence, three different sports media perspectives have emerged in response to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s ultimate decision. All three have had a certain underlying validity.

First, there was the ultra-progressive opinion, most prominently delivered by Dave Zirin in The Nation, that it would be “All-NBA hypocrisy” to punish Morant a Black superstar professional basketball player “while this country’s gun addiction rages out of control.” Gun violence, he wrote, is not fostered by “young Black men but by a far right that is drunk with reactionary fever dreams and visions of race war.” Not surprisingly, the NRA has not tried to “defend Morant’s `right’ to bear arms,” Zirin continued. While this would “be smart politically [for NRA MAGA supporters] racism trumps [any] political strategy” to protect gun owners.

A second perspective was that Morant deserved to be kicked out of the league or suspended for at least half a season or more. From that point of view, Silver was coddling an extremely gifted basketball player, so as not to seriously disrupt Morant’s career, nor prevent the league from reaping the potential benefits, if his Jordan or James-like super star talents were to be fulfilled.
Silver, though, was seen by most in the sports media as having arrived at a reasonable punishment—no less than a 25-week suspension without pay and assurances from counselors that Morant is ready to return—while still making the crucial point that the Commissioner and the league do not think it is good for the NBA’s image to have its high-profile basketball players publicly brandishing guns. The player’s gun culture struggle in the NBA has been ongoing for decades. It began with Silver’s predecessor David Stern.

In almost every well-publicized instance in which NBA players have broken this still unwritten rule about displaying guns, the athlete involved has been African American, which inevitably has placed the league’s gun control punishments in a decidedly racial context. In the United States, one is far more likely to run afoul of the law, be shot by police, or be penalized by a sports league for brandishing a firearm in public, if one is Black or Brown and/or perceived as having a mental health-related issue.
If one is white and has the support of family and friends, a person can pretty much carry and display a gun almost anywhere in public, except maybe not the Capitol—although apparently certain members of Congress exercise that privilege—nor in elementary and secondary schools, unless you are a teacher or school security officer. The nation’s gun craziness, mixed in with the appearance of widespread racism, makes the NBA’s gun policy suspect, even though on its face it may seem sound.

For basketball fans, though, Morant’s behavior on and off-the-court has created a paradox. Jerry Brewer of the Washington Post, captured the potential super star player’s dilemma best: “With Morant, you can’t believe what you are watching [on the court],” but “in the back of your mind, you can’t be certain it will last.” Thus, his “punishment… will outlast [any] NBA discipline.” It certainly will not be the last NBA player-related gun controversy, however.

Nor will Morant be the last African American athlete from a major American team sport to be embroiled in a gun controversy. In fact, as ESPN.com reported, on June 20th cornerback Jack Jones of the New England Patriots was arraigned “on weapons charges in East Boston.” The NFL, in contrast to the NBA, though, merely urges its players not to do something stupid or reckless with a gun.

MIRROR, MIRROR On The WALL, WHICH IS The MOST REPUGNANT, SPORTSWASHED SPECTATOR SPORTS ORGANIZATION
Of THEM ALL? SAUDI ARABIA’S LIV GOLF
John Weston Parry

In recent years, a growing number of spectator sports organizations have distinguished themselves by their reprehensible actions; then tried to sportswash awful deeds in repugnant ways, using public relations and legal strategies to obscure their offenses. The NFL, USOPC, IOC, and FIFA have all vied for being the worst offenders. There can be no dispute now, however, as to which sports organization is the most socially offensive. That distinction goes to the Saudi Arabian financed and controlled and Trump supported LIV Golf tour.

LIV golfers have managed to far exceed their Professional Golf Association Tour (PGA Tour) brethren, not in popularity, by any means, but in social insensitivity, greed, and politicizing their sport. LIV golfers have allowed themselves to be pawns: (1) for Saudi Arabia’s oppression of its entire female population; (2) for the murder and imprisonment of political dissenters, including the dismemberment of Washington Post (Post) columnist Jamal Khashogi; (3) for OPEC’s support of Russia over the United States and Western nations by decreasing its oil production when Western energy reserves have reached critical thresholds; and (4) by becoming an incubator of right wing MAGA Republican politics.

Not surprisingly, one of LIV Golf’s most ardent American backers and beneficiaries is former U.S. President Donald Trump, whose golf resorts have been the sites of two major LIV competitions, including the team championship this past week at Trump National Doral in Florida. That tournament was so much in demand no American television network broadcast the event. Nonetheless, the winning four-man team led by Dustin Johnson received $16 million to split. The last place team divided $1 million. The total purse might be the greatest loss leader in sports history.

But then, the Saudis are not primarily investing in this golf scheme to make money, although they hope that, unlike Trump’s United States Football League team in the 1980’s, they will be able to make a handsome profit on the side, or at least not lose too much money. Saudi Arabia, as Kent Baab, wrote in the Post, “is hellbent on transforming itself, or at least convincing the world, it is striving toward a post-oil and pro-woman future.” LIV Golf is one part of that propaganda offensive. Yet, “in mainstream quarters the series is still viewed as corrupt [and] its players greedy…,” and one might add unprincipled and either politically brazen or naive.

LIV Golf, by all appearances, has an unlikely economic recipe for success. As PGA Tour golfer Joel Dahmen tweeted: “If a player wins a golf tournament in a forest and no one sees it, does it count?” Only in the sense it underscores how desperate to make even more money than they do on the lucrative PGA and European Tours, a minority of talented male professional golfers must be. While the very best golfers have mostly steered clear of this grab for cash, a few high-profile stars, along with some golfing wannabees, have been eager to be bought off, no matter that may mean for oppressed women and political dissenters in Saudi Arabia and for right wing politics in the United States.

Those star players at the money trough are mostly Americans on the downside of their careers, like Phil Michelson, Dustin Johnson, and Patrick Reed; Americans whose careers have stalled, like Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau; and international competitors whose stars are fading, like Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter, or who do not have same name recognition on the PGA Tour as their American counterparts, like Cam Smith. They are joined by an assortment of other golf professionals, who have yet to establish themselves as stars. However, the games two most respected players, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, as well as a majority of other PGA Tour stars, have publicly opposed LIV Golf and embraced the professional sanctions against those golfers who have defected.

Ultimately, LIV Golf is doomed to fail unless it can secure a television deal from a major network to broadcast all or at least most of its events. While the Saudis may have a great deal of money to spend on propaganda of this sort, they are likely to see, in the not-too-distant future, that this type of professional golf format is not catching on. When this realization crystalizes, the Saudis, as they have done with some of their other expensive propaganda-infused, modernization efforts that have failed to catch on, are likely to walk away, leaving the renegade LIV golfers holding the proverbial empty bag. At that point, it will become clear how many bridges these former PGA and European golf tour members have burned by trying to undermine the tours that gave them the opportunity to become rich and famous.

Seemingly, the biggest headscratcher is why Phil Mickelson, who has made so much money on the PGA Tour and has been a strong leader and advocate for more diversity in professional golf, made such a leap, so late in his career. There are at least two reasons. First, is tautological, the fact that it is late in Mickelson’s career. He is now 50 years-old and it appears unlikely he would do well on the PGA tour going forward, much less win more than one or two, if any, events. Second, and more importantly perhaps, Mickelson reportedly has astronomical gambling losses to contend with. He appears to have a serious gambling problem.

While LIV Golf may be a big gamble for many of the younger golfers on that fledgling tour, it is easy money for Mickelson worth a reported two hundred million dollars, guaranteed by the Saudis. They do no need Mickelson to win, just to lend them his once illustrious, but now tarnished, name. Next to Tiger Woods no golfer is more well-known or has had, until recently, a bigger fan following. In Mickelson’s opinion, financed by the Saudis: “Liv Golf is trending upward… the PGA Tour trending downward… I love the side that I’m on.” Such a large amount of money undoubtedly will make his recent financial problems go away, but it may also undermine his golf legacy.

The LIV Golf formula from a financial perspective appears to be a selfish trade-off. Instead of trying to buy good will, as the PGA Tour does, by providing communities that host its tournaments with sizable donations and promotions for local charities, LIV Golf supports the Saudis global ambitions and Trump politics instead, and, so far, puts significantly more purse money in the pockets of the players. More money for players is what is driving this presently small migration of PGA Tour players to LIV Golf.

Like Trump’s New Jersey Generals football team in the 1980’s, there is no guarantee the big money will continue for very long. In fact, the prospects now appear to be dimmer than before. Most players and golf fans do not like the LIV golf competitive formats, which are different in unpopular ways from the PGA and European tour events. Despite the hype by LIV backers that these competitions bring a breath of fresh air to professional golf’s status quo, the reality is that they have failed to capture the imaginations of the television networks or golf fans, except MAGA Republicans when LIV events are held in Trump resorts. Even then, attendance is more of a trickle than overflowing crowds.

To borrow a popular phrase from a 1984 Wendy’s commercial: “Where’s the beef?” LIV Golf is a sport without a substantial audience led by a few former PGA stars whose stardom continues to dim every day they remain on the LIV Tour. Undoubtedly, those players’ corporate sponsors will take notice of that dimming, as well as LIV Golf’s unpopular political associations, if they have not done so already, by cutting those golfers’ endorsement packages.

Nonetheless, for this current year at least, many LIV golfers have made much more money on that tour, either in prize money or Saudi guarantees, than they would have, had they remained with the PGA Tour. Dustin Johnson, the top LIV Golf money earner, raked in over $35 million this season.

For those golfers who might be tempted by this huge pot of gold to switch over now, however, they may be more like late comers to a Ponzi scheme. The available prize money, which is scheduled to increase, will still have to be split amongst any additional golfers, unless more money arrives because a major network decides to broadcast these unpopular LIV Golf competitions. Currently, those events only draw a fraction of the attendance associated with PGA Tour competitions.

A wild card in all of this could be the upcoming national elections in the U.S. They might provide LIV Golf with a MAGA lifeline and conceivably revive its weak antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, if not in 2023, then perhaps after the Presidential election in 2024 should Trump be re-elected and put his cronies in charge of the Department of Justice. It will be interesting to see how much money, assuming it can be traced, the Saudi’s plow into Trump’s presumed third run for the presidency.

LIV Golfers Sue the PGA Tour and the Tour Responds

The other unresolved consideration is how the legal system deals with the lawsuits by LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, respectively, against each other. Out of frustration at being barred from competing in PGA Tour events, nearly a dozen golfers on the Saudi-backed and controlled LIV Tour initially turned to the courts to bail them out with a Mickelson-like Hail Mary back in July. Yet, predictably that strategy has already begun to fizzle, especially now that Saudi Arabia has snubbed its nose at the Biden administration. But that legal calculus may all change if MAGA Republicans control Congress and then the presidency.

Originally, the U.S. Department of Justice, at a point in time that President Biden was hoping to convince OPEC to increase oil supplies, initiated an investigation into the suspensions imposed on former PGA players who had joined LIV Golf. Those sanctions were intended to prevent players from participating in PGA Tour tournaments, including majors, if they had defected. Soon thereafter, 11 LIV golfers, including Phil Mickelson, sued in federal court alleging antitrust violations and initially asked for a temporary restraining order. That motion was soon denied.

In addition, four of the original plaintiffs, including Mickelson, dropped out of the suit not long thereafter. This was around the same time Rory McIlroy expressed hope that the two groups of professional golfers could come to some sort of meeting of the minds by splitting their differences. Later, four more of the original plaintiffs dropped out, leaving only three golfers from the original suit. One of them is Bryson DeChambeau, whose career has been sinking fast after he appeared to be on the verge of superstardom.

At the end of September, the PGA Tour, perhaps sensing the weakness in the LIV Tour’s legal position, filed a countersuit accusing LIV Golf of illegally interfering with the contracts the PGA Tour had with those players who had defected to the Saudi-backed tour. Allegedly, clauses in the LIV Golf contracts were even more restrictive than those that the LIV plaintiffs had complained were antitrust violations. That included prohibiting LIV golfers from participating in any PGA Tour events conflicting with a LIV Golf event.

A week later, the body which determines the Official World Golf Rankings, decided that it would not award ranking points for LIV Golf events. Those points are used, among other things, to determine eligibility for PGA Tour events as well as the Masters, PGA, U.S. and British Open, which are the four major tournaments, along with the PGA Tour championship, which most LIV golfers would like to participate in. Around the same time, OPEC announced that it would be cutting rather than increasing its oil production, which was perceived as a slap in the fact to President Biden.

Over and above everything else that was happening, the basic antitrust legal argument that the LIV plaintiffs have put forth is unconvincing and thus unlikely to gain much judicial traction based on its merits alone. The plaintiffs are trying to contend that they are being victimized by the PGA Tour because it is improperly wielding its status as the sole purchaser of the services of the best professional golfers. However, the primary reason the PGA Tour is banning LIV Golfers is because the Saudis paid them much more guaranteed money for their services to play for them, meaning the PGA Tour is not the sole purchaser of those services.

It is important to recognize that PGA Tour players are independent contractors, who must compete for the right to play on the Tour. In signing up to be Tour players, they must agree to abide by Tour rules, including which outside events they may participate in and what punishments there will be for breaking those rules. Every major American and international spectator sport has organizational rules that the athletes are obliged to obey or face sanctions, including limitations on playing for competitors.

Conclusion

It is no surprise then, that after the judge dismissed the request for a temporary restraining order, using language that suggested the case was weak, most of the plaintiffs, including Mickelson, dropped out of the suit. Ultimately, the battle between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf probably will be settled outside of the legal system.

The PGA Tour has tradition, fan appeal, television networks, corporate sponsors, distrust of the Saudis, and most of the players on its side. The LIV Tour, however, has extremely deep Saudi pockets, former President Trump, plus the allure of forcing the PGA Tour to reach an accommodation, which will make elite golfers much wealthier as a group than they are now. Thus, as offensive as Saudi-backed LIV Golf might be to many Americans, it may survive, but probably as a satellite revolving around the PGA Tour.

HAPPY NEW YEAR NFL: If SPORTS ARE A REFLECTION Of AMERICAN SOCIETY, FOOTBALL IS A FLASHING ALERT
By John Weston Parry

Professional football, America’s favorite sport, is becoming increasingly difficult to tolerate, much less enjoy, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a substantially diminished level of play in the NFL due to repeated Covid outbreaks fueled by player and league recklessness. Making matters worse, for a long time now, the NFL has been a cesspool of controversies and immoral behaviors, which are showing no signs of cresting soon. As celebrated and recently retired Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell explained back in 2013, NFL deviancy “never ends…[Y]ou hold your breath…to find out what crime, what betrayal…what warped values … [will be] identified…next.”

This past year has been particularly bad, even by the NFL’s diminished moral standards. The league has continued to support Dan Snyder as the owner of Washington’s Sexually Abusive Football Team (WSAFT), as he restarts his efforts to con a Washington Metropolitan area jurisdiction into building him and the league a state-of-the art stadium complex.

In addition, the NFL has fully embraced gambling with almost no regulation; then awarded the 2024 Super Bowl to Las Vegas, the world’s number one gambling destination. That decision came shortly after Las Vegas’ once revered head coach John Gruden was fired for having been finally caught exchanging numerous hate- and prejudice-filled e-mails with complicit NFL insiders. This includes former WSAFT President Bruce Allen, who, after being fired two years ago, is in an ugly feud with Dan Snyder.

And three more former NFL players with signs or symptoms of CTE, the degenerative brain disease tied to playing football—which the league covered-up for so long—saw their lives come to tragic, premature endings, one in a homicidal shooting spree and suicide that caused the deaths of six other people. Unfortunately, the latest medical literature suggests CTE-related mental health risks to football players are likely to be heightened going forward, if they contract, or already have contracted, Covid.

Nevertheless, it is business as usual in the NFL with one ominous caveat: as the pandemic has mushroomed again, the league has concluded that it is a perfect time to begin taking even greater Covid risks. The Commissioner, the owners, the teams, the players, the television networks broadcasting NFL games, and the NFL’s corporate sponsors continue to bury their heads in the sand, now a little further, hoping that somehow the league’s golden goose will continue to lay more and more golden eggs.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is being paid nearly $64 million this year alone to oversee a train wreck waiting to happen. Yet, he rarely speaks in public anymore. Mostly, Goodell carries out his job behind a secretive curtain, hoping to ensure that even more golden eggs are laid, gathered, and distributed to all the NFL beneficiaries as contractually required. If what is behind that curtain were to be fully revealed, however, the league’s reputation, by the weight of its recklessness and depravity, might just implode like Oz.

Covid Substantially Diminishes the NFL; Much of that Damage Is Unnecessary

Covid and its variants have been wreaking havoc on the NFL’s business model by steadily diluting the level of competition across the league. The athletes and other individuals, who make up its teams, as well as the league itself, are much like American society as a whole. They cannot all agree on what course of action should be pursued to fight the spread of the virus as it becomes more and more transmissible. Like many Americans athletes and coaches have become more and more willing to resist and reject basic public health protocols, including frequent testing and, the most reliable protection of all, becoming fully vaccinated with two shots and a booster.

For entirely different reasons—one politically-motivated; the other historical racism—there are false narratives prevalent in Republican circles, which owners tend to belong to, and in the African-American community, which includes most of the athletes, that federally supported Covid vaccines are or might be dangerous, even deliberately so. Those concerns are supported by very little scientific evidence, especially as compared to the dangers the virus and its variants have been proven to pose to those who are not fully vaccinated.

Football players, because of their athletic training, associations, experiences, and the fact that they are all males, often have a bravado and inflated expectation of being able to overcome pain, injuries, and disease. There is a feeling among these elite male athletes, which has some primal validity, that they need to do nothing about the virus because physically they seem better protected against this highly contagious disease. Being better protected, however, is not nearly the same thing as being reasonably safe, especially for all those football players with incipient brain damage.

Moreover, continued full vaccine hesitancy is injurious to the business of football itself, not to mention that it sends the wrong message to the general public about the necessity of being vigilant in taking virus precautions. Unfortunately, that wrong message is prevailing. Yesterday, with its new guidance, even the CDC seems to have caved somewhat to the pressure of prioritizing political and economic expediency over sound public health guidance.

As a result of this confluence of beliefs and feelings, and the NFL’s collective bargaining process, which pits athletes against coaches, owners, and management, the league rules governing Covid are filled with gaps, inconsistencies, and questionable health practices. The beliefs of the least common denominators often interfere with what would be best for the common good of the league: putting the best product on the field without unnecessarily jeopardizing the health of players, other team employees, fans and the general public.

Currently, teams are being ravaged by new cases of the virus, and countless athletes are unavailable to play in games. According to The New York Times, on December 16th, the NFL had about 150 players on its Covid List, which is more than five times as many just before Thanksgiving. Washington’s Football Team alone reportedly had 21 players on that list. Washington’s game with Philadelphia, along with two other weekend NFL contests, had to be postponed until later the following week, which meant those teams had to play again with fewer days to recover.

Many teams in the NBA, NHL and in college football and basketball are experiencing major virus outbreaks as well. The College Football Playoff champion may well be the virus, if key teams become too heavily infected to play, and thus must forfeit. At least four bowl games have been canceled so far.

This situation in sports is likely to become worse as the far more transmissible Omicron virus has become dominant, spreading at rates much greater than any other variant to date. Already there have been calls for spectator sports to be suspended immediately and, as Kurt Streeter of The New York Times advises “[c]ome back in February, or later” once the virus becomes more manageable. The NHL agreed to a short work stoppage and decided not to allow its players to participate in the already politically damaged Beijing Winter Olympics, so that the league can try to make up all the games that have been postponed so far.

The NFL, rather than mandating two vaccines and a booster for all its players and coaches and taking a prudent Covid break, is diluting its already loose safety protocols. The idea is to have players remain on the Covid List for shorter periods of time, so they can return more quickly to heavily depleted team rosters. This is a variation of what Trump did during his presidency, urging that there be fewer tests to minimize the number of cases being identified on his watch.

Vaccinated NFL players who test positive, but display no obvious symptoms—even if they have not received a booster or have had only one shot because they already were infected with Covid—may retake the test and be out of isolation in as little as one day, if two rapid tests are both negative. Unfortunately, this does not mean the players will be infection-free during the days while they await their next test, especially if they lied about their vaccination status as some players, like Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers, have done, or fail to disclose their symptoms.

Unvaccinated players, or those who continue to test positive are supposed to isolate for 10 days. In addition, the rapid tests may well be less accurate and reliable when a person has the Omicron variant. Almost all the scientific data about the lengths of infection are based on the Delta and prior Covid variants, not Omicron.

Yet, even these questionable NFL health protocols have been further diluted. According to ESPN, the NFL and the Players Association negotiated more changes that “ease the burden on vaccinated [players].” Modifications include doing away entirely with regular testing and replacing it with random spot testing of some players, plus “targeted” testing of others after known possible exposures.

On the first day that such limited testing was used, 47 more players were added to the Covid List, but probably more unknowingly infected athletes were being allowed to mingle with their teammates and coaches. On Monday December 27th reportedly 74 more players had to go on the Covid-List based on the revised guidelines. Furthermore, the players union wants to do away with the requirements that vaccinated players wear masks indoors at team facilities. “A source familiar with the ongoing discussions said it was likely all teams would be removed from the enhanced [indoor] protocol sometime in the coming week [of December 20-27].” This would mean some unidentified infected players will inevitably be congregating with their teammates without masks or social distancing and more serious outbreaks will be inevitable.

The NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, a neurosurgeon who apparently was placed on the league’s payroll to quell concerns about CTE, concluded, contrary to the guidance of most public health authorities, that asymptomatic players were not driving the spread of the virus. Thus, those players do not need to be tested as frequently. The best news about this questionable rationalization is that the NFL will be hogging fewer of these rapid Covid tests, which increasingly have been unavailable for many less privileged Americans who have been trying to obtain them.

Even if sound health protocols were followed, and the NFL’s rules and culture have made that impossible, the integrity of the competition will continue to suffer even more as the highly transmissible Omicron variant spreads. More heavily Covid-depleted teams will play less unhealthy healthy teams, normal football routines will be disrupted, and, increasingly, all teams will lose the services of many of their best athletes, for days and even weeks at a time. The NFL has become more like professional baseball during World War II when there were not enough major league caliber players to fill team rosters.

Moreover, athletes, coaches, fans, and the general public all will be at heightened risk during the key divisional games coming up and the playoffs, assuming those contests continue to be played before 60,000-80,000 fans, many in largely indoor stadiums. As The Washington Post’s Jerry Brewer wrote, the NFL, with regard to the virus, is acting like “misguided, shortsighted, danger-seeking fools, all of them.” This “is willful ignorance.”

Dan Snyder, the NFL, and Washington’s Sexually Abusive Football Team (WSAFT)

Decades before Dan Snyder became owner of Washington’s Football Team, the franchise was dominated by racism and racial insensitivity under the reign of George Preston Marshall, who not only named the team the “Redskins,” but proceeded to further denigrate Native American culture with the team’s degrading mascot and racist song. Marshall himself was a proud racist who refused to employ, or allow team management to employ, African Americans, especially those who were highly skilled football players. Washington’s football team was the last major American professional franchise, excluding hockey, to integrate its roster
For many years, despite the franchise’s deplorable racial history, Dan Snyder adamantly refused to change the team’s offensive name and failed to promote Bobby Mitchell, the first African American player in the franchise’s history, to a more prominent management position. Mitchell finally had enough and quit. But racial insensitivity is not where Snyder has made his bones as a particularly unconscionable NFL owner.

Sexual abuse of his team’s female employees will define Snyder’s sullied reputation. When he dies, it is likely to be in the first paragraph of his obituary. Not only did he help cover up what appears to be the worst sexual abuse scandal in NFL history, which is saying quite a lot for that league, but he appears to have been a willing participant, who reportedly paid millions of dollars to keep one of his accusers silent.

In addition, Commissioner Goodell with the blessing of all the league owners has refused to release a written report of the investigation into the Washington franchise’s sexual abuse scandal. Snyder reportedly tried to buy off and intimidate former employees who might have spoken to the press. Instead of forcing him to sell his team as the NBA did with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, whose bad behaviors were far less egregious than those of Snyder, the NFL did almost nothing to sanction Washington’s owner. The league simply made Snyder’s wife the titular head of the team, so the press would have to come to her, and not her husband, to answer embarrassing and possibly incriminating questions.

Recently, even after The Washington Post released the results of a detailed investigation documenting the many ways Snyder had secretly worked with his lawyers and private investigators to interfere with the so-called independent investigation that Beth Wilkinson had conducted for the NFL into Washington’s football team, Commissioner Goodell and the league stood firm. They still refused to release the investigative report, saying now that no such report existed and claimed nothing untoward had happened with regard to the investigation itself. Like Baylor University had done in covering up its sexual abuse scandal, the NFL apparently directed Wilkinson to make an oral report of her findings and not write anything down.

Goodell, though, was finally forced to speak publicly. In his slippery words, “[t]here’s always a little bit of tug and pull particularly with lawyers and law firms… That’s something that I think we were able to overcome and make sure we came to the right conclusions.” Misogyny, along with racism and gay-bashing, have been a prominent part of the NFL culture, as John Gruden’s e-mails to Bruce Allen and others revealed. Thus, the league’s disappointing response to this scandal was not unexpected. Ultimately, nothing more is likely to happen to Snyder in term of league sanctions, and he certainly will not be forced to sell his team.

Instead, Snyder, undoubtedly with Goodell’s encouragement, has restarted his campaign to get the three Washington Metropolitan jurisdictions, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia, into a bidding war to finance a state-of-the art stadium for Washington’s Football Team. The Post reported that team officials envision the stadium as the centerpiece of a “mini-city, possibly in Northern Virginia, that would include “a vast commercial and entertainment complex” with ‘[r]estaurants… a conference center, and hotels.” Snyder’s lease at Fed Ex Field in Landover, Maryland does not expire until 2027, although that has not stopped other owners from breaking such leases in the past.

Commissioner Goodell has made it a league priority to strongly encourage every NFL team, which has not already done so, to build a new stadium complex, which is paid for, at least in part, by public monies. Those teams that are successful can expect to be the sites of a Super Bowl, soon after their new stadium becomes operational. That is what just happened in Las Vegas, and probably will happen relatively soon in Buffalo. Last week New York Governor Kathy Hochul stated that she supports using hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds to help the Bills, owned by another billionaire, build a $1.4 billion stadium complex near Orchard Park, where the team has played since 1973.

The NFL Has Gone All-In, As to Gambling without Much Regulation

As noted earlier, the NFL has made it official. Las Vegas will host the 2024 Super Bowl. The league has made a complete about face on its prior stands against: gambling on professional football; having a team in the sin city; and allowing athletes and other people associated with the league to be involved with sports betting operations. One of the biggest betting events in Las Vegas, and across the country online and in betting parlors, is the Super Bowl.

Las Vegas obtained its NFL franchise in 2017. The Oakland Raiders and the league agreed to move that team there from California after public officials committed about $750 million for a new stadium near the Vegas Strip. That questionable use of public monies was approved, even though Las Vegas has one of the most under-funded and poorly performing public education systems in the country.

A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a foreboding divergence from precedent, with a memorable dissent from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, struck down a law that Congress had passed nearly 30 years earlier, which had barred sports gambling operations in most of the country. Congress has been reluctant to enact new sports gambling legislation, largely leaving it up to the states and sports enterprises themselves, if they so choose, to prevent corruption from spreading.

As a result, there is almost no sports gambling regulation and NFL teams, the league, and many of its players, coaches, and owners have become closely associated with sports gambling. Gambling businesses saturate NFL games and other related coverage with advertisements. Sports networks, of which there are many now, have created numerous shows devoted to betting on football, including point-spreads and the performance of teams and players in fantasy leagues. One can bet on almost anything that happens in an NFL or college game, which makes trying to catch cheaters extremely difficult.

One day, though, football fans are likely to awaken to the news of wide-spread sports gambling corruption, which will have been covered up, like sexual and domestic abuse of women by athletes, or widespread brain injuries sustained by football and hockey players. In the meantime, those affiliated with the NFL will be getting rich from sports gambling. As Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis said when his team was awarded the 2024 Super Bowl, “it’s a marriage made in heaven”—or hell, depending on one’s point of view. Despite being a new franchise in a city that has never had professional football before, the team is only 27th in average home attendance out of 32 NFL franchises, but Las Vegas and the NFL could not be happier.

CTE Continues to Devastate Former Players, Covid Could Make It Much Worse

For many years, the NFL under Commissioner Tagliabue, and then Goodell, and with the help of its medical advisers, deliberately misled the public about the extent and severity of brain damage to football players. Compounding this unconscionable strategy, the league and the players union refused to compensate brain-damaged, former players or found ways to discount the severity of their conditions to minimize just compensation.

Until a few months ago, African American players with likely football-related brain damage, were being denied benefits because of the questionable racial differentiations the NFL used to evaluate the mental health and related needs of its black athletes. Yet, when the brains of NFL deceased players have been examined and tested for CTE, 99% have been found to have tested positive. There has never been any indication that black football players are less likely to have CTE. Rather, all players are likely to be negatively impacted by this debilitating and too often deadly, and hard to diagnose condition.

Murder, suicide, and tragic deaths for NFL players with mental disorders, who later tested positive for CTE, are not uncommon. While it is difficult to conclusively determine whether the tragic ending of a particular individual football player, who had CTE, was caused by that brain damage, it is scientifically irrefutable that CTE is a major contributor to such tragedies when all NFL football players are considered as a group.

The list of tragedies for deceased players with CTE keeps growing. It began years ago with players like Pittsburgh Steeler, Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, whose mental deterioration led to his homelessness, addictions, seizures, and excruciating pain. As ESPN the Magazine writer Greg Garber described, Webster died alone with “a bucket of vomit by his side.” Legendary linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide with a shotgun; then the NFL prevented his daughter from referring to Seau’s CTE at his posthumous Hall of Fame induction.

New England Patriots All Pro tight end Aaron Hernandez was accused of murdering at least two people and convicted of one of those crimes. Before his case could be concluded on appeal, Hernandez apparently committed suicide in his jail cell.
Sandwiched in between Hernandez’s shooting sprees was Jovan Belcher’s murder-suicide. That tragedy did not garner nearly as much attention because Belcher’s team and the NFL were largely successful in burying the story. The first line of the New York Times article summarized what had happened: “With his coach looking on, a Kansas City Chief’s linebacker shot and killed himself outside the team’s practice facility …less than an hour after he killed his girlfriend…,” who also was the mother of his baby daughter.

In 2021 there were three more tragic deaths of former NFL players, all diagnosed with CTE post mortem and/or who had serious mental disorders. The first was Vincent Jackson, a former wide receiver with both the Changers and Buccaneers. Only 38 years old, he was found dead and alone in a hotel room where he had been staying for about a month separated from his wife. According to Dr. Ann Mckee, director of the Boston University CTE Center, “Jackson was a brilliant, disciplined, gently giant whose life began to change in his mid-30’s. He became depressed, with progressive memory loss, problem solving difficulties, paranoia, and eventually extreme social isolation.” Subsequently, Jackson was diagnosed with Stage 2 CTE. His death was attributed to severe alcoholism, apparently related to his having severe CTE symptoms.

Two months later, 32-year-old former NFL player Phillip Adams went to a prominent local doctor’s home in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and for no readily apparent reason, shot and killed everyone inside, including the physician, his wife, two of the doctor’s grandchildren, and two technicians who were working on the air conditioning system in that home. Adams then took refuge in that house and, before he could be arrested, took his own life. He too was diagnosed with a “severe” form of CTE.

Finally, in early December, former New Orleans Saints defensive end Glenn Foster, died at age 31 under suspicious circumstances, while in the custody of an Alabama sheriff’s office. Foster, who is African American and previously had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was stopped at about 11:00 pm for allegedly going 92 miles per hour in a 45-mph zone. Foster was arrested and charged with resisting arrest, reckless endangerment, and trying to flee from police.

Foster’s father explained the situation about his son’s needing mental health treatment to the local chief of police, but before Foster could be taken to a mental health facility pursuant to a court order, he was rebooked on new charges for offenses that had occurred while he was in jail. The sheriff’s office refused to allow him to go to a mental health facility for treatment and also failed to provide him with any treatment while he was inside the jail. In addition, Foster was prohibited from seeing any visitors, including his family, due to covid restrictions.

Two days after he was jailed, Foster reportedly died while being transported to a medical facility in a police cruiser. According to the local coroner, Foster had died of so-called “natural causes,” which were not further explained. Subsequently, Foster’s family said a private autopsy had found “some evidence of neck compression and strangulation.” It is too early to know with any degree of certainty whether Foster’s mental disorder was related to or aggravated by CTE, or whether and how his mental condition contributed to his death.

What is irrefutable, however, is that Foster became another former NFL player with mental health issues, who has died in tragic circumstances. This problem may grow worse, not better. As the medical journal The Lancet reported in May, individuals who contract Covid are significantly more likely to experience mental health problems, especially if they have pre-existing mental disorders. This raises the question about a potential increase in long-term mental disorders for football players should they contract Covid, since many—and probably most—of them have undiagnosed CTE.

PICKING MUSHROOMS On SKATES, CORRUPTION, BOYCOTTS, INCOMPETENCE, And OTHER POST-OLYMPIC MATTERS©
    John Weston Parry

Introduction

Now that America has stopped cheering, after watching the United States women and men bring home more gold and total medals than any other nation, it is time to reassess the Olympics and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) badly flawed organizational model. Ever since the corruption behind the Boston Olympic bid fiasco was revealed and dissected for public view, it has become increasingly apparent to economists and most sports journalists covering Olympic sports, that paying bribes to IOC officials to secure the Summer or Winter Gems is no longer a prudent financial investment. Being a host city is an almost certain guarantee that the citizens and residents of the host country will be fleeced, and, with the Covid pandemic still raging, endangered.

The Myth of the Olympics as a Unifying Factor in World Affairs

Unfortunately, financial and public health transgressions are only two of many forms of Olympic corruption that continue to exist, due in large part to the IOC. As a result of the financial liabilities attached to hosting the Games, increasingly, totalitarian regimes like China, Russia, and North Korea have assumed greater influence in the Olympic movement by being willing, and even eager, to lose money and pay bribes to Olympic officials in order to promote themselves through the many propaganda opportunities that the Games and the IOC provide them with.

In return, Olympic officials look the other way at widespread human rights violations. The IOC justifies its acceptance of totalitarian regimes by embracing the same bankrupt Olympic Ideal, which was used to accommodate Nazi Germany during the 1932 Berlin Summer Olympics. The mantra goes something like this: Politics have no business being part of Olympic sports, even when the host nation is engaging in deplorable practices to subjugate some or all of its citizens. If there were to be a political boycott, so goes the corollary, how could we live with the damage to all the Olympic competitors, who have dedicated their young lives to their sports?

While such a result undoubtedly would be regrettable, the impact on those athletes would be nothing close to the damage caused to, and tyranny imposed on so many more people, who routinely are being oppressed by these totalitarian nations. Nevertheless, at every Olympics since 1980, including those in Tokyo, we continue to hear American television, Olympic commentators, many of them former athletes themselves, pontificate about the harm caused by that boycott. The message has been clear: an obviously misguided U.S. President, Jimmy Carter, deprived American Olympic athletes of their chance at a medal, Olympic glory, and mounds of cash by withdrawing from the Summer Games in Moscow, merely because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Ironically, the subsequent boycott backlash actually helped to set off a domino effect that would drag the U.S. into its own even longer Afghanistan folly with predictably awful results.

Widespread Olympic Corruption

Because many fewer major metropolitan areas than in the past remain eager to pay bribes to have the opportunity to become Olympic bid finalists, the financial corruption may well have shifted in another way. The financial scheming appears to include the arbitrary decisions about whether a new sport should be given Olympic status; or, conversely, eliminating existing sports like baseball and softball for self-serving reasons: like punishing America and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) for not giving the IOC more of the profits that American athletes generate for these Games. Similarly, for decades a cohort of IOC officials have been blackballing American cities when they have tried to become hosts for the Summer or Winter Games.

Only recently, since it became obvious that being a host city is a bargain with the devil, was the U.S. finally awarded a bid for the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but not until 2028. That means there will be a twenty-six-year hiatus since the U.S. hosted any Olympic Games. The most recent American Olympics were the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The most recent Summer Games occurred in 1996 in Atlanta. Those Games are remembered for the hysteria and false prosecution surrounding the Olympic bomber, while the Games in Salt Lake are best known for widespread corruption in the process of securing that bid. Based on worsening climate conditions, the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics could be known for clouds of smoke and rings of fire.

A Continuing Worldwide Covid Pandemic

Then there is the little matter of Covid-related pandemics continuing to ravage the world in a majority of nations that cannot—or have substantial numbers of people, including their athletes, who refuse to—get vaccinated. Too many American athletes did not take the necessary precautions. Neither the IOC nor the USOPC had the fortitude to demand that for the safety of everyone involved in the Olympics, athletes, coaches, and trainers had to be vaccinated in order to participate. As Charles Blow described in The New York Times such vaccine defiance is nothing less than “anti-vax insanity,” which unfortunately has spread like the virus itself to our supposed role-models in the American Olympic athletic community.

Most of the American offenders are macho young men typified by renown, champion golfer and failed Olympian, Bryan DeChambeau. DeChambeau, despite adopting an ultra-scientific approach to golf, was kicked out of Olympic competition because he refused to vaccinate, and surprise, surprise tested positive. His response thereafter was about as unscientific, not to mention unempathetic, as one could imagine: “[I] don’t need it… I’m a healthy young individual that [sic] will continue to work on my health.” A number of NFL athletes are equally obtuse, claiming their vaccine status, which appears to be unvaccinated, should be a private matter, rather than a team and league concern.

Where Are the Olympic Games Headed and What Should Be Done Next?

Going forward, the Olympics are on the verge, if they already have not become, the global, Twenty First Century version of the Roman bread and circuses. Alarmingly, it is not only the athletes, who will be made to suffer at the altar of entertaining the masses for big bucks. Everywhere one looks—beyond the carefully selected and over-hyped instances of Olympic dedication, heroism, bravery, mental health awareness, and the very pleasing American medal counts—are corruption, collusion, and incompetence, both planned and a la carte.

The most pressing problems have their roots in the IOC’s organizational structure that is designed to allow their leaders to more easily dodge accountability and responsibility, while still raking in stacks of easy money. Even if those Olympic offenders, almost always men, are caught with their hands in the till, which itself is a rare event, the transgressors typically receive big settlements and other rewards for having to endure being jettisoned from their very profitable leadership positions. After a replacement leader is appointed—these days often the organization’s first woman—the offending Olympic organization, like the USOPC after the unconscionable scandal involving rampant sexual abuse of female athletes over many years, remains largely unchanged.

How does one explain, other than organizational corruption, the outrageous decision to allow Russian athletes to compete under the auspices of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC)—which was able to win the third most medals at these games—by stepping in for mother Russia. It was the ROC, which orchestrated that country’s state-sponsored doping schemes and helped encourage and intimate Russian athletes, undoubtedly coercing many of them to participate in their government’s doping corruption.
While there are a multitude of Olympic corruptive influences that need to be addressed going forward, four appear to be most in need of immediate attention. These are ongoing problems, which already have been mentioned, that never seem to be fixed for very long, assuming they are fixed at all.

Bid Rigging and the Recognition of Olympic Sports

To begin with, there is the ongoing travesty known as the Olympic bidding process. Virtually every decision in recent years regarding which nations and which metropolitan areas will host the Summer and, less remunerative, Winter Games have been marred by financial and political corruption. This has gone on for decades and shows few signs of correction, beyond largely empty threats of possible U.S. Justice Department prosecutions. The IOC has shown itself, time and time again, incapable of conducting an ethical bidding process, while, at the same time, consistently shielding Olympic officials who engage in such corruption.

Closely related to this bidding corruption has been the lack of transparency in the seemingly haphazard decisions that are made about which sports should be given the imprimatur of becoming Olympic competitions, or conversely being relegated to the title of former Olympic sports. How these decisions about what is an Olympic sport have been made should raise red flags and spur investigations, of which there have been few, if any. The selection criteria are vague enough to allow for the inclusion or exclusion of many different sports and athletic events without good reasons.

According to the Olympic Charter, a sport for men has to demonstrate that males in no less than 75 countries and on four continents “widely” play or participate in that athletic activity. A sport for women must show that it is “widely practiced” by females in no fewer than 40 countries and on three continents. What constitutes “widely” is entirely subjective. Nor is there a definition of what constitutes a sport, other than its supposed popularity.

What goes on behind the scenes, in terms of money being paid out to Olympic leaders and umbrella Olympic organizations like the IOC, USOPC, and various federations, for the privilege of being considered, much less selected as an Olympic sport, is largely unknown. We do know, however, about the lack of transparency that characterizes this process, as well as the proven corruption in the other processes that help to determine how and for whom profits are generated in the Olympic movement.

Kurt Badenhausen, writing for Forbes back in 2016, explained that decisions to bestow Olympic recognition can be a huge boost to the growth of a sport. Thus, there is a substantial financial incentive to obtain such recognition. Furthermore, the process, as modified in 2014, has become a new means to make bidding on the Games more attractive by allowing host nations the prerogative of “introduce[ing} new sports” and new athletic events for no apparent reason other than they want those sports to be included. Reportedly, the temporary reinstatement of baseball and softball for the Tokyo games was an example of this type of accommodation to a host nation. The additions of surfing, rock-climbing on plastic, skateboarding, and rhythmic gymnastics featuring attractive female dancers twirling ribbons are all examples of subjectively judged sports being able to promote themselves successfully within the necessary Olympic hierarchies.

This recognition process seems extremely arbitrary. For example, there would appear to be no barrier—other than the IOC’s possible embarrassment—for the hundreds of mycological organizations representing mushroom hunters in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, to someday get recognition as an Olympic sport by making it like bass fishing (another potential Olympic sport), and perhaps requiring participants to use skates. That way mycological dexterity could be a sport in both the Summer and Winter Games, simply by changing the type of skates the “athletes” use. As we have seen with rock climbing on plastic, there is no reason to require that there be actual mushrooms involved.

Performance-Enhancing Substances: The WADA-IOC Duplicity

The primary reason the Russians felt so emboldened in their state-directed schemes to use illicit performance-enhancing substances, beyond their substantial influence within the Olympic movement itself, are the relatively lax World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) monitoring and enforcement protocols governing Olympic sports in every country. While state-sponsored doping, like Russia’s, is more pernicious and dangerous and may exist in other nations as well, most notably China, the free market Olympic variety is far more widespread and commonly practiced, including in the United States. Based on a number of reports, including from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), this type of cheating has been especially prevalent during the Covid pandemic when testing requirements have been greatly relaxed.

As noted earlier, Covid is unlikely to go away in the near future and the WADA-IOC alliance, which has showed itself to be incompetent, as well as corrupt, by largely ignoring both state-sponsored doping and the free market variety, remains in place. Even Thomas Bach has criticized WADA, while carefully avoiding any discussion of the IOC’s complicity in both creating and continuing to manage WADA to achieve the IOC’s best interests. Putting a system in place that identifies most of the cheaters would substantially reduce overall revenues. Like all major spectator sports, the Olympics need most of their cheating athletes to remain unidentified and unsanctioned

At the same time, the entire enforcement framework for anti-doping activities, including within the Olympic movement, is misguided. The primary question should not be whether a substance is performance-enhancing, but rather: Will it jeopardize the health of the athletes who use it? If not, the question should become: Is the substance readily available, both in terms of cost and access, to all athletes, so there is a relatively level playing field? Like the IOC itself, WADA is not structured organizationally to carry out a more modern and nuanced interpretation of its mission to protect athletes’ health and to ensure a level playing field. Nor is the IOC structured to deal with state-sponsored doping by its member nations, especially because the most cited offenders, Russia and China, have so much influence, not only in the IOC, but also in WADA.

The IOC and Human Rights Violations in China

The most pressing Olympic problem at the moment surrounds (1) the 2022 Winter Games being held in China, a nation that has been committing blatant human rights violations; and (2) the IOC bid process that appears to favor totalitarian regimes, most notably China and Russia. To state the obvious, it will be difficult to resolve the first controversy satisfactorily within the IOC’s leadership framework and the tight time limits remaining. Thus, short of an actual boycott, compromises appear inevitable, and even they are hardly guaranteed to succeed.

With regard to the option of relocating the Winter Games to avoid threatened boycotts, there appears to be one possible solution, which also would have the advantage of giving nations another year to get Covid under better control, globally. (The Chinese already have promised to institute draconian measures, short of requiring vaccinations, to control the movements of Olympic competitors and their teams and entourages while they are in China.) That option would be to postpone the Winter Olympics until 2023 and move them to a new location, which already has a sound winter sports infrastructure in place and is willing to absorb the financial risks.

Unfortunately, the politics in carrying out such a switch, within any potential host nation, within the IOC itself, and among global leaders, as well as the challenges of managing the tight time-frames and Covid protocols, makes this approach difficult, if not impossible, to carry out successfully. This means there would be a substantial possibility of failure in moving the Winter Games now.

At the same time, a U.S. boycott, which Sally Jenkins and a number of other commentators and journalists have proposed, is morally justified, but even Jenkins’ employer, The Washington Post, would not go that far. The Post’s editorialists are advocating for a united effort to “celebrate sports, not dictatorship,” while making it clear “China does not deserve to host the Winter Olympics.” Furthermore, it seems very likely that the USOPC, American Olympic athletes, NBC, which is broadcasting those Games, and most American Olympic corporate sponsors would all oppose a boycott. Without widespread political support, it is equally, or maybe even more, unlikely that the Biden Administration and Congress would come to an agreement to carry out an unpopular Olympic boycott during a national election year.

In addition, from a foreign policy stand point, using a boycott to challenge Chinese human rights transgressions may well be morally justified, but as a practical matter its impact might backfire. China is no longer a third world country that can be pushed around. Today, it is a leading global economic and military juggernaut that is fully capable and prepared to fight back in kind. China appears to be the global power that we once mistakenly thought the Soviet Union was nearly sixty-five years ago. What we do to respond to Chinese aggression and human rights violations should be far more nuanced and comprehensive than merely boycotting their Olympics. Also, what is happening to African Americans and other people of color in this country and the close call our democracy had with insurrection, suggests that American domestic policies could be subject to an Olympic boycott as well, both in retaliation and, conceivably on the merits.

The best option, as the Post editorial advises, may be for the United States to use all of its media, political, and corporate resources and influence to help ensure that the Chinese are unable to make their Olympics a propaganda victory, while shining a light on the Chinese human rights violations that are being committed. Such an approach, on a smaller scale, was carried out successfully during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi to highlight human rights abuses by Russia against its LGBTQ communities.

The other aspect of this predicament, and one that needs to be mitigated in the near future, was the process used to select China to host these Winter Olympics in the first place, especially given how the Chinese used the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics as a slick propaganda tool. The Olympic movement needs to ensure that totalitarian nations do not continue to have an advantage in being selected to host—or in the case of North Korea co-host—the Summer or Winter Games. When they are selected, the IOC should have strict protocols in place to ensure that the Olympic movement does not facilitate or actually promote totalitarian propaganda or try to stifle legitimate political criticism by athletes and other participants.

Conclusion

This politicizing of the Games to benefit totalitarian nations is a consequence of the IOC’s organizational structure and membership, which promote the most self-serving interests first, over the well-being of the athletes and the public. As long as the IOC, as presently constituted, is in charge of every Olympic sport and athlete worldwide, and all the federations and other national organizations that control these sports and athletes, corruption, cover-ups, and incompetence are sure to follow. The Olympic model, like the NCAA trying to govern American collegiate sports, is irretrievably broken, even though the process functions well to generate revenues and wealth for those in charge.

The promotion of sports and the protection of athletes are limited by an overriding financial mission. Thus, seemingly laudable Olympic ideals can be easily manipulated, or simply disappear in an instant, whenever revenues are in jeopardy. Those quixotic ideals have been a smoke screen to obscure what really goes on behind the curtain, including, in the past, facilitating Nazi propaganda. Thomas Bach is the Olympic movement’s current Wizard of Oz, a role he seems intent on keeping for a long time. He and the IOC need to be exposed for who they really are.

THE NCAA HAS BEEN DISCRIMINATING AGAINST FEMALE ATHLETES, WOMEN’S SPORTS, and WOMEN SINCE IT’S INCEPTION, TITLE IX NOTWITHSTANDING ©
  By John Weston Parry

Curiously enough, the primary reason why the NCAA and its controlling super conference members discriminate against their female athletes and women’s sports today is much the same as why they exploit male athletes in the revenue-generating sports of football and men’s basketball. Money, and those who will do almost anything to be in a position to get as much of it as possible, are at the root of much evil in this country. Unfortunately, this obsession is what we have been taught to believe should be the American Dream.

How that grab for cash works with regard to female college athletes and their sports is different, though. In the NCAA’s hierarchy of distorted values, major revenue-generating sports for men come first followed by other sports for men, and then sports for women in that order. Connecticut women’s basketball, run by a very smart man, is one of the few exceptions that help to prove the rule. Coach Geno Auriemma’s players probably were not inconvenienced by the blatantly inferior weight rooms, hotel accommodations, food, and NCAA March Madness remembrances bestowed on most of the members of women’s teams, compared to what their male counterparts received.

The fact that these age-old gender discrepancies made so much news during these national college basketball championships is both a sign of the potential for incremental progress and an indictment of the media for presenting such female gender discrimination as somehow being surprising or even shocking. As Lindsay Crouse explained in The New York Times, the only circumstance in which predominantly male “lawmakers” seem genuinely interested in protecting women athletes is when those men want to discriminate against transgender athletes in the name of gender “fair[ness]”—and God.

The NCAA has been discriminating against women athletes and their sports since its founding. The organization’s only response so far to the latest outrage is hiring another law firm to conduct one of those independent inquiries—which is neither independent, nor unconstrained by the dictates of the client. As has been so common recently when men commit offenses against women or girls, the lead investigator will be a woman to give the resulting report the appearance of distance from the men who are pulling strings to influence the results.

While we wait for this commissioned report to be written for, and scrubbed by, the NCAA and its super conference members, which typically takes an awful long time, it would be useful to more closely examine the organization, historically. How has the NCAA and its super conference cartel regarded and treated its female athletes, including implementation of Title IX?

That answer will not inspire much hope things will change in productive ways. The NCAA not only has been discriminating against women athletes and their sports, but has failed to protect female college students, including athletes, when they are being sexually abused, assaulted, and harassed by athletes, coaches, doctors, and other men intimately associated with college athletic programs. Misogyny has been a structural component of the NCAA, seemingly forever.

The NCAA Takes Control of Women’s Collegiate Sports

For decades after its inception in 1906, the NCAA expressed little interest in female college sports, which most of their male members viewed as inherently inferior. The organization preferred to focus on the serious athletic activities of men, especially sports like football and men’s basketball, which have generated substantial revenues for their most valued members. In 1971, the NCAA’s disinterest in female athletes led to the establishment of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), as the governing body of college sports for female athletes.

Soon, though, once the NCAA understood the potential implications of Title IX on its athletic programs for men, the organization began to use its substantial political and economic influence with the television networks and the courts to wrest control of women’s sports from the AIAW. In the early 1980’s, the NCAA forced the college athletic association for women to disband. In response, the AIAW sued the NCAA for restraint of trade.

Ultimately, a federal appeals court took a circuitous route to arrive at its flawed conclusion that there had been no violation of American antitrust laws. Those male judges employed the legal fiction that the NCAA was an organization that existed “primarily to enhance the contribution made by amateur athletic competition to… higher education.” The appeals court added that “even when [the NCAA’s] restraints [of trade] are patent…, there must be proof of specific intent.”

Under that very high standard of proof, those judges found no conclusive evidence the NCAA had established a “monopoly [over]… women’s sports,” even though the organization was intending, and soon would have, such a monopoly. That whole way of thinking about college sports as amateur educational activities that should be insulated from our antitrust laws may be upended, however, because in 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court will revisit that legal fiction.

Title IX: The Early Years

Title IX mandates: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Major college sports programs, in cahoots with the NCAA, argued then—and continue to complain today—that Title IX was unfair to male athletes because women were not as interested in sports as men. Those men also contended that competitions among females were inherently inferior and thus unworthy of equal support.

As a result, the NCAA and its supporters campaigned to limit the law and its regulations and oppose its full implementation. Nevertheless, Title IX, along with its regulations issued in 1975, spawned an era in college sports that saw significant progress for women athletes. Unfortunately, those initial steps forward were slowed by a lengthy struggle.
The NCAA, along with major college athletic programs, their male fans, and many male politicians, tried to derail Title IX with negative publicity, litigation, and regulatory obstacles. To begin with, the 1975 regulations gave universities and colleges three-more years—in addition to the three years that already had passed—to become compliant. Without the threat of enforcement, the law had no legal clout.

The original statute had been enacted in the context of other civil rights laws of that era. So-called “fairness” in athletics for women was intended to be defined broadly, as it had been in large part for race in schools and workplaces. The NCAA and major university athletic programs strongly objected. They contended, among other things, that Title IX did not apply to athletic departments and their sports programs because those entities did not receive federal financial assistance, directly.

In 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court, which now had its first female justice, split the proverbial baby in half. In Grove City College v. Bell, the Court ruled that Title IX only applied to the specific programs receiving federal funds, not to the entire university or college that was receiving those funds. That same year the U.S. Supreme Court also decided that the NCAA could no longer exert exclusive control over its lucrative Division IA college television football package. That meant individual conferences and universities were free to negotiate contracts to generate their own television revenues without being limited by NCAA rules on profit-sharing.

This ruling would soon have a profound effect on college sports. Many Division I schools began to cut back on non-revenue sports, particularly those for women. During the 1980’s, the movement to diminish women’s athletics at the college level, was accompanied by a retrenchment in high school sports for girls as well. The opportunities for girls to continue with their sports in college, and possibly earn one of the relatively few scholarships that existed for women, were shrinking.
Despite the NCAA’s continued opposition to Title IX, a string of legal decisions in the 1990’s forced colleges and high schools to appear to be more committed to women’s sports. The most significant was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that, among other things, enhanced the ability of women—and groups representing women—to enforce Title IX by ruling that under the statute and its regulations, federal courts have the right to award successful plaintiffs monetary damages. The threat of monetary damages created an incentive for universities and colleges to improve how they monitored Title IX compliance involving their athletic programs.

Soon most universities and colleges, and even the NCAA, publicly supported—or decided not to publicly oppose—the creation of more opportunities for female athletes. This movement was short-lived, however. By the turn of this century, the NCAA was being led by the presidents of universities and colleges with big time sports programs that found it in their financial interests to marginalize Title IX compliance.

As a result, resistance to Title IX in college athletic programs began to increase once again. The NCAA leadership was committed to making decisions that benefited revenue-generating sports at the expense of female athletes. Numerous athletic directors—overwhelmingly men—began eliminating many non-revenue sports for men and women. This made it appear that those athletic departments were not discriminating against female athletes and their sports when in fact men continued to receive the lion’s share of the overall resources that were being spent.

The NCAA and Major Sports for Men

As a result of successful litigation and media education by women’s groups, the NCAA’s male-dominated leadership embraced a more nuanced approach to its Title IX opposition. The new victims in the NCAA’s revised approach have been male athletes, who play college sports that allegedly are being discontinued or cut back in order to create more opportunities for female athletes. While it is true that many non-revenue college sports for men are going through tough times, why this is happening has relatively little to do with women’s sports.

Football and men’s basketball at Division I universities and colleges, and many Division II and III schools as well, monopolize the resources that could be used to support non-revenue sports for both men and women. As U.S. News and World Report explained a few years ago, “football keeps eating up larger portions of athletic budgets, and Title IX keeps getting blamed.”

When athletic departments, the NCAA, and their supporters continue to rue the decline in men’s college sports, they disingenuously ignore the amount of money and resources that support revenue-generating sports like football and men’s basketball, particularly the astronomical salaries of the exclusively male coaches of these favored teams. Instead, these opponents of Title IX disparage the law as being a federal intrusion into the sanctity of college sports, even though the opportunities and support for female college athletics pale in comparison to those for college men.

Division I football and men's basketball are viewed by the NCAA and its super conference leadership as sacred cows, while sports for women are easy targets in a college sports world that men dominate. Reportedly, many Division I schools have engaged in various subterfuges to create the appearance that they are making substantial progress under Title IX, when in fact they have been losing ground or standing in place. Former congresswoman, Donna Shalala, who for years was the president of the University of Miami—and an ardent supporter of football and men’s basketball—acknowledged in 2011 that “universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught.”

In one of the more blatant deceptions, numerous university and college athletic departments were caught engaging in an Orwellian strategy 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 caught “double-and triple-counting women… to mask the fact that they have fewer female athletes.” It is reasonable to assume, though, that many more college athletic programs have been implementing similar or more clever deceptions that have not been revealed, at least not publicly.

Because of Title IX and its impact, many female athletes have benefited from expanded opportunities to participate in high school and youth sports. Once they enter college, however, female athletes must contend with the fact that the NCAA and many university and college athletic departments continue to openly discriminate based on female gender, even in sports for women.

Since Title IX was enacted, for example, opportunities for women to be head coaches of women’s teams have actually decreased. In 1972 the vast majority of women’s college teams (90 percent) had female head coaches. Today, most do not. Furthermore, coaches of women’s teams are paid substantially less than coaches of men’s teams. As Richard Lapchick explained in a recent report issued by The Institute for Diversity in Sports (TIDES), “`white men are overwhelmingly in the key positions of college sport at the university and college level.’” In addition, there has been an absurd and deplorable stereotype circulated that women coaches tend to be lesbians, who will indoctrinate their players into becoming gay.
Sexual Offenses Involving College Athletic Programs

Title IX Is Further Diluted

A major problem with Title IX’s implementation on college campuses has been the manipulation of investigations and hearings to protect male athletes and other men, including team physicians and coaches, when they have been accused of sexual offenses targeting female college students, including female athletes. For years this has been a glaring deficiency with Title IX. Unfortunately, this problem worsened when the federal government, under the direction of Republican Department of Education Secretary Betsy Devos, enacted regulations that further diluted legal protections for female college students who have been victims of sexual assault, sexual abuse, or sexual harassment. The Biden Administration is reviewing all of these new rules to determine which should remain and which should be jettisoned or modified.

Some of the changes, like a clear and convincing standard of proof in administrative hearings make sense from a due process standpoint in certain limited situations, such as when a male student may be permanently expelled from school or stigmatized as a sex offender. In toto, though, the regulations further reduced incentives for universities and colleges to investigate legitimate complaints against athletes and other men associated with their revenue-generating athletic programs, at the expense of female accusers.

For years a critical problem with Title IX has been that normal protocols and procedures often have not been followed or have been short-circuited when an athlete or other prominent man associated with a major college sports program has faced such accusations. The temptation to act improperly—which in the past has included many cover ups—in order to protect revenues and alumni donations generated by big time college sports has been and will continue to be substantial, and too often overwhelming.
The new Title IX regulation that is likely to have the greatest impact on major college sports programs, at the expense of female students, mandates that universities and colleges may not be sanctioned for their administrative improprieties, unless it can be shown the officials acted with “deliberate indifference.” That threshold is considerably higher than mere negligence or even gross negligence. It leaves more room than ever for athletic programs to manipulate the Title IX process to protect their high-profile athletes and coaches.

In addition, schools can now escape responsibility if the alleged female victims do not report their complaints to designated university officials. That means coaches and other athletic department staff are not legally obligated to inform their school’s Title IX officials if they have knowledge about offenses that their athletes allegedly committed.
Also, a school’s duty to investigate claims off-campus is now strictly limited to (1) buildings that are “owned and controlled by a student organization that” the school officially recognizes; and (2) “locations, events, or circumstances” where it has “substantial control” over those student activities. Night clubs, bars, restaurants, and off campus housing where many of these sexual assaults occur are not controlled by universities and colleges. Thus, for example, under these new rules, Jameis Winston’s accuser would have had no Title IX remedies against Florida State University because her alleged rape occurred in Winston’s off campus apartment.

To add injury to insult, in January 2020, even before the new regulations were released, Secretary Devos announced that her department would issue regulations to expand Title IX’s religious exemptions to cover more universities and colleges. Those exemptions allow religiously-based institutions to violate Title IX provisions and discriminate without being penalized, if what they do is permitted under the scope of their self-described religious prerogatives.

Baylor University’s religious exemption, for instance, which targeted “unchaste” female students, helped fuel the worst college sexual assault scandal in NCAA history. Because of this religiously inspired double standard, Baylor was allowed to discipline female students far more harshly than male football players for improper drinking and sexual activities. The university also refused to pursue Title IX investigations when unchaste female students alleged that they had been raped or sexually assaulted by football players. That included one player who later was convicted of his offenses in a criminal trial where the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sexual Abuse of Female Gymnasts

Perhaps the worst breakdown of protections for female college athletes under Title IX and the NCAA rules involved the sexual abuse of numerous Michigan State gymnasts. MSU’s gymnastics coach Kathy Klages continued to sing the praises of team doctor and serial predator Larry Nassar, long after members of her team complained that the physician had sexually abused them. The University retained Nassar even though there had been sexual abuse complaints against him from female students dating back to the late 1990’s

Throughout this ordeal, the NCAA was invisible. Even today the organization and its members continue to show little interest in preventing, investigating, or sanctioning allegations of sexual abuse, sexual assaults, or any other type of sexual misconduct in college sports. This pattern of neglect is a major reason why seven women in April 2020 decided to sue the NCAA for failing to protect them “from alleged sexual assaults by male college athletes.”

An ESPN Outside the Lines investigation revealed that “Michigan State University knew about Larry Nassar’s abuse… [but had] failed to act.” The ESPN program concluded that Nassar was “surrounded by a collection of adults who enabled his predatory behavior – … medical professionals, administrators and coaches at Michigan State University, and gymnasts’ parents, whom he groomed just as effectively as those he violated.” The Detroit News soon reported that “multiple M.S.U. officials, including trainers and assistant coaches, had been told of inappropriate behavior by Nassar over two decades.” MSU denied any wrongdoing, but shelled out more than a half a billion dollars to settle the lawsuits that Nassar’s victims had filed.

The NCAA eventually took official notice of this national scandal for a nanosecond, following the resignations of MSU’s women’s gymnastics coach Kathie Klages and athletic director Mark Hollis in January 2019. Like the university itself, Hollis stated that his program “ha[d] been attacked by [an] evil … individual.” Hollis added that his department’s “first priority has always been [student-athletes’] health and safety.”

The NCAA decided not to pursue possible violations of its rules against sexual offenses involving university or college athletic departments, because it had no such policies. Its hands-off approach not only encompassed how the university and its athletic department had mishandled the allegations against Larry Nassar, but also allegation of sexual assault lodged against male athletes of the university’s football and basketball teams.

Apparently, the male-dominated NCAA does not consider the prevention of sexual abuse, sexual assaults, and other forms of sexual misconduct that male athletes, male coaches, or male team doctors commit to be part of its responsibilities. Similarly, the NCAA has looked the other way when dozens of college football and basketball programs have been involved in sexual assault scandals involving their athletes and coaches.

Unlike Olympic sports, there is no pseudo-independent Center for SafeSport in college athletics or much congressional appetite so far to get involved. The primary mechanism for dealing with sexual abuse and other sexual misconduct in college sports is Title IX. Unfortunately, that statute has only been marginally effective in preventing such abuse in the past and its enforcement powers in recent years have been diluted.

NCAA Super Conference Sports

The NCAA is run by representatives of the same big-time sports schools and super conferences that the organization is supposed to monitor and penalize for infractions. The NCAA has deliberately placed reprehensible and often criminal conduct by athletes, coaches, and other men associated with high profile college athletic departments against female students outside the organization’s jurisdictional boundaries.

Based on what has transpired in the past two decades, it appears evident that the NCAA does not normally involve itself in these sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence cases because the organization’s bylaws prohibit them from doing so, unless the alleged offenders have received special benefits that other students do not receive. The exceptions have occurred when those bylaws have been unilaterally bypassed or manipulated in order to quell the fallout from really bad national publicity. This exceptional process was initiated in the abuse scandal involving young boys in the Penn State football shower room, but has been reprised several times since including Baylor’s football-related sexual assault travesties.

When it comes to football-related crimes against females, the NCAA and its member super conference college presidents typically resemble Colonel Klink in the 1960’s World War II TV comedy, Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing.’” Big-time college football programs and the athletic departments in which they reside are primarily responsible for their own discipline. Too often local law enforcement officials keep their distance or allow under-qualified and compromised campus police to investigate.

These major athletic programs often are permitted to discipline themselves. According to a groundbreaking survey that former U.S. Senator Clare McCaskill’s staff conducted in 2014, 90 percent of the colleges that responded acknowledged that their athletic departments had a direct oversight role in sexual assault cases when athletes were involved. More astonishingly, “40 percent of the schools in the national sample ha[d] not conducted a single sexual-violence investigation in the past five years.” And this study was conducted before the former Trump administration decided to further dilute the federal Education Department’s Title IX enforcement powers.

A 2016 online survey of male undergraduates at a large southeastern Division I school, which was part of a study published in the journal Violence Against Women, found that over 50 percent of male students who participated in collegiate or intramural sports admitted to having “coerce[ed] a partner into sex,” meeting “the legal definition of rape.” Also, according to a 2015 Texas A&M study, based on 22 years of FBI data, there was a 41% “increase in reported rapes on the days of football games on college campuses.”
Yet, despite decades of serious sexual misconduct on campuses linked to athletes—especially football players—the NCAA’s major concern has been to separate itself from these problems, and fight against the effective implementation of Title IX. Even after the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, the NCAA never established protocols dealing with sexual abuse and sexual assaults in college sports. That unwillingness to become involved has only intensified as super conference schools have consolidated their power and influence within the NCAA’s leadership.

While sexual assaults and domestic violence linked to professional and college football have been rampant, that does not mean there have not been similar problems in the rest of the college sports world. Men’s college basketball is another male-dominated sport that has had nationally publicized scandals involving allegations of sexual crimes and/or domestic and dating violence. College basketball programs frequently have been the incubators of such offenses, most prominently in recent times at schools like Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan State, Yale, and Louisville.

The NCAA Continues to Largely Ignore Sexual Assaults and Domestic and Dating Violence

The NCAA has continued to be largely invisible before and after these alleged sexual and domestic crimes have occurred. Offending universities and colleges have been allowed to establish the rules for, monitor, and investigate their own basketball and football programs, too often with direct input from—or behind the scenes influence of—their complicit athletic departments and wealthy boosters. Major college sports programs, especially those in the football and basketball-driven super conferences, have considerable power within the NCAA’s morally obtuse leadership structure. They also 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, and relatively few stiff penalties. The NCAA has done almost nothing to reverse 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 received some sort of sexual violence training. In addition, these campus officials must attest that their athletic department is actually aware of its school’s policies governing sexual violence and have a mechanism in place to investigate such violence. .It is hard to imagine requirements designed to have less of an impact than these.

The failure of the NCAA to impose rigorous prevention and reporting requirements on college athletic departments has become especially worrisome because, as discussed earlier, the Department of Education took steps under the prior administration to substantially dilute Title IX enforcement. That has left college sports in an even worse position with regard to preventing sport-related crimes of sexual and other violence against female students, including athletes.

This vacuum in leadership has led “seven women, including three female athletes,” to file a landmark 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.” These women have 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 explains, have 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.”

Conclusion

The NCAA and its super conference members have created and maintained the same type of discriminatory and misogynistic environment that Title IX and its initial regulations were intended to rectify. This is not something new, but rather a pathology that has been part of the organization and college sports for many decades. Any expectation that an investigation the NCAA has commissioned and will influence, even if it is led by a female civil rights attorney in good standing, is unrealistic. As the results of the men’s basketball recruiting violations commission that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led proved, ultimately what the organization does mostly protects the interests of its male-dominated super conference members.

Reopening Major Team Sports During the Coronavirus Pandemic and Civil Unrest:
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NCAA, NHL, MLS, NWSL, and WNBA ©
By John Weston Parry

Overview

America’s favorite professional and college team sports for men and women are making plans to reopen. Those plans may seem like rational processes to some, but the disparate decision-making involved is likely to result in various degrees of chaos, and then painful regrets. The variables and concerns are many and shifting.

The available pools of money and other essential resources are shrinking. Fewer and fewer Americans are physically distancing and wearing masks. Every jurisdiction has its own coronavirus policies and protocols. In many places COVID 19 cases already are spiking and the situation is likely to grow worse once the weather turns cooler in the fall. Testing and isolation efficacy is variable and often unknown. The quality of competition is likely to be substantially diminished. And new dangers and concerns, especially from civil unrest, are looming or may emerge at any time.

Most importantly, though, from the perspective of American spectator sports themselves, no one knows what the actual longer-term health risks for athletes who contract the coronavirus are, assuming they live through the experience. Fifteen to 20 percent of the cases have complicated outcomes, and many of those have severe health implications for athletes, such as the ability to breathe normally. How will the sports world react if the athletic career of Lebron James, Patrick Mahomes, Mike Trout, Megan Rapinoe, Draisaitl MacKinnon, Jozy Altidore, Elena Delle Donne, or any number of other popular sports star is suddenly over or badly compromised? How many such tragedies will be too many for other athletes, the media, and fans to stomach?

What happens to fan interest if key athletes on multiple teams are unable to play? Will one or more of the many stadiums, arenas, and training facilities where teams gather resemble meat packing factories with respect to the percentage of athletes and team employees, who become infected? What might occur if the NFL, college football, or other team sports are crazy enough to play their games in front of live spectators, or fail to set up their operations in anything other than a fully protected bubble? How will these American spectator sports operate if the coronavirus continues to surge due to beach crowds, mass protests, and other large group functions that have broken out across America? What will be the costs of having to shut down these sports again? These are all possible scenarios that teams and leagues should be prepared to deal with if they chose to go forward and play in these risky circumstances. Alarmingly, The Kentucky Derby, which has been postponed until September, is planning to invite fans to attend thus encouraging other spectator sports to follow suit.

In addition, each sport must overcome its own set of labor and management challenges. Perhaps the most pressing right now is that many African-American and other socially active athletes, especially those who dominate the NBA, NFL, and WNBA, may not want to train and play—and deservedly so—unless their teams and leagues find outlets to allow them to express their outrage about police violence and racial injustice in ways that include, but are far more consequential than, just kneeling during the national anthem. NASCAR and all of its drivers have condemned the image of a noose that was left in the garage stall of the sports only black driver, Bubba Wallace and they even banned the Confederate flag inside their race tracks. Still, NASCAR has yet to condemn the fans who continue to carry and wave those flags just outside those venues.

Make America great again has become a very sad and frightening parody of itself as racial injustice and civil unrest, at least temporarily, have supplanted coronavirus devastation as this nation’s pre-eminent concern. What happens to the NFL, NBA and other American spectator sports if owners begin siding with Trump’s callousness or the President calls in the military?

The NCAA’s super conference and other Division I football and basketball programs have their own unique challenges, which, assuming universities and colleges open, may include campus protests, civil unrest, and the fact that adolescents and young adults are more apt to engage in reckless behaviors. Conversely, what happens if a number of star college athletes decide they do not want to risk their professional prospects by playing during the coronavirus pandemic for little more than their scholarships? Also, if many of these universities and colleges do not reopen for regular students because it remains too dangerous, how will it look if football and basketball players are asked to undertake such risks? And what would be the legal liability of doing so, even if these athlete-students are compelled to sign waivers?

Elsewhere, MLB appears to be all about how dwindling revenues should be shared when it is the players, and not the owners, who are assuming most of the health risks, many of which are unknown. There is growing concern there will be no season. The NHL must overcome travel restrictions, not only between the U.S. and Canada, but for many of its foreign players who have been living overseas during the coronavirus hiatus. MLS has created bad feelings among its athletes by threatening to lock them out if they did not agree to the league’s contract demands. And in popular women’s team sports largely controlled by men, including the NWSL and WNBA, it is economic necessity that seems to be dictating many of the coronavirus decisions for female athletes, particularly those about how and when to reopen.

Collectively, the current crop of ad hoc plans for reopening America’s favorite team sports do not sound like recipes for either economic or public health success, unless one happens to be a true blue—I mean red—MAGA sports enthusiast who wants to dispense with the inconveniences of reality and fact-based risk-assessments. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s most respected federal public health expert, is only lukewarm about the prospects of team sports safely reopening in the most secure bubble environments, like the one the NBA is attempting to create in Orlando, Florida.

Dr. Fauci is fully alarmed by the prospects of much larger professional and college football teams deciding to dispense with such badly needed protective bubbles for their players and staff. He is especially concerned because, based on the best scientific evidence available, there is likely to be a new wave of coronavirus cases once the weather turns cold again in the fall and winter months when a vast majority of football games are played.

Common Public Health Problems that All These Team Sports Will Share

All American professional, college, and Olympic team sports have the coronavirus as a common enemy. Yet, where, how, and when it will peak, resurface, and spread again in different localities in the United States is largely unknown, except that the trends at the moment are alarming and the situation is likely to grow worse in the fall. Is it safe to predict that if a locality escaped the worst effects to begin with the odds are good that it will do so in the future? Conversely, if a nation like the U.S. has experienced the very worst effects of the virus, is that pattern likely to continue going forward?

Not necessarily on either count as Florida's precipitous rise in cases demonstrates, although it seems reasonable to assume that population density, physical distancing compliance, and adequate testing protocols are key factors. Population density changes especially during the summer months when people normally gravitate to beaches, lakes, and resorts. More to the point with regard to spectator sports, normally high population densities are required to maximize profits, while filling seats in stadiums and arenas requires the opposite of physical distancing. As to testing, many questions which cannot be answered with a high degree of certainty are being addressed with rosy presumptions or fact-deprived assurances.

A common problem these spectator sports are grappling with is whether there should be fans in attendance and if so, whether there should be reasonable attempts to ensure physical distancing? Based on the overwhelming amount of anecdotal and public health information, as well as existing government restrictions in the U.S. and most of the world, America’s mainstream spectator sports, with the possible exceptions of professional and college football and conceivably hockey, will not have fans in attendance. For the foreseeable future, profits will have to come, if at all, from television, streaming, and corporate sponsorships.

All of these team sports also must decide where to hold their competitions. Using pre-existing stadiums and arenas dedicated to those teams does not appear to be a reasonably safe alternative, even without fans. This raises a whole series of possible contractual issues, assuming the teams do not own their facilities outright and are legally committed to playing in particular stadiums and arenas.

Currently sports that are planning to open or reopen soon in terms of actually playing games, which include MLB, the NBA, MLS, the NHL, NWSL, and WNBA, have decided to relocate to jurisdictions that: (a) have largely dispensed with mandatory public health measures—too often for spurious reasons; and (b) boast sufficient high quality sports facilities for entire leagues to hold all their competitions in one relatively secure location. Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of leagues and teams chose Florida for their relatively safe spots and are paying the price now.

All of these leagues have shortened their seasons with an emphasis on the more lucrative playoffs. The NFL, the NCAA, and super conferences appear committed to using their own stadiums and arenas, although neither enterprise has made a final decision as to whether there will be spectators and if so how many and with what precautions. Yet, all of this planning seems very tentative and subject to change. Even the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo are far from a certainty.

Threshold concerns are how the testing should be conducted and will the necessary testing capabilities be available and functioning appropriately? Will it be daily, just before games, or only when a player, coach, or staff member exhibits symptoms? How much will testing cost? And will the required number of tests be available? How accurate will the tests be in terms of the percentages of false negatives and false positives, meaning those that test negative, but actually have the virus, and those that test positive, but are virus free?

A number of the college super conferences, for example, are only planning to test football players if they have symptoms, which is not only dangerous but irrational, except perhaps in a sport where young male athletes already get brain damage and are carted off the field in droves. As one unidentified college football player responded in an ESPN confidential survey, “[t]here’s an assumption of risk when you play [this] sport to begin with…I don’t think adding the virus to that changes anything for the coaches or players.”

Also, who should be making the decisions whether specific athletes, coaches, or staff has the appropriate symptoms? What percentage of team doctors have expertise and prior experience in making these often very tricky calls as to whether the virus is present? Are they receiving special training to make these diagnoses? Will they err or the side of allowing the athletes to play or protecting the rest of the team? Will stars and superstars be treated differently than bench players? Should men be making most of the decisions for female athletes?

A critical set of problems revolve around how to deal with the athletes who contract or are exposed to the coronavirus and who should decide what happens to them? There are several possible scenarios to consider. First, what will happen if an athlete has been seriously exposed—as opposed to an incidental exposure—but has not tested positive for the virus. Should that athlete be quarantined for at least fourteen days, along with any other athletes, coaches, and team staff members he or she has exposed?

Clearly from a public health point of view quarantines should be required whenever there have been significant exposures. If it is the team’s decision, however, the outcome might be different, especially for star players and coaches. Frequent testing could be used instead, although that would leave open the considerable possibility that asymptomatic athletes, or athletes whose test results are inaccurate (false negative), could expose other teammates, coaches, and staff members. Such an occurrence could be a crushing blow to any team. Furthermore, what about athletes, coaches, and staff who are at high risk if they are infected, or simply do not want to assume the risk if a teammate has been exposed, but has not tested positive yet?

At the same time, because these tests produce false positives, athletes and coaches without the coronavirus may be forced to quarantine, along with the people who have come in contact with them. Unfortunately, the number of false negatives and false positives currently are correlated in part to the type of tests that are used. The ones that are less intrusive and more convenient that most of these sports will be relying upon are less accurate and thus less reliable.

Second, what will happen when athletes contract the coronavirus, live, but have longer-term impairments as a result, which negatively affect or end their athletic careers and/or place their future health in jeopardy? Who should be responsible for taking care of the athletes’ health and disability-related expenses? Currently, college athletes have no long-term protections, while professional athletes have limited protections. If athletes are being asked to assume these considerable health risks, should they not be fully protected and in the case of professionals given a greater share of the revenues as hazard pay? NBA players, for example, are pushing for league-financed insurance policies to protect them, not only against severe COVID-19 complications, but also career-impairing injuries because their training preparations may be insufficient due to the pressures to reopen sooner, rather than later.

Third, it is unclear what testing capacities these popular spectator sports actually will have in a nation in which testing to date has been sub par and distributed inequitably. Will the states and federal government treat athletes, coaches, and team staff members as privileged Americans who should be among the first in line to receive these tests, as if the are essential workers in the White House? If so, how will these sports deal with the negative fall out that is sure to follow as the previous furor with NBA players proved? Who will pay for all those tests, assuming insurance will only cover a small proportion of them? And what happens if a team or league does not actually deliver on the testing capacities it is promising to implement?

A final set of problems involve the economic viability of these sports ventures during the coronavirus. Already it is clear that revenues from live spectators probably will be zero, or at least greatly curtailed. Yet, no one really knows what the demand will be for fans watching on television or through various streaming options. On the one hand, there is the expectation of a widespread pent up desire of fans wanting to view any type of mainstream sport that approximates normal competitive circumstances.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that these competitions will be so obviously flawed and distorted that millions of fans will reject the new product, especially if stars and superstars contract the virus or test positive. Or both factors may co-exist at once creating a seesaw economic effect with unknown consequences. In addition, because there is a relatively high likelihood that coronavirus cases will increase beginning in the fall, leagues may be forced to suspend play once again, which would be extremely costly.

However these public health and economic factors play out, they will be somewhat—or very—different for each team sport and the athletes in those sports. None of these leagues are likely to be doing what is best from a public health standpoint. Many of the risks they assume and the library of problems they will encounter are gong to be unique to their own sport cultures and operations.

The greater the monetary rewards and the more that ownership tends to reflect the attitudes of President Trump towards the virus and civil unrest, the greater the risks are likely to be. Paraphrasing Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post, these entities “want to be strong without doing the things that make you strong.” Without expert guidance, these enterprises have limited capacities to solve “complex problem[s],” including the effects of the pandemic and civil unrest on their individual sports.

The National Football League

Much of the impending chaos is likely to be centered on America’s favorite spectator sport. Professional football has a rich history of burying both health problems and racial inequities in piles of deceptions. Currently, the NFL is desperately trying to maintain its normal schedule during a pandemic and civil unrest that the league owners contributed to in no small way. Football is a sport in which physical distancing is impossible most of the time and infectious bodily fluids are continually being exchanged during practices, scrimmages, and games.

On the public health side of the equation is the frightening possibility that the NFL will choose—and be able to manipulate certain localities to allow its teams—to play games before live spectators based on the ludicrous, sleight of hand argument that it is safer not to physically distance outdoors than indoors. First, stadiums hold many more fans than arenas. This means that even though as a general rule it is safer outdoors, the probability of spreading the virus will be greater with so many people in one facility.

Second, much of the time people actually spend at a professional football game is indoors in suites, restaurants, food stations, corridors, and most of all germ-infested bathrooms. And third if liquor is available, the normal boorish behavior practiced at professional football games is likely to be reprised increasing the coronavirus risks even further. Who is going to ensure drunken, stoned, or just generally inconsiderate—mostly male—fans are wearing their masks? More importantly for the NFL, who is going to want to go to pay to watch these games live in the first place or bring their families to watch these games?

Whatever the NFL chooses to do, reopening will carry risks for players, coaches, and other staff members, particularly in colder weather in which the coronavirus appears to thrive. As Cincinnati Bengals nose tackle D.J. Reader has explained, football by its nature “is literally sweating, bleeding, spitting on each other all the time.” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, has warned: “We fully well expect that we will have positive cases that arise because we think this disease will remain endemic to society… Our challenge is to identify them as quickly as possible and to prevent spread to other participants.”

Unfortunately—as college football programs already have discovered—the risk of NFL players contracting the coronavirus may escalate dramatically once players report to their teams training camps. While there now appears to be tiered set of NFL health protocols to guide teams as to how they should prepare their training facilities to bring back players, coaches, and other staff, there are no specified penalties for failing to do so, which suggests teams will have considerable discretion. ESPN reports that the “NFL and NFLPA … may perform surprise inspections of sites to ensure compliance with the protocols,” but such a meek threat is unlikely to deter team owners who decide to continue to do things their way, as they always have.

Ravens head coach John Harbaugh has stated the guidance is “impossible” to carry out, especially in locker rooms and workout facilities during training camps when as many as ninety players are there at one time. “Are guys going to shower one at a time all day? Are guys going to lift weights one at a time all day long?” Harbaugh also is concerned that some teams may not comply and thus have an “advantage” over teams that do—although that benefit may be short lived if lack of compliance breeds disease.

His concerns may be a moot point since there is no clear indication when training camps will actually open. Already the players union (NFLPA) is warning NFL athletes not to hold voluntary workouts in groups as more and more players, including superstars like Ezekiel Elliott of the Cowboys and Von Miller of the Broncos, have tested positive. Nonetheless, other players flout the union's guidance, like President Trump's pal Tom Brady in Tampa where the coronavirus cases are skyrocketing.

In addition, there are three other potential stumbling blocks that could push the late July start dates back indefinitely, even if the NFL and the NFLPA still wanted to move forward. First, specifics about how the testing and diagnosing of symptoms will be handled by the league and its teams has not been released, particularly whether every training facility will have access to the needed testing kits to meet whatever testing protocols are required. Second, it is unclear whether all the jurisdictions where NFL training camps are scheduled will permit these facilities to open as planned. And third, by agreement, no training camps can begin operations until the training camps of all the other teams are ready to commence.

With regard to civil unrest in this country, the NFL has made itself the symbol of supporting racial injustice both in its hiring practices and how it has handled peaceful protests by Colin Kaepernick and other players, most of whom are African Americans. Kaepernick was blackballed by every team. His football career is likely over or at least badly damaged, even if a team finally signs him to a contract. (Ironically, though, someday Kaepernick could be inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame due to the huge impact he will have had on the game.)

In the meantime, the players are demanding more social justice demonstrations and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who is in the middle of what appears to be his final contract, has issued a long overdue mea culpa on behalf of the league. He undoubtedly understands that without such a gesture there probably will be no football played and his subsequent career will be in jeopardy.

Nonetheless, two important points need to be stressed about this seeming turn-around. First, it did not come from the owners lips. Normally when the league makes a major decision through the Commissioner a number of owners will speak out to lend their support. Their silence so far appears to represent a lack of consensus on the dimensions of the league’s commitment to racial justice. So far the only signs of change are that a small handful of NFL general managers are, as The Washington Post put it, “waking up to racism” as being a problem.

Second, conspicuously, no mention was made about Kaepernick, much less any steps to restore his football status and good name within NFL management. Later Goodell indicated that he hopes an NFL team will sign Kaepernick to a contract—but it would be up to racially insensitive owners to decide whether to do so or not.

Around the same time that Goodell was signaling the possible dawn of a new era in the NFL, New Orleans Saints’ likely Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Brees and President Trump were garnering headlines by attacking past protests by African-American NFL players. They then proceeded to attack each other in melodramatic displays of mutual ignorance.

Brees began the mindless prattle with his pious uttering that, despite Floyd’s murder by police and other racial inequalities that have spurred widespread national protests, the quarterback wanted to publicly reaffirm his original criticism of Kapernick and other players who had knelt during the national anthem. Like the President, Brees proclaimed that no matter what was happening around the country, he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag.”

The outrage across the league from other players and the media was instantaneous and uniformly condemning, with the exception of tweets of support from President Trump. Brees teammate Malcolm Jenkins may have said it best: “[Y]ou don’t understand …how insensitive your comments are… I’m disappointed, I’m hurt, because while the world tells you, `You are not worthy,’ that your life doesn’t matter, the last place you want to hear it from are the guys you go to war with and that you consider to be your allies and your friends.”

Brees soon changed his tune to avoid becoming a pariah even on his own team. He apologized, acknowledging for the first time that the protests have “never” been “about the American flag.” Soon President Trump was on twitter again chastising Brees for changing his mind. “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag.”

Subsequently, the President launched a twitter attack targeting Goodell as well, after the Commissioner had apologized to African American players for the NFL’s reactionary positions. “Could it be even remotely possible that … Roger Goodell… was intimating that it would now be O.K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country & our Flag?”

Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins put the controversy in perspective when she observed that for the NFL and its fans, the issue is whether to choose to “defend” a “knee on the turf or a knee on the neck.” How these diametrically opposed views about protests against racial injustice will affect the reopening of the league, as well as fan support for the NFL and its teams is hard to tell. So far the players have not indicated what type of protests they expect to be able to carry out either on or off the field.

This may lead to a host of tensions involving players, owners, corporate sponsors, the media, and politicians. Already in Washington D.C. the monument to George Preston Marshall, the avowed racist founding owner of the city’s NFL football franchise, was removed, while calls for current owner Daniel Snyder to change the racially insensitive “Redskins” moniker that Marshall had bestowed on that franchise have become louder and louder.

Instead of doing the right thing by changing the name, however, Snyder has tried to shift the focus away from his franchise’s racist history by belatedly honoring Bobby Mitchell, who long after the rest of the NFL had been integrated, became Washington’s first African American player. Swayed by the Black Lives Matter movement, Snyder finally retired Bobby Mitchell’s number and renamed a section of FedEx Field, which had been dedicated to Marshall, for Mitchell. This was a bitter-sweet, long overdue acknowledgement of a team great, who entered the Hall of Fame back in 1983, and then for years toiled as the team’s assistant general manager, until he painfully retired in 2003 after being passed over twice as general manager in favor of white men.

These rising racial tensions, when combined with the myriad of health considerations, present the league with steep challenges in terms of successfully launching the upcoming season. Dr. Fauci has warned the league that their plans appear to be doomed to failure. “Unless players are essentially in a bubble—insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day—it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall.”

The National Basketball Association

Of all the professional leagues, the NBA appears to be the most advanced in planning its reopening. Still, Dr. Fauci would only go so far as to say the plan “might very well be quite successful” and is “not reckless at all.” The plan also is the most advanced in terms of responding to racial injustice and allowing its players and employees the freedom to express their views, as long as they do not offend the Chinese government. Much of this progress is due to the strong leadership of its Commissioner Adam Silver.

Yet, even the NBA has undertaken quite a risk and has considerable challenges to overcome, not the least of which is its shift from a position of strongly supporting public health safety to one that stresses the importance of reopening for a league with pressing financial needs. As Marc Stein and Brooks Barnes of the New York Times explained, after being held up as the most responsive professional sports league CEO to public health concerns, Silver, like every other sports commissioner, has pivoted towards a new narrative. In the Commissioner’s words, “I’m not proud of shutting down. I would be proud of finding a path that was safe and as risk-free as possible for us to play.”

The Times reporters, after speaking directly with club officials from multiple teams, concluded that “monetary motivations are largely behind the [NBA’s} comeback.” The NBA, because of the financial implications of the political fiasco with the Chinese government and the league’s relatively generous contract with its players, needs to bring in revenues to continue to thrive. Both the league and its players generally embrace this financial reality. Thus, the NBA may be pushing to reopen without having overcome all the necessary obstacles to doing so safely.

While it is clear that the NFL’s hope of limiting safety risks by playing outdoors will not work if the football teams fill their large stadiums with spectators, there is no doubt that playing indoors, even without spectators, carries a special risk. The coronavirus is spread far more easily indoors than outside as the experiences of nursing homes and meat facilities can attest. In addition, Florida, where the NBA is set to reopen, is experiencing an alarming increase in the number of coronavirus cases. So far Orange County, where the ESPN-Disney complex is located that will be used play all of the NBA’s games and create a bubble for its players, coaches, and other staff, has seen less of an increase than the rest of the state. But that may change quickly as Disney and Universal open up their theme parks and the tourists come pouring in.

Furthermore, Silver’s assurances that there will be adequate testing and health protocols are based on presumptions rather than actual experience and accomplishments. At the beginning of May as the Commissioner was making plans to reopen the NBA, the Times reported that “he was confident that that the league would have little issue… obtaining the requisite kits to administer daily testing in the N.B.A. bubble.” If players tested positive, the league would “play on” rather than “immediately shutter[ing]” as it did initially. Silver had to concede, though, that the league was “choosing among multiple bad alternatives.”

Once players and staff arrive at the campus complex they will undergo two separate coronavirus tests, which will initially help to guard against both false negatives and false positives. During that process the athletes and staff will be quarantined for 36 hours. Outside their rooms, players and staff will be required to physically distance from each other and wear masks, except when they are eating, engaged in basketball training or games, or participate in outdoor or other activities where physical distancing is easy to maintain.

It is still unclear who will be allowed to pierce the NBA’s protective bubble beyond NBA team personnel and ESPN/Disney staff members and whether and how frequently those ESPN/Disney staffers will be tested and what actual restrictions there will be on player movements outside the NBA’s bubble. Players or staff members who leave the campus for unauthorized reasons will be expected to quarantine for 10 days. Unfortunately, that begs certain questions. What reasons will be authorized? Who will be giving out those authorizations? And will those restrictions be strictly enforced, since, for so many athletes, breaking curfew—wink, wink—is a way of life?

Family members and significant others will be barred from campus, but only until after the first round of the playoffs. Then each player will be allowed to have a separate room to house their guests. This will create new opportunities for the athletes and staff to contract the coronavirus, particularly if these guests are not being tested as rigorously as the players themselves. As a respected epidemiologist told ESPN, the NBA“`want[s] to protect their players, but an outbreak would be really hard to deal with. It would have long-term consequences.’” People may look back and ask: ”`Did we have to do this?’”

That may be why the NBA has told players that there will be no penalty if they decline to participate, other than not being paid, which a number of players like Kevin Durant and Washington Wizards star forward Davis Bertans are doing. Silver, though, couched the message differently by stating that the precautions “may not be for everyone.” In addition, he stressed the luxurious accommodations and amenities each player would receive.

At the same time, as with the NFL, the NBA’s reopening could be negatively affected by civil unrest and the movement for racial equality, especially if President Trump decides to involve the military or tries to incite violence or promote racism in other ways. Unlike the NFL, though, one would expect most NBA owners to be supportive of its players, at least publicly, but only if the protests and other social justice activities do not interfere with the restart of the league’s season.

Washington Wizards’ management joined its players in releasing an impressive statement that read: “WE WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE THE ASSASINATION OF PEOPLE OF COLOR…, WE WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT THE ABUSE OF POWER FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT, and WE WILL NO LONGER SHUT UP AND DRIBBLE.” In addition, when James Dolan the owner of the New York Knicks refused to actively condemn racial injustice by taking the position that sports businesses are no “more qualified than anyone else to offer our opinion on social matters,” condemnation around the league was widespread. Similarly, longtime Sacramento King’s play-by-play announcer Grant Napear was fired by team management when he reacted to the Black Lives Matter movement by posting the response: ALL LIVES MATTER…. EVERY SINGLE ONE!!”

The National Basketball Players Association is working with its players to come up with ways to ensure that the NBA’s reopening does not harm the Black Lives Matter movement. According to Michele Roberts, the union’s executive director, the players only want to play again if doing so “can, in fact, highlight, encourage and enhance this movement.” She urged each player to decide for himself whether playing would be appropriate given the continuing protests across the country.

Reportedly, though, a growing number of players have expressed ongoing concerns about the reopening. In part this is symptomatic of an emerging conflict between the NBA players, who make up the rank and file, and the relatively few superstar players, like Lebron James and Kevin Durant, who exert so much influence. This tension is not over racial justice where there is a great deal of agreement, but rather the lack of input from a vast majority of players. The NBA, like the NFL, other team sports, or Hollywood, has become an enterprise that caters to the needs and whims of its superstars. Washington Post columnist Jerry Brewer put it this way: “In the middle of a spirited battle against systemic racism, it’s humbling [forNBA players] to realize that the structure of [their own] house is flawed.”

Major League Baseball

It is unlikely that any MLB teams will be joining players soon in releasing statements condemning racial injustice in this country. The two parties have been locked in an ugly battle over how to divide whatever revenues can be salvaged by a risky reopening. Furthermore, despite having played a 2015 MLB game between the Orioles and Chicago White Sox before an empty stadium due to the civil unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of local police, the league took nine days to make a public statement about the killing of George Floyd.

As James Wagner wrote in The New York Times, for African American players and “some fans…, the delay… from a league that… wraps itself in the legacy of Jackie Robinson did not sit well.” Far more important to the league, though, was its June draft, which garnered the lion’s share of the baseball media’s attention. In the meantime, there still is no resolution to the labor dispute, although baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, on the first day of the draft, promised that play would begin in the summer. The problem is that what that resolution will be is still very much up in the air, while the details of doing it safely have been given short shrift.

As the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga explained, even before pandemic and this labor standstill, MLB was faced with uncomfortable financial challenges: “local television contracts that won’t be replicated because people consume sports in new and different ways, an aging fan base and declining attendance. Combine those with a product that is deeply flawed: too many home runs, too many strikeouts, too-long games with too much dead time between the action.”

Unfortunately for both sides, the failure to reach a deal much sooner has significantly limited the number of games that can be played and thus the revenues that can be generated. According to the Commissioner, whatever happens, MLB’s revenues will shrink by at least “70% in 2020. He initially hoped that an agreement could be reached around the idea that there would be between 48 games, which the league had proposed, and 89, which the players countered with, and full salaries and benefits would be prorated according to the percentage of games being played based on a 162 game season.

Originally the owners had approved a tentative deal that would have included 82 regular season games beginning in early July and then the playoffs. Home stadiums without fans in attendance would be used in jurisdictions where it would be permitted. Later spectators might be allowed to attend. All games would be either interdivisional or against natural rivals in the same region. Active rosters would be expanded to accommodate more minor league players since the minor leagues have been closed down for the entire 2020 season.

Despite the special hazards to the players posed by the coronavirus, they would receive only half of all the revenues generated, which would be a substantial pay cut. As pitcher Blake Snell of the Tampa Bay Rays said in explaining why this would be unfair, “Bro, I’m risking my life.”

By not training and playing games in a single location like the NBA is going to do, the league has increased the possibility that players, coaches, and other team staff will carry the virus into stadiums and training facilities from the their homes and other places they visit and carry the virus out into the local community. To limit the spread of the disease players would have to be tested frequently and preerably daily. Whether the necessary testing capacity will be available in most, much less every, jurisdiction that has a MLB team is doubtful. Furthermore, the risk of infection is going to vary amongst the 30 different jurisdictions that each host a team, including Toronto, which is in a different country with rigorous international border restrictions going both ways.

One of the main reasons compromise has been so difficult is that the economic and public health risks of reopening baseball within the framework that the league and the union have been negotiating under is not that attractive to either side, especially since negotiating a deal for so long has substantially reduced the potential benefits to both parties. The financial upside for the owners has been substantially curtailed and the health risks for the players, coaches, and other staff members are considerable or unknown. Furthermore, nothing has been resolved about what to do with team members who have special elevated risks either due to pre-existing conditions or age. Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker, for example, is 76 years old, has type 2 diabetes, and an issue with his heart.

Thus, instead of coming to an agreement both sides have been accusing the other of bad faith. A number of observers, including many players, believe that the owners have been using the reopening negotiations in order to gain leverage over the union in future contract negotiations. The players have expressed their disgust at how the process has been handled, while the Commissioner is now stating that he is “not confident” there will be a season. The sticking point remains the number of games to be played, which is being used to determine the proposed salary percentages the players should receive.

Unfortunately, the union’s insistence that there be more than the 60 regular season games, which MLB proposed, would likely push the playoffs into late October or early November. As Anthony Fauci has warned, such a late date is dangerous from a public health perspective. “I would try to keep [the baseball season] in the core summer months.”

Fauci’s concerns may be a moot point. According to the Washington Post, “the owners effectively halted negotiations with the players’ union,” and this was not even “the worst news” on that day. Reportedly, at least three major league franchises have COVID-19 outbreaks on their teams and two franchises, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Toronto Blue Jays, have had to close their Florida training facilities. The worst outbreak so far is the one involving the Phillies where eight people, including 5 players, have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Despite that news, MLB has forced the players to return by invoking its power to dictate what the 2020 schedule should be. Training camps will begin in Florida and Arizona the beginning of July, jurisdictions that have recently seen an explosion of new coronavirus cases. In the words of pitcher Trevor Bauer of the Cincinnati Reds: "We're driving the bus straight off the cliff... Covid 19 already presented a lose lose situation and we've somehow found a way to make it worse."

The NCAA and Super Conference Football and Basketball

If MLB has a problem because it is planning to reopen in 30 separate jurisdictions, the NCAA has an even worse dilemma trying to jump start super conference football and basketball seasons throughout the country. There is no unifying voice to reduce the chaos and unintended consequences of so many schools making their own coronavirus decisions. Unlike the NFL, the NCAA has not evidenced any intention of mandating uniform testing and health protocols leaving it to the conferences and schools to figure on an ad hoc basis.

Complicating matters, an unknown number of universities and colleges will not be open for regular students. All the California state schools are going to be closed. They have been joined by many other institutions that either will be closed entirely or have substantially reduced attendance and offerings. And should there be a coronavirus resurgence, more universities and colleges will probably close as well.

In the meantime, as John Feinstein wrote in The Washington Post, universities and colleges with big time football programs like Notre Dame are pushing hard to “get students back on campus in August even though there would certainly be risk involved.” In the case of Notre Dame, that is because the “[f]ootball season opens August 29th.” Thus, instead of mandating health protocols, the NCAA released a document called “The Resocialization of Collegiate Sports: Action Plan Consideration” and voted to end the moratorium, which had suspended intercollegiate athletic activities. Many teams began holding voluntary workouts in June.

The New York Times documented that the move to play football games and other major collegiate sports in the fall is being done without much input from the athletes. More to the point, athlete health and safety does not seem to be a priority. Generating billions of dollars in revenues, alumni donations, and college applications through sports, particularly football, appears to be all important for these super conference members.

The rush to play football, basketball, and other major college sports without the informed consent of the athletes involved raises a number of ethical concerns. First, given the hazards these athletes face from the coronavirus the fact that they are not paid and still banned from generating revenues for themselves underscores how they continue to be financially exploited by these universities and colleges.

Second, and most importantly, if the athletes are supposed to be treated like regular students, what, other than making money for the school, could possibly justify exposing them to greatly enhanced risks of contracting the coronavirus. Moreover, the proposed testing protocols for college athletes are inadequate on their face, especially as compared to what professional athletes are suppose to receive. Two major reasons for this inadequacy are the aforementioned lack of direction from the NCAA and cost considerations. According to Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, the amount of money needed to regularly test an entire team could be as much as $600,000. This may seem like a great deal of money, but it is only a fraction of what super conference head football and basketball coaches make each year.

As reported by Sports Illustrated, a number of universities, including Arizona, LSU, Kentucky, and Arkansas, plan only to test those athletes exhibiting actual symptoms or who have been found to be in serious contact with an infected person. These schools are deliberately ignoring epidemiologists and public health experts who stress that it is essential for athletes to be tested when they first arrive on campus and frequently thereafter. Without such testing, the coronavirus is likely to be spread by asymptomatic carriers, who make up a substantial percentage of the known cases. As Zachary Binney an Emory University epidemiologist has pointed out, the U.S. has experienced “example after example where waiting for symptoms to develop leads to widespread outbreaks.”

Brian Hainline the NCAA’s chief medical officer falls back on the lame rationalization that “[t]here is not one best testing practice” since “[n]o one has been through anything like this” before. This is a misleading at best. If protecting the athletes is the first priority, these schools and the NCAA should err on the side of more testing, not less. In the S.I. article, Hainline blithely suggests things might improve down the road if a saliva test becomes widely available. Then athletes could be tested in batches by spitting into one jar. If their mixed sample had no positive results, all of those athletes could be cleared at once.

Even if these college athletic programs were committed to providing state of the art testing protocols, this would not overcome the public health objections Anthony Fauci has raised concerning football. With so many players living, practicing, and playing together they need to be in a bubble-like environment. The lack of rigor in testing is particularly concerning when college athlete-students are involved because they are more prone to act recklessly than older athletes.

As a professor of psychology who specializes in adolescent behavior concluded in the New York Times, the expectation that college students will act responsibly when it comes to the coronavirus “is a fantasy.” Risky behaviors “peak during the late teens and early 20s.” In addition, the number of coronavirus cases is likely to spike during the fall and winter months when most of the games would normally be scheduled.

Despite these pressing dangers, the NCAA is allowing chaos to reign supreme. Will Hobson of the Washington Post recently made a comprehensive inquiry into what college football programs across the country are doing to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic. He concludes that collectively these plans are “wildly inconsistent.” Hobson laments “thousands of college football players… [are] serv[ing] as test subjects as college sports officials try to figure out how to have a football season in the middle of a pandemic.” Not one university or college has committed to test as frequently as what is being promised by every major professional sports league that is reopening.

The most testing any conference has agreed to yet is once a week in the Pac-12, “Officials [of] the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and ACC… said they are offering guidance…, but that individual schools are ultimately in charge of setting covid-19 testing policies.” Thus, a number of schools are requiring no testing, while many others are refusing to disclose what their testing policies are or will be.

As one athletic department administrator warned, “the lack of uniformity across college football presents perhaps an insurmountable challenge to the upcoming season,” especially once teams have to travel elsewhere to play games. Already many football players and other college athletes have tested positive for the coronavirus after returning to campus, including eight at the University of Houston, 15 at Texas, and 28 at Clemson. Of those, a vast majority were football players. Without frequent testing and the immediate quarantining of those who are infected, the coronavirus will spread rapidly, especially in locker rooms and training facilities where as many as 85 or more football players plus staff are packed together. In June several super conference college football programs closed down their operations, including Houston, Boise State, and Kansas State. The uncertain hope now is to that they will be able to play some games, but probably not the full schedule.

Lastly, if college athletes contract the coronavirus and they sustain long-term impairments or even die, there are no programs in place to pay their medical bills or compensate them for loss of income or death. As an Indiana State athlete discovered years ago after being paralyzed playing football, he was ineligible to even recover workers’ compensation, much less receive health and disability benefits from his university. Unfortunately, that unconscionable reality has been true for every college athlete ever since.

Instead, a growing number of schools, including Ohio State and Indiana, have the audacity to insist that their athletes sign coronavirus waivers. This is not only to make athlete-students assume the health risks for training and playing during this pandemic, but to create the impression that these teams are taking necessary precautions, which they are not. As the New York Times reported, in order to help maintain this deception “players [must] wear a mask in public or lose [their] scholarship.”

Despite all these health risks, the meager benefits, and the lack of informed consent, ominously major college players have not voiced nearly as many objections to getting back to training for, practicing for, and playing their sports—which most of them seem to want to do—as they have about police violence and racial injustice. The New York Times reported how football players and other college athletes “knelt on campuses and outside courthouses and a capitol. They filmed videos and challenged coaches and gripped megaphones to call out racism they knew from their classrooms and stadiums. They led protest chants, registered voters and started to strategize for Nov. 3, Election Day.” Some “even pledged not to play,” if social conditions did not improve.

In addition, African-American college football players are objecting in public when their coaches act in racially insensitive ways. This is especially significant in a sport where most of the players are of color, while nearly 80% of the coaches are white. A few coaches, like Tom Herman at Texas, have joined their players in promoting racial equality, but others, including Mike Gundy at Oklahoma and Dabo Swinney at Clemson, continue to do things with racist implications.

During a fishing trip, Gundy was photographed wearing a T-shirt promoting a conspiracy-monger news network that has labeled Black Lives Matter a “farce.” Swinney raised eyebrows by refusing to take action against his assistant coach when he had used the n-word. Washington Post columnist Barry Svrluga cited these instances, where college football players were objecting to their own head coaches, as being part of “the chorus of athletes… who… increasingly understand[] that their thoughts and expressions matter. They know that change is theirs to make.”

One of the likely targets of change is the University of Mississippi, where the state flag continues to display a symbol of the confederacy and the school’s teams are nicknamed the “Old Miss rebels.” Both the NCAA and the Southeastern Conference have already insisted that the state redesign its flag. Republican Governor Tate Reeves, though, has resisted stating: “I believe very strongly that if we’re going to change the flag, the people of Mississippi should be the ones who make that decision.” It is likely, however, that University of Mississippi athletes, particularly African-American football players, will have their say—and perhaps the last word.

The National Hockey League

The NHL has proposed its own format for reopening, which is complicated by competing travel restrictions in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, but probably not from any nascent awareness of the need for the league and its teams to become more diverse in light of ongoing protests throughout North America. The NHL is allowing, but not requiring, teams to begin to hold “small-group team training” for up to six players at a time, if their jurisdiction’s regulations allow such gatherings. This is called Phase 2. Phase 1 was players self-quarantining.

Players who participate in these “voluntary” sessions will be tested two days before their first practice and “at least twice a week” thereafter. There also will be daily temperature checks before the players can enter the training facilities. Players also may choose to arrange to train at another team’s facility, but may not train in any other facility. Formal training camps for all players are scheduled to open July 10, assuming circumstances surrounding the coronavirus pandemic make it feasible to do so. This is Phase 3 and is expected to last at least three weeks.

The NHL Players Association (NHLPA), however, has not yet voted on this phase or Phase 4, which would be necessary to resume play. Since the regular training camps will involve 40 players at the same time, it is anticipated by many that in Phase 2 the number of players who may train together will need to increase incrementally to help ease the transition to mandatory training camps in July. In addition, what is learned from the voluntary training sessions during Phase 2 will be used to finalize the health and testing protocols for the two phases that come next. Already, though, the Tampa Bay Lightning franchise has closed its training facility because three of their players tested positive for the coronavirus.

Currently nearly 20 percent of the league’s players are overseas and must return to North America. When they do, it is likely they will have to self-quarantine for 14 days. In addition, due to similar travel restrictions between Canada and the U.S., it has been reported that several Canadian teams are exploring the possibility of holding training camps in the U.S. However, unless those quarantine requirements are lifted, it means that there may well be problems for players that need to travel between the U.S. and Canada during the playoffs.

In Phase 4, 24 of the league’s 31 teams will participate in a playoff tournament. Eighteen teams represent U.S. cities; eight are located in Canada. There will be no more regular season games, begging the question of why there will be no pre-tournament games between teams to get them ready for the playoffs. Instead, the eight teams—four from each conference—that have earned a first-round bye because of their superior regular season records will play a three game round robin with their conference to determine conference seeds, one through four. The other sixteen teams will play best-of-five playoff series with a team in their respective conference to determine which eight teams will advance to play one of the top four teams in their conference based on the round robin.

A tricky part from both a public health and administrative perspective is the choosing of so-called hubs to host the competitions. The plan, somewhat similar to the NBA, is to choose two hub cities representing the Eastern and Western conferences, respectively. All the conference games would be played in those two cities. The list of candidates includes NHL arenas in metropolitan areas that currently do not have high coronavirus rates. No final decision has been made on which two cities will host these games or whether fans will be allowed to attend. Indications are that the seats in the two arenas will be empty, except for the media and team and league personnel.

The NHL’s plan’s strength is its flexibility, which also is a weakness because it leaves many of the critical health and administrative details to be worked out later. Another weakness is that the entirely new playoff format and the lack of preparatory games is likely to produce a diluted product both in terms of the level of athletic competition and fan interest in maintaining Stanley Cup traditions.

In a sport that is known for its fighting and other blood spilling violence on the ice, how will games be refereed? Will there be a special effort to penalize overly aggressive play and how will fans used to such violence react? No one really knows for certain whether blood can carry the virus. It is known, however, that those with coronavirus symptoms are prohibited from donating blood.

Major League Soccer

After contentious negotiating, Major League Soccer, which unlike other leagues, acts for all of its 26 teams, approved an amended collective bargaining agreement with the MLS Players Association. This followed weeks of bad feelings as the league threatened to lock out the players if they did not accept its terms. The players then skipped workouts to protest the league’s threats. Under a compromise agreement MLS will reopen in three stages.

The first stage, which resumed before the new contract was signed, involves training to get the players back in shape to resume playing games. On or before July 1st all the teams are supposed to be in Orlando Florida where they will play what is described as a “World Cup-style” round robin, followed by 16 advancing teams participating in a single elimination competition to crown a league champion on August 11. The round robin match outcomes will be included in the regular season standings that were suspended in March. All matches will be televised and/or streamed, meaning that some or many will not be televised.

Players will be expected to participate unless they, or a significant other, have special risks associated with contracting the coronavirus. Thus, arguably the league’s best player, LA Galaxy’s Carlos Vela, will not be playing because his partner is pregnant. His teammate Javier Hernandez also will not be playing for the same reason, meaning the league’s most visible team already will be losing two key athletes.

Modeled on the NBA’s approach, the teams will be in a protective bubble at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at the Walt Disney Resort. MLS does not yet have a comprehensive plan in place to test players and isolate those who show symptoms or are exposed to the coronavirus, but intends to prepare one. The league intends to limit interactions with the public. There will be no spectators at those games or for practices in Orlando. Before teams go to the ESPN complex, if their jurisdictions allows, they are allowed to hold practices open to the public.

Afterwards MLS hopes to resume its regular season in the fall with games being played in the teams’ home cities. Fans might be able to attend games in those jurisdictions in which it is permitted. Commissioner Don Garber acknowledged that “[w]hen that will happen is uncertain,” especially given the recent resurgence of the virus in certain key MLS markets and the likelihood that the colder weather will generate more coronavirus cases.

Women’s Team Sports: NWSL, U.S Women’s Soccer, and the WNBA

While most of the attention has been focused on major team sports for men, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) will return to action on June 27 before any other sports league. All nine of its teams will travel to Salt Lake City, Utah for a month-long tournament in a modified bubble environment, which still presents a number of opportunities for contracting the virus. These matches to crown a champion are intended to replace the regular season schedule.

NWSL Commissioner Lisa Baird’s stated the reason for the early start is that “America and Americans [are] fall[ing] in love with [this] sport,” However, as ESPN’s Graham Hays pointed out “[t]hat’s an optimistic vision” for a league that has been struggling to “transform interest in the U.S. women’s national team into a consistent nationwide audience.” While many of the national team’s stars normally participate in NWSL games, it still remains uncertain how many, if any, of those stars will be part of this tournament. The game’s biggest star Megan Rapinoe already has declined and national team co-captain Alex Morgan gave birth to a baby in May. In addition, more than a dozen other athletes on the national team have indicated they will not be playing either.

Furthermore, other national team players have little incentive to play because they will be paid whether or not they assume the risk of contracting coronavirus by going to Utah to compete. Also currently a number of key international players in the NWSL are living outside the United States. According to Hays, all league players will be paid regardless of whether they show up. The NWSL’s players union (NWSLPA) said this was being done because it was a “piority… to protect our players… And we feel the NWSL shares those values.”

While it is refreshing that at least one league is offering its players an entirely voluntary choice whether to play or not, what that gesture will do to the level of competition is hard to gauge, but it cannot be good for growing the sport. The danger to the players is very real because the NWSL has far less resources to protect its athletes compared to professional leagues for men. In addition, the women who participate will be the guinea pigs for all those other leagues in assessing and addressing the likely impact on athletes who compete under these risky conditions.

Even though the reopening is less than a week away, there are many gaps in terms of health, safety, and testing protocols that need to be addressed and some that will clearly expose those who participate to increased risks, more so than for most men’s sports. The basic idea is to go to an environment that so far has had a relatively low incidence rate with respect to the coronavirus and try to limit contact with outsiders, although the league has yet to make a final decision whether there will be fans.

While charters are supposed to be available to shuttle teams to Utah, it is unclear whether all the teams and players will take advantage of that protection. If international players decide to participate, they probably will fly independently. All the players who do this will risk being exposed and becoming infected on route. In addition, the league has a family friendly plan to allow player children and caregivers to travel with teams, thus creating another set of opportunities for the coronavirus to spread amongst the athletes, coaches, and staff.

Once the players and families arrive they will not be housed in one campus as the NBA is doing, but rather teams will be housed in several locations, each of which is supposed to function as separately secured bubbles. Commissioner Baird said the league wanted the “environment not to feel like a restriction, we want it to feel like a welcoming village.” Players will be tested for COVID-19 before leaving for Utah and soon after they arrive. Already, though, the entire Orlando Pride team had to cancel its Utah tournament plans after six of its athletes and four members of the staff, all reportedly asymptomatic, tested positive.

If anyone connected with a team tests positive, contact tracing will begin for everyone in that housing unit. If a game took place within 48 hours before a positive test was confirmed, the opposing team will undergo contact tracing as well. Players and staff with high-risk contacts will have to quarantine for 14 days. How the NWSL plans to deal with family members and care givers accompanying players is unclear. Also, it appears from Hays’ detailed report that after initial testing, further testing will only be carried out if players develop symptoms or have been exposed to someone who has symptoms. Thus, there will be a significant opportunity for asymptomatic carriers to expose other players and staff.

In terms of the national protests against police violence and racial injustice, NWSL, unlike U.S. Soccer which until recently had been rigidly opposed to demonstrations, has tried to walk a fine line. NWSL says it “continues to encourage our players to participate in honoring our nation during the national anthem … [while] support[ing] the right of everyone in our league to exercise their right to peacefully protest.” In the past, that delicate balance has not always worked. After Megan Rapinoe gained national recognition for kneeling during the national anthem, Bill Lynch, the owner of the Washington Spirit, prevented her from kneeling at a subsequent game that she was playing against his team.
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Nevertheless, NWSL’s policy is in stark contrast to the restrictions that U.S. Soccer has imposed preventing members of the U.S. women’s national team from kneeling during the national anthem or engaging in any protests against U.S. government policies. This prohibition was instituted in March 2017 to respond to Megan Rapinoes protests. Following George Floyd’s death, however, players have been pushing hard to have U.S. Soccer amend its policy.

Finally, the WNBA is just beginning to make plans for its reopening on July 24th for its 12 teams. Since the NBA pretty much controls the league, it is no surprise that they are thinking about adopting a somewhat similar reopening plan, which would include playing a proposed 22-game regular season and playoffs in one secure location. The league has selected the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla, as its bubble location. If everything goes as planned training camps would open in early July, but the players union still must approve that plan.

Many of the health and testing protocols need to be worked out. As WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert put it: “There’s a lot to do between now and the tip [off] of the season.” According to the Associated Press, Terri Jackson, the executive director of the players union, indicated the “players are confident that the league will have the proper safety guidelines in place.” There are indications, though, that the bubble may be burst because the league hopes to play some or many of those games elsewhere at sites that have superior broadcasting facilities. Since no fans will be in attendance, the struggling league views it as imperative to bring in revenues from television and streaming. Already, though, key players are dropping out and many more may due so before the June 5th deadline. Among the most notable so far are Natasha Cloud and LaToya Sanders of the Washington Mystics and Jonquel Jones of the Connecticut Sun.

In addition, the league is working with the players, a majority of whom are African-American, to honor their commitment to pursue social justice initiatives to oppose “racism in all its forms.”

Conclusion

There is very little reason to believe America’s most popular team sports for men or women will escape the ravages of the coronavirus or the tumult of social change in the U.S. heading into the election season. The pressing questions for these sports leagues are: How bad is the pandemic going to be? How disruptive will the unrest be? And how will each of these sports enterprises be affected, individually, by these two landmark historical events, which are occurring simultaneously?

Due to the chaos involved it is not certain that the most prepared sports will be least affected and the least prepared affected the most. Probabilities are never certainties, especially when dealing with human behaviors. Even in the best of circumstances probabilities are influenced by random chance. Sound preparations cannot always overcome bad luck or unanticipated events. The NFL and NCAA, for example, could conceivably fare better than the NBA, despite the fact that Commissioner Silver’s plan is far less risky, from a public health standpoint, than the reckless proposals emanating from those other two major sports entities. Sadly, struggling women’s leagues, such as the NWSL and WNBA, may not have enough resources to contain the virus as well as the more established leagues for men.

Ultimately, though, the Coronavirus and civil unrest are both unpredictable. They are subject to unquantifiable forces beyond the control of science, much less the vagaries inherent in self-interested decision-making of sports leagues and their teams. What we do know now is alarming. Much of America refuses to take the virus seriously, which places us all in peril. The odds seem good that the economically-fueled movement to reopen America’s most popular team sports for men and women will not end well, especially for an unknown number of athletes, coaches, team staff and loved ones who will be stricken.

MARYLAND FOOTBALL’S “DYSFUNCTIONAL VIPER PIT” IS PART OF AN NCAA CULTURE OF AVARICE AND NEGLECT, WHICH RICE COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS CANNOT CHANGE©
By John Weston Parry

Overview

What really happened to the University of Maryland football program remains murky. It is doubtful that there will be complete answers or full accountability. Maryland, like other universities with super conference athletic teams, is managing its football program’s recent string of outrages with silence, plausible deniability, firewalls, and shifting responsibility. Nothing that the NCAA implements from the Rice Commission recommendations can change that reality.

The NCAA and its super conference partners will continue to largely ignore and obscure serious transgressions in two critical areas: (1) crimes against, or abuses and exploitation of, student-athletes; and conversely, sexual assaults and other forms of male athlete or coach violence against females, most of whom are students. The NCAA still has no mandatory standards governing either of these types of athletic program-involved transgressions, and continues to resist full implementation of Title IX.

As college presidents go, Wallace Loh seemed to be one of the better ones, who—in his words anyway— prioritized academics over revenue-generating athletics. Previously, he had been willing to go on record that North Carolina should receive the NCAA’s death penalty for creating a toxic atmosphere, which allowed so many of its student-athletes, especially those in the basketball and football programs, to engage in and be victimized by widespread academic fraud. Loh even took the highly unusual step of apologizing—belatedly—for his football program’s inexcusable negligence, which appears to have cost a student-athlete his life, even before the so-called independent, in-house investigation he had had been overseeing was concluded.

Yet, as became crystal clear when the Maryland Board of Regents immediately took over the investigation after Loh’s unexpected apology was issued, presidents of universities at schools with super-conference athletic programs have illusory power and control over transgressions perpetrated against student-athletes by coaches or other athletic department employees. In the words of an attorney, who the former athletic director improperly paid to provide legal representation for two Maryland football players charged with sexual misconduct, the athletic program is a “dysfunctional viper pit.”

Presidents at these super-conference universities are mostly figureheads, who are expected to protect their athletic department’s interests and, if necessary, fall on their swords—with big severance packages—when horrible things are allowed to happen. High profile head coaches at these schools have more power than the university presidents and are paid even higher salaries. Whether it is big time football, basketball, baseball, ice hockey, lacrosse—or even women’s basketball—the primary motivations of college presidents are not to monitor and take actions to curb transgressions in their athletic departments and the sports programs those departments are supposed to control and supervise. The primary athletic functions of the president of a super conference university is to: keep alumni and high profile head coaches happy; help the most popular sports programs on campus win more games; generate more sports revenues; and provide cover for the excesses and bad judgments of individuals in those big time sports programs when they transgress—unless what they do is so outrageous it threatens the reputations of the university’s board of regents and/or the state’s most visible politicians.

What these presidents and the NCAA are not empowered or inclined to do is direct athletic departments to adhere to comprehensive, independently-arrived at, mandatory standards that make future athletically-related abuses of students unlikely. Nor do they provide for and enforce strict sanctions against coaches and athletic department administrators when these awful things occur on their watch. In addition to the tragedy that led to the death of Maryland’s Jordan McNair, more than 30 other college football players have died in sanctioned football workouts since 2000. The fundamental problem in big time college sports is that little meaningful accountability exists from college presidents on down when student-athletes are abused or neglected, and when deviant athletes abuse fellow students.

The NCAA is worse than a sham. It is organized to be an enabler and at times a co-conspirator. The NCAA structure helps offending programs escape accountability, even allowing athletic programs—through their universities—to sanction themselves. This is what happened—once again—this August when Ohio State suspended head football coach Urban Meyer for only three games after he had allowed assistant coach, Zack Smith, to remain on his staff, despite multiple accusations, beginning in 2009, that Smith was physically battering his wife. Meyer also knew that Smith was engaging in other disreputable and out of control behaviors, including illegal drug use, having an illicit affair with a football staff secretary, and frequenting strip clubs.

Nonetheless, Ohio State officials appeared to be most concerned that in July Meyer had been accused of lying at the football team’s media day. Meyer had claimed that he did not know about a subsequent 2015 allegation of domestic abuse against Smith. According to the so-called independent investigative report that Ohio State had commissioned, there was insufficient evidence to conclusively prove that Meyer deliberately lied. Investigators and the university accepted the head coach’s self-serving explanation that he suffers from memory lapses. (It is virtually certain that this tidbit will not appear on Meyer’s resume.)

What made that explanation even less credible were two additional facts: Meyer previously discussed how to delete potentially incriminating texts on his cell phone about that incident; and his athletic director had specifically instructed the head coach to acknowledge at media day that he knew about the 2015 domestic abuse allegation. Subsequently, after years of silence, Meyer issued a familiar non-apology, apology on a twitter feed rather than in person: “I sincerely apologize to Courtney Smith and her children for what they have gone through”—but he made no apology for what he had done.

The recent Rice Commission recommendations, even if they are all successfully implemented, will do little to change this broken NCAA culture. Those new standards are way too narrow in scope, continue to blur accountability, and still help to maintain and reinforce the self-serving legal fictions surrounding student-athletes and amateurism. Offending coaches, athletic directors, and on occasion university presidents or chancellors may be asked to leave their positions by authorities other than the NCAA, but typically these individuals depart with large settlements that make them even wealthier than they once were. Also, there are no NCAA prohibitions against those individuals being hired again by some other university or college, as long as their transgressions involve abuses to student-athletes or other students, rather than cheating or jeopardizing the generation of revenues by the super conferences and other university athletic departments.

The University of Maryland fiasco is a painful illustration of such impotence and dysfunction, but it is important to understand that since the turn of this century, dozens of super conference sports programs have been complicit in the horrible abuses being committed against student-athletes, female students, and even young boys on those campuses. That lists includes highly distinguished—and lesser—academic universities, such as Penn State, Michigan State, Florida State, North Carolina, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Louisville, Miami, Oklahoma State, Rutgers, and others. In addition, many non-super conference athletics programs, even at illustrious academic institutions like the Naval Academy, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, have allowed sports-related sexual abuses against their female students to occur.

Future scandals may not be exactly the same and they may involve different university and college athletic departments and individuals. Unless there are fundamental changes in how these programs are monitored and sanctioned at a national level, though, money, greed, and the obsession to win will ensure that new abuses against student-athletes and other students—followed by implicit and explicit cover-ups—surface in many of these big time college sports programs. More disturbingly, though, no one knows how many equally or even more reprehensible offenses against student-athletes and other students will go undetected or will not be fully revealed. If the rate of detection is anything like that for the use of performance enhancing drugs, for every offense that is successfully investigated, many more will go undetected.

The University of Maryland

While I never attended the University of Maryland it is my home town college for collegiate sports, especially basketball. I grew up and live nearby and spent more than a year at the beginning of my legal career as a lawyer for MaryPirg (Maryland Public Interest Research Group), a student-run organization on campus. For several years now, I have shared a season ticket to watch the men’s basketball team, which, until it moved to the Big Ten, seemed to be one of the cleanest in the nation under the watchful eyes of former head coach Gary Williams. There were no hints of recruiting violations during his reign, sometimes to the consternation of less principled and more result-oriented alumni.

The last national scandal at Maryland until now was the tragic death of Len Bias in 1986 from a cocaine overdose after the Boston Celtics had selected him as the number 2 player in that year’s draft. The fallout cost Maryland coaching icon Lefty Driesell his job—and seriously diminished his coaching reputation. When Williams retired and Coach Turgeon took over, the basketball and football programs became closely affiliated with Under Armour. Like Nike at Oregon, the apparel company has been committed to establishing winning athletic programs at Maryland. The owner of the company, headquartered in Baltimore, is a U of Maryland grad. Yet, despite the large influx of Under Armour dollars and the company’s recruiting “assistance,” Maryland has struggled to field a winning football team in the Big Ten and now appears to be slipping in basketball.

At the same time, allegations of corruption associated with both the football and basketball programs have suddenly emerged. This is similar to what happened at Vanderbilt University when it decided to make winning football games in the powerful Southeastern Conference an academic priority. At Maryland the shoes began to drop in 2018.

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 involve 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 is 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.

The second and far more disturbing shoe to drop came in May when Maryland freshman football player Jordan McNair died of heat stroke after collapsing during a football-related workout under the direct supervision of the training staff. By itself the death was tragic enough, but what would be revealed later about the program provided a microcosm of almost everything that is wrong with the NCAA’s monitoring and enforcement system, especially when super conference athletic programs with large corporate donors are involved.

For over two months nothing appeared to be going on in public. Behind the scenes the athletic department had hired a former college athletic trainer to conduct one of those so-called independent reviews of the incident, while the parents of the deceased football player had retained a well-known Baltimore law firm. Maryland’s athletic department appeared to be handling the incident itself, internally. Neither the NCAA nor President Loh issued any public statements, while the acting—and then later permanent—athletic director, Damon Evans, reportedly kept an extremely low profile.

All hell broke loose, however, when ESPN ran an article, the second week in August, entitled “The Inside Story of a Toxic Culture at Maryland Football.” According to the ESPN expose, which was based on “multiple people close to the football program,” the death of McNair was part of a brutal culture “of fear and intimidation” in which players were routinely subjected to physical, mental, and verbal abuse comparable to boot camp or extreme hazing, should they not excel in the program’s fitness training routines or were deemed no longer to deserve a scholarship. The person who was most responsible for this culture was identified as strength and conditioning coach Rick Court, who was “one of Durkin’s first hires at Maryland in 2015.” As reported in the Washington Post, when Durkin was made head coach, he promised to “be aggressive in everything we do… That’s what I know… I learned those values a long time ago.”

The ESPN expose, relying in part on information gathered by the Baltimore law firm representing McNair’s parents, provided an alleged timeline for McNair’s death. There was a strong suggestion of gross negligence as to the training staff’s treatment of the player once he “collapsed after running 110-yard sprints, showing signs of extreme exhaustion and difficulty standing upright.” McNair apparently had suffered “a seizure at about 5:00 p.m.” Reportedly, nearly an hour had passed before anyone called for emergency outside medical assistance. Maryland officials vehemently denied the validity of that timeline, initially.

Two days after ESPN published the devastating article, the University of Maryland suspended Coach Durkin. The athletic director said that Durkin’s indefinite leave of absence was taking place immediately, even though Evans had allowed the head coach to address the football team in a private meeting the day before officially announcing the suspension. Evans, after keeping silent until then, explained in a carefully crafted letter that he was “concerned by the allegations of unacceptable behaviors by members of our football staff detailed in recent media reports.”

While several people, including one of Maryland’s most prominent donors to the program, came to Durkin’s defense in the Washington Post, the best that his defenders could offer was what Morton Downey Jr. once described as pablum puking. “He’s… an outstanding husband and father. He treats people with respect… That’s not the DJ that I know.” Much more important was what Maryland Governor Hogan had to say and what it signaled to the university. “If the investigation confirms these reports, then strong and permanent corrective actions should be taken immediately.”

Barry Svrluga, the incandescent Washington Post columnist, did not need anything more damaging to be revealed. “This isn’t some murky NCAA violation or minor misstep. This is about basic human decency.” Still, “it took [the death of 19-year-old Jordan McNair] to expose the culture Durkin created with the Terrapins… as the worst version of college athletics.” Otherwise, under the NCAA’s and university’s watch, it probably would not have come to light.

For a brief moment thereafter, it seemed as if concerns about winning football games might save Durkin’s job. A number of parents and former players lined up to support the head coach, which was not that surprising given the fact that Durkin and his coaching staff consistently rewarded those players who excelled on the field and in the team’s over-the-top fitness rituals. Also, many fans and boosters were voicing concerns about how Durkin’s suspension would hamper recruiting.

Reportedly, though, most people closely associated with Maryland football appeared to be deeply disturbed by what was continuing to be revealed. The Washington Post, based on its review of the medical records, largely confirmed, and added more damning information to, the timeline of McNair’s death that ESPN had reported. Nearly an hour had elapsed before paramedics were called. By the time McNair arrived at the hospital about 90 minutes later at 6.36 p.m., he had a temperature of 106 degrees and a heart rate of 184. Although he was immediately immersed in ice cold water, which is the essential recommended treatment, McNair died because too much bodily damage had already occurred.

It was after this report that the primary media focus shifted to the university of Maryland training staff, especially Rick Court. A number of medical experts from around the country, who specialize in the treatment of heat stroke, opined for the media that if McNair had been immersed in ice cold water at the University of Maryland within 30 minutes of when he collapsed, there was nearly a one hundred percent chance he would have lived. According to the NCAA’s sports medicine handbook, “a delay in treatment can be fatal.” Thus, it is critical for first responders to “[c]ool first, transport second.”

Apparently this was more than enough for University of Maryland President Loh. Rick Court was forced to resign, but received a generous settlement package worth two-thirds of the compensation that remained on his lucrative contract. Loh also appointed an in-house commission to review the culture and practices of the football program under Durkin’s leadership. More consequentially, after many weeks of silence, Loh apologized to McNair’s family. He then stated that the “university accepts legal and moral responsibility for the mistakes that our training staff made on that fateful workout day.” Evans echoed those sentiments, but raised questions about who was responsible by emphasizing that he had not been appointed permanent athletic director until after McNair had died.

Similarly, Loh appeared to be deflecting criticism, placing all of the responsibility on the training staff who had just resigned. Public perceptions about Loh were further damaged a couple of days later when the Post reported that nearly nine months before McNair died, Loh had vetoed a plan to take health care decisions for athletes out of the control of the athletic department and place it in the hands of independent medical providers. This was a shift that even the NCAA had recommended, but did not mandate. While this reorganization would be a welcome change to make for all college athletic programs, it is unclear whether doing so would have altered the medical outcome in McNair’s tragic case.

By implication, the Board of Regents, which controls Maryland’s entire university system, decided not to give Loh their endorsement or support. At the urging of Maryland’s Governor, they assumed control of the investigations into both McNair’s death and the Maryland football culture. Whether this was a good development or not remains ambiguous.

On the one hand, the Board of Regents is organizationally, if not politically, independent from the University of Maryland. On the other hand, the college park campus has much more influence than any other school in the cluster. The vice-chair of the board and chair of its working group on intercollegiate athletics is Barry J. Gossett. He is one of Maryland football’s most prominent boosters, after whom the team’s athletic facility was named. Once Durkin was suspended, he urged fellow Maryland boosters and fans not to draw any negative conclusions. “That’s not the DJ I know that does things like that,” he opined. Whatever happens, though, it is unlikely to hamper the football program’s dedication to victories and revenues. It also will have little or no impact on other super conference schools.

Shortly after the Board of Regents took control of the investigation, more bad news emerged about Maryland’s football program. The university disseminated a statement acknowledging that former Athletic Director Kevin Anderson had used department funds to pay the legal defense of two football players accused of sexual misconduct in 2017. Maryland officials appeared to be breaking their silence about the matter because the Diamondback, the school newspaper, had run a story about what allegedly happened and, along with The Washington Post had submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the university about the details surrounding that incident.

Apparently, the athletic department under Anderson had been trying to counteract the internal investigation that the university’s Title IX office had been conducting about allegations against those players. In addition, according to the Post, a number of sources confirmed that Coach Durkin had been the individual, who had initially contacted the lawyer the athletic department hired to defend the players at the student disciplinary hearings, and thereafter. Reportedly, the defense cost $15,000.

Once again a major university with a super conference football program was providing support to football players accused of sexually abusing another student at the expense of the alleged victim. While it is an NCAA violation for a student-athlete to benefit from the sale of his likeness or name, there is no rule against players receiving compensation in the form of university paid legal assistance for crimes that they may have committed on campus, if it is to protect football, basketball, or other athletic programs.

Conclusion: The Irrelevant Rice Commission Recommendations

After reading about widespread physical, mental, academic, and sexual abuses that have been visited upon students-athletes at large public universities like Maryland, Michigan State, and North Carolina—as well as the neglect, deflections, and cover-ups by the NCAA, super conference athletic departments, conferences, and university presidents in failing to protect the health and safety of their athletes—one might think that the Rice Commission recommendations would address this gaping deficiency with hard hitting solutions. After all, NCAA President Mark Emmert promised, among other things, that the recommendations would “prioritize the interest of student-athletes over every other factor.” In addition, one might assume those recommendations would compel athletic departments to implement strong measures to try to prevent sexual assaults and violent acts committed by male student-athletes, by forcing the NCAA and its member universities to impose strict penalties when proper precautions and strict monitoring and enforcement are not carried out, and Title IX protocols are violated.

Not surprisingly, the NCAA and the Rice Commission continue to pussy foot around both of these seminal issues, which are at the heart of how intercollegiate athletics are mismanaged and the public interest is sacrificed in the process. With regard to enforcement, the beefed up methods for adjudication only pertain to cases in which there have been specified violations. The NCAA’s rules still do not address abuse or exploitation of student-athletes by athletic department or university personnel, or the sexual abuse of other students by athletes. Similarly, in terms of holding university presidents and athletic department officials more accountable, that too only applies to the reporting of specified rules violations.

Furthermore, the new policy and rules changes weakly address the widespread academic fraud issue by requiring that Division I schools pay the tuition, books, and fees for scholarship student-athletes, who return to that same school within 10 years to complete their degrees. That requirement, however, only applies to scholarship basketball players who attended the same school for at least two years. Furthermore, because the NCAA is establishing a separate fund to pay for those expenses, it is unclear whether Division I schools will be obligated to pay if the funds are insufficient to cover the need. As a legal matter, the NCAA cannot compel those schools to make such payments, unless they agree to do so.

The NCAA, in supposedly making student-athletes its number one concern, mandated improvements for basketball players only, thus ignoring athletes who play football, baseball, hockey, and other big time collegiate sports. What happens to those athletes when they retain agents in high school or college? Under the current rules they will continue to be screwed. In addition, the recommendations do not improve the inadequate health and disability coverage for student-athletes who are severely injured or permanently impaired.

What remains in place are many arcane rules that threaten the eligibility of student-athletes for petty or arbitrary reasons. This represents the opposite of what Emmert describes as “champion[ing] the success of student-athletes.” As Michael Powell recently observed in the New York Times, “[e]lite college sports is a car so broken it might be best to let a chop shop have it and sell it for parts.” Selling—or even giving away—super-conference sports would be a good place to start.

Two stories came to light in August, which underscore the NCAA’s hypocrisy in its pretending to prioritize student-athletes. The first involves super conference member, North Carolina. When that university perpetuated what is arguably the worst example of academic cheating and fraud in the history of collegiate sports, their officials argued—and the NCAA obediently accepted—that this was mainly an academic matter beyond the NCAA’s purview. In August, though, when 13 Tar Heel football players sold their Nike team shoes in violation of NCAA rules, they were all suspended, most of them for four games, one more than Coach Meyer.

North Carolina Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham, who led the effort to minimize any NCAA penalties for the school’s academic fraud scandal, intoned with a straight face: “[w]e are disappointed when we fall short.” Head Coach Larry Fedora also was “extremely disappointed in our players’ actions and how [they] reflect on the university and our department.” Yet, as Michael Powell reported, Fedora, in addition to his $1.8 million salary, is paid by Nike to have his team display the very same shoes his players sold.

In many ways, the second story, as reported in the Washington Post, is even more disturbing. C.J. Harris was an outstanding football player on one of the top high school teams in Georgia, who excelled as both a safety and a running back. He had measurables that college coaches normally adore: size, speed, and versatility. In his sophomore year, however, he began having multiple seizures, but the normal anticonvulvive medication, even in high dosages, was unsuccessful in controlling his condition.

Thus, his football aspirations were put on hold and appeared to be very dim. In January 2017—his junior year—at his doctor’s direction, he started taking legally prescribed cannabis oil through a syringe in his mouth every six hours. This appeared to be a miracle cure. He had no seizures thereafter and was allowed to resume football, where he proved to be an exemplary athlete.

Despite his exceptional football accomplishments, colleges that give scholarships would not recruit Harris. The best offer he received was from Auburn to be a preferred walk-on, who could play his way into a scholarship. Later, that deal was abruptly rescinded. While no college confirmed why his prospects were being marginalized so dramatically, in retrospect it appears to be due to the NCAA’s rule prohibiting athletes from using cannabis for any reason, even with a proper prescription under a physician’s care.

Cannibis contains THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, which the NCAA classifies as an “illicit drug.” There are no medical exemptions given under the NCAA’s student-athlete friendly drug rules for this medication. The only possibility that the NCAA would approve its usage is if the THC level registered “15ng/ml and below,” which is an extremely low threshold.

Nevertheless, Harris had his family doctor test him. The reported results found no trace elements of THC in his body. Unfortunately, the NCAA rejected the test out of hand because it had not been performed by one of the only two World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratories in the U.S., located in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, respectively. WADA now has a monopoly on NCAA drug testing and its two sites are a long way from Georgia. Curtis has enrolled at a private preparatory high school hoping the NCAA’s commitment to champion student-athletes is something more than just sports propaganda.

COLLEGE SPORTS MADNESS THE NCAA AND FBI WON’T FIX©
By John Weston Parry

For many millions of Americans March Madness is the most entertaining sports extravaganza of all. It matches the best, as well as many good, college basketball teams from around the country for nearly three weeks of high pressure games, upsets, gambling—both real and virtual—and a great deal of fun for its fans. Unfortunately, the college basketball championship playoffs have become a symbol for and a diversion from much of what is wrong with major Division I sports programs. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) academic depravity has few boundaries, but no one seems to be motivated enough to hold the recidivist institutional offenders accountable.

NCAA-facilitated abuses will not be fixed by an FBI investigation, even if it leads to the prosecution of a few agents and assistant coaches, most of whom—as Kevin Blackistone has pointed out—are African-Americans who report to mostly white head coaches. Already the NCAA is trying to minimize any lasting fallout by employing the time-honored strategy of establishing a committee with a well-respected figure—Condeleezza Rice—to devise and present self-serving recommendations that may or may not be implemented. Making matters worse, this in-house committee is only authorized to consider a small portion of the overall problems that the NCAA’s self-serving organizational structure perpetuates.

The National Football League (NFL) also employed an in-house committee to obscure and cover-up evidence of concussions and brain damage to its players. Major League Baseball did the same thing in dealing with performance-enhancing drugs, as did USA Gymnastics after allowing so many female Olympic athletes to be sexually abused. The only way to effectively address these widespread spectator sports pathologies is to prevent them in the first place by creating an independent, federally-sanctioned monitoring and enforcement authority. Athletes doping with toxic substances is just one of many out-of-control spectator sports abuses.

The NCAA is among the very worst sports enterprises, part of an elite class which includes the NFL, USOC, IOC, and FIFA. The NCAA has been dysfunctional, incompetent, and corrupt for decades, well-before the Penn State travesty was finally revealed. Following that debacle, the NCAA assured the public and politicians that its membership organization had those institutional abuses under control.

Since then the array of transgressions have expanded and grown more pernicious as the money available to those who commit, obscure, or cover-up these crimes and other bad behaviors without being caught continues to expand. The NCAA is unable, due to its dysfunctional organizational structure and lack of institutional control, to protect student-athletes, academic values, or the public. What is important to understand is that these abuses and crimes in collegiate athletics are far worse and much more widespread than the basketball examples that have finally garnered the FBI’s attention might suggest.

In the past ten years, four of the worse scandals in NCAA history have been revealed, each of which rivals Penn State. In addition, there have been dozens of other instances of serious abuses and lack of institutional control implicating football and other sports at schools such as Notre Dame, University of Southern California, Oklahoma State, Ohio State, Auburn, Vanderbilt, and even smaller academic institutions like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and New York State University at Binghamton. Furthermore, many more serious transgressions are never exposed.

The four worst scandals encompass a variety of venal offenses: sexual assaults, widespread academic cheating, and other transgressions by Florida State University (FSU) football players; nearly twenty years of institutionalized academic cheating and fraud involving—and perpetuated against—student-athletes at the University of North Carolina (UNC); the sexual abuse of dozens of collegiate gymnasts and other athletes at Michigan State University (MSU); and payoffs and bribes involving high profile collegiate basketball players at major programs throughout the United States. In all of these tragedies, coaches, university administrators, and the NCAA have tried to obscure, deflect, and cover-up the seriousness of the offenses, much like the Penn State travesty, or the NFL with concussions.

The scope and egregiousness of these many offenses are staggering. They demonstrate a consistent pattern of student-athlete abuse, neglect, and exploitation, as well as a reckless and often deliberate lack of institutional control from the top down. The NCAA allowed these transgressions to occur; then worked hard to deflect and marginalize their seriousness. This is because the NCAA’s prime monitoring and enforcement directive is to minimize the financial and public relations damage to the offending universities, colleges, and major conferences that control the NCAA’s decision-making process.

How the NCAA has responded to these scandals should not be surprising. Its infractions officials try to engage as little as possible by letting the offending institutions mostly monitor and punish themselves. The NCAA only acts when corporate and fan condemnation appear to be seriously jeopardizing the athletic revenue streams.

Florida State: Academic Cheating and Sexual Assaults

The FSU fiasco had two divergent elements: academic fraud and Title IX violations due to alleged sexual assaults committed by many of its football players. These separate, but interrelated, scandals involved many different athletes and two venerated head coaches over at least a five-year span. The impotence of the NCAA in both situations is appalling.

The 2007 academic cheating case, which involved major NCAA violations, implicated 61 athletes, many of whom were football players. It took nearly two more years to issue the slightest of penalties. FSU lost only one football scholarship for two years and the team was placed on four years probation—which is not really a penalty at all, especially given the NCAA’s lack of oversight. In addition, Head Coach Bobby Bowden had 12 of his victories vacated leaving him with only 377, but none of them were championships. Furthermore, Bowden was allowed to continue to coach at FSU, but was asked by FSU to retire—with lavish benefits—at the end of the next football season for a different reason: his teams’ national and conference rankings had failed to meet expectations for a number of years.

This allowed Jumbo Fisher to take over the program and guide it to the National Championship in 2013. During Fisher’s tenure, which lasted until 2017, a number of football players—including most prominently, Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston—were charged with or accused of committing sexual assaults. This became a mega-scandal, which not only involved the football team, but university officials, who had failed to comply with Title IX—as well as local law enforcement in Tallahassee, who gave FSU athletes the benefit of every doubt.

The FSU employee, who was in charge of counseling rape victims, admitted in a deposition that football players, who were accused of sexual assaults, received special treatment. Not surprisingly, most of the 20 victims who initially made such allegations decided not to pursue student misconduct charges against the football players. In Winston’s case, the university did not even bother respond to respond when his alleged victim alleged that Winston had raped her. Coach Fisher stonewalled by arguing he was unaware of any FSU policy that required him to report sexual assault allegations to FSU officials, other than to his athletic director. He also took no disciplinary actions against Winston and insisted instead that the media was biased in covering the rape allegations.

Eventually the federal government launched a Title IX investigation into how FSU had mishandled these sexual assault allegations. In the meantime, the university decided to pay Winston’s accuser $950,000 in a settlement agreement without admitting any wrongdoing. FSU’s President offered no apologies, insisting that the university was the real victim. Throughout this sordid affair, the NCAA said and did almost nothing.

North Carolina: Two Decades of Academic Cheating and Fraud

According to the New York Times, massive academic fraud transgressions had been centered in the UNC’s African and Afro-American Studies Department, which “presided over … `a shadow curriculum’ designed to help struggling students – many of them athletes – stay afloat.” Audits revealed that there were “problems with dozens of courses and …as many as 560 unauthorized grade changes were suspected of having been made… dating back to 1997.” In 2012 a university reading specialist, Marie Willingham, went public contending that many of the athletes she had worked with over the years were unable to “read at anything close to college level.” Willingham admitted that she and other academic counselors had advised athletes to take these fraudulent classes.

UNC’s response was underwhelming and disturbing. Officials simply promised to direct staff to monitor courses to ensure that they existed and would meet as scheduled. Initially no university officials or head coaches were held accountable. Instead, UNC focused its wrath on Willingham for blowing the whistle on the widespread academic fraud. She not only lost her part-time university position, but she was fired from her job as a grade school teacher. Eventually Willingham obtained a $335,000 settlement from UNC, but as part of that agreement the university did not have to admit to any wrongdoing.

UNC officials continued to issue unconvincing denials. The provost sanctimoniously pretended that “there had been no way to anticipate such behavior … in an institution that relies on the professionalism and basic good will of its employees.” Borrowing from the FSU playbook, the provost added that universities were the real victims of these transgressions because they could no “longer operate on trust.”

Some years later the NCAA finally charged North Carolina with institutional negligence (lack of control) in allowing these academic violations to occur. What concerned the NCAA investigators, though, was not the fraud or the educational damage to the athletes involved, but rather the strong possibility that those athletes violated the rules on amateurism by receiving special benefits. The first two notices did not even mention the many violations connected to the vaunted basketball program, which was alarming. It seemed as if the NCAA intended for the powerful basketball program to escape any serious sanctions, despite its obvious involvement in the scandal, including the documented role of a key academic counselor that Roy Williams had brought with him from the University of Kansas.

It was not until the third notice of allegations that the basketball program became the center of attention. That notice focused almost exclusively on Roy Williams’ program, placing his basketball legacy in jeopardy. If the NCAA concluded that players on Williams’ 2005 and 2009 championship teams received extra benefits, those championships could be voided. University of Maryland president, Wallace Loh—whose school had left the ACC acrimoniously a couple of years before—opined that UNC basketball deserved the so-called “death penalty” that in 1986 had effectively destroyed Southern Methodist University’s football program.

Neither Coach Williams nor other UNC officials disputed the NCAA’s allegations. Instead, athletic director Bubba Cunningham contended that the charges against the basketball program should be withdrawn because adding these new allegations violated NCAA bylaws. That legal ploy suggested the university understood that if it were to prevail, it would be best not to argue about the truthfulness of the allegations against them. As it turned out, none of this really mattered to the NCAA.

Although the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions found that what had happened at North Carolina was “troubling,” it issued a convoluted ruling about sanctions that defied explanation. The Committee’s chair, Southeastern Conference Commissioner, Greg Sankey, explained that under its bylaws the “NCAA defers to member schools to determine whether academic fraud occurred…” Here they said such fraud could only exist if North Carolina athletes received a benefit that other students did not receive. Since the academic fraud encompassed non-athletes as well, there could be no violation of any NCAA rules.

Michigan State University and the Sexual Abuse of Female Gymnasts

The most blatant ongoing saga of wanton neglect of elite athletes occurred in the United States, not Russia. It involved hundreds of young female gymnasts being sexually abused over the past twenty years. Largely obscured by the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal was the moral turpitude of MSU under the deliberately clueless oversight of the NCAA. Well-over one hundred female college athletes were victims of sexual abuse by the university’s team doctor, the now infamous Larry Nassar. MSU and the NCAA failed to protect those female gymnasts, even after university officials knew—or should have known—that these young athletes were in jeopardy.

MSU officials appear to have intentionally built walls of silence to provide them with plausible deniability. MSU’s gymnastics coach sang the praises of team doctor, Larry Nassar, even after members of her own team complained that he had sexually abused them. What happened to these gymnasts, who were supposed to be under the protective oversight of MSU and the NCAA, when combined with the concerted efforts of key university officials to cover up those abuses, was as disturbing as the tragic circumstances that engulfed young boys at Penn State.

This tragedy demonstrates, once again, that from top to bottom both the NCAA lacks the oversight capacity and resolve to protect collegiate athletes or to prevent bad behaviors, crimes, and corruption. There is very little meaningful scrutiny and accountability for alleged transgressions in collegiate sports, except when the infractions threaten revenues.

Much like the Penn State scandal, Doctor Nassar’s widespread sexual offenses appear to have begun in the late 1990’s. His transgressions were committed against Olympic athletes, but mostly members of MSU’s gymnastics team. The collegiate athletes were neglected in large part because the NCAA is organizationally incapable or unwilling to protect the health and welfare of its athletes. (See also, Chapter 23, “The NCAA Provides Shamefully Inadequate Health Care for Its Student Athletes,” in The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame (Rowman & Littlefield, June 2017).

According to the Washington Post, despite two criminal investigations in 2004 and 2014 into Nassar’s predatory treatment methods for female athletes, a MSU student’s Title IX sexual abuse charge against him in 2014, and his being fired by USA Gymnastics in 2015, university officials continued to retain Nassar as their team doctor until September 2016. That was just two months before he was arrested. Reportedly, university officials let him continue to treat female student-athletes, but only while wearing gloves and without using the specific therapy that had motivated a student to file the Title IX claim against him.

In addition, MSU’s gymnastics coach, who later resigned, held a secret meeting with her team in order to defend Nassar. Only after the team doctor was formally indicted did the university promise to conduct an internal review of how it had handled complaints against—and suspicions about—Nassar. Moreover, until the state’s attorney general demanded the results of that investigation and report, MSU officials had planned to keep their findings secret.

Making matters worse, in light of the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, the NCAA had never instituted any protective measures. As Jumbo Fisher’s testimony indicated during the FSU scandal, there were—and continue to be—no guidelines in place, which instruct college athletic departments what they should do when sexual abuse allegations involving their athletes or employees arise. Nor are there any NCAA sanctions that can be imposed against college coaches and other officials who fail to report such abuses.

In the wake of MSU’s obstructionist behaviors, the bad optics of former and current MSU female gymnasts confronting Larry Nassar day after day at his nationally-televised trial, and an the state’s attorney general’s investigation of the university, MSU’s president and athletic director resigned. The evening before the second resignation, long after all the damage had been done, the university received a letter from the NCAA announcing it was going to conduct a now superfluous, self-serving investigation into how MSU had mishandled student-athletes’ allegations against—and alarming reports—about Nassar

Bribery, Payoffs, and Sexual Favors in Big Time College Basketball

The latest college basketball scandal appears to have begun in 2013 with a tantalizing, high profile expose about members of Louisville University’s basketball team—coached by the legendary, Rick Patino—receiving sexual favors from escort services while they were being recruited. This expose eventually mushroomed into numerous FBI wiretaps and investigations involving corruption in major college basketball programs. The NCAA acted as a facilitator of the scandal, rather than a bulwark against serious violations.

The first domino to fall occurred in June 2017 when the NCAA suspended Patino for five games at the start of the upcoming season. It also placed the basketball program on probation, while a final rendering of Louisville’s punishment could be made. The Committee on Infractions found that Patino had provided insufficient oversight of his program, including staff coaches who had been involved in obtaining the escorts for these recruits. The Committee recommended harsh penalties, including forfeiture of the team’s 2013 national title. Louisville officials objected vociferously, expecting—as has happened so many times before with other big time programs—to avoid the harshest recommended penalties.

Although still under fire, Patino opened the season as Louisville’s head coach and still an active member of the college basketball hall of fame. In late September, though, perceptions about college basketball changed dramatically, as did expectations about leniency from fellow NCAA members who ultimately dispense the penalties. The FBI announced that, based on an investigation initiated towards the end of 2014, it had documented numerous instances of bribery involving the recruitment of elite high school basketball players.

Allegedly sports agents and financial advisors, as well as sports apparel companies and their executives, had made payoffs and provided other improper benefits. These bribes went to elite players, their parents, coaches, and other trusted authority figures in those players’ lives. The intent was to convince these prized athletes to commit to signing with designated colleges, agents, apparel companies, and/or financial advisors.

One of the most damning accusations that federal prosecutors made in connection with the FBI probe was that two unnamed Louisville coaches had received substantial sums of money from Adidas, which was the team’s apparel partner. Those two school employees had allegedly used the payments as bribes to convince two elite high school prospects to sign with Louisville. That revelation was made only a few months after the NCAA had first sanctioned Patino and Louisville in the sexual favors scandal. The university immediately suspended Patino; then fired him a few weeks later.

Most coaches, and other individuals closely associated with big time college basketball, have been aware that these types of recruiting offenses have been going on for many years. Gary Williams the University of Maryland’s former head coach and hall of fame member, publicly complained about such corruption back in 2009. He recently confessed that he was disappointed in himself for not being “vocal enough” in speaking out against such practices.

The NCAA’s self-serving solution to these well-publicized problems was to have states—with the help of the American Bar Association—enact laws to prohibit even licensed agents from representing high school and college athletes. That only made things worse because all the financial transactions occurred under-the-table without the athletes having the benefit of professional advice. The NCAA was far more concerned with preserving its archaic rules on amateurism than supporting and protecting elite athletes who make most of the ever-accelerating college basketball revenues possible. As a New York Times editorial explained,

College basketball has long made much of its money by
sleazy recruitment and exploitation of teenage stars…
   [P]rosecutors are now treating these shady dealings as what
   they are: corruption, not rules violations….[C]riminal
   complaints were rare in an area too often relegated to
   self-policing by universities and the NCAA.

Conclusion

In light of all the recent bad publicity and a national survey indicating nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that universities and colleges with major athletic programs value money over the welfare of student-athletes, in October 2017 Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s President, tried to contain the damage with a narrowly focused initiative. He announced the creation of the aforementioned NCAA’s Condolezza Rice led commission, which would be tasked with recommending changes to college basketball.

Unfortunately, Emmert disingenuously implied that the NCAA would abide by these recommendations. What he failed to reveal, however, was that whatever is recommended—much like recommendations from the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions—will be reviewed and likely modified to suit the preferences of the five super conference members, plus Notre Dame. They, through their NCAA representatives, retain the final decision-making authority.

Certain relatively minor issues might well be embraced. The major issues confronting the NCAA, its members, student athletes, and the public, however, are likely to be ignored, obscured, or marginalized. The final NCAA-approved changes will not result in:

student-athletes receiving benefits any where close to what their services are worth;
licensed agents being allowed to represent high school or college athletes;
the stranglehold the super conferences and Notre Dame have over the NCAA being substantially diminished; or, most importantly,
a new federally-authorized body—building upon the Knight Commission—being organized and funded to replace the NCAA.

As things stand now, little of substance will change for the better. Instead—much like with the NFL’s brain trauma research committees—the NCAA will buy itself precious time. In the interim, the public furor will subside as fans refocus their sports madness on baseball, the Masters, the NBA and NHL playoffs, the NFL draft, and other sporting events—at least until the next NCAA-facilitated mega-scandal arises.

THE NFL’S UNDERLYING PROBLEMS HAVE BEEN IGNORED FOR SO LONG SOME APPEAR TO BE BEYOND SALVATION©
John Weston Parry

Even a few owners are beginning to realize that, despite skyrocketing revenues and its apparent preeminent popularity, the National Football League (NFL) is a business in trouble, hemorrhaging in several different places at once. Some even participated in symbolic gestures during the National Anthem to show solidarity against President Trump’s attack on the league. Also, rather than continuing to reflexively reward Commissioner Roger Goodell for making them extremely wealthy, the league’s compensation committee reportedly paused to actually consider dissenting opinions, notably from Jerry Jones the owner of the NFL’s most valuable franchise. Yet, even Jones’ self-serving concern that Goodell mishandled the suspension of Cowboy’s emerging superstar running back, Ezekiel Elliott, pales in comparison to the totality of problems that the NFL now faces. They include:

the league’s failure to deal fairly, justly, and wisely with player personal conduct issues, culminating in the Elliot mess.
a heated political controversy pitting team owners and mostly white fans against NFL players—mostly African-Americans—who have engaged in mild symbolic protests during the playing of the national anthem to highlight racial injustice and inequality in the black community;
an re-emerging realization that tackle football’s inherent dangerousness makes it a sport that children should be discouraged from playing; and
growing fan resistance to paying exorbitant fees to watch professional football games in person or on television.

Unfortunately for the NFL, it already may be too late for it to respond effectively to these cascading issues. Attitudes about football have changed in ways that inevitably will devalue the game in the eyes of the public. The primary beneficiaries of the professional game’s skyrocketing bounties—the owners—have done a very poor job in protecting its future, preferring instead to maximize their short-term gains. As George Will opines so delicately, football “will never again be, as it was until recently, the subject of uncomplicated national enthusiasm.”

Ezekiel Elliot and the NFL’s Personal Conduct SNAFU

The NFL’s personal conduct enforcement system desperately needs to be scrapped. It is not only out of step with any semblance of what is supposed to constitute due process, but with the arbitration procedures used by every other major American professional team sport. The Commissioner’s decisions, beginning even before the Ray Rice scandal, have produced inconsistent, ambiguous, unfair, and arbitrary. The Tom Brady “Deflategate” fiasco that dragged for many months documented the Commissioner’s due process incompetence. It appears, however, that the Ezekiel Elliott affair may compel the owners to overhaul their personal conduct apparatus a second time. If Roger Goodell were not so adept at generating money and wealth for owners at the expense of the fans and public, he would no longer be the Commissioner.

The latest NFL personal conduct debacle has focused on Ezekiel Elliott. Goodell suspended him for six games based on a league investigation, which purportedly concluded Elliott had repeatedly physically abused his former girlfriend. The league had been trying—with limited success—to appear to be more sensitive in its handling of alleged player violence against women. Both the Commissioner and the league were widely criticized—and even condemned—for their leniency towards Ray Rice. The former Baltimore Ravens running back was given a two-game suspension, initially, even though he was seen afterwardsr in a much publicized video punching his wife in the face and apparently knocking her unconscious. According to the Washington Post, in response to that damning publicity the NFL “bolstered its security staff, said it would launch its own investigations of reports of abuse by NFL players, and deliver punishments that hold abusers accountable regardless of how the criminal justice system handles a case.”

Thus, it should not have been much of a surprise when Commissioner Goodell imposed a relatively harsh punishment on Elliott, notwithstanding the fact that law enforcement had found the evidence against him to be insufficient to launch a prosecution. It turned out later that the league’s investigator also had recommended not suspending Elliott because in her mind the evidence was equivocal. Her supervisor, however, a league executive, who is a former prosecutor, squashed that recommendation. Apparently neither Goodell nor the committee advising him had been informed about the investigator’s misgivings. According to the New York Times, the league took the official position that the investigator had found “`substantial and persuasive evidence …that [Elliott had] engaged in physical violence against [his former girlfriend] on multiple occasions during the week of July 16, 2016.”

One of the major problems with any administrative investigation of criminal-like behaviors is that neither defense attorneys nor prosecutors have a legal obligation or much incentive to share non-public information with private investigators, even the NFL. Thus, no matter how thorough and even-handed private investigators may try to be, they often are going to be missing relevant evidence. That is what happened in Elliott’s case. In addition, while they may be characterized as being independent, NFL investigators are paid by the league and report to the aforementioned former prosecutor, who apparently may choose to ignore or massage the investigators’ recommendations.

Once the federal courts became directly involved in the case based on an appeal by the players union, substantial defects in the league’s decision-making process became part of the public record. Not only had the league office ignored its own investigator’s recommendation, but reportedly Elliott’s lawyers had been denied an opportunity to compel the former girlfriend to testify at the arbitration hearing, which had been convened to review the Commissioner’s ruling. Based on preliminary evidence submitted by both sides, a lower federal court found there was a substantial probability that Elliott would ultimately prevail in the litigation to issue a preliminary injunction against the NFL. Unless it is revoked, that judicial directive prevents Elliott’s suspension from being enforced until a final court ruling is made.

The NFL has decided to appeal that preliminary injunction. Whatever happens, though, the league’s image has taken another hit. As Sally Jenkins wrote in the Washington Post, it is nm/“time for the NFL owners to rethink the powers of the commissioner… Roger Goodell 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…[because] it works better for all.” The NFL and its players continue to be stuck with the self-serving and quixotic impressions of a public relations-oriented chief executive, who has no formal legal training.

Freedom of Expression for African-American NFL Players Receives a Chilly Reception

Ever since Tommie Smith and John Carlos solemnly bowed their heads and saluted with black fists as the Star Spangled Banner was being played in recognition of their having won gold and bronze medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the image of black athletes engaging in symbolic political protest has been a flash point for controversy. Those symbolic actions of yesteryear were quite tempered compared to what many black activists, especially Professor Harry Edwards, had urged the African-American Olympic athletes to engage in, which included a boycott of the Games. Nonetheless, over the years, using the National Anthem as a vehicle for protest has proven to be particularly provocative and threatening to the professional and collegiate sports establishments.

No major sporting event can begin without playing the Star Spangled Banner. Standing respectfully at attention is no longer a sufficient tribute to the country or our soldiers. “True Americans”—most of whom tend to be white at sporting events—are expected to place their hands over their hearts. Furthermore, no major American sport, either in 1968 or now, has been more closely aligned to the political status quo and the importance of protecting the perception of America’s greatness, than football. The strength of that alliance certainly has not waned now that a life-long, avid professional football fan is in the White House, although the league's tolerance with the President's rants against the NFL and its players have reached the boiling point.

It is in this political context that Colin Kapernick taking a knee during the National Anthem should be considered. Unfortunately, Kapernick’s protest against the disproportionate percentage of incidents of police excessive force and deadly brutality involving African-Americans has been inflamed by the violence in Charlottesville and our President’s racially insensitive comments, thereafter. These events prompted ESPN personality, Jemele Hill, who is African-American, to call President Trump a white supremacist. This label would have been more appropriate for the President’s father and perhaps a few people in his administration, but seemed to be excessive—or at least premature—in characterizing Trump himself. The President’s press secretary initiated a possibly illegal campaign, joined by her boss, to have Hill fired for expressing her opinion on social media.

So far Hill, who was reprimanded and apologized for placing her employer in a difficult position, has not been suspended much less terminated, from her highly visible job at ESPN. In large part this is because in her situation she like any employee enjoys certain First Amendment protections that Kapernick does not. Currently Kapernick no longer is an employee of the NFL or any of its teams. He deliberately let his contract with the 49ers lapse in hopes of securing a better deal elsewhere. Thus, he can only hope that fans and the sports media will pressure the league enough that the owners will choose to facilitate a situation that will allow him to play again. It would be the right thing to do.

Kapernick has taken the first step towards reconciliation by indicating that he will not kneel during the National Anthem if he is hired by another team. In the interim, though, some other players around the league are engaging in similar low-key National Anthem protests. Their numbers now include several white players who feel that Kapernick is being unfairly blackballed because of his protest and political views.

The NFL and a number of its supporters, though, continue to pretend that Kapernick is not being blackballed, at least not in the sense that there is an active conspiracy to deprive him of future employment. They contend instead that Kapernick is not playing because he is washed up as a quarterback, which is preposterous given his demonstrated quarterbacking skills. While his play may have declined since his Super Bowl run in 2012-2013, last year Kapernick proved himself to be a better than average starting NFL quarterback. He started 12 games for the 49ers, threw 16 touchdowns, had only 4 interceptions, and his quarterback rating of 90 was higher than most starters, including two-time New York Giants Super Bowl winning quarterback Eli Manning.

While there is no public evidence of an organized conspiracy against Kapernick, individual owners, who desperately need quarterback help, are choosing not to retain his services, even as a back-up. To paraphrase one ESPN radio personality, owners have the right to make such decisions on behalf of their teams, which this person believes justifies the owners’ actions. Yet, in choosing to exercise their prerogatives against Kapernick, the owners may be harming the league in the long run by making an issue of their perceived racial insensitivity.

Most of the owners appear to strongly disagree with the nature and substance of Kapernick’s protest, which of course is their right. Many of them also believe, or profess to believe, that some fans will refuse to support the NFL if it appears that the league is not condemning these types of protests forcefully enough. It has been reported that an unknown number of fans have deserted the NFL already because protests involving the National Anthem are viewed as being un-American, more so than black citizens being brutalized and even killed by the police. For those unhappy fans Kapernick’s continued unemployment demonstrates the owners’ resolve. Even if a few owners like Steve Biscotti of the Baltimore Ravens may sympathize with Kapernick, they do not want to offend their fellow owners, who seem to overwhelmingly support the police and President Trump over activists protesting against racial injustice and racial inequality.

In the short-run, it is likely the NFL will simply shrug-off any concerns about the appropriateness of the owners chilling or obstructing the rights of its players to engage in various forms of political expression. Thus, it seems premature to embrace the well-articulated opinion put forth by ESPN The Magazine’s, Howard Bryant, that there is “a galvanized player movement [which] is finally standing up to the power of the league.” What should worry NFL owners and executives, though, are the long-term consequences of their doing political battle with their mostly African-American players. If, as trends suggest, football increasingly will become a game played and supported by African-Americans, then the NFL is insulting and marginalizing the very population it will need to enlist going forward.

Recognition of that possibility may have played a small role in the league deciding to support players and coaches joining together with a few owners during the National Anthem to symbolically protest President Trump's insistence that protesting players be punished, while penalties should no longer be meted out for violent hits. More likely, though, the implicit imprimatur of the league for these protests was due to the fact that the President of the United States was attacking the NFL, which could prove harmful to the players and the owners alike. In response, Marc Thiessen, who is affiliated with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, is proposing that Republicans in Congress take a closer look at "some of the federal benefits the NFL enjoys," undoubtedly with a view towards encouraging the owners to quickly restore the traditional alliance between football and the political status quo.

Tackle Football Is Especially Dangerous for Children

In The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame (Rowman & Littlefield, June 2017), I explain why “children playing football is the NFL’s Achilles heel.” It is because:

[p]laying tackle football is not a safe activity for children or even older adolescents, and the prospects for making it so are discouraging... [T]hose dangers have become apparent and undeniable. Thus, the burden should be on those who want kids to play tackle football to show that the risks are manageable and worth taking. In the meantime, children—including older adolescents—should be strongly discouraged from taking those risks.

If this happens, the NFL is in big trouble. So far, however, the movement to protect children from the ravages of football continues to meet substantial resistance. Even though 76% of sports fans in a Washington Post-UMass-Lowell survey acknowledged that “head injuries causing long-term health problems for [NFL] players” was a “major problem,” most of the adults surveyed, including 66% of sports fans, still believe “tackle football is safe for high schoolers.” Incredibly, over 40%, including 48% of sports fans, cling to the reckless notion that it is safe for children to begin playing tackle football before age 14.

The seeming disconnect between fans understanding the health dangers of football to professional players, but discounting those dangers when children are involved is disturbing. As with the obvious health risks of tobacco that were ignored for so long, cognitive dissonance and misleading public relations campaigns—in this case by the NFL—account for a great deal of the disparity between medical and scientific evidence and these well-ingrained beliefs. In most high schools football continues to play an important—and sometimes dominant—role in the social activities of students and parents alike. The harsh reality, though, is that tackle football is dangerous. While safety measures can be improved somewhat, it is unlikely that without changing the nature of the game, those improvement will ever make football reasonably safe from a public health perspective.

According to recent studies, a vast majority of former professional and college football players, 99% and 91% respectively, whose brains were examined, have shown alarming signs of brain damage in the form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Even though these findings were based on brains that, for the most part, were submitted for study because the deceased players involved had shown symptoms of brain damage and cognitive impairments, the results are still extraordinary. Both neuro-scientists and the federal courts have concluded that the available evidence indicates, overwhelmingly, that CTE should be viewed as a common condition amongst former professional and college players.

What should be especially alarming to parents, who allow their children to play tackle football, though, are several additional considerations. To begin with, Stanford University researchers recently confirmed what many neuro-scientists suspected: it is not only concussions that impair football players’ brains. Repeated sub-concussive impacts that occur dozens of times, both in games and practice sessions, can be as devastating as repeated concussions over a lifetime. These are the types of brain traumas that were once cavalierly dismissed as being “dings” or recklessly marginalized as having one’s “bell rung.”

Second, at all levels of football, athletes are getting bigger, stronger, and faster, which means each of these collisions generates more force and impact on the brains of the players being hit, and those doing the hitting. The frequent scientific comparison, even for kids, is that each of these collisions, which may occur dozens of times in a game or in extended practice session is like driving a car into a cement wall at 30 miles an hour.

Finally, and most importantly, children’s brains and skulls do not fully develop until they are adults. This makes them especially vulnerable to being injured by concussions and sub-concussive impacts. Their brains rattle around inside their skulls, rather than being cushioned by a tighter fit. Each time young players absorb blows to their heads or bodies, the harm to their brains is much greater than it would be for an adult. Furthermore, because children can absorb more punishment without displaying symptoms of brain damage, their injuries tend to be more readily missed or ignored.

A recent Boston University study published in the medical journal Translational Psychiatry found that the risk of mental impairments and behavioral issues “later in life” tripled for former players who had begun playing football before age of 12. The study included over two hundred former athletes most of whom played football in the NFL or through college. While the study could not conclusively identify what caused these cognitive and behavioral problems to manifest themselves when the players because older adults or at what age, if any, it is reasonably safe to begin playing football, it is one more important piece of evidence supporting the view that playing tackle football as a child is dangerous.

Hopefully, sooner rather than later, educators, health professionals, and parents are going to become more concerned about the greatly elevated health risks that football presents to the children they are supposed to protect. When that happens, more and more youngsters are likely to be encouraged, if not directed, to play other less risky sports. Certain prohibitions may be put in place, while allowing children even to play tackle football may create legal liability.
These trends strongly suggest that the number of skilled professional football prospects will continue to decrease, as will the overall quality of play. When that happens, professional football, as we know it, will no longer be a mainstream sport. It will become a spectacle like boxing, cage fighting, or professional wrestling.

Declining Interest in Football

Despite their much-publicized recent problems—which have followed an the heels of the NFL’s disgraceful cover-up of brain injuries, repeatedly coercing communities to pay them huge public subsidies, and moving a team into Las Vegas, the sports gambling center of the Western World—surveys indicate that professional football remains the most popular American spectator sport. According to the aforementioned Washington Post-UMass Lowell poll, 60 percent of the respondents consider themselves to be professional football fans. Thirty-seven percent list professional football as their favorite sport, which places it at the top of those fan rankings.

At the same time, this poll is very misleading because it only measures the breadth of professional football’s popularity. The depth of that appeal appears to be far more shallow and fleeting, if the main factor to be considered is a continued willingness of fans to spend substantial sums of money to watch football either in person or on television. Increasingly younger generations of spectators are turning elsewhere for their entertainment and leisure activities. Last year the television ratings for regular season NFL games declined by nearly 10%.

The percentage of people under 50—particularly adolescent boys and young men, who in the past could be counted on to be among the most avid professional and college football spectators—is steadily shrinking. This appears to be a result of several different phenomena most notably:

an endless stream of video and audio alternatives that can be conjured up on multiple electronic devices, instantaneously;
a widespread desire to try to obtain many, if not all, of these competing video and audio gratifications for free, or at least for much less money than in the past;
the decreased and divided attention spans of younger people for any activity, including watching sports, due to multi-tasking; and
quality of the competition is being diluted, while rule changes are significantly reducing the number of crowd-pleasing violent hits and collisions.

Younger professional football fans seem to want a product that is not only portable for viewing in almost any location or venue, but is cheap, if not free, and can be consumed in incomplete, but vital chunks, while doing at least one other activity. Experiments by the NFL involving the streaming of games with the naïve hope that this will lead to new and substantial revenue streams is a fool’s errand. Ultimately it will lead to a reduction in overall revenues and create fans who just want to keep up with the score or watch when there are key plays or nothing else to do.

The expectation of continuing to make non-playoff football games and other live sports competitions “must see” or “appointment” TV has passed, along with its most effective proponent, Don Ohlmeyer. One of the more reliable ways to attract sports fans to professional football has been by celebrating how dangerous and violent it is compared to other mainstream sports. Today, crass celebrations of such risk-taking have been transformed by lawsuits and public opinion, which have made it imperative that NFL teams and the league appear to be doing much more to protect their players from these unnecessary and reckless dangers.

In the process of trying to make the game seem less destructive to the health of the athletes involved, the quality of competition—in terms of player and team performances—has been marginalized. Not only are players more constrained in what they may do to physically intimidate and overwhelm their opponents, but a number of football experts have observed that there is a growing shortage of skilled players in the league, especially quarterbacks and offensive lineman. Washington Post sports columnist, Adam Kilgore, has opined that as a result, the quality of play in the league is changing “fundamentally…for the worse.”

At the same time, the NFL is suspending more players than in the past for using performance-enhancing drugs. If the league’s testing protocols continue to improve, the percentage of suspended players will likely increase. This would mean a greater number of less-skilled players would be needed to replace them, while fewer players will continue to be able to enhance their on-the-field performances, artificially.

Making matters much worse for the NFL (and major college football programs as well), not as many children are playing tackle football, especially in higher income households. If this trend continues, which appears to be very likely, the decline in the quality of available players will quickly accelerate, encompassing every position on the field. The expectation has been that children from lower income families will increasingly populate professional and collegiate teams. Yet, the Washington Post has reported that the percentage of children from lower income neighborhoods playing team sports has decreased significantly primarily because the cost to participate has been “rising.”

It is not only children and their parents who are turning away from tackle football. Increasingly players are shortening their careers to try to minimize the brain damage and other long-term impairments they suspect they may have already sustained or set into motion. They also are more willing to sit out if they are injured, meaning once again a greater number of less skilled players have to be used to fill the gap.

In addition, a growing number of people in the sports media, who cover football, are questioning the ethics of being involved in promoting this violent game, and some are speaking out. In August, ESPN football analyst, Ed Cunningham, at the height of his broadcast career, abruptly quit saying that he could no longer watch the mounting injuries each week. A couple of weeks later, the Washington Post’s Jerry Brewer made the remarkable admission that “[i]f my job weren’t tied to covering the NFL, I would boycott it… I don’t want either of [my two sons] to inherit my love for a game that treats its players like toys and its fans like breathing dollar bills.”

No matter what Commissioner Goodell and the owners may claim, the future of the NFL is in jeopardy.

PUBLIC SUBSIDIES TO BENEFIT WEALTHY TEAM OWNERS: THE NFL LEADS THE WAY IN GREED AND DECEPTION©
By John Weston Parry

Overview

No sports organization has been more successful in obtaining public monies to increase the wealth of its owners than the National Football League (NFL), or more brazen. In recent months their tactics have culminated in the most egregious series of rip-offs in professional sports franchise history. This also has led the league to relocate a team to the epicenter of sports gambling in the Western World, opening the door even wider for unsavory characters to pollute professional football and its players at a time when other bad behaviors are rampant.

The Roger Goodell-led NFL has employed a mix of politics, threats, deceit, coercion, and “musical chairs” economics to unjustly enrich its owners at the expense of local taxpayers, most recently in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Las Vegas—the “Sin City.” When metropolitan areas—including St. Louis, San Diego, and Oakland—do not hand over the cash they lose their teams, which is the Twenty First Century equivalent of having one’s legs broken. Unfortunately, many more such rip-offs are on the horizon—most conspicuously in the Washington D.C. area—since they have become the preferred way for American professional sports leagues, major university and college athletic departments, and Olympic organizations to grow their businesses and profits.

The NFL did not originate this type of sports scheming, nor is it the only league (or sports organization) to have used it effectively without being subjected to serious governmental scrutiny or sanctioned for anti-trust violations. This type of gouging of the American public began with Major League Baseball (MLB) in the 1950’s when the Dodgers and Giants relocated from New York to California and has been used by all our favorite sports leagues, including Major League Soccer (MLS)—not to mention the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its affiliates in deciding which nations will host the Summer and Winter games. The strategy has been—and continues to be—for team owners and league officials to encourage and coerce politicians and legislators so they will divert limited public funds, which should be spent on far more critical community needs, to help finance extravagant stadiums, arenas, and other athletic facilities and infrastructures for these increasingly profitable, wealth-generating sports.

Afterwards, the primary beneficiaries of the public’s coerced and misspent generosity—the team owners—reward the local fans by charging them more and more to attend games and events, including bloated licensing and parking fees. This leaves area businesses, firms, and other wealthy patrons as the chief purchasers of the best tickets—in part because they have been able to shift a relatively small, yet not insignificant, portion of the cost to federal and state taxpayers through business-related tax deductions. Should local businesses and other wealthy fans choose not to kick in what owners deem to be sufficient private tributes by buying enough of the really expensive seats, teams threaten to move claiming community support is lacking. Even if local communities comply, franchise owners may decide to move anyway to metropolitan areas that are viewed as being more profitable and/or more generous with their tax dollars.

The Early Years

For decades owners of baseball and other major sports franchises mostly adhered—or at least pretended to adhere—to the value that professional teams should be essential assets of the communities and fans that were supporting them. This was viewed as a miniature version of the social contract. Professional sports teams had relocated before, including football’s Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles in 1946 and baseball’s Boston Braves to Milwaukee in 1953, but those franchises moved because attendance had been dwindling and their owners were actually losing money.

The long-held belief about the importance of a professional team’s loyalty to its fans was abruptly transformed when two of baseball’s most storied franchises moved to California in search of greater revenues and wealth. These two commercially and competitively successful baseball teams—the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants—decided to open the 1958 baseball season playing in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, in order to make considerably more money for themselves and their various business associates.
The Dodgers’ carefully planned exodus from Brooklyn to occupy a brand new, publicly financed stadium in Chavez Ravine was the first prominent example of a professional sports franchise receiving substantial public subsidies as an incentive to relocate. The Giants followed suit almost immediately moving from Manhattan to Northern California because San Francisco officials had promised Giants owner Horace Stoneham that—as Los Angeles had done for Walter O’Malley—they too would subsidize the building of a brand new stadium. The windy, inhospitable Candlestick Park opened for business in 1960—proving that even the obvious economic benefits one of the great cities of the world provided, could be negated by stupidity.

In those days, California was seen as the American mecca for eternal optimism and sunshine (San Francisco not withstanding), opportunity, and skyrocketing profits. It was the gold rush all over again. That sudden, two-team exodus from New York City launched what would become a hard to resist windfall for major professional sports leagues. The symbolic turning point for these now commonly-employed strategies of greatly enhancing a team’s value at the public’s expense occurred in 1984 when the NFL allowed the Colts to secretly flee Baltimore for Indianapolis in moving vans during the middle of the night.

That outlandish and cowardly maneuver ushered in an era in which owners moving their franchises became a prominent concern for major metropolitan areas that had existing professional sports teams. It also became an opportunity for large metropolitan areas, which did not have teams of their own, to begin bidding wars to obtain one. Neil Demause and Joanna Cagan persuasively described this unseemly process as a Field of Schemes. From the mid-1980's through the end of the Twentieth Century, there was “an unprecedented wave of stadium [and arena] building,” spurred on by team and league-orchestrated “musical chairs” in which major metropolitan areas competed in order to keep or attract a variety of sports franchises.

During that time period alone, 10 billion dollars or more in public funds were doled out to support the construction of new athletic facilities, even though in most instances the existing stadiums and arenas could have been used for many more years. Demause and Cagan documented that by 2002 “seventeen of the thirty major league baseball teams” and “seventeen of the thirty-two [NFL] teams” either played in facilities that had been “built since 1992” or were about to move into new stadiums. Making matters worse, although these sports complexes generally were—and continue to be—“officially owned by quasi-governmental stadium authorities, the revenue streams … increasingly flow[ed] toward [the] private pockets [of team owners]….”

Two major metropolitan areas were used repeatedly to stoke recurring rumors about franchises moving and new franchises being created, which fueled the musical chairs supply and demand illusion and trickery. Both cities had lost major professional franchises: Washington in baseball; Los Angeles in football. Despite repeated—but mostly insincere—pressure by Congress to bring a team to the Nation's Capital, and many offers by potential suitors and local officials in nearby jurisdictions, Washington remained team-less from 1971 to 2005. Similarly, Los Angeles lost its professional football team for a second time in 1994 when the Raiders, which had moved there in 1982, returned to Oakland. Thus, astonishingly, the nation's second—and soon to be—largest television market had no NFL franchise until 2016.

Throughout those years both the MLB and the NFL artificially created demand. They planted misleading stories in the media that various cities—especially Washington and Los Angeles—were interested in obtaining new or existing franchises. Most of those designated cities were never that interested, or, in the case of D.C. and LA were being blackballed behind closed doors to ensure that the economic leverage of their respective leagues did not dissipate. Fortunately for the owners and leagues involved in this hustle, the sports media could be counted on to widely publicize almost any story about: a franchise that was threatening to move; or of a city which would sell its soul to obtain a franchise. These stories tended to be built on rumors, hearsay, and self-interested statements by those who were likely to benefit, rather than on facts. This form of media manipulation became so frequent that the teams which moved or threatened to move became known as free agent franchises.

The NFL Goes All-In With Its Los Angeles Hustle

While it is true that MLB originated this type of scheming to fill their coffers with public monies—and the NBA, NHL, MLS, NCAA, and IOC have all been eager participants in one way or another—the NFL, which reportedly generates some $14 billion in revenues annually, has orchestrated the most sophisticated, widespread, and profitable variation to date. NFL franchise values have continued to skyrocket as local metropolitan communities have been presented with an uncomfortable choice between building outlandishly expensive new stadiums, which substantially increase the wealth of the NFL owners at the expense of critical community needs, or losing their teams for many years, possibly forever. In 2016 and early 2017 six major metropolitan areas—St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, Atlanta, and Las Vegas—were embroiled in these NFL-generated stadium manipulations.

After using Los Angeles for years as leverage to strong arm other cities into building new stadiums, NFL owners became convinced that it would be even more profitable to place at least one football team in the nation’s biggest television market, but not until a final scam was underway. The first public inkling of a change in strategy occurred early in 2015 after the St. Louis Rams threatened to move back to L.A, unless local authorities voted to subsidize the construction of a new football stadium. What stood out as being different this time was that Stan Kroenke, the team’s owner, somehow “convinced” St. Louis politicians to allow the Rams to assume a year-to-year lease as the stadium negotiations continued, meaning the city gave up its most important bargaining chip receiving nothing in return.

At the time and certainly in hindsight, it appears likely the possibility Kroenke might decide to keep the Rams in St. Louis was a pretense designed to give his team a place to play while a new much more expensive stadium was being built for him in Inglewood, California. As Will Leitch concluded in Sports Illustrated, like the stadium shenanigans involving other professional teams, “[t]his was a real estate deal that made the Rams owner… even richer…[which] is the prime directive for commissioner Roger Goodell.”

A major element of the league’s new strategy to build extravagant, publicly subsidized stadiums in every NFL city was threatening to move a second team to Los Angeles. The idea of sharing the Inglewood site with the Rams, as the Giants and Jets were doing so profitably on the east coast, was being floated repeatedly. MetLife stadium in New Jersey, which cost $1.5 billion, remains the most costly American sports complex in history. That facility cost even more than Jerry Jones’ monument to himself near Dallas. As a result, both the Giants and Jets quickly became two of the most valuable sports franchises in the world. Despite their new found wealth, however, the Giants and Jets insisted that local taxpayers pay off tens of millions of dollars of public debt that was owed on Giants Stadium, which had been demolished in order to build the MetLife complex.

Initially, both the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders used threats that they would move to Los Angeles as leverage for trying to convince local California voters to approve public funding for lavish stadium projects. Under the most publicized scenario those two teams would have shared a brand new facility in Carson, California, assuming both teams did not receive the public support they were demanding from their current municipalities. The proposed $1.7 billion dollar complex also would have been home to the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team.

Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Atlanta Get “Ready for Some Football”

MLS had joined the lucrative game of franchise ransoms and musical chairs, not only in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. but most notably Las Vegas. A proposed $200 million soccer stadium in the “Sin City” was seen as an obvious attempt by its mayor to remove the stigma against professional franchises being located in America’s sports gambling hub. While MLS decided to pass on the stigma of Las Vegas, those well-publicized negotiations helped generate enthusiasm for an NFL team, which had been the city's ultimate objective. Across the country in the District of Columbia, city residents reportedly picked up half of the $300 million cost needed to build a new soccer stadium and its required infrastructure.

Instead of a soccer team Las Vegas landed a National Hockey League franchise without much public funding because the owner was imagining it to be a golden opportunity. He proudly named his team the Golden Knights, but later voiced extreme displeasure when he learned about the sweetheart deal the NFL was being offered, along with the probability that the Raiders football franchise would reduce his market share. He also must have been outraged that he had helped pave the road made of gold for his primary sports competition.

Not surprisingly, given the relative political sophistication of voters in San Diego and Oakland, and the amounts of public money being demanded ($550 million and $350 million, respectively), plans for new football stadiums in those two communities failed. Furthermore, it was far from certain that even if the voters had complied with the respective stadium demands, those two teams would have remained. Most of the available evidence suggests that both the Chargers and Raiders—like the Rams before them—were getting ready to move, regardless. The major question was where.

San Diego decided to become the second team in Los Angeles, sharing the expense of the costly Inglewood football stadium complex with the Rams. A number of team members and journalists complained that it made little sense to move the Chargers from its devoted fan base to be the second football franchise in a metropolitan area that already had seven professional sports teams, and major college football and basketball as well. On numerous occasions, over many years, the LA fan base had displayed a tepid interest in professional football, especially during the Rams inaugural 2016 season in which the team’s number of television viewers actually declined from what it had been in St. Louis.

Oakland, not wishing to be the third team in LA, decided to channel the ghost of Al Davis and relocate to Las Vegas, baby. According to Will Hobson of the Washington Post, the Nevada legislature already had authorized Clark County to spend $750 million on a proposed $1.9 billion Las Vegas football stadium using bonds secured by revenues from a proposed hotel room tax. In addition, the County would spend about $900 million more to improve an existing rail system, which would be used to transport fans from downtown gambling casinos and hotels to the new domed stadium and other key locations. Furthermore, it was widely reported that Goldman Sachs was going to help finance the deal based on its close relationship with multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who was going to become the Raider’s owner’s partner.

Nonetheless, the much publicized enthusiasm for marrying the glitter of Las Vegas with an NFL franchise was a story so magnetic that it tended to mask several potential problems, which made—and continues to make—this venture a risky investment, not including the consequences of the close proximity to gambling and organized crime. By NFL standards, the two million people in the Las Vegas metropolitan area is a small number. In addition, there is an extremely low population density beyond the city and county limits for many miles in every direction. Thus, minimally adequate attendance and television viewership are far from a given.

Gamblers may love to bet on football, but attending or watching football games are very different leisure activities, even when those gamblers are accompanied by their families or other companions. Upon further reflection, both Adelson and Goldman Sachs expressed their doubts by withdrawing from their tentative agreements, leaving the fate of the Raiders in limbo. In the meantime, Commissioner Goodell and the NFL tried for a last time to strongly encourage Oakland to come up with the requested public funding. When that did not work, the league voted 33 to 1 to approve the move to Las Vegas with its $750 million in guaranteed public funding. Bank of America decided to put up an additional $600 million as well.

This left the Raiders with only $500 million to pay, but, according to the Washington Post, the team will have to give the other NFL owners a relocation fee of between $325-350 million. In essence, Las Vegas is paying the Raiders between $400-425 million; the rest will go to the league owners. Furthermore, the actual public outlay in addition to the transportation fix is likely to increase. As columnist Norman Chad points out, “the public handout will approach $1 billion… [in] a state that annually ranks last or next-to-last in public education…”

Even worse, because the Raiders’ new stadium will not be ready for occupancy until the 2020 season, there is always the possibility that in the interim the city of Oakland and the team would come to an accommodation, and the NFL would find some legal loophole to vacate Las Vegas. This would leave that city and county with no football franchise, a major stadium and infrastructure expense, and a mountain of bad publicity. Otherwise, it will be the Bay area that has no football, other than the Forty Niners who now play in Santa Clara forty miles away.

On the other side of the country, however, there is no good reason for the NFL to leave the burgeoning metropolis that includes and surrounds Atlanta. Nor did local residents seriously believe that the Falcons would move very far when Falcon’s owner Arthur Blank told city officials in 2013 that if the public subsidy for his team was insufficient, he would locate the stadium beyond the city limits. Blank also promised that under no circumstances would his team be renewing its lease at the Georgia Dome, which was set to expire in 2017.

Largely as a result of Blank’s pressure and the area’s obsession for football, it is still possible that the Falcons new $1.5 billion Mercedes Benz football stadium will open for the 2017 football season, buoyed by $600 million in public donations. However, delays have been reported due to the complexities of installing what is being described by CBS Sports as the “absurd[ly]” complex retractable roof. In the meantime, local taxpayers have been saddled with most of the remaining debt on the 20-year old Georgia Dome, which was financed almost entirely using a local tax on hotels and motels. As a reward for being so cooperative and compliant, Atlanta will be the host city for the 2019 Super Bowl, which is likely to cost local taxpayers even more money.

Dan Snyder Lays the Political Ground Work For His Payout

Even though Dan Snyder’s Washington area sports franchise, which he purchased in 1999 for less than a third of its current valuation, has become one of the most valuable in the world (Forbes), increasing its value continues to be his predominant preoccupation. When he bought the team, Snyder benefited from a huge licensing deal with FedEx. Beginning in 2000, Snyder also made numerous income-enhancing renovations to the team’s stadium, which had opened for business only three years earlier in suburban Maryland.

Nevertheless, Snyder seems obsessed with becoming even wealthier at the public’s expense. Not only has he demanded public monies to build a new, more extravagant stadium at a site yet to be determined, but he already has captured millions in state and local dollars to enhance his team’s headquarters and its two training facilities, which are all located in Virginia even though his team plays in Maryland.

Snyder has used his political connections and proximity to three competing jurisdictions to great advantage. His game plan to get wealthier at the public’s expense appears to have been launched in 2009 when he hired Bruce Allen as the team’s general manager. Allen is the brother of former Virginia Governor and U.S. Senator, George Allen, and is the son of George Allen senior, the Hall of Fame coach who led Washington’s football team to its first Super Bowl. Subsequently, Snyder and his politically-connected general manager convinced politicians in the fiscally conservative state of Virginia to spend over $12 million dollars on the team’s headquarters and training facilities in Loudoun County and Richmond, respectively, rather than locating them in Maryland and/or the District of Columbia.

More importantly, Snyder was creating stiff competition between these three jurisdictions for the privilege to subsidize a new football stadium. In 2014 Snyder promoted Allen to be team president, despite the franchise’s poor won and loss record and Allen’s questionable football-related decisions that had contributed to the widespread perception the team’s management was in a state of chaos. For Snyder, though, Allen’s political acumen appears to have been far more valuable—winning football games was secondary to making money and accumulating wealth.

Allen’s primary role has been to help Snyder negotiate public subsidies to benefit the team’s bottom line.Whether a new stadium will be built in Virginia remains unclear. What seems certain, however, is that it will be located in the jurisdiction that provides Snyder with the best deal, especially the promise of substantial public monies to support its construction and infrastructure. In the process, it is likely his new stadium will leave Maryland residents with a substantial debt since the FedEx Field lease will not expire until 2027.

Conclusion

What the NFL, MLB, and other major sports leagues and their owners have been willing to do to disrespect local communities and fans that have been supporting them—often for decades—is more than just offensive. These sports cartels led by the NFL get away with such arrogance because, in the words of Howard Bryant of ESPN The Magazine, “[t]his is what power does. It makes its own rules. It answers to know one.” That is particularly true because these self-governing professional sports leagues—much like the NCAA and IOC, which also encourage their constituent members to screw the public—have been largely, or in the case of baseball totally, exempt from enforcement of our antitrust laws and serious scrutiny from Congress. This has resulted in the creation of isolated mini-economies, which serve the selfish interests of wealthy professional leagues and other sports cartels—and their constituents—at the expense of the public.

ADEQUATE PROTECTIVE NETTING AT LAST, BUT SO FAR ONLY ONE MLB TEAM IS PARTICIPATING ©
By John Weston Parry

At long last, one Major League Baseball team—the Chicago White Sox—out of 30 has overcome decades of mindless resistance to making fans safe at its ballpark by extending protective netting to the foul poles. Several other teams are committed to doing so in what they vaguely term the near future. Two decades ago the National Hockey League (NHL) mandated plexiglass barriers to insulate its fans from potentially devastating injuries and death from catapulting pucks.

A vast majority of MLB baseball teams, however, are continuing to risk the safety of their patrons in order to sell more tickets. In the process these franchises are placing themselves in growing legal jeopardy and accumulating public scorn. Despite MLB’s hollow warnings that fans be constantly alert and wear a baseball glove, their patrons continue to be injured on a regular basis, and even killed. In response, the league and its teams blame the victims for having accepted the danger when they set foot in a MLB stadium, whether or not those people happen to be disabled, frail, elderly, or children. The assumption of the risk principle in the law has been turned upside down by legal fictions designed to insulate spectator sports from liability, regardless of actual blame.

In reality, though, watching a baseball game up close is almost like running with the bulls in Paplona, except it is not only macho adult males who end up physically and mentally damaged. Even baseball players have come to understand the inherent danger, which is why so many of them are emotionally wrought when a batted ball or a shard from a bat strikes a vulnerable fan in a potentially crippling or lethal way. It has been and continues to be an unnecessary danger in baseball that could be eliminated almost immediately, not only at the highest professional levels, but wherever the game is being watched live by substantial crowds of spectators.

Netting is not especially expensive when compared to the value of a human life or the cost and pain of fan medical bills, recovery, and rehabilitation. When Commissioner Rob Manfred’s legacy is completed, his missteps in delaying and obscuring the obligation of every MLB team to do what is humane, compassionate, and obvious will reside in the first paragraph of his farewell or obituary, no matter what his other accomplishments may be. The unanswered question is whether the Commissioner, as well as his predecessor and mentor Bud Selig, actually believed they could not take the correct moral stand on this issue because team owners would have fired them? Or did they conspire with the owners to do as little as possible to make MLB games safe for the fans because doing so might have marginally diminished the game’s skyrocketing revenues?

MLB’s history of failing to protect fans’ safety at games is something for which all who have participated in or supported those strategies and decisions should feel ashamed, in the same way MLB should be ashamed of having ignored the use of performance-enhancing substances for so many years. Time and time again, MLB, like most other leagues and organizations that control highly lucrative spectator sports, has failed to do the right thing, even when only a relatively small amount of its money has been at stake.

MLB’s History of Ignoring Fan Safety

Fan safety at major and minor league baseball games is an issue that has been debated and largely marginalized and obscured for decades, even after fans have been severely injured and even died. This callous attitude finally began to thaw in 2015 when MLB responded to this emerging crisis with tentative uncertainty. Commissioner Rob Manfred, after huddling with his owners, issued a weak, non-binding recommendation that major league teams should be encouraged to incrementally protect more of their fans by installing netting, but only from home plate to where the two dugouts begin. Nearly a third of the league’s teams decided to exceed this clearly inadequate recommendation, understanding that it did not go nearly far enough.

One of the many teams that chose not to exceed the recommended minimum was the New York Yankees, which issued a familiar corporate statement that team management was “`seriously exploring’ that option” in lieu of actually implementing enhanced safety measures. This was significant because much of the impetus at that time for improved protections had originated with the Yankees. Several days earlier, the team’s players, coaches, and fans were horrified when a little girl sitting directly behind the visiting Minnesota Twins’ dugout in Yankee Stadium had been hit in the face by a screaming line drive. Reportedly it was traveling at over 100 miles per hour when it left Todd Frazier’s bat.

Brian Dozer, who played second base for the Twins and had witnessed the horrific damage, put it best: “`I don’t care about the damn view of the fan. It’s all about safety.’” According to the New York Times, the child, who had been sitting directly behind the dugout, bled profusely, had to be hospitalized, and appeared to need reconstructive surgery. It was “at least” the “third time [that 2015] season a fan at Yankee Stadium had been struck by either a foul bowl or a shattered bat”—and undoubtedly there were unpublicized instances as well.

A major stumbling block has always been that teams continue to unduly prioritize the macho views of disgruntled fans—like celebrated author Stephen King—who insist upon having unobstructed views no matter what the safety consequences may be for the masses. In doing so, these entitled fans have provided professional baseball teams with a selfish argument for not addressing obvious safety concerns, especially to children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Over time, ignoring such obvious risks inevitably facilitates fan injuries, some of which are devastating.

For years, MLB and its teams have taken the position patrons who come to ball parks are responsible for protecting themselves against injuries. Their assumption of the risk, which is printed with very small type on each ticket, continues to be a callous, but clever legal way, to blame the victim. Typically there are numerous distractions at ballgames, and many are deliberately inspired or encouraged by the home teams because their owners no longer believe that the action on the field is entertaining enough to suit most fans.

Thus, artificial distractions pop up everywhere, along with the constant din of overly loud noise, that bombard the human senses with mind-numbing regularity. In such an environment expecting fans to pay close attention to each thrown or batted ball is unrealistic and dangerous. Even seemingly avid baseball fans appreciate that much of the game can be slow and boring, which is why so many of them are doing other things than watching, such as: purchasing or consuming beverages and food item at their seats; checking the electronic scoreboards; intently using their smart phones; watching mascots perform; or just trying to have a conversation with friends, family, or other nearby fans.

When the NHL faced a similar crisis with hockey pucks injuring its patrons, the league installed walls of plexiglas as protection, which for years now have completely encircled the playing surfaces in every arena. That was twenty years ago. By comparison MLB has consistently resisted fan safety measures, in large part because of how the two leagues and their teams have traditionally viewed—and taken advantage of—the favorable laws protecting them from liability, even when they clearly are at fault.

For decades professional baseball has enjoyed special liability protections, which leave fans at risk. What has become known as the “baseball rule” created the means for teams to effectively avoid liability for fan injuries by placing that warning language on each ticket. Fans able to read the small print are presumed to have been properly alerted that they willingly assume the entire risk of being injured when they attend ball games. Those who cannot read that small print due to disability, illiteracy, or because they only speak another language also are presumed to have been alerted, even if it can be demonstrated that they were not.

In recent years, what once was an absolute legal defense to liability has developed some relatively small holes, along with the potential for those gaps to be enlarged. One substantial reason for the legal opening is what happened in the summer of 2011 after an adult fan—again at Yankee Stadium—was severely injured by a line drive, which severely damaged his face. Treatment to heal his injuries reportedly cost more than $100,000. The Yankees either reneged on a verbal promise to cover his out-of pocket expenses, or never intended to do so.

The legal calculus for the New York court hearing that injured fan’s case changed because supposedly another fan had obstructed the plaintiff’s view of the ball with an umbrella. By allowing fans to open umbrellas during its games, the Yankees were deemed to have negligently increased the danger to other fans posed by batted balls. Thus, in this one limited circumstance, the team could be held liable. Given the actual dangers to fans of batted balls or bat shards being propelled into unprotected stands, there was ample reason to suspect that this New York judge had been looking for an opportunity, no matter how slight, to pierce an unreasonable precedent known as the baseball rule.

Around the same time, courts in other jurisdictions were beginning to create small exceptions to the baseball rule as well. Appeals courts in both Georgia and Idaho relied on various procedural technicalities for failing to apply that rule against fans who had been struck by baseballs in the stands. In addition, an Ohio court in Rawlings v. Cleveland Indians Baseball, Co. Inc, like the New York court, cited “attendant circumstances” that did not normally present themselves as the rationale for not applying the baseball rule in that case. There a Cleveland fan was struck after he had been told to leave his seat and relocate so the team could prepare for a fireworks celebration following the game. Like allowing the open umbrella at Yankees Stadium, the instructions to the fan to change seats had elevated the risk of his being injured.

Regardless of the legal mumbo jumbo, fan injuries from balls and bats being propelled into the stands at MLB games is a clear and present danger. In 2015 Bloomberg News documented the scope of these injuries. It found, astoundingly, that at least “1,750 spectators get hurt each year … [which is] more often than a batter is hit by a pitch.” It was just after these eye-popping statistics had been released that the newly-installed baseball Commissioner, Rob Manfred, cowardly advised, but did not mandate, that every team “erect protective netting in front of the most exposed field-level seats from one dugout to the other.”

Incremental Changes Beginning in 2015

A majority of MLB teams, including the New York Yankees, opted to respond selfishly. They carefully weighed the marginal costs of making fans safer, before deciding upon a course of action. Initially most teams chose to comply with Commissioner Manfred’s minimalist recommendations. Only a third of the two league’s teams extended their netting beyond that bare minimum. The one team that did more than any other was the New York Mets, the Yankees’ metropolitan area rivals, by extending its protective netting just beyond first and third base.

Nearly three years later, beginning with the 2018 major league season, all 30 teams had some form of extended netting in place at their stadiums that incrementally exceeded the Commissioner’s original guidance. Most, like the Yankees, only extended their protective netting as far as the first and third base dugouts, which failed to eliminate the risk of injury to fans seated elsewhere. Only the New York Mets and a few other clubs were protecting vulnerable fans in seats past those dugouts. No team, however, installed netting that extended to the foul poles like professional baseball stadiums in Japan had done.

Making matters worse, many fans in seats higher than the areas protected by the height of the netting remained vulnerable to injuries. To guard against those injuries the New York Times reported that in Japan “[w]histles blow when balls are headed for the seats. [Also, a]fter each foul ball, signs urging fans to pay attention are illuminated on the scoreboard.” Those relatively simple and inexpensive remedies have not been implemented in MLB ballparks.

Not surprisingly, given the safety deficiencies in these otherwise fully extravagant, publicly subsidized MLB stadiums devastating harms to fans continued to occur, unnecessarily. In August 2018 a 79-year-old grandmother died after she was struck in the head by a foul ball at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. She was seated in the loge level above the box seats between home plate and first base. That elderly woman was the first fan to be killed by a baseball at an MLB game since 1970 when a 14-year-old Alan Fish was struck by a batted ball at Dodger Stadium, and later died of brain trauma. Despite that eerie coincidence, the local and national media did not even cover the grandmother’s death. Reportedly the Dodgers and local media had managed to kill the story until February 2019 when ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” did an extended piece about the fatality and how it had been suppressed.

According to ESPN, “the Dodgers made no public comments about [the grandmother’s] death or what caused it.” Instead, they, MLB, and their broadcast partners had kept silent. When confronted five months later about that death and the need to extend protective netting at Dodger Stadium, the team accepted no responsibility and answered no questions. Instead, it released a statement intended to limit its liability: “[W]e were deeply saddened by this tragic accident…. The matter has been resolved between the Dodgers and the… family. We cannot comment further.”

Apparently the Dodgers—undoubtedly with MLB’s blessing—decided to settle with the family to avoid litigation, any resultant publicity that such a suit would likely generate, and the ever present possibility that an unfavorable verdict in a case with legally compelling facts would do permanent damage to baseball’s assumption of the risk protections.

That resolution seemed to quell, for the moment, the media’s clamor for MLB teams to follow in the footsteps of their Japanese counterparts and implement comprehensive ballpark protections. Despite the ESPN expose, the Dodgers continued to stonewall on measures to extend the netting at their ball park, even after the LA Times reported that the team was planning to spend $100 million on other—obviously more pressing to them—stadium renovations.

That May, though, media reports about these disturbing ballpark incidents resumed, this time in Houston after a two-year-old girl was struck in the face with a line drive. Much like what had happened two years earlier at Yankee Stadium, the toddler was immediately rushed to the hospital for emergency treatment. MLB, adopting much of the language that the Dodgers had used after the grandmother’s death, released a similarly innocuous, self-serving statement: “The events at last night’s game were extremely upsetting… We send our best wishes to the child and family involved.... Clubs have significantly expanded netting and their inventory of protected seats in recent years.” Yet, fans continued to be hospitalized with serious injuries from batted baseballs with regularity.

Nearly a month later the lawyer for the Houston child’s family revealed in the New York Times that the injuries to the little girl had been nearly catastrophic. She “sustained a skull fracture, bleeding on the brain and seizures.” In addition, that same month another fan was immediately hospitalized after she was hit in the head by a line drive at Dodgers Stadium. After years of having dragged its feet on improving the deficient netting at its ballpark, Dodgers’ officials released an incredible statement. They contended that months earlier the team had initiated “the process of studying how netting at Dodger Stadium could be configured to provide better protection for our fans.” They promised that once that study was completed, the team would implement the recommended changes.”

That Dodger dodge was followed by three new MLB fan injuries in July. The New York Times reported that “a three-year-old boy was taken to the hospital in Cleveland after being hit by a line drive and fans were struck in consecutive games at the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium… — one in the head by a ball and the other in the back by a bat that sailed over the netting.”

Despite all these serious incidents over so many years, the Commissioner adamantly refused to direct teams to implement an effective league-wide fan protection policy, leaving it to the franchise owners to do so piecemeal. As of the end of July 2019, only the Chicago White Sox had actually extended their netting to the foul poles. Three other teams—the Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Texas Rangers stated that they will do so sometime in the unspecified near future. The Washington Nationals, following the White Sox lead, installed netting almost to the foul poles. As for the other 26 teams, there were no firm commitments. Furthermore, no franchise chose to implement the type of fan warning systems present in Japanese professional ballparks; nor have any promised to do so.

Conclusion

The issue of fan safety at major and minor league baseball games—along with MLB’s brazen attempts to obscure the continuing threat—have become growing legal problems and public relations fiascos for the teams and their defenders in the media. While much of the baseball rule legal fiction remains in place as precedent, teams that do not extend their netting to the foul poles will face increased legal liability and public scorn when more of these tragic and inevitable incidents occur. Sooner, rather than later, support for baseball’s assumption of the risk protections will collapse in the media and then the courts, especially as more clubs bow to the pressure of parents to insulate their children from serious harm when attending what should be a fun family experience.

With the building of these extravagant new baseball stadiums, the economic justification for failing to make safety improvements has evaporated, while the relative risks to fans have escalated. When compared to the billions of dollars major league teams and local governments spend on improving their ballparks, the relatively small cost for netting is minor.

Furthermore, as a 2018 William & Mary Law Review study revealed, franchises have intentionally decreased the foul territory separating the field of play from the stands. These corporate decisions to make room for additional premium seats place more fans in danger of being struck by foul balls or bat shards. Many fans have even less time than in the past to react in order to protect themselves from serious injuries. Also, the consumption of alcohol at baseball games, which makes a great deal of money for the owners, further decreases reaction times, making the imbibers more vulnerable to these injuries.

In addition, teams continue to introduce new and improved artificial distractions to entertain the majority of fans whose attentions wane from the game of baseball. At the same time, MLB teams are creating new legal expectations regarding safety as they slowly, but continually, increase the protective netting in their stadiums.

Together all these developments have created an assortment of “attendant circumstances” that courts are more likely to consider when evaluating the level of danger that fans should be expected to assume when they pay to attend a game in person. For the good of the game, Commissioner Manfred should instruct all MLB teams that, as soon as possible, they must extend their netting to the foul poles and provide audio warnings when balls or bats are flying into the stands. This policy should cover minor league teams affiliated with MLB as well.

MONUMENTAL MISHANDLING OF THE RUSSIAN DOPING SCANDAL: IOC-WADA Collaborations Are A Disaster©
   By John Weston Parry

There are so many disappointing aspects to the Russian doping scandal that it is difficult to know just where to begin or end the discussion. The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) belated compromise to partially ban Russia from the upcoming Winter Games is unlikely to improve the overall efficacy or fairness of its flawed anti-doping enforcement protocols going forward. Punishing Russian athletes without providing them with due process is not a reasonable alternative either. Moreover, what should be the most important doping consideration—the health and safety of Olympic athletes—is continually being down-played or ignored.

Doping should be treated as a public health problem, rather than a political hot potato in which self-serving enforcement standards and sanctions change depending on the target and who is making the decisions. Collaborations between the IOC and the World-Anti-doping Agency (WADA) have been an unmitigated disaster on almost every front, except as diversions to protect the interests of Olympic and anti-doping officials. Until recently, both the IOC and WADA continued to have influential members, who served as employees of the Russian government. The entire global organizational structure for identifying substances to ban, testing banned substances, and enforcing those bans should be re-imagined and rebuilt.

The Olympic Myth of Bringing Nations Together to Foster Peace and Harmony

Rarely, except for the losing nations in World War I, have offending countries been banned from the Olympics. Beginning with the authoritarian influence of Avery Brundage (1936-1972), the IOC has tried to create the illusion that Olympic sports competitions foster global peace and harmony. Brundage worked hard to establish and maintain that fiction, even during the Cold War Olympic years. More disturbingly, as President of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Brundage lobbied hard for Nazi Germany to become the host of the 1936 Summer Olympics.

By necessity, during World War II (1940 and 1944), the Olympic Games were canceled. In 1948 when the Olympics resumed both Germany and Japan were unable to field teams because, as occupied nations, they had no independent national governments. Since 1924, South Africa and Rhodesia have been the only nations to be completely banned from these global competitions. Those two countries—not coincidentally—had very little political clout within the IOC hierarchy. South Africa, despite Brundage’s vociferous objections, was barred from 1964 to 1988 because of its apartheid policies. Rhodesia was banned in 1972, primarily at the behest of Great Britain, which was angry at Rhodesia for declaring independence from British colonial rule. In 1976 Rhodesia was banned once again based in part on evidence that its minority white government was discriminating against and suppressing black citizens.

More than 30 years passed until the next nation was banned from the Olympics, in what appears to have been a politically motivated power squabble. The IOC partially banned the sports-challenged country of Kuwait from 2010 to 2012 and then again in 2015 to the present because its government appeared to be undermining the independence of the Kuwait Olympic Committee. Kuwait’s imperious actions threatened the IOC, which views itself as being largely above the laws of every national government, including the United States. By comparison, vicious totalitarian nations, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia, which threaten world peace, continue to be warmly welcomed by much of the Olympic community.

In this self-interested, profit-seeking, laissez-fair environment, which has existed for many decades, it has been especially difficult to convince the IOC to sincerely investigate, much less sanction, the many different countries that have been involved in facilitating or covering-up the use of illicit and illegal performance-enhancing substances by their athletes. WADA did not even come into existence until 1999, and then only as a lap dog for the IOC. In recent years, many national Olympic organizations and affiliates, including those in Russia, China, Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere, have been serial offenders, but never decertified or otherwise sanctioned, for failing to adequately monitor and investigate doping by their Olympic athletes.

Arguably the most blatant example of Olympic neglect, however, has nothing to do with doping. That involves the abject failure of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and USA Gymnastics to protect hundreds of young American female Olympic gymnasts from being sexually abused by various coaches and their team doctor over the past twenty-years. (See, “Wanton Neglect By Olympic and Michigan State Officials Facilitated the Sexual Abuse of Hundreds of Female Gymnasts,” Sportpathologies.com/blog)

In the history of the modern Olympics, East Germany during the Cold War years and now Russia have been condemned as the very worst offenders. Curiously, the IOC never formally sanctioned high-level East German sports officials for their roles in promoting widespread doping amongst their athletes, even though their transgressions turned out to be part of the government’s “state plan.” What made the lack of scrutiny so much worse is that hundreds of East German Olympic athletes, particularly females, developed serious and even catastrophic health impairments, especially from abusing steroids and other testosterone-producing drugs. Similar, as well as different, health risks exist for the many athletes who abuse—and/or are strongly encouraged to take—performance-enhancing substances today.

State-Sponsored Doping in Russia

With regard to the Russian Olympic doping scandal , it is important to understand that for many reasons IOC leaders never wanted to be directly involved, particularly beginning in 2009 after they had awarded Russia the 2014 Winter Olympics. Russia has been one of the most influential members of the IOC in recent years, especially since the USOC has been partially ostracized due to its long-running power struggle with the IOC over the division of American television revenues. Thus, it took an extraordinary amount of global outrage to convince the IOC to do anything that might offend their powerful comrades in the Russian Sports Ministry and various Russian Olympic organizations and affiliates, including the Russian Olympic Committee. Ultimately, though, outrage against Russia on many political fronts, not just doping, forced the IOC to act, but in a way that would be reasonably expedient for its members.

At least as far back as February 2010, knowledgeable Russian insiders had informed WADA that the Russian Sports Ministry and that nation’s anti-doping agency were assisting large numbers of Russian athletes to cheat. Nevertheless, it took nearly five years for WADA to respond. Incredibly, until 2015 the only global anti-doping agency in the sports world lacked any independent authority to conduct its own investigations and issue sanctions.

Apparently in 1999 when the IOC established WADA, it was made abundantly clear that those drug enforcement officials would do nothing more than conduct tests and report cheating violations to the IOC. In addition, by 2009 any investigations that involved Russian doping became further compromised because the IOC had a vested interest in protecting Putin, the Russian Olympic Committee, and Russia’s powerful sports ministry. Russian government officials were directly responsible for ensuring—leading up to and during the 2014 Sochi Olympics—IOC members received the “special considerations” that they have come to expect.

Typically, such considerations have involved official and unofficial representatives of host nations/cities providing IOC members with hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal and/or illicit benefits as a quid pro quo for being rewarded with the Winter or Summer Games. One of the most publicized payoff schemes occurred in conjunction with the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics. Similar shenanigans occurred in Rio as well. Allegations already have been lodged and are being investigated regarding the decision to award Japan the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Olympic corruption never seems to end.

Eventually WADA did begin to test Russian athletes using its admittedly flawed procedures, but it was still up to the IOC to conduct further investigations and issue any sanctions. For more than five years the results were predictable. As the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins explained, IOC members looked the other way “while they dined from the ice-sculpture buffet and sipped their aperitifs.” They were, she said, hypocrites, for blaming Russian athletes “whose choice was to either participate in doping… or face angry state authorities, maybe even a gulag.” That enforcement slight of hand “conveniently divert[ed] attention from the IOC’s own misdeeds, the offenses that they either committed or enabled and ignored.”

Even IOC President Thomas Bach had to acknowledge later—while insincerely deflecting criticism from himself and the IOC—that the international anti-doping system was rife with major structural deficiencies, including “politics and possible conflicts of interest.” In order to tame those destructive influences, Bach recommended that WADA be independent of all the sports organizations that have a pecuniary interest in the athletes the anti-doping agency is supposed to monitor and investigate. Unfortunately, that may be extremely difficult to accomplish since WADA depends heavily on those sports organizations for its funding.

What happened—or more accurately did not happen—in the Russian investigation should have been expected. It was not until 2015, eleven months after the Sochi Games had concluded, that WADA finally issued a report accusing the Russian government of orchestrating a pervasive scheme to create a secret doping program for its Olympic athletes in preparation for those Winter Olympics, as well as for the Rio Summer Games that would follow in 2016. During all those years, the IOC was conspicuously silent, even though it fully recognized that WADA had no independent investigatory powers apart from the IOC itself.

Moreover, as described in The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame (Rowman & Littlefield, June 2017), even after that report was issued, very little changed. “Despite the scope and grandeur of the accusations …, the IOC-approved WADA sanctions were remarkably restrained….” Rather than penalizing specific Russian government officials, WADA decided to rescind “the accreditation of a lab in Moscow at the center of the scandal. This lab not only had destroyed hundreds of drug samples of Russian athletes, but had produced undetectable drugs for athletes to use.”

In addition, the International Association of Athletic Federations under the leadership of its new president, Sebastian Coe, grudgingly agreed “to indefinitely suspend the entire Russian track-and-field team…” After schmoozing with Russian sports officials, however, Coe gave them “the opportunity to make changes… that could lead to the lifting of the ban well before the [2016 Summer Games in Rio]. There were no sanctions against any of the other Russian sports federations or … [any] Russian officials….”

Thereafter, the pressure on the IOC to take dramatic, well-publicized actions against the Russian Olympic apparatus intensified, particularly in the U.S. after the Department of Justice initiated its own highly publicized, but ultimately lackluster, criminal investigation into state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes. Ultimately, only the Russian Track and Field team was banned from the Rio Olympics. Furthermore, many of those track and field athletes were allowed to participate under a neutral flag, after establishing that they were clean. “[T]he USA Track & Field president conceded that an unknown number of Russian athletes were being made to `pay a [stiff] price for the serious transgressions of their federation’”—not to mention the incompetence and/or corruption of the IOC, WADA, and the IAAF.

Around the same time, WADA decided it should also promote the perception that its anti-doping officials were finally getting tough on Russia. Suddenly, without gathering sufficient scientific evidence, WADA decided to ban a drug known as meldonium, which was popular among Russian and other Eastern European athletes. Russian soldiers had been using this drug for many years—apparently without major health problems—to promote endurance and protect their hearts during highly aerobic warfare training exercises and other combat activities.

There was no compelling evidence that meldonium was performance-enhancing, other than to allow athletes to exercise strenuously with fewer health risks. The much celebrated Russian tennis star, Maria Sharapova, who was raised and has lived most of her life in the United States, became the most notable athlete snared in the political in-fighting between Russian sports authorities and the WADA. In the process, Sharapova lost at least two years of her career, her reputation was damaged, and she probably will never be the champion she once was.

Most of the Russian athletes, who qualified for the 2016 Olympics, were vetted and allowed to compete, which made many anti-doping proponents and members of the American sports media angry. Thereafter, stories continued to surface about Russian athletes being involved in widespread doping, which Russian officials had supposedly orchestrated. This included the reported clandestine destruction of hundreds of positive test results. One key Russian whistleblower, chemist Grigory Rodchenkov, proceeded to build a lucrative career as a purported witness to the worst aspects of Russian state-sponsored doping. After fleeing to America, he starred in a documentary and contributed to numerous media exposes.

Much of what Rodchenkov has claimed appears to be largely uncorroborated, at least in the public record. At the same time, both WADA and IOC officials have come to embrace his version of what happened. They have said it was their strong impression that what Rodchenkov claimed he had witnessed most probably was accurate. On the other hand, one of the major allegations, which Rodchenkov made against a Swiss chemist for allegedly assisting the Russians, proved to be entirely false.

To a significant extent, it has been stories about what Rodchenkov said he had witnessed or heard that have driven the doping narrative in the American media, along with public pronouncements by IOC and WADA officials regarding Russia’s apparent guilt. How much of Rodchenkov’s narrative is true and what has been made up or exaggerated for dramatic effect is difficult to ascertain because much of the supporting evidence is weak. Still, it seems to be undeniable that Russian officials orchestrated an elaborate program to encourage—or coerce—many of their athletes to use illicit performance-enhancing substances. Nonetheless, there were many other factors—in addition to widespread evidence of doping—that contributed to the IOC’s belated decision to partially ban Russian athletes from the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.

The American Perspective on Russian Doping

An important factor influencing the IOC was the American media and the potential American television audience for the Winter Games. Three diverse elements helped to mold the American narrative about Russian doping: (1) strong anti-Russian sentiments originating during the Cold War and intensified by the 2016 Presidential elections; (2) selective suspension of the commonly-held American belief that individual ingenuity is far superior to state-sponsored programming; and (3) the hope that American athletes would win more medals—with all the acclaim, ratings, and dollars that brings with it—by reducing the number of Russian athletes who would be competing at the Winter Games.

Most Americans are threatened by the Russian government for many valid, and not so valid, reasons. Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election has become a given, except for loyal supporters of President Trump. More importantly, virtually every major American foreign policy initiative is being opposed or thwarted by President Putin and the Russian government, especially in Syria, North Korea, and the Crimea. Thus, it has been easy for Americans to perceive the punishment of Russian athletes as a rational response to what is viewed as a loathsome Russian government, despite—or in many cases because of—the cozy relationship between Putin and President Trump.

Second, scorn for Russia also seems to have obscured the normal American bias that a relatively free market with little or no government interference will always be better than government controlled actions or policies. As Americans we pride ourselves on the ability to accomplish great things free of governmental intervention or support. There is a popular belief by many Americans that government involvement inherently lessens the product of our individual efforts.

Yet, the opposite seems to be true when it comes to molding American perceptions about state-sponsored cheating in sports by unpopular nations, especially Russia and China. We seem to be convinced that the Russian and Chinese governments, which we usually denigrate as being inept, are able to substantially exceed what American and individual athletes can and do achieve with a little help from their well-connected friends. Widespread drug cheating in baseball, football, swimming, track and field, tennis, and cycling demonstrates that this type of American ingenuity can at least approach what the Russian and Chinese governments have been able to provide their athletes with. It was even more difficult and expensive for WADA to catch Lance Armstrong than the Russians. In addition, many baseball, football and tennis players, swimmers, and sprinters continue to cheat, and most of them get away with it.

As explained in The Athlete’s Dilemma, drug cheating in professional, Olympic, and collegiate sports is rampant. The popular crusade against Russian athletes obscures more pernicious doping problems, including: the ineffectiveness and insincerity of the WADA; the negligence and corruption of IOC leaders; and the continued existence of the Russian sports apparatus, which despite all its doping crimes and misdemeanors, will be in charge of hosting soccer’s World Cup in June. In many ways, the IOC and FIFA are similarly corrupt.

Third, for many Americans punishing Russian athletes is a convenient and selfish way to promote the medal prospects of American athletes and domestic television ratings for the increasingly vulnerable and less relevant Winter Olympics. In America, Olympic achievement is defined by medals won, especially as compared to Russia. Yet, in these winter competitions, the U.S. has no chance to prevail over Russia, except by divine intervention or the IOC imposing a ban that precludes many or most of Russia’s best athletes from participating.

Whether the current ban will be effective enough to ensure a victory over the Russians in the medal count is still very much in doubt. Despite public pronouncements about high burdens and standards of proof for Russian athletes to overcome, what actually happens behind closed doors is anyone’s guess. Unless the existing requirements are arbitrarily and unfairly changed, the likelihood is that many of those Russian athletes will be cleared to participate, as was the case in Rio.

American television ratings for the 2018 Winter Olympics already were being threatened because of declining interest in the Games, time change problems making live television difficult, and a prohibition against National Hockey League players participating. Counter-intuitively, though, as with the Rio Games, the absence of many of the top Russian athletes may boost the ratings. The fact that more American athletes are in a good position to medal will bring viewers to their screens, especially if many Americans actually medal. Thus, banning Russian players not only is perceived as the right thing to do, but it appears to be very good for business—at a time when promoting business is all-important to a fragile American psyche.

Russian Athletes Are the Most Convenient and Politically Expedient Targets

The problem with profiling—presuming that an individual, who shares a group characteristic, has behaved or will behave like most other people in that group—is that typically the resulting conclusions are unreliable and invalid, and too often inaccurate. Profiling is misused to justify stops, searches, seizures, and arrests of members of minority groups producing badly flawed and controversial results. The IOC has made a similar, overly broad and logically-challenged generalization, which is as follows: every Russian Olympic athlete should be presumed to have used illicit performance-enhancing substances because the Russian government orchestrated a clandestine scheme to allow many of its athletes to cheat.

Democratic nations, particularly the United States, normally embrace due process protections that would prevent individuals from being presumed guilty by having to prove their innocence. In contrast, the Russian government does not tend to value due process nearly as highly. With regard to the Russian doping scandal, however, the normal cultural imperatives have been reversed. It is the Russians who are demanding more due process and the Americans who are willing to dispense with due process in order to punish Russia, and presumably President Putin.

Although there appears to be little doubt that the Russian government deserves IOC sanctions, there is substantial doubt as to which Russian athletes deserve to be penalized and how those determinations should be made. This is especially true, if, as a number of commentators have alleged, many of those athletes may have been given these illicit drugs without their knowledge or consent, or were compelled to take them by Russian sports officials. In addition, a significant percentage of current Russian athletes were too young to be Olympians in Sochi, so they probably were not involved in any consensual doping schemes.

By applying American principles of law, the answer to the question of how the IOC-WADA apparatus should proceed against Russian athletes should be clear: each athlete deserves a fair hearing and the burden of proof should be on the accusers to demonstrate a violation. It may be impractical and inconvenient in some cases, but it is the right thing to do. After all, WADA and the IOC have been gathering evidence against Russian athletes for many, many months, providing anti-doping officials with a substantial advantage in any fair hearing procedure.

Furthermore, as it stands, a much higher percentage of Russian doping violators are likely to be identified than drug cheaters from other nations, including the U.S. Currently, only about two percent of Olympic, collegiate, and professional athletes are identified as cheaters when they are tested. In Rio about 30 percent of Russian Olympic athletes were prohibited from competing and that percentage is likely to be considerably higher for the upcoming Winter Olympics. Those sanctions should be more than enough to deter most Russian athletes from cheating in the future, assuming those individuals are no longer being tempted or coerced by Russian government authorities.

Thus, the more important question is whether a temporary ban to its athletes will deter the Russian Sports Ministry and Russian Olympic Committee from cheating in other ways? Unless the Russian sports machine is neutralized, it is very likely that their athletes will continue to be strongly encouraged to dope, even if initially those athletes are unwilling or do not consent.

Putin, the Russian Sports Ministry, and the Russian Olympic Committee

The supreme villains in the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal—in addition to President Putin—are the Russian Sports Ministry and the Russian Olympic Committee. By all accounts, these Putin-controlled agencies were directly involved in perpetuating and orchestrating a massive fraud and cover-up. Yet, the IOC has only temporarily sanctioned one member of those two Russian agencies. Putin later gave that person a promotion and made him Russia’s point-person in preparing to host the World Cup. Otherwise, the IOC has dealt with the massive Russian interference in Olympic affairs by looking the other way. There has been an obvious political double-standard when one compares the IOC’s hands-off Russian officials policy with the harsh sanctions imposed on Kuwait for its meddling in what were deemed Olympic matters.

The IOC’s insincere actions to convince the world that it was trying to reform the thoroughly rotten Russian Olympic sports establishment have resulted in cosmetic changes with no substantial penalties being issued against the guilty officials. Vitaly Mutko, the long-time head of the Russian Sports Ministry, will no long be allowed to participate or attend international Olympic events. However, he has been replaced by his former deputy Pavel Kolobkov. Until recently Kolobkov served on WADA’s board and thus was nominally in charge of Russia’s anti-doping program.

After Mutko was sanctioned, Russian President Putin appointed him to be the Deputy Prime Minister overseeing all Russian sports. In that capacity, Mutko is in charge of planning and other preparations for the 2018 World Cup. Despite Mutko’s doping escapades, FIFA continue to warmly embrace him and shows little interest in finding out which Russian soccer players have been doping. According to the New York Times, Mutko and one of his deputies were accused of concealing and covering up “hundreds” of doping violations, including at least one that involved “a Russian soccer player.” FIFA’s response was that the Russian state-sponsored doping scandal would have no impact on “its preparations for the tournament.”

At the end of December, though, after sponsors had expressed their displeasure with the doping optics, certain cosmetic changes were made. Mutko stepped down as the president of the Russian soccer federation and chairperson of the World Cup organizing committee. Alexei Sorokin, who is the chief executive of that committee, replaced Mutko, assuming both roles. Meanwhile Deputy Prime Minister Mutko will continue to direct World Cup preparations for the Russian government.

The IOC also temporarily suspended Russia’s Olympic Committee. In addition, the IOC temporarily suspended its president, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov. Until December, Zhukov had been helping his fellow committee members make—and thus was instrumental in influencing decisions about—what should happen to Russia’s athletes and officials in wake of the Russian doping scandal. Based on what has happened in the past, there is every reason to believe that in the relatively near future Putin appointees will once again be helping the IOC and WADA make their anti-doping decisions.

What Should Happen Now?

The common denominator in this doping debacle is that the Russian sports apparatus, the IOC, and FIFA all have long histories of institutional neglect and corruption, while the WADA has been a willing partner. The worst thing that could happen now would be to give WADA more money and power with which to perpetuate itself. As expressed in the Athlete’s Dilemma:

Currently, almost all the organizations that oversee anti-doping in sports, and the testing protocols and enforcement procedures that they use, remain largely a mess. Collectively they provide little reassurance to the public, insufficient fairness and due process to the athletes, and unacceptable scientific and statistical reliability. The protections in place today are dictated much more by self-serving organizational and financial objectives than sound public policies to protect the health of the athletes involved.

In the context of the Russian doping scandal, at least three things need to happen going forward:

(1) the Russian governmental agencies overseeing their Olympic sports should be sanctioned and reformed;

(2) a new agency independent of the Russian government should monitor and enforce anti-doping protocols involving Russian athletes in the role of a receiver; and

(3) WADA should be replaced by a new global public health agency that is scrupulously independent of the sports it is created to test and monitor.

Sanctions should be imposed for Russia’s state-sponsored doping transgressions. It should begin with Russia indefinitely losing its seat on the IOC, unless and until Russian sports officials can demonstrate that their anti-doping program is: independent of Russian government influence; effective; and clean. Russia also should permanently lose its seat on WADA’s board and have no seat on any agency that is created to replace WADA.

Second, Russia’s sports anti-doping program should be placed in what American law calls a receivership. In the private sector receiverships typically are used to put mismanaged property or assets under the custodial supervision of an independent party known as a receiver. This model also has worked in the public sector to correct severe racial and economic inequities in public school systems.

The receiver—either an individual or global agency with strong public health credentials and no formal ties to Russia, the IOC, or WADA—would operate the Russian anti-doping program on behalf of Russian athletes and the Olympic movement. The receiver would ensure that Russian athletes are not being influenced, encouraged, or allowed to use illicit performance-enhancing substances. The Russian government would be charged with paying for the expenses of placing its athletes under a receivership. Payment of those costs would be a precondition for Russia being allowed to petition the IOC for reinstatement.

Finally, a new organization independent of Olympic and other sports that it will be monitoring should be established to replace the WADA. Its primary mission should be to protect the health and safety of athletes. The emphasis no longer would be on prohibiting the use of substances that are performance-enhancing in ways that are deemed to be competitively unfair.

Instead, this new global anti-doping, public health authority would only ban substances that are performance-enhancing and create unreasonable health risks to the athletes using them. Performance-enhancing substances would be allowed if they are medically prescribed and administered in dosages: (1) with a demonstrated therapeutic value; or (2) that have no unreasonable short-term or long-term health risks. Testing would be conducted regularly both during and outside competitions with the same frequency and protocols being applied to every athlete and to every sport.

THE NCAA IS WRONG for BIG TIME COLLEGIATE BASKETBALL, FOOTBALL, and OTHER SPORTS ©
  John Weston Parry

In the context of many collegiate football scandals and transgressions, what has happened to big time collegiate basketball in recent days should come as no surprise. “[S]candals in college hoops,” reads an ESPN The Magazine headline, “are as common as questionable fouls.” The depth of the corruption and hypocrisy surrounding the NCAA and its relatively new ruling collective is mind-blowing. As bad a record as the NCAA had in the second half of the Twentieth Century, what it has done since it began reorganizing in 1997 has been a national disgrace.

Over the past twenty years, the NCAA has ceded more and more power and influence to the super conferences and the most profitable university and college athletic programs. An NCAA-commissioned poll found that 79 percent of Americans surveyed believed that money was more important to major colleges than the welfare of their student-athletes. Furthermore, even NCAA President Mark Emmert finally has acknowledged—with a push from the FBI—that there should be a “fundamental change with the way college basketball is operating.”

The truly awful Penn State and FSU football scandals turned out to be only the tips of a toxic, super-conference iceberg. With the obsession to promote football and basketball revenues, regardless of the radioactive fallout, the NCAA’s new self-serving structure has polluted all the other Division I sports as well. Predictably, the most popular sports media solution being voiced to resolve the latest basketball scandals would embrace more pollution by permitting some student-athletes to share in the revenues. At the same time, the free market business model would continue to operate in collegiate sports with minimal constraints, but plenty of public, student, and alumni subsidies.

That proposed approach would add a new meaning to the term “for profit education.” Yet, it would not solve the overarching problem, which is that a relatively small number of super conference members and Notre Dame largely control the NCAA and the revenues collegiate sports generate. Although the proposed financial reformation would be more equitable for many—but not necessarily most—student-athletes, the side effects would make things even worse for the public, and further undermine academic and other educational values. The proposed changes would likely produce a system that provides limited financial rewards to a limited number of student-athletes. At the same time, a majority of the revenues would continue to flow to the most prominent athletic departments and their high profile coaches, while the overall education and health of most student-athletes would continue to be ignored.

The NCAA’s Reorganization

Economists and other social scientists who studied Division I athletic programs a number of years ago arrived at a rather self-evident, but nonetheless disturbing, conclusion that has become increasingly difficult to refute. Major college athletics operate like big businesses, although only a relatively few programs are actually profitable in the sense that they continue to produce deficits for their schools and/or the public. In 1997 to better leverage the economic opportunities for its most powerful members, the NCAA decided to restructure in ways intended to most benefit the major Division I athletic programs that produce the lion’s share of the revenues.

NCAA member schools were divided into three independently-operated divisions: I, II and III. The NCAA already had separated Division I programs into two groups by creating a special IA designation for the largest programs, based primarily on the amount of revenues they generated. With this money-weighted approach the NCAA ignored an obvious slippery slope problem, which has taken college athletics to the bottom of a very steep hill and into an educational quagmire.

When the NCAA reorganized in 1997 into three independent divisions, those with the IA designation were given far more power and influence than the rest of the Division I universities and colleges. Every Division I school was supposed to be treated equitably, but the IA representatives retained a majority of the NCAA board positions, even though they represented only about one-third of the total number of eligible universities and colleges. It was Animal Farm all over again. A relatively small number of Division I programs were more equitably situated than all the others.

Thus, year after year in this century the biggest programs consolidated their power and influence to such an extent that they eventually forced the NCAA to allow them to recommend self-punishments when they violated the NCAA rules and to allow the conferences and Notre Dame to make television deals on their own. Yet, even that disproportionate representation, increased self-government, and skyrocketing revenues were deemed insufficient to meet the commercial expectations of the largest collegiate sports factories, especially in football and basketball.

For many years almost all universities and colleges participated in intercollegiate sports by virtue of being members of a particular conference, an alliance which hardly ever changed. The military academies, Notre Dame, and a few other schools were not part of any conferences, but these were the notable exceptions because traditionally they have had enough alumni and other fan support to ensure that they could thrive on their own.

Then, a few years ago, major collegiate athletic programs in football, basketball and a few other high profile televised sports began soliciting and/or accepting bids from other major conferences. In too many instances these schools left the conferences where they had been for decades to go to a conference that appeared to give them the best chance to maximize their revenues and reduce their program deficits. To a large extent it was about television revenues and long-term deals to ensure increasing revenues for the teams and their conferences.

Soon there was chaos as conference realignments shook up the collegiate sports world. In many instances, universities and colleges joined more than one conference depending on the sport that was involved. That is why, for example, John’s Hopkins is in the Big Ten and Denver University—a national hockey power—is in the Big East, but only for lacrosse, while Notre Dame is a football independent, but a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for other sports. Fundamentally, though, it was mostly a money grab as intercollegiate television revenues in many different sports were increasing year after year after year. They key to obtaining those precious television revenues was no longer the NCAA, but rather through major conferences, except for Notre Dame, which already had negotiated a long-term deal with NBC.

Like Vito Cordeleon in the Godfather, the major conferences and Notre Dame issued ultimatums that increasingly the star struck NCAA could not refuse. Thus, in 2014 the NCAA reorganized once again using the fiction that they were giving student-athletes more of a voice. The stated intention, as set out on the NCAA’s website, was to “`better serve our members and most importantly, our student-athletes,’” but even NCAA President Mark Emmert had to admit that “`the new governance model represent[ed] a compromise” to allow the five super-conferences to largely establish and implement their own policies, including, as it has turned out, the imprimatur to largely police themselves.

Under the most recent reorganization, a presidential group comprised of representatives from the five super conference was created, which must approve any amendment before the Division I leadership body may even consider it. In addition, the Division I 24 member voting group must include 20 university and college presidents that have major football programs, plus one additional athletic director. For the first time, a student-athlete was given a seat, along with a faculty member, and a woman administrator. In addition, a Council was created to conduct the day-to-day business involving Division I matters, but at least 60 percent of those members must be athletic directors. Thus, the token student, the token faculty member, and the token woman have no real power under this governing structure. Moreover, none of these leadership bodies has any power independent of the five major conferences and Notre Dame.

As a result, those super-conference athletic programs and Notre Dame are able to control television contracts, conference memberships, the definition of amateurism, behavior of athletes and coaches, and other major collegiate sports-related issues. Such unfettered power is why, even before the 2014 governance was implemented, the NCAA and its Division IA members were compared to “cartels” or the “mafia.” In commenting about the NCAA’s reorganization, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post observed “you can’t help people who won’t help themselves… [They are like] staggering drunks who won’t let go of the bottle... Athletic directors are not the people who can solve these problems. They are the people who created them.”

North Carolina’s Massive Academic Fraud Scheme Escapes NCAA Sanctions

What Happened

What happened to North Carolina, especially to its hallowed basketball program, in perpetuating academic fraud over many years without being sanctioned, is a testament to the power of super-conference members and the NCAA’s growing irrelevancy. The NCAA’s primary function—in addition to allowing super conference members to make more money and pretty much do as they please—is to enforce the rules on amateurism to ensure that Division I athletic programs do not have to compensate student-athletes for most of the revenues they generate. To make matters worse, the NCAA employs a double-standard when it is enforcing its rules against super conference members like North Carolina, as opposed to other athletic programs.

The North Carolina academic fraud story is a travesty, but unfortunately it is not extraordinary, certainly not in context of the many other national scandals that have been allowed to fester in major college athletic programs in recent years. Penn State, Florida State, Auburn, Notre Dame, University of Southern California, Syracuse, Miami, and Oklahoma State are just some of the multiple offenders. Undoubtedly, many other programs also are guilty of serious transgressions that were never revealed or only revealed in part.

The academic fraud that was perpetrated in North Carolina’s basketball program started at least as far back as 1997, while the much beloved Dean Smith was still in charge. It evolved into a national scandal during the Roy Williams era, which began in 2003. Since he took over the program, Williams’ players have been high profile culprits and victims in the largest academic scandal ever uncovered at a university or college. Coach Williams continues to proclaim, however, that neither he nor anyone associated with North Carolina basketball knew anything about what was happening or did anything wrong, although, like President Nixon, he now vaguely admits that mistakes were made.

Those mistakes included sitting by while dozens of his players received passing grades in courses they never attended and did little or no work for. In many instances, those players turned in papers and other assignments that so-called academic counselors at the University had prepared for them. Influential segments of the university wanted star athletes to focus on sports without losing their eligibility should they either: fail too many courses; or their grade point averages dipped below 2.0 (C average) in an academic culture in which grade inflation guarantees that a vast majority of college students attain at least a 3.0 (B average).

During all those years—and even while the athletic department was being investigated for academic fraud—the school and its alumni were busy bragging about the high grades and graduation rates of UNC’s student-athletes. North Carolina chose to ignore the compelling connection between widespread cheating and the academic success of its athletes. The New York Times’ Michael Powell aptly described that fraud as one “of spectacular proportions… [F]or two decades… the university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student-athletes, most of them basketball and football players” who were African-Americans. In the process, many of the complicit athletes were deprived of a college education.

When Coach Williams returned to North Carolina from the University of Kansas stories about academic fraud involving college athletes already were widespread in the media. The danger of this type of academic cheating was well known in the sports world even then. So-called academic counselors for student-athletes at numerous colleges were being accused of facilitating this type of fraud. Thus, when Coach Williams took the unusual step of bringing Wayne Walden, who had served as an academic counselor for the men’s basketball team at Kansas, with him to perform the same academic support functions for Tar Heel athletes, this should have raised a red flag.

Walden became one of the central figures in the academic cheating scandal at UNC. According to Powell, once he was at UNC Walden “steer[ed] basketball players to these [fraudulent] classes” for nearly ten years. While academic cheating was not uncommon at other universities and colleges with major football or basketball programs, North Carolina’s academic transgressions cascaded into a national scandal in 2013. In large part this was due to the school’s reputation for academic excellence, the halo-effect of Dean Smith, and the apparent audacity, comprehensiveness, and longevity of the academic fraud.

These wrongdoings were not limited to the UNC basketball program. Football players apparently were involved in a greater number of academic offenses, but football teams have many more players than basketball teams. This fraud also involved some non-athletes, but it mostly involved African-American athletes, who were trying to achieve the American dream through athletics.

According to the New York Times the transgressions were centered in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, which “presided over … `a shadow curriculum’ designed to help struggling students – many of them athletes – stay afloat.” Audits revealed that there were “problems with dozens of courses and …as many as 560 unauthorized grade changes were suspected of having been made… dating back to 1997.” In 2012 a university reading specialist, Marie Willingham, went public contending that many of the athletes she had worked with over the years were unable to “read at anything close to college level.” Willingham also acknowledge that she and other academic counselors advised athletes to take these fraudulent classes.

The university’s response was underwhelming. It promised to direct staff to monitor courses to ensure that they were actually being held. No university officials or head coaches were held accountable. Instead, the University focused its wrath on Willingham for publicly blowing the whistle on the widespread academic fraud. She not only lost her part-time university position, but she also was fired from her job as a grade school teacher. Eventually Willingham obtained a $335,000 settlement from the University, but as part of that agreement UNC did not have to admit to any wrongdoing—and, of course, it never has made such an admission.

Both the University and Coach Williams continued to plead ignorance or issued unconvincing denials. UNC’s provost sanctimoniously pretended that “there had been no way to anticipate such behavior … in an institution that relies on the professionalism and basic good will of its employees.” He added that the universities were the real victims of these transgressions because they could no “longer operate on trust.” The New York Times Editorial Board saw the problem differently. North Carolina, “`[many other] schools, the conferences, and the N.C.A.A…. are engaging in exploitation [of student-athletes]…’”

The NCAA’s Convoluted Response

Eventually the NCAA charged North Carolina with institutional negligence (lack of control) in allowing these academic violations to occur. What concerned the NCAA investigators was not the fraud or the educational damage to the athletes involved, but rather the strong possibility that those athletes violated the rules on amateurism by receiving special benefits that regular students did not. To the public, this appeared to be a bizarre twist on the notion that North Carolina was cheating its competitors at other universities and colleges by cheating, which normally is the standard in other sports for these types of infractions.

The first two notices did not even mention the vaunted basketball program, which was strange. At North Carolina men’s basketball is more important than any other sport by far, including football. Thus, it seemed as if the NCAA intended for the powerful basketball program to escape and serious sanctions, despite its obvious involvement in the scandal. It was not until the third notice of allegations that the basketball program became the center of attention.

The third notice focused almost exclusively on Roy Williams’ program, placing his basketball legacy in jeopardy. If the NCAA concluded that players on Williams’ 2005 and 2009 championship teams received extra benefits, those championships could be voided. The University of Maryland’s president, Wallace Loh—whose school had left the ACC acrimoniously a couple of years ago—opined UNC basketball deserved the so-called “death penalty” that in 1986 had effectively destroyed Southern Methodist University’s football program.

Neither Coach Williams nor other UNC officials disputed the NCAA’s allegations. Instead, athletic director Bubba Cunningham argued that the NCAA’s charges against the basketball program should be withdrawn because the new allegations had amended the original charges, which supposedly violated NCAA bylaws. That legal ploy suggested the University understood that if it were to prevail, it would be best not to argue about the truthfulness of the NCAA’s allegations.

Ultimately, although the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions found what had happened at North Carolina was “troubling,” it issued a convoluted ruling about sanctions that defied logic and suggested bad faith. The Committee’s chair, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey, explained that under its bylaws the “NCAA defers to member schools to determine whether academic fraud occurred…” Moreover, such fraud could only exist if North Carolina athletes received a benefit that other students did not receive. Since the academic fraud encompassed non-athletes, there was no violation of NCAA rules. Thus, the basketball programs 2005 and 2009 national championship seasons would be unaffected, so that with the national championship the team won in 2016, Coach Williams still would have one more than Dean Smith, and remain in the college basketball hall of fame.

There are two problems with the NCAA’s ruling, beyond the fact that on its face it seems preposterous. First, it makes a mockery of the NCAA’s carefully crafted illusion of the student-athlete. Both UNC and the NCAA not only failed to ensure that these students received an education in return for their athletic contributions, but they facilitated the cheating that led to those failures by looking the other way.

Second, if there actually was no violation of NCAA rules, how does one explain the severe penalty the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) received for unintentionally committing a far more minor infraction? Caltech is a Division III program that has earned its reputation for intercollegiate sports futility. The university is a world-renown academic institution that gives out no athletic scholarships. Every student who attends is allowed to sample classes at the beginning of each semester. For administrative convenience, students are considered part-time until their course registrations are finalized. Allowing students such flexibility is one of the university’s guiding academic principles.

Between 2007 and 2010, about 30 Caltech athletes chose to sample classes like any other students. Under NCAA arbitrary rules, however, these athletes were deemed academically ineligible to play any intercollegiate sports. When astonished school officials realized that they were in technical violation of the rules, they promptly reported the situation to the NCAA. The NCAA chose to impose a steep penalty anyway, placing the athletic program on three years probation for failing to exercise institutional control. Their punishment also included a one-year ban on playing in post-season games, although as columnist Norman Chad pointed out, it was “akin to forbidding Pope Benedict XVI from breakdancing.”

What the NCAA did to Caltech borders on the absurd, but it provides a compelling contrast to the manufactured rationale that was used to conclude North Carolina did not similarly fail to exercise institutional control when it allowed dozens—perhaps hundreds—of student-athletes to take fake courses. What should have happened was easy to figure out: Caltech deserved a warning, while North Carolina deserved to be sanctioned severely. Instead, the NCAA did the exact opposite in order to protect one of the nation’s premiere men’s college basketball teams.

NCAA College Basketball Recruiting Mess: Show Me the Money

Men’s college basketball played at the major conference level finally is being recognized for the sleazy mess it became long ago. There is no doubt that the basketball is entertaining to many sports fans, but as the FBI has helped establish—and even the NCAA is finally admitting—the game needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, expecting former secretary of state and collegiate sports fan, Condoleeza Rice—and a group made up of college basketball insiders—to do what is best for student-athletes and the public is unrealistic, especially since the super-conferences continue to have substantial influence and final say over any NCAA actions affecting them.

Creating a task force or special committee made up of friendly faces is a go-to tactic when an organization wants to try to control and limit the damage from an ongoing scandal of its own making. That is what the NFL did —and continues to do—in order to try to manage the issue of player brain damage by manufacturing distortions, deceptions, and lies. The latest college basketball fiasco is different, though. It was largely unearthed and publicized because of a major FBI investigation. Usually only international sports cartels are subject to such broad-based American prosecutions. The federal government’s decision to invade what once was the NCAA’s private domain is another strong signal that the organization is becoming irrelevant.

The NCAA is hoping to stem its downward slide by issuing a self-serving report with Condoleeza Rice as the lead author to give the likely whitewash a modicum of credibility. The nature of the criminal activities associated with college basketball, played in the elite conferences that supply a vast majority of professional players, involve two critical aspects of the game. Both have major financial implications for the beneficiaries.

First, there is the recruitment process that helps to bankroll the programs at these elite basketball schools. It supplies the star players, which make all the various revenue streams possible, especially the lucrative television deals. For years there have been countless stories focusing on the unethical, illegal, and/or illicit practices in the college basketball and football recruitment process. These exposes have involved under-the-table money, prostitutes and other adult entertainment, fancy dinners, inflated and false promises, and violations of NCAA rules—all in order to obtain the most coveted prospects. In response, the NCAA and the schools themselves have done very little—beyond issuing self-serving investigative reports and mostly anemic sanctions—to police or to otherwise correct the massive malfeasance and misfeasance perpetrated by high-profile college and university athletic departments, coaches specifically designated to “handle” recruitment, and shady alumni.

Second, there is the corrupt process of signing star high school and collegiate athletes to professional basketball contracts, as well as all the endorsements and other financial dealings that professional players benefit from. It is here where there is a divergence of interests between the college and university athletic departments, including their NCAA minions, versus the players and their various unofficial representatives.

The purpose of recruitment is to steer players towards college athletic careers that will benefit men’s collegiate basketball programs. In most instances, though, it is in the financial interest of these players, through their representatives, to sign professional contracts before they complete their college eligibility, and too often after their first and only year in college. Thus, it is not surprising that implicit and even explicit arrangements are made frequently in which players promise to use a particular agent, agency, or other player representative to represent them in negotiating professional contracts and endorsement deals in exchange for providing immediate benefits to the players or people the players care about, such as their family members or significant others.

Too often AAU and high school and college coaches, parents, relatives, and other people who are close to the players receive money or other benefits in order to convince the athletes to sign with an agent/agency, or a company, such as Adidas, Under Armour, or Nike, that wants those athletes to wear and thus advertise their shoes and other basketball merchandise. When those agreements are negotiated or signed while a player is still in college—or about to go to college—the athletes involved are supposed to lose their eligibility, while the people who offered them money or other benefits may be subject to criminal prosecution. In addition, because of the NCAA, there are laws in almost every state and the District of Columbia that make it illegal for an agent to represent a basketball player who is still a student-athlete in college. (See Blog 5: How the NCAA and a National Lawyers Group Made It a Crime to Represent College Athletes)

Nevertheless, it has been relatively easy for the high school and college athletes, agents, and shoe companies and other corporate sponsors to break the rules. The pay-offs for acting illicitly or illegally can be substantial for all the offending parties. Even average NBA players earn tens of millions of dollars in their careers. Thus, it is no surprise that Duke’s head basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski, has complained, “Before these kids ever come to us, we are not the only ones recruiting these youngsters.”

These types of problems do not exist with athletes who are willing to give up their so-called amateur status, especially Olympic athletes and young basketball players who sign professional contracts and choose not to play in college. All of these athletes may sign contracts with agents and benefit from endorsement deals without there being any penalty to them or to the individuals who sign them to contracts. With Olympic athletes the money they receive is placed in a trust, which can be used for expenses while they are competing as so-called amateurs, and then the money may be spent as they like once they turn professional or retire from Olympic athletics.

If the NCAA had employed the Olympic model for student-athletes, the FBI investigation would have been pointless. Most of the alleged illegal activities of those suspects would no longer be considered crimes. Also, there would be much less incentive for agents or shoe companies to pay assistant coaches, family members, or players to get the athletes to sign agent contracts and endorsement deals, at least no more incentive than in any other situation where highly talented entertainers are involved.

One and Done Rules & Other Problems Will be Difficult to Solve

Unfortunately, even if the NCAA were to surprise us and arrive at a reasonably acceptable solution for dealing with the bribes and other under-the-table payouts to standout basketball recruits—and all the people who are thought to be able to influence their decisions—that alone would not make much of a difference. There are a myriad of problems that the NCAA and its leadership have neglected or made much worse in collegiate sports. Like FIFA, the IOC, and the NFL, the organization’s infrastructure is rotten and needs to be replaced.

Also, the narrow solution that Condoleeza Rice will advocate for might not even adequately address the related problem of what to do about young, but very talented players, who opt out of college after one or two years of eligibility. Despite all the graft and corruption surrounding elite college basketball players, the NCAA appears to be trying to further to professionalize the college game by extending the requirement that a player spend at least one full year in college to at least two years, and maybe more. The utopian deception is that somehow an extra year or two of college will provide these elite players with better educational opportunities, which appears to be nonsense given the money and effort that has to be expended already to help many of these star athletes pass their college courses. The primary reason big time basketball programs want to force more of these elite players to stay longer is to ensure that those teams can successfully recruit the very best—and most lucrative—players.

Beyond the fact that any such restrictions should have been disallowed as improper restraints on trade long ago—but are still permitted—NBA owners would probably oppose such a plan because it does not appear to be in their financial interests. NBA teams like to be able to sign extremely talented high school players. Furthermore, the league has been busy promoting its development league, which now has Gatorade as its prime sponsor. At the same time, many elite men’s collegiate basketball programs could be concerned that under the new eligibility rules too many more players would decide to skip college altogether. Instead, assuming they were not yet good enough to secure an NBA contract immediately, those players could sign up with the NBA’s development league or some foreign professional league.

Conclusion

In order to solve the many problems that major college athletics present, including widespread academic fraud, bribery, pay-offs, and other graft, there needs to be a seismic shift. The authority to monitor, police, and sanction illicit behaviors by athletic departments, alumni, coaches and athletes should be removed from the control of the super-conferences and Notre Dame. This can be achieved in two ways. First, the NCAA could be reorganized, once again, with a view towards making it more like the Knight Commission. The problem with that approach is that the organization still would be the NCAA which—despite a long history and numerous reorganizations—has always failed to strike the proper educational and fiscal balance between athletics and academics, and to properly police athletic departments, alumni, coaches and athletes.

The preferable approach would be to dissolve the NCAA and replace it with a newly-formed governmental entity or a new entity established or designated by Congress to monitor, police, and sanction colleges, universities, conferences, athletic departments, alumni, coaches, and athletes that fail to follow standards, regulations, and rules that the new entity would establish. A new entity composed mainly of educators without a vested interest in big time college athletics would allow for a fresh start after many decades of futility. (See also Blog 9: National Health Commission On Sports)

LEGAL FICTIONS UNDERMINING PROFESSIONAL AND COLLEGIATE SPORTS ON BEHALF OF CARTELS©
  By John Weston Parry

More than anything else what allows sports cartels to thrive in the United States at the expense of the public interest is how our antitrust, liability, and criminal laws are applied to professional and intercollegiate sports. The outright antitrust exemption for baseball, the partial exemptions for football and other professional sports, shield laws for Olympic organizations, and the dismaying embrace of the NCAA’s Orwellian concepts of the student-athlete and amateurism have established dysfunctional precedents and systems of monitoring and enforcement that are based on legal fictions. Providing the privilege of self-governance for these sports cartels never made much sense to begin with. Unfortunately, over time the resulting dysfunctions have become even more outrageous as the leading sports organizations have grown into politically astute domestic and global corporate giants that too often treat their host communities and fans with contempt and jeopardize the health of the athletes who make them so much money.

Professional Team Sports: Exceptions Make the Rules

Antitrust Exemptions and Enforcement Privileges

In the United States, the antitrust laws—and how they are interpreted and enforced—have provided substantially reduced liability for major professional team sports when they engage in various activities that might otherwise be viewed as illegal restraints of trade. Baseball has a total exemption. This legal fiction exists due to a 1922 U.S. Supreme Court decision. Oliver Wendell Homes and his brethren unanimously concluded—wink, wink—that major league teams in the post-World War I era were not engaged in interstate commerce, even though those teams played their games in cities located in many different states and the District of Columbia.

Subsequent judicial decisions stopped short of providing the same absolute antitrust exemption for other major professional sports leagues in this country, which were intentionally structured to operate very similarly to baseball. That judicial distinction for no apparent legal reason meant in 2010 when the NFL tried to argue that that it should be viewed as 32 independently-owned teams, the highest court of the land issued a unanimous opinion, reaffirming that the NFL—and presumably the NBA and NHL— may not share in baseball’s carte blanche antitrust privileges.

Nevertheless, substantial interpretive allowances have made antitrust enforcement against those other professional leagues much less likely and proof of violations far more elusive as compared to most other American businesses. Collectively, Major League Baseball (MLB) and the other major American professional sports leagues have been allowed to operate like monopolies in carrying out fundamental aspects of their business models. Yet, despite the many privileges given to and the transgressions committed by our professional leagues, arguably the NCAA, as is discussed later, has become the worst American antitrust scofflaw, followed closely by Olympic organizations.

Over many decades meaningful competition for our four major professional sports leagues has been rare. No alternative leagues have emerged as serious contenders for market shares since the mergers of the American Basketball Association into the NBA in 1976, the World Hockey Association into the NHL in 1979, and the collapse of the Trump-inspired United States Football League in 1985. Owner-driven collusion to hold down player salaries and benefits, while not particularly successful in recent years, have been revealed in the NFL and appear to exist, to a certain extent, in the other major sports leagues as well.

Nonetheless, this type of abuse has not been subject to much legal scrutiny because in recent years the violations have been largely ineffective due to the owners themselves and the early brilliance of labor-lawyer and MLB Players Association founder and chief executive, Marvin Miller. As the professional football teams in Washington and Dallas have illustrated repeatedly, for many owners the incentive for signing the most valuable talent, especially for the teams with the largest bank rolls, continues to be greater than the incentive for supporting owner-orchestrated collusion. For this reason the not so laissez-faire free market appears to produce a relatively balanced outcome much of the time when it comes to salaries and other monetary benefits for the players.

Yet, as compared to international soccer, our major professional team sports have many more economic restrictions, and virtually all of them favor the owners and leagues. Furthermore, mostly through the work of their typically competent and occasionally exceptional commissioners, who usually serve their owners well at least financially, all four major sports leagues compel their team owners to promote competitive balance. They do this in large part— and thus violate the spirit of our antitrust laws — by allowing, with minor variations, the worst teams to draft the best new players first, rather than allowing those players to negotiate with any team they choose.

In the NBA, there is a draft lottery, but only the worst teams are included. The more they lose the better the chances are that they will select at the top of the draft and be guaranteed a lottery pick for having missed the playoffs. Furthermore, the NFL artificially dampens salaries for players in their first four years in the league, and all the leagues, in different ways, restrain players who wish to sign with new teams, particularly early in their professional careers.

In basketball and football, the NBA and NFL commissioners working in tandem with the NCAA, also have placed serious age restrictions on high school players, who otherwise would be talented enough to make the jump directly to the professional ranks. Here the common corporate interest is in allowing the major college sports conferences to serve as free training grounds for those two professional leagues, while ensuring that many of the most lucrative college programs continue to have a steady supply of high quality players for way below market value.

These eligibility restrictions based on age have little to do with encouraging elite athletes to get a college education and everything to do with the economic welfare of the two leagues, their teams, and the major intercollegiate athletic departments and programs. One can only imagine the public and legal outcry if performing artists were prohibited from becoming professionals until after they had reached a certain age in order to strongly encourage them to perform in college without being paid a salary.

Some of the public interest clamor for enforcing the antitrust laws against teams in the major professional leagues has been diluted because both management and labor now tend to benefit, at least financially, from the monopolistic practices that generate escalating revenues for owners and players alike. Occasionally, the players will charge collusion or unfair business practices, which still exist, but this is usually a strategy for improving their positions in the collective bargaining process. Serious legal challenges have been relatively rare, since neither side wants to disturb the geese that lay the golden eggs. A few years ago, even when it was clearly documented that the NFL owners were engaging in collusion, the players union ultimately chose to look the other way in exchange for receiving additional financial benefits as part of the collective bargaining agreement.

Generally, today’s owners and players agree more than they disagree. In 2016, both the MLB and NBA reached mutually beneficial contractual arrangements that allow both the owners and labor to share in the accelerating revenues. The NFL and NHL have existing agreements that do not expire until 2020 and 2022, respectively. Thus, it is not surprising that in all four major professional team sports, players have voluntarily agreed to place substantial limits on free agency to ensure the financial health of their respective leagues and to generate more revenues for themselves. Although there have been notable exceptions, the players generally have not been the primary victims of these sports cartels during the Twenty First Century.

The real victims of the leagues’ monopolistic practices are the fans and local communities that continue to pay more and more for the privilege of watching games or having or keeping a professional team in their metropolitan areas. The price for tickets and the competition to obtain professional sports teams have been artificially inflated because the leagues have been given excessive control of the supply and demand, which is another way of saying they are violating the intent of our antitrust laws.

Criminal and Civil Wrongdoings

While antitrust is the most frequent area in which American laws are marginalized in favor of leagues and owners of sports franchises, often law enforcement and the courts also apply the laws differently when athletes and coaches commit or are accused of committing civil or criminal wrongdoings. Traditionally, the major professional sports leagues, much like the N.C.A.A., have been ceded considerable discretion to enforce their own self-serving rules of conduct without interference from the courts. Furthermore, the legal concept known as assumption of risk has been interpreted broadly to favor teams, leagues, and sports organizations when there have been injuries to athletes or fans during games and other competitions.

In recent years, however, there have been some fractures and fissures in these legal privileges for professional and collegiate athletes and coaches, especially in matters involving sexual and domestic abuse against women and children. Looking the other way or giving special treatment to those sports celebrities in serious criminal matters has become far less socially acceptable, although it continues to happen. Given the positive contributions in recent years made by the Justice Department and the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, especially in investigating and prosecuting Title IX-related violations of athletes and coaches, it will be interesting to see what happens to such enforcement under the Trump Administration. The signs are not good for victims.

Traditionally courts have been even more reluctant to become involved in on-the-field matters, but increasingly they are being asked to do so. Athlete-on-athlete violence that used to be viewed as being the exclusive domains of the given sport that was involved is on occasion being prosecuted criminally. The Economist has described this legal evolution as the creation of new “boundaries of …. prosecutorial discretion.” Within the National Hockey League, for example, violence with fists continues to be deemed legally acceptable, but using a hockey stick as a weapon is not; nor is deliberately smashing someone’s head into the ice.

Nonetheless, even now most North American courts remain reluctant to interfere with self-serving administrative punishments of sports leagues when players violate civilized norms of society and cause serious injuries to their opponents. Perhaps the most notable example of such deference to league policies occurred in the over-hyped scandal known as "deflategate." While it did not involve criminal activities per se, the NFL through its Commissioner, Roger Goodell, used that incident to make a blatant and largely successful power play to re-establish control over player conduct matters without court interference.

Goodell issued a harsh and arbitrary penalty against one of the league's most visible and popular players, New England quarterback Tom Brady. The Commissioner's decision was based largely on subjective impressions and circumstantial evidence — which seemed to have been circumstantial at best — that Brady had instructed team employees to deliberately deflate the air pressure in the footballs used during the 2015 AFC Championship Game to make it easier for him to throw.

When the federal courts refused to overturn the Commissioner's arbitrary and legally-deficient ruling, the league was able to wrest control of personal conduct matters from outside interference, not only from the player's union but also the judiciary. Deflategate might have seemed like a minor squable between colleagues who share humongous revenues. However, the precedent is likely to be destabilizing for serious personal conduct matters, such as sexual assaults, domestic violence, drugs, and conflicts of interest by team doctors. Goodell has demonstrated that, at least until the current CBA concludes in 2020, he can act unfairly in player personal conduct matters without serious consequences due to the acquiescence of ownership.

The NCAA, Amateurism, Student-Athletes, and the Law

In the words of former Washington Post columnist Tracee Hamilton, “[i]t is impossible to be surprised by the dreadful hubris and hypocrisy of college sports, which seem a daily occurrence….” While some of this corruption has been going on since the early 1900’s, it was institutionalized beginning in 1951 when Walter Byers became the first executive director of the NCAA. For nearly forty years Byers established his fiefdom, which later he would acknowledge was a “cartel.” Byers was instrumental in the cartel's creation and expansion by inventing and exploiting the concept of the “student-athlete” and then using his influence to dilute the impact of Title IX for women athletes. He created an amoral agenda, which was made even worse by the NCAA officials who followed him.

The massive problems that have been uncovered involving the NCAA and intercollegiate athletics during the Twenty First Century have centered on, but not been limited to, the dichotomy between: highly commercialized major Division I athletic programs, especially those that now populate the super-conferences in football and basketball; and noncommercial sports, which have no scholarships, tend to lack sufficient funding, and are at risk of being discontinued. Major intercollegiate sports have been and continue to be run as or like big businesses. Hypocritically, though, under the misleading banner of amateurism, those with the talent—the student-athletes—have been prohibited from receiving payments and many other benefits beyond tuition and recently some—but not all—essential related expenses.

At the same time, head coaches and their top assistants—like corporate leaders and their chief underlings—tend to be highly paid, oftentimes excessively so. It is common—and thus no longer surprising—for a major super conference football or basketball coaches to receive considerably more in compensation than the often highly paid university and college presidents to whom they ultimately report. In more recent years, the athletic directors at schools with these inflated quasi-professional programs have been receiving extremely high salaries as well for their non-academic revenue-generating contributions.

Unfortunately, when winning, making money, promoting sports-related programs, and increasing alumnae donations from athletes and sports fans drive these universities and colleges, education inevitably suffers, sometimes terribly so. Rarely does this homage to big time sports occur without negative consequences for the athletes, academic programs, student bodies, nearby communities, and general public.

Super-conference sports have many of the same trappings as professional franchises with respect to marketing, television contracts, shared revenues, and rules of operation with their league and conference members. Furthermore, as socially favored “non-profit” educational sports businesses, they have been insulated from American antitrust laws and other regulations, and largely exempt from taxation. In addition to commissioners, who protect and promote the interests of their conferences, these privileged programs have the NCAA and their member university and college presidents on call to perform yeoman public relations duties on their behalf.

Hypocrisy and plausible deniability have replaced academic and intellectual integrity when these major intercollegiate athletic programs are likely to benefit or appear at risk. Corruption, chaos, academic fraud, criminal behaviors, and deceit—in the pursuit of revenues—are the hallmarks of super-conference sports, which continue to be periodically reorganized within the NCAA to allow these transgressions to go largely unsupervised and unchecked. These sports businesses have compromised educational values at almost every Division I college and university. They even infect the most academically prestigious Division III schools, which supposedly do not have athletic scholarships, but nonetheless stretch the rules to provide full scholarships to students who happen to be elite athletes—wink, wink.

The NCAA’s notion of amateurism has been a bad joke perpetuated to ensure that all the adults involved can generate more revenues for themselves at the expense of the student-athletes. Even the once seemingly sacrosanct Heisman Trophy, given to the most distinguished college football player, on and off-the-field, has been transformed into a showcase of bad behaviors and the advantages of neglecting academics in favor of football and monetary glory. Criminal accusations, sexual violence, cover-ups, fraud, self-indulgence, self-promotion, and leaving college without a degree have become the trophy’s hallmarks for future generations, rather than an athletic legacy for future Supreme Court justices and other pillars of society.

Student-Athletes

While big time head coaches and athletic directors have been receiving kings’ ransoms for their services, until recently student-athletes have received tuition, room and board, but very little else—at least not legally—for supplying the essential ingredient without which most of the intercollegiate athletic department revenues would disappear: the athletic talent. That has changed slightly with the NCAA now allowing universities and colleges—with the permission and direction of their conferences—the option of providing stipends to pay for various incidentals of college living for these student-athletes.

While most of the super-conferences have approved this option in some form for all their student-athletes, other Division I universities and colleges, have tended to be more selective, often only providing it to student-athletes in the most popular sports usually basketball and/or football, and sometimes hockey, lacrosse, or baseball. This has created a new hierarchy that reflects the emphasis each university or college places on intercollegiate athletics, and the sports most important to them.

Not surprisingly, what constitutes the maximum allowable stipend differs from institution to institution, depending upon what the current athletic scholarships cover. By agreement, for the moment schools are deferring to guidelines created by the federal government to make these determinations. While the intent is to cover basic living expenses, the problem is that the stipend is presented as cash, which can be spent for a variety of purposes that are difficult to track. This gives the super-conference programs, which offer bigger stipends an advantage in recruitment, even if the total scholarship amounts are the same.  Coaches—and athletic department personnel—however, have no such limitations on pay. They can be paid millions of dollars.

In addition, coaches, athletic departments, and colleges and universities are allowed to keep substantial revenues from various endorsement deals, which often involve merchandise, such as shoes and uniforms that coaches or school officials make their athletes wear. The NCAA has hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and other assets in reserve. Yet, if the student-athletes try to benefit similarly—even if it is to receive compensation when commercial enterprises use their names or likenesses—such actions, if discovered, typically result in their being suspended or even dismissed from their teams and having their scholarships revoked.

This, however, seems to be changing incrementally. A federal court in O’Bannon v. NCAA, found that the defendants had violated federal antitrust provisions by prohibiting college athletes from making a profit on the commercial uses of their images and likenesses. Beyond piercing the veil of amateurism as a legal defense, the judge tried to alter the economic landscape by replicating the Olympic model as a proposed solution for compensating college athletes. This would have allowed intercollegiate athletes to place their earnings in a trust that could be used for legitimate living expenses now with the rest to be available to them when they became full-time professionals or otherwise ended their amateur status.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeal, however, in reviewing the decision issued a compromise. The ruling became final in October 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take the case. The high court's decision not to become involved meant that going forward the NCAA’s rule-making apparatus and decision-making, at least in the Ninth Circuit, would be subject to American antitrust laws. In addition, there was now an influential precedent for other jurisdictions to follow.

Nevertheless, that compromise seems to have pressured the NCAA into agreeing to a settlement of over $200 million to compensate former college athletes for not providing them with fair and adequate scholarships. What was even more troubling about the agreement, however, is that the Associated Press reported that ot would be funded from "NCAA reserves... No school or conference will be required to contribute." This financial largesse raises two important questions: just how much money does the NCAA have at its disposal and how much of it came from the schools and conferences it is supposed to monitor and discipline?

In addition, the student-athletes legal fiction remains in place. Going forward what the NCAA must allow universities and colleges to provide their student-athletes, if they so choose, continues to be narrowly limited to scholarships that cover reasonable expenses related to attending college. Since health-care is a cost typically born by students, and not viewed as an essential educational expense, the O’Bannon decision leaves that critical issue in the selfish hands of the NCAA and the various athletic conferences to determine.

Currently, the NCAA does not require sponsoring schools to pay the medical bills of their student-athletes, although the NCAA does not prohibit it either. Typically, though, student-athletes must cover health costs with their own insurance. Moreover if these athletes should incur long-term or catastrophic injuries, there is little expectation that the sponsoring schools will compensate them for their care or lost earnings potential.

As a result, elite college football players, like LSU and Stanford running backs, Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey, chose to make the wise career decisions not to play for their college teams in much publicized bowl games. This avoided the possibility of those players being injured and thus jeopardizing their likely multi-million dollar pay days. Unfortunately, very few college athletes have the realistic opportunity to make such a choice. In almost every other circumstance college players are compelled to risk their bodies, and sometimes their careers, without any financial or insurance protections.

The NCAA Should be Dismantled

Under the warped leadership of the NCAA, hypocrisy, commercialization, greed, and a fundamental denigration of fundamental values have been given free reign. The super conferences, through member university and college athletic departments, have transformed football, basketball, and many other men's sports, including hockey, lacrosse, soccer, baseball, and wrestling, into state and university supported business enterprises with little deference to academics and moral values. Many college students at those schools may be highly entertained by those sports, but the student bodies, their parents, and the public are being shortchanged, over-charged, and over-taxed if college’s primary mission is to educate and train students to become good citizens with good jobs.

Because of the NCAA and its protective legal shield, there is little or no accountability. With all their bad behaviors, even our professional leagues—with the possible exception of the NFL—are less tarnished and more accountable than big time collegiate sports. Moreover, these dysfunctional values tend to undermine non-super-conference universities and colleges as well, including many with the best academic reputations.

Unfortunately, there can be no meaningful progress in reestablishing educational values in intercollegiate sports, as long as the NCAA continues to control and oversee the agenda. In John Feinstein’s view, the NCAA “has worked out about as well as [Neville] Chamberlain…in 1938…. It is time to go back to square one.” Under its own criteria, the NCAA has proven to be organizationally and functionally incapable of exercising institutional control over its own staff, much less member universities and colleges athletic departments. Thus, the NCAA deserves its own rarely imposed “death penalty” for tolerating and promoting misfeasance, malfeasance, and outright corruption.

Doing away with athletic departments and placing oversight in the hands of academic faculty is an idea that has percolated for years, but is unrealistic and impractical for much of the collegiate athletic world, with or without the NCAA’s presence. As long as revenue-generation, trying to win at all cost, and powerful alumnae are viewed as essential components of major intercollegiate athletic programs, athletic departments or similar structures with different names will continue to thrive and exert their influence on campuses. Federal guidance and oversight, including new laws and regulations, and more active judicial involvement are all needed to constrain and ameliorate the social pathologies, corruption, and incentives to misbehave that characterize major intercollegiate sports.

THE UGLY SIDE OF SPORTS CARTELS​NFL NCAA MLB IOC WADA IAAF ITF FIFA NBA/WNBA NHL MLS PGA AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY ©​

The Roman Colosseum

THE UGLY SIDE OF SPORTS CARTELS
NFL NCAA MLB IOC WADA IAAF ITF FIFA NBA/WNBA NHL MLS PGA
AGONY IN THE SHADOWS OF VICTORY ©