 |
| |
|
 |
 |
Sports, not sex Time to recruit players -- and stop tempting themPosted: Friday January 17, 2003 5:07 PM
With football recruiting season at a boil, there is growing alarm on college campuses that some recruiting weekends are veering out of control. This follows a recent spat of embarrassments and criminal investigations involving sex and alcohol at recruiting parties for visiting prospects, some of which have led to NCAA sanctions. Among findings against Alabama last year, for instance, the NCAA cited players inviting strippers to on-campus recruiting parties. But that’s mild compared to what’s transpired in past years on campus junkets to Florida, Colorado and Michigan, where lawbreaking antics have brought out the police. Some college officials have responded by handing down rules to better supervise the entertainment of high school recruits. That’s not enough for some. Selby Parker, a counseling psychologist who early in his career was academic counselor at Southern Mississippi, has written asking the American Football Coaches Association to assume a leadership role. In his words, “I am concerned over the continued stories regarding the recruitment of high school athletes, where schools are using the sexual drives of young men to influence them to attend their respective institutions." Folks could start by weighing in on the tradition at some schools of inviting attractive co-eds -- groups with names like the Arizona Angels, Alabama Belles and the Garnet and Gold Girls -- to escort recruits on their visit. Or why not encourage parents or a relative to tag along on the sales trip? Hopefully, this is an issue that hopefully won’t make headlines again before the Feb. 5 national signing day. In the meantime, let’s go to the mailbag and see what users have to say about the BCS, the bowls, the Ohio State-Miami finish, challenges to Title IX and other issues.
I would suggest making the regular college football season shorter. There is no need to play 13 or 14 regular-season games. Include all Division I-A schools -- this is America, you know. Where is the fairness? It is sad for honest taxpayers not to have an even opportunity to make the BCS bid without some dictator taking care of their own. The whole NCAA is becoming sickening and I would suggest that anyone who's a fan of an non-inclusive BCS team to strike, refusing to watch or participate in such events.
All right, rumblings of a taxpayer revolt! States rights or something, we suppose. Sounds juicy. We can tell you that schools and conferences excluded from the current BCS system remain hot about the snub, and these are the folks most likely to push for a playoff. Listen to Nevada-Las Vegas president Carol Harter on the present system:
More than half the current bowls need to be taken behind the barn and shot. There aren't 56 teams worth watching, and these games are just a way for local chambers of commerce to gouge loyal fans with $75 tickets and jacked-up hotel charges. And the Sugar Bowl wasn't sold out because a sorry FSU team was invited. That's the best match-up the BCS can provide to the No. 3 team [Georgia]? I’m with you, but let's just retire our friends. No need to be violent about it. And, no, the Sugar didn’t get much mileage out of that teacher-student thing with Bobby Bowden and Mark Richt.
I'm a major fan of football, but I only watched two bowls -- the Fiesta Bowl and the Orange Bowl with Carson Palmer. So basically, I watched the national championship game and the Heisman Trophy winner. ... Having 28 bowls is crazy, and maybe a playoff system doesn't fit the high intensity of Division I-A, but some kind of compromise could work. If the schools were really worried about the kids, they would play a 10-game schedule and then a playoff system. These schools and conferences weren't so worried about the kids when they decided to add all those extra games and conference championship games, were they? That’s scheduling for the money. So who knows, even more potential cash may yet lure college presidents to a football playoff.
When you play an 11-game season and have a playoff for eight teams, that means the most a team can play is 14 games [15 for conferences with a championship game]. Is that too much to ask? I hear the reasons for not having one are that it makes the season too long and the fear of injuries. ... And please don't cry academics. Football players play their games on the weekend. Where are all of the cries for basketball, which plays away games during the week in a season that spans two semesters and is much longer than football? There are no valid reasons not to have a playoff in I-A football. Sorry, we still buy the cries about academics. The NCAA sells these gladiators as student-athletes, right? We’ll get off our pedestal and go for a blown-out college football playoff under one condition -- the NCAA finds a way to share some of the fresh loot with the players, fly their parents to the game, house and feed them for a week. Call us when they agree.
How come all of the sports journalists love to have columns that deal with the lack of black coaches in the NBA or NFL, but no journalist is willing to write about the almost complete absence of the white American NBA player? If the tables were reversed and there were the same number of black NBA players as the current number of white NBA players, there would whole newspapers filled with these stories. Why is it OK to say the NBA hires only on talent and not be able to say that about the black college coach? Glad you brought up the NBA. No league or sports group has afforded more coaching/front office gigs to minorities, and chaos doesn’t reign nor has the NBA folded. We’re for hiring and playing the best people -- Mike Miller and Steve Nash included -- but if blacks have proven capable of coaching in the NBA and college basketball, then why not the NFL and college football?
Will somebody finally give Al Groh his due? Leaving the Jets to coach at Virginia in a conference that Florida State had a stranglehold on was risky enough, but now look at the rewards. He went from 5-7 his first year to second place in the ACC. ... UVA is going to be the class in the ACC for years to come and I bet that's something that you haven't heard before! OK, a big thumbs up to Coach Al. And sounds like he’s lining up another top recruiting class, led by Florida offensive lineman Jordy Lipsey and tight end Jon Stuper of State College, Pa. But don't get carried away with talk of a dynasty.
It's hard to question the refs on the Fiesta Bowl call. In my opinion, it should have never got to overtime. Chris Gamble caught that third-down pass, in bounds after being held, yet he was ruled out of bounds. On the ensuing punt, there was a huge return by Roscoe Parrish that led to the game-tying field goal. The only reason that call seemed bad was the fact that Miami had thought they had won. That’s precisely the point. There were a handful of debatable calls for both Ohio State and Miami, including the Chris Gamble play -- only the game would have been over but for a delayed interference call. And most football people we asked saw it as a questionable call -- better left a non-call -- to decide the national championship.
I am neither a Miami fan nor an Ohio fan, but I watched most of that game and that was a terrible call. It is a shame when someone affects an exciting game other than a player. Unless the foul is obvious, let the guys play. The pass interference calls in football are often not legitimate. I hear you, but it’s also time to let it rest. Ohio State remains the national champion.
Does Florida State really have a problem with their football player ethics -- or do they just have worse PR than other comparable teams. Can’t say, but Bobby Bowden has dropped very few PR games in his day.
It seems very easy for the schools to implement academic reform. I was a competitive cross country and track athlete at Penn State in the late ‘70s and 1980. I recall talking about it back then because UTEP and Washington State were seemingly always finishing first and second at the NCAAs, while we were the first All-America team. The kicker: Most of those schools’ athletes did not speak English, yet were supposedly going to class and very few graduated. It’s easy talking about reform, but tough to follow through if you’re driven to put up W's and win conference titles. The reason for optimism now is college presidents -- not athletic directors -- are calling the shots, and they’re more likely to be embarrassed by academic shenanigans.
Junior colleges would welcome relief from the proportionality issue of Title IX. Our men's and women's sports have equal budgets, scholarships, etc. The problem we have is with roster sizes. The ladies don't even want to use all of their scholarships; they like to keep their roster sizes down. ... You may even have to turn away walk-ons -- no more Rudys. I don't know of a community college AD in the state of Florida who doesn't want relief from this problem. Our female/male student ratios are always tilted towards the women due to homemakers returning to school in their 40s and 50s to become nurses, etc. No doubt community colleges present a unique challenge when it comes to Title IX. But since your “ladies" are sitting on scholarships, we’d encourage female athletes and their parents to give your school a call. And don’t fret over Rudy. If lucky, you might land a middle-aged Thelma. That’s a better story.
Not only did the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics not include anyone from Division II, III and junior colleges, but it also did not include anyone from any of the 300-plus NAIA institutions. Sounds like President Bush’s commission is stuck on the Division I big boys. Go, Texas! Mike Fish is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. Comments? To e-mail Fish, click here.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
