At any rate, I will wrap up some loose ends this month. While this may be a rowing column, I think it important to discuss American football before I head back across the Pond.
Like a lot of Americans, I am a football fan. I have a game on in the background right now as I write these words. It is an exciting game, and more complex than it looks like to most of the uninitiated. I cannot play football myself - I am too small, too slow, too uncoordinated. A friend of mine who taught at Eton several years ago made the mainstream British press for getting his students to play weekly Sunday-morning football games on the playing fields of Eton (a big thumbing of British propriety and Etonian sensibility). I played with him one morning, and had a bunch of schoolboys make me look silly as they ran circles around me when they weren’t just running me over. But I enjoy watching football and appreciate the athletic efforts of those who do play.
I do not idolize the pigskin. However, having spent three years living in the American South, I certainly discovered that some people have an irrational passion for the sport. As a result, football has warped the American sporting landscape.
The public policy arguments about whether cities should go out of their way to attract or retain professional football teams, and the owners who play with such policy, need not concern a column on rowing. College football, however, does concern me.
There is no professional minor league (to borrow a baseball term) for professional football players to hone their skills before joining the National Football League. Some players head to the Canadian Football League, although that is a different sport. Arena Football, an odd variation, has also produced several players who have gone on to the NFL. Recently, the NFL has used the World League of American Football (all of whose remaining teams are in Europe) as a development league. But the main proving ground for young players is college. As such college football has taken on many semi-professional aspects, while working on the fiction that the football players are students.
Colleges waste huge amounts of money on football. In US Division 1-A colleges, programs give out 85 football scholarships. At 1-AA programs, they are allowed 65 football scholarships (although some leagues - like the Ivy League - give out none). They have enormous coaching staffs. Most programs fly (often on charter flights) to what I would consider relatively nearby away games - close enough to drive. On the night before home games, the athletes sleep in hotels. They get special dining privileges. Their coaches are often devoid of class - not the sort of people who should be mentoring students. The students get very rudimentary educations at best. And this is just the tip - most of what goes on happens below ground.
The cost of maintaining a football program at one of these universities is enormous. The number of scholarships alone at the 1-A level, and even for 1-AA programs which give scholarships, already outnumbers the number of players on a professional team. Many of these scholarship players see little playing time. Yet whether they play or not, they still cost the college the same amount of money.
Football is, of course, a so-called "revenue" sport. Yet in a given year, only about a dozen programs actually end up making money for their universities. The rest lose money - a lot of money. A lot of programs at universities are money-losers, but they at least contribute something to the benefit of the university which makes up for their loss. I have yet to see what football contributes to a university.
Most students at a university cannot play football. So the enormous amounts of money being spent benefit only a small proportion of the student body. I will not repeat my argument against athletics scholarships which I have discussed previously in these letters, but it stands to reason that any institution which pretends to have an academic mission as its reason for being should not be offering places to people solely on the basis of their ability to play a sport.
Sports are an important part of a complete collegiate experience. I think it fully appropriate for a university to fund its athletics department appropriately, even at a loss, in order to provide athletic opportunities for all of its students to complete their educations. How much a university can afford, or is willing to spend, is a policy decision each university has to make. But the spending should go to benefit the entire student body.
I do not approve of the recent decision by Boston University to drop its football program. BU’s logic concerning the expense was non the issue - but it could have easily cut expenditures on football by dropping all football scholarships. BU is a fine academic university, but even bright students may want to play football and should have the opportunity to do so. If BU did not want to compete in a league which gave 65 scholarships per team, there are other leagues at the 1-AA level which do not give scholarships. Even so, non-scholarship teams at that level have proven they can be competitive against scholarship teams. From the Ivy League, Harvard, in 1997, had the second-ranked team in the country at 1-AA. Dartmouth was fourth-ranked the year before. The Patriot League is also a fine academic league which has turned out fine non-scholarship football programs in recent years.
Not every student can make the football team, nor would necessarily want to. Not every student can make the rowing team, nor would necessarily want to. But every student should have the opportunity to play sports. And the university, to the best of its ability, should provide that opportunity.
At William & Mary, over $700 out of every student’s tuition (that includes undergraduate women and graduate students of both sexes) goes to underwrite the athletics department. Yet almost no students have the opportunity to play varsity-status sports. Of that money, the overwhelming majority underwrites the football program.
I played a varsity sport in college. We stayed in our dorm rooms on the night before home races (and our football team stayed in the dorms on the night before home games as well) - it never occurred to us that we shouldn’t. Yet the W&M football team wastes money on hotels before home games. We took long bus rides (up to eleven hours) to away races, but it never dawned on us that it should be otherwise. Not so W&M football. And W&M, one of the finest colleges in the United States, gives 65 football scholarships, more than the entire roster of a professional team. Why?
Meanwhile, in contrast to this huge amount every student has to pay to subsidize football, less than $30 of everyone’s tuition goes towards the Department of Recreational Sports. Rec Sports has to take this appalling amount of money and support thirty club teams (whose members have no access to the Athletics department facilities such as athletics trainers or weights rooms or vans to get to competitions) as well as provide a gym for the entire campus - a woefully small gym at that. I will not go on at greater length about the idiocies of William & Mary’s campus policies - I do not have enough time or patience. But it is worth pointing out that W&M is not alone.
Just as football programs take advantage of clueless college administrations, they also take advantage of the football players themselves. What do most football players get out of college? Very little. Few make the pros, and even if they do a pro career is often short and not necessarily well-compensated for the risk involved. There are only so many stars who earn tons of money and stay injury-free long enough to have lucrative careers. At least if students, if I may call them that, were going to appropriate colleges for their needs - not warped by football handouts - they might at least get an education capable of helping them through life. But not only are many at inappropriate colleges, but many more do not even manage to graduate from college with a degree.
The NCAA came into being, in part, to enforce a minimum of rules on college programs in order to protect the students from exploitation. The NCAA itself became corrupt. Athletics directors, schooled in the ways of the NCAA, have joined the conspiracy. And coaches themselves are part of the problem. Few coaches today are fulfilling the mission of a college coach and are primarily educators whose classroom is the playing field. Few athletics directors are academic types out of the old deanship mold, but are a whole new class of people - professional athletics administrators.
So, why this tirade on a rowing column? Two reasons: first, this irrational expenditure on football is affecting rowing; and second, this is the future of rowing in the United States.
Those places which spend too much money on their so-called revenue sports are rarely the sorts of places which believe in providing sporting opportunities for all. Rowing programs often suffer, on the logic that these places do not fund their club sports, or promote their club sports to varsity status with money they could save by cutting unnecessary expenditures on their varsity sports.
The only area in which we are seeing an increase of expenditure for rowing is in women’s rowing. Thanks to common mis-interpretation of Title IX (a good law, a lousy implementation), women’s rowing programs at colleges with big football programs are often getting an absurd amount of funding. This is a subject I have written about previously and will not therefore repeat here. Money for rowing is good, unless we, as a sport, are selling our soul (do we have a choice?).
One southern program is typical in its idiocy. It matches its spending on (men’s) football with spending on women’s rowing. Because of its accounting methods, it does not merely match overall budgets, but instead matches itemized spending. Thus, women’s rowing has a budget of $40,000 to spend on clothing to match the budget the football team spends on clothing. Rowers don’t need expensive cleats. They don’t need pads. They don’t need lots of clothing (although many boathouses I have been in would benefit if rowers changed their clothes more often). And the rowing team there has only about thirty women. So each woman has to figure out a way to spend over $1000 each per year. Keep in mind that this is the deep South - so they do not need expensive items like fleeces and lines waterproofs or even pogies. Meanwhile, that university does not see the need to hire a boatman (never occurred to them, and when asked by the head coach they refused because they did not see the need). Nor does it see a need to give its long-suffering men’s program any money. This is good?
Colleges funding women’s rowing in this way are not committed to rowing. They are not committed to women’s athletics. They are not committed to providing educational opportunities for their students outside the classroom. They are trying to use a mistaken court decision to justify maintaining their football programs.
Some places are hamstringing their rowing programs with restrictions that are inappropriate for a non-revenue sport. Most show their failure to even try to understand the needs of rowing. Many of the coaches being hired are no better human beings than the average football coach - and women’s athletes are being exploited. Coaches today are beginning to come out of a new mold, where degrees in physical education and physiology are proliferating, and coaches with real academic backgrounds are getting scarcer. Old-time coaches, even ones with successful records, are getting pushed aside in favor of the new NCAA-friendly versions, or because they stick up for the interests of their students. Although men’s rowing is not an NCAA sport, the nefarious organization has gotten its claws in there as well, as pro-NCAA athletics directors have consolidated the NCAA rules onto men’s rowing, and have indeed been encouraged to do so by the NCAA with threats of non-compliance-sanctions.
Last year, while surfing the web, I looked in on the Michigan Men’s Rowing site. The men’s team at Michigan, though well-funded through its own hard efforts, is still a club-status team, while the Michigan women have varsity status and a big university-supplied budget. The Michigan men included a link to the women’s team site, but did so with commentary: Michigan, like many big universities, has its athletics department web sites on a commercial server. The Michigan men found this odd, considering that this was supposed to be an academic institution, and a good one at that. Why a commercial site? There is no good answer. Of course, for the casual web-surfer, it is obvious where priorities in athletics departments lie: look at the official collegiate rowing sites on commercial servers and try to find any useful information. They are rarely updated, and the information is often useless - either it is not the sort of information kept for rowing ("individual records," for example) or it is formatted so bizarrely as not to account for how rowing works (look at a lot of results charts, for example). Compare these commercial sites with the ones on the academic servers - not all of these are good or even regularly maintained, but those which are maintained at least have some use for rowing. As a rule, however, the ones on commercial sites are all dreadful - because the athletics departments, and the companies they hire to maintain the sites, know nothing about rowing and care even less.
Things will only get worse. How long until the whole edifice comes crumbling down, and until the NCAA has to intervene to sweep everything under the carpet the way it has swept the troubles afflicting revenue sports under the carpet? Listen to the NCAA and you would think it is an effective watchdog which has sanctioned those programs not in compliance with its rules. But then look at the number of exploited football players, drop-outs, criminality... we have a problem indeed. As I write the final draft of this, I have the Div 1-A national championship game on the television. Florida State, the top-ranked team, has a 27-year-old undergraduate for a quarterback. Its star player is quite literally a thief who spent part of this season in jail. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech’s quarterback and star is a "red-shirted" freshman, which means he was a freshman last year and did not play so as to provide him an extra year of eligibility - should he stay in college (doubtful), it will take him at least five years to get a four-year degree. Yet this is sadly considered normal.
Do we want women’s rowing to go down that route?
The students on the football teams at these 1-A and many 1-AA programs are not students. The sport resembles a professional sport, except that the students are not allowed to be paid for their "services." This, of course, encourages many students to drop out and play their luck in the pros sooner. Coaches are accomplices in discouraging education for their athletes, as an education may impede their ability to train. That attitude would be fine if playing football were the primary job of the athletes, but in theory they are supposedly full-time students who happen to play football. If they cannot afford college, there are scholarships available along the normal channels. One of the great lies prompted by southerners is that football provides educational opportunities for students who would otherwise not get a college education - it is a lie, because other scholarship and loan opportunities are available (and more would be available if colleges did not waste money on football and other so-called revenue sports) and because the average football player hardly gets a proper education in the big-time football programs anyway.
Coaches’ careers rise and fall on winning. This has encouraged the newly-varsitied rowing programs, in places which do not understand or care about rowing, to race inappropriate schedules, including pot-hunting. It should be interesting to see what happens when enough of the newly-varsitied programs in the same (football-based) leagues have all developed their programs under generally inept and uncaring coaches - will there be pressure to do better? What about participation, the professed goal? If coaches are unwilling to develop novices, and do not care about their lower boats, yet have twenty-five scholarships (a number sure to increase), that means to me a lot of attrition and unfulfilled students. But that really is not the objective, I suppose.
Some of the newly-varsitied programs have indeed hired good coaches, but many have not. Under normal circumstances, I would say that this would mean the demise of these new-fangled coaches in favor of the effective ones. However, effective coaches must come from somewhere, and the new athletics establishment under the guidance of the NCAA is not a good place to find the old-style coaches who knew how to educate their students and who, indeed, could produce winners as well.
There is no professional rowing league, and there is unlikely to be one. Even if there were, very few people would be able to make their living in one. So what sort of service are colleges doing for their students when they spit them out of these new-fangled rowing programs? And what kind of service are these colleges doing for their student population in general with these sorts of athletics departments? Have the colleges forgotten their mission?
I have alluded to these questions quite a bit over the last few years in these letters. I am curious to see how it will all play out. As I prepare to leave for Europe, I wonder what the landscape will look like when I return to the coaching scene in the US.
During the past six months, I have not been coaching, at least not officially. I resumed sculling. I took on a position as Secretary of the Friends of Williamsburg Rowing. I helped with registration at the Head of the Charles, where I also did announcing. And I have taken advantage of living in a rowing town to ride with several coaches on the Charles River behind elite, club, and collegiate crews. I still have much to learn as a coach, and living in Williamsburg the last three years has left me off the beaten path. So these last few months have been very valuable for me as a learning experience.
I have also been pleased to spend the time in Cambridge/Boston. This is a great rowing town, still mostly uncorrupted by what is happening elsewhere. The area supports the sport. And the coaches I come across are full of class and have a great appreciation not just of the sport but also of what their missions as coaches are.
I have also been back at Harvard. Harvard, of course, boasts the largest athletics department in the country even though it is not even close to being the largest university. There are more varsity-status sports here than anywhere else. There are no athletics scholarships of any kind. As for attendance at home games... well, there really isn’t much interest. I have been to plenty of home football games with attendance under 500 people (in a very large stadium). The only games which regularly sell out in my experience are the hockey games, and I am told that they stopped selling those out several years ago when the team went from being one of the best in the country to being near the bottom of its league. Besides the varsity sports, club sports also receive funding through the athletics budget, and there are tons of these. Not only do more Harvard students compete intercollegiately than at any other university, but more Harvard students also take part in intramurals than anywhere else. Taking part is only part of it - championship teams abound as well despite - or, I would argue, because of - this approach. But as the NCAA tightens its noose, it remains to be seen how much longer places like Harvard can hold out. Certainly, in Harvard’s Newell Boathouse, the letter combination "NCAA" is not something to say too loudly without some coach groaning at the stacks of inappropriate regulations they now have to follow.
I have been accused, in some fora, of being self-centered in these letters. That is a valid critique. I write from personal experience and observation. Yet I admit that I do not know everything, and I am not always right about what I think I do know. But these letters are a first-person account, which I hope makes them more enlightening. They are over-opinionated because I like to stimulate discussion. Sometimes they are a bit simplistic because I am catering to a diverse audience, much of which is not American. Comments are always welcome, and I try to respond to any queries.
Have a good millennium!