This has been a bad month for people who still believe in purely amateur student athletics.
Over the past week, a number of reports have surfaced about Auburn junior quarterback and Heisman Trophy frontrunner Cam Newton. According to reports originally published on ESPN.com, a man who said he represented Newton told Mississippi State he was looking for payment to sign there. And later, recruiters from Mississippi State told ESPN Newton and his father asked for money in return for Newton's committment to the school.
Almost one month ago exactly, Sports Illustrated dropped a similar—if less timely—bomb on college football fans. Their article, ""Confessions of an agent,"" is a tell-all by former veteran agent Josh Luchs in which he names 30 athletes he said he paid during the 1990s with cash and gifts that violated NCAA rules.
These are not, of course, the only revelations to surface about college athletes, and by no means will they prove to be the last. What they show, however, is further evidence that the idea of amateur college sports and ""student-athletes"" in major revenue sports is a joke.
Anyone who was truly shocked by the allegations against Newton or the stories in the article about Luchs—and there has been plenty of hand wringing in the past month about them—clearly has not been paying attention to the world of college athletics for a long time.
What it boils down to is simple: College sports are big money for universities. Given the choice between being A School That Does Things The Right Way and a school that rakes in a ton of TV revenue thanks to a star player, it's easy to see which track many universities will take.
There are millions of dollars at stake when it comes to player recruiting, so the temptation to throw a few thousand (or, in Newton's case, a few hundred thousand) dollars at a player is clearly there. The same goes for professional agents like Luchs, who could see millions in commission if they're the guy who gets the first-round draft pick. This system of payment has been around for years, and we can only assume is more common at major programs than we would like to believe, possibly even this one.
Obviously, I have no evidence to suggest the Wisconsin Athletic Department has taken part in any wrongdoing whatsoever, and no one else does. But, in a purely hypothetical scenario, if it came out next week that a Wisconsin football player took money from an agent when he played here, would it shock you? Would you truly be taken aback if an investigative report found that UW recruiters discussed payment for a prized player?
If it would, you need to realize the world college athletics has become. We should not be surprised at any revelations of athletes taking money from schools when they are theoretically amateur student-athletes. Considering the amount of money at stake, it is almost inevitable that schools and recruiters would resort to paying for players.
Now that we have established that the problem exists, the next question is what we do about it.
The solution of stripping college athletics of its amateur status and letting this system of payment be an open and accepted process is not an option. Such a system would create a college recruitment process similar to professional free agency bidding wars, with the richest and largest programs able to lure top recruits away from the smaller schools like TCU or Boise State that have made college football so much fun in the past few seasons.
At the same time, the status quo is hardly desirable. While the existence of this kind of payment is obvious in general, specific cases are far more difficult to nail down—surely the problem is more wide-spread than USC, Cam Newton or the players Luchs named, but we cannot say for certain which schools are taking part. The result is a recruiting underbelly that only rears its ugly head when programs are stripped of wins (and players of awards), embarrassing athletes and the NCAA as a whole.
Clearly, then, the solution is exactly what people have been saying for years: The NCAA has to do a better job investigating violations and enforcing its rules. Programs should know that whatever benefit they get from paying a star player (and whatever profit a star player gets from accepting money) can be taken away when, not if, the NCAA finds out.
Until that point, the system of pay-to-play will only become more prevalent.
How should the NCAA handle scandals over recruiting? E-mail Nico at savidgewilki@dailycardinal.com.
