“Old Men Forget:” Presidents Must Tell Coaches When to Leave

Playwrights often depict tragedies where the blindness of an aging hero leads to acts of hubris that doom them. Aeschylus, the great Greek playwright, reminds everyone, “call no man happy until he is dead.”  In Shakespeare’s King Lear, “robes and furr’d gowns hide all,” tells the familiar story of how position and success can lead to hubris, bad judgment and spawn the “cankers” of the mind that destroy judgment. Old age and unaccountable power ferment a witches brew that through history has corrupted leaders in all walks of life.

The story is all too familiar in every culture—a young hero and leader triumphs. They continue their success and aggrandize power and position and come to they identify with their position. They see themselves as indispensable and refuse to step down with dignity or honor intact. College sports is not immune to this unfolding tragedy.

Woody Hayes assaulted a player on the sidelines during the 1978 Gator Bowl and then attacked his own coaches as they tried to hold him back. Lute Olsen finished out his fine career amid embarrassment, recriminations, strokes and depression. Bobby Bowden was forced out of an extraordinary career after five mediocre years amid the humiliation of having a successor forced on him and being stripped of 14 victories. We have all watched the 84 year old Joe Paterno fall from grace over alleged disinterest in the sexual abuse by an old coach and member of the Penn State family.

Ohio States’ Hayes was 65 and had been regularly reprimanded for loss of control and assaulting people during his career, but despite the warnings of his superiors continued with his behavior. Olsen was 74 at the end of a brilliant and largely untarnished career, a gentlemen coach. He had bitterly resisted efforts to provide an honorable exit for him as he lost control of his game and life. Bowden was 80 and had forged Florida State into a football power He had fought efforts to move him out tooth and nail and the Board did not side with the President just as with Paterno.

Knowing when to leave with dignity and honor intact is a rare skill that few of us arrive at on our own and often we need help from friends or more vitally from our leaders. This is where Presidents should come in.

But knowing when to leave with dignity is hard but not impossible in life and in sport. Tony Russo’s recent retirement at the age of 68 after winning the World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals illustrates how it can be done. John Wooden stepped down at the age of 65 after winning his tenth national basketball championship. Dean Smith of North Carolina stepped down at the age of 66 after a brilliant career. In football Bo Schembechler from Michigan retired at the age of 60 after two Big 10 championships and Tom Osborne retired from Nebraska at the top of his game.

To survive for twenty years at one place in the cutthroat world of college sports requires coaching brilliance and persistence. It means the coach has won time and again and probably had to resurrect himself or herself. To keep passion and interest, they fuse their identity with the consuming activity of coaching. It is excruciatingly hard to step down from what they are great at, let alone what defines them as a person. Only superb self-knowledge or a very good President can deal with this temptation.

The key denominator for all these coaches who ended in embarrassed failure lies in the unwillingness of their Presidents to remove them. In leadership theory we would talk about “mentor them out!” In cases of celebrity coaches, athletic directors stand relatively powerless, and in the case of Olsen, Bowden and Paterno the Presidents refused to act when they should have.  For just as the fool tells King Lear, the coaches need someone wiser to help them:

O, sir! You are old;

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of her confine: you should be rul’d and led

By some discretion that discerns your state

Better than you yourself. (2.4:140-144)

Why do the Presidents fail?

First and foremost, a successful and visible college football or basketball program becomes a lodestar for a university’s identity and brand. Penn State built much of its rise in enrollment and national stature around the signal power of Paterno’s program and his old school charisma. Ohio State’s rise to national prominence followed the same path. A school like Florida State staked its brand and strategy directly upon the success of the football program. From an institutional perspective university administrations and Presidents are very reluctant to remove a coach who has come to represent their university. This is also why coaches must increasingly be pure as the driven snow in their public life because they now stand for the school and its values. The endless drum beating of publicity flaks and the ESPN world augment the college coach’s prominence. As the always thoughtful Don Wetzel argues, the media tends to “goddify” such coaches to everyone’s detriment.

Second, the power base of the coach transcends the power base of the President. The Board of Trustees takes a personal interest in the success of athletic programs. Universities deploy athletics programs as a forum to lobby and wine and dine officials and contributors. This places coaches at the center of the mix of public and private power that sustains modern universities. A coach’s relation with the Board expands to enmesh with rich and heavy weight boosters and contributors. Even if a President believes that the coach should retire for reasons, the Board and boosters may paralyze him or her.

Third, coaches are human despite the publicity around them. Individuals surround and lionize coaches. Fans quasi-worship and deify them. The ESPN media machines amplify this myth making. Everyone around them, their coaches, players, staff, fund raisers and sometimes Presidents have a vested interest in not telling the coach the truth; he or she would protect their legacy by going out on top rather than playing out the denouement of tragedy and mortification.

Coaches are humans. They succumb to the myth of their indispensability just like the political and corporate leaders who cannot give up power, success and repute. No one wants to leave it all behind and  risk that horrible question, “wasn’t he once somebody?” Only the Presidents have the perspective and responsibility to deal with this and for them, “ripeness if everything.”

Paterno disgrace symbolizes the problem; the issue will arise soon at some other prominent programs. I do not blame the coaches, really. I would struggle for the self-awareness and discipline to leave in such a position. But very few who succumb to the temptations that Shakespeare and Aeschylus portrayed will leave in dignity and honor. They will bring down their institutions with them.

Just as these feel like classical tragedies, a classical virtue would have lead the Presidents to act and guard their institution and protect their coach—courage.

A Tale of Three Sports & their Unions-Part 1 & 2

Professional sports leagues require unions. Only a voluntary contractual agreement with organized players permits the apparatus of modern professional sports. Common apparel deals and common pool distributions as well as salary caps, required minimum expenditures on salaries and revenue sharing all need these agreements to protect a league from anti-trust challenges. The contracts permit drafts, compensation limits and trades to occur without restraint of trade challenges. Modern professional sport leagues deploy these devices to several vital goals:1)guarantee profit and return on investment; 2) maintain some competitive balance across big and small market teams; 3) police drug use; 4) give bad teams a chance to become better and construct balance competition over time. Despite each owners desire to win at all costs, they have a joint interests to steward steward a profitable sport with high quality games and competitive hopes for teams and fans.

 

Despite the central role of unions and their continuing and unique power, two labor negotiations broke down in acrimony—one lead the union to dissolve and players to sue the league, the other has lead to an impasse that may lose the season. Baseball, on the other hand, with little fanfare, just did a “handshake” agreement to extend labor peace to 20 years. I think these different outcomes flow from both the culture created between owners and players and the structure of incentives the contracts focused upon. In particular football and basketball narrowed in on a zero sum view of revenue tied to salary caps while baseball used luxury taxes and revenue sharing to address the chasm between small and large market teams.

Most team owners are unwaveringly entrepreneurial and aggressively libertarian in their politics. They hate having a strong union. In addition they tend to be very personally invested in the status and fate of their teams. This resistance coupled with periodic attempts to break the unions have blighted professional sports with thirty years of lockouts, strikes and bitter recrimination, reaching its height in the disastrous baseball 1997 seven month baseball strike that lead to a cancelled World Series or hockey losing an entire season in 2004-2005.

All professional sports are afflicted by the trend of large market owners buying up the best talent. Left on their own most sports would degrade to permanent oligarchies with permanent winners and losers and very frustrated and lost fans. It would also degrade the talent competition where one small group of teams would regularly trounce others based upon bought talent. Many of the union authorized mechanisms on revenue and drafts are to protect owners from destroying their sport through the dynamics of inequality in revenue as how to allocate costs among players.

In the last seven months the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had their collective bargain agreements expire. The NFL involved a four-month lock out, ugly negotiations and recriminations and immense public pressure to settle. The NBA negotiations have imploded with the NBA verging on a lost season. Baseball, which has the longest and most bitter history, has a handshake agreement to put a new agreement in place without a lockout or strike four months before the start of spring training.

Why the difference? All the negotiations involved complex and unique aspects but the chasms exist over percentage of revenue dedicated to owners and players as well as devices such as salary caps and luxury taxes to save owners from themselves and sustain some competitive balance and quality product for fans and media.

What interests me is that two sports along with hockey have used salary caps to address the issue of escalating salaries and competitive equity. To me this has always made sense, and it drives me batty that baseball has never used one. Baseball permits oligarchs to dominate talent by letting teams develop players and then the oligarchs like Boston, Philadelphia and New York buy that talent when they become free agents. The irony is that the two leagues with salary caps have generated two different economic and competitive cultures that lead to the labor chaos. Yet baseball has eschewed the rational approach, but evolved this deeper peace and even a common venture model.

While unions are dying everywhere in the United States, they thrive in professional sports because of the monopoly and monopsony of the leagues and the very limited and highly skills population from which players develop. The contacts also insulate the enterprise from many anti-trust and restraint of trade charges. So why the immense differences in outcomes of the last three negotiations?

The issue driving owners remains as always maximizing profit, long term investment and maximizing their freedom and status from being owners. Given whom the owners are, they strongly prefer not to have unions or long-term agreements with their employees.

As an example, the bitterness and contractual brinksmanship in football makes the least sense. Professional football has become the most popular and profitable professional sports enterprise in the United States. If owners are to be believed, only two teams are losing money.  Attendance and contracts rise yearly. The Super Bowl like March Madness has permuted into a cultural institution. The major device to generate quality of fan interest and quality of product has been a percentage split of revenue with players and a relatively hard salary cap.

With no guaranteed salaries, the football teams can seem to pay outlandish salaries but guaranteed salaries mean little. The real money has migrated to extremely high rookie bonuses and singing bonuses. This in turn softened the salary cap considerably. This hypothetical equality is augmented by some marginal revenue sharing to prop up smaller market teams who have trouble even reaching the salary cap minimum, but more than a few teams, as in baseball have not even spent their revenue sharing money on talent or salaries.

Part II will examine how the history and incentive approach influenced the approach and outcomes of these three labor negotiations.

Part II

So how did an economically and media successful enterprise like professional football get dragged to the abyss and almost lose its season. Really bad negotiating tactics, animosity and mistrust between the negotiating teams hurt. The players believe correctly that they play the most dangerous and life threatening sport in the world besides boxing. They resent the owners cavalier cover-ups and drive for money by piling on more games at the risk of their health. The owners seemed totally deaf to these concerns driving the enmity. The real drive of the owners grew from a small group of very powerful owners who wanted to change the share split with players to maximize their large investments.

This should have been easy to resolve. The economic policies distributed playoff teams far and wide as well as guaranteeing that many unsuccessful teams could turn themselves around within one to two years. Parity in playoff access had become the norm in the NFL; it worked and inspired fanatical fan and media support. Despite all this and very strong incentives to settle peacefully, the culture of animosity and resentment of players and owners and power of the hard line owners lead to the four month lockout and a new contract at the last minute.

The players actually gained considerable advantages around health and safety issue with limits on practice and full pad time and new pensions for older players. The owners gained a more friendly percentage distribution but had to build in requirements that teams that receive revenue sharing must spend a very high percentage on salaries rather than use for profit and starve their talent pool. The salary cap remained harder than before. More  limits upon rookie compensation will lead to more rational risk spending and increase the money balance to veterans. It is not ot a bad deal that could have been struck much earlier. It was worked out after bitter negotiations that reaffirmed a culture of antagonism and rogue owners till wishing unions would disappear.

The fact that the unions did use their Armageddon play and they did disband to challenge the ownership and competitive balance structure shocked everyone, including the players. It emboldened the NBA players, and cast a shadow upon the very similar but different negotiations of the NBA.

The NBA is a mess compared to the NFL. Assuming you can ever believe owners, it claims 22 teams of 30 lost over 300 million dollars. The league had steadily lost cachet, and media interest and attendance had edge downward for a decade with a slight blip last year. The incipient pro soccer league actually passed the NBA in per game attendance. The talent level remained superb, the skill level mediocre, and the too long season and grotesque playoff schedule where half the teams make it diminishes mid season games to the point of meaninglessness. The quality of play reflected it.

The NBA’s soft cap with too many exceptions had become nonsensical only really affecting young players. The league had developed salary ratios of 3 or 4 to 1 despite a cap. Unlike the NFL, the championships remained clustered within a small number of teams with mini-dynasties. The endless playoffs at the end of an insignificant and low TV rated season, generated little interest until the very end. The NBA desperately needs a hard cap or strong revenue sharing to ensure both a quality product and some reasonable level of profits, otherwise the cycle will continue. The losses, the bitterness, the off field culture of the league heightened already bitter anger between the two sides, and neither was willing to compromise despite being well within a ball park. In negotiating terms they had hardened their positions rather than looking to their interests. Unlike the NFL where calls for President Obama’s intervention rang out, very little public pressure arose to demand a settlement. For many folks the NBA season could disappear and no one would notice or care.

The NBA has another huge problem. For many fans, college basketball and March Madness provided an easy substitute. If the NBA did not play, it hardly mattered to many basketball fans because from November through March, they could watch passionate and interesting basketball with far better TV distribution than the NBA has. This substitute effect for the NBA reflects rising college ratings and interest along side slowly declining NBA attendance and wide spread indifference.  The NBA culture and negotiations the focus upon zero sum issues and a strong substitute mean the league and players are making themselves irrelevant.

Baseball has had the longest and worst history including a cancelled world series, a nullified reserve clause and collusion actions. Yet this month a new contract will be signed with little fanfare or brittleness. In fact, baseball over the last twenty years has evolved into something resembling a partnership arrangement rather than the adversarial relation of the other sports.

Much of this grows from the abiding fan loyalty and comfort with the sine wave progress of teams and seasons. It grows because baseball essentially owns uncontested market territory from April through September. It grows from a remarkably successful economic model that generates profits, limited but effective revenue sharing from luxury taxes and stable or increasing attendance even as baseball has sunk into the shadow of football in terms of sports interest and wealth.

I wonder how much of this evolves from baseball not having a salary cap and living with incredible inequality in expenditures among teams. Maybe the lack of cap and guaranteed expenditure percentages displace the negotiations in a way that enables them to occur without being seen as zero sum games. I think the lack of a cap but very powerful luxury taxes permits the rich to spend freely but at the same time pay to subsidize others. This softens the libertarian and don't tread on me beliefs of many of the owners. Maybe a league that almost destroyed itself in 1997 and permitted itself to be humiliated by drug scandals collectively knew it could not afford the conflict.

Baseball moves much more slowly than football or basketball in talent development and team transformation. This leads owners to a longer-term view to begin with. But paradoxically baseball has had championships distributed across the widest array of teams of any sport, far more than NBA and more than the NFL.

This distribution of championships should not occur but it does for two odd reasons. First, baseball teams draft college players or invest in international or high school players and can keep them under professional contract for six years. This means that most teams keep players until their late twenties. The problem with baseball occurs when the rich teams simply buy up the best players from smaller market teams.

The catch and irony is that these rich teams must now give six to seven year contracts to players in their early thirties or late twenties, a totally absurd risk calculation. The average players peak years are 23-31, after that they steadily and and inexorably decline in skill and production. This means the rich teams are locking into huge contracts for two to four years of peak performance while the other teams got five years of peak performance years at much less money. This has resulted in older and slower rich teams who perform far more erratically than their salaries would suggest because of the age and long term contract factor. At the same time the sheer inequality has driven teams to be more innovative in player evaluation and scouting to offset these differences.

Oddly enough the bitter history seems to have generated a sense of partnership.This has been augmented by their Commissioner actually learning from past failures rather than magnifying them like basketball's David Stern.  It leads to a “handshake” contract but also mutual willingness to address issues like signing bonuses and earlier availability for arbitration as well as moving teams from leagues or adding an extra wild card team. It also leads both sides to realize the integrity of the enterprise depends upon aggressive testing and to create cutting edge technology and requirements to test for human growth hormone.This supplements mandates that players must now wear a new helmet to protect them from 100 mph fastballs.  Both sides realize they have vested interest in the reputation and physical integrity of the sport.

I think the fact the baseball achieves most of their competitive balance goals through luxury taxes rather than caps with exceptions makes the negotiations less bitter. The powerful and personally invested owners do have more freedom but they pay a heavy cost of up to 75 to 100 percent tax when they go over the agreed upon limits. The issues do not feel like zero sum games but rather permit owners to act if they are willing to pay the costs. This will now be extended to address the issues of huge rookie costs that are hurting everyone. The luxury tax money then gets redistributed. I don’t like it but the logic has worked to produce competition and balance when it should not.

Three sports. Two wars, one reached a treaty based upon the sheer money both would lose; one is on the verge of imploding for a decade over embittered relations and an economic model that does not work. One lives in hard-nosed comity because they learned their lesson and has made an incentive and penalty economic system that should not work but actually produce real competition. The culture ensnaring the two sides and the focus of economic relations had as much to do with these outcomes as the real issues involved.

A Tale of Three Sports and their Unions-Part 1

Professional sports leagues require unions. Only a voluntary contractual agreement with organized players permits the apparatus of modern professional sports. Common apparel deals and common pool distributions as well as salary caps, required minimum expenditures on salaries and revenue sharing all need these agreements to protect a league from anti-trust challenges. The contracts permit drafts, compensation limits and trades to occur without restraint of trade challenges. Modern professional sport leagues deploy these devices to several vital goals:1)guarantee profit and return on investment; 2) maintain some competitive balance across big and small market teams; 3) police drug use; 4) give bad teams a chance to become better and construct balance competition over time. Despite each owners desire to win at all costs, they have a joint interests to steward steward a profitable sport with high quality games and competitive hopes for teams and fans.

 

Despite the central role of unions and their continuing and unique power, two labor negotiations broke down in acrimony—one lead the union to dissolve and players to sue the league, the other has lead to an impasse that may lose the season. Baseball, on the other hand, with little fanfare, just did a “handshake” agreement to extend labor peace to 20 years. I think these different outcomes flow from both the culture created between owners and players and the structure of incentives the contracts focused upon. In particular football and basketball narrowed in on a zero sum view of revenue tied to salary caps while baseball used luxury taxes and revenue sharing to address the chasm between small and large market teams.

Most team owners are unwaveringly entrepreneurial and aggressively libertarian in their politics. They hate having a strong union. In addition they tend to be very personally invested in the status and fate of their teams. This resistance coupled with periodic attempts to break the unions have blighted professional sports with thirty years of lockouts, strikes and bitter recrimination, reaching its height in the disastrous baseball 1997 seven month baseball strike that lead to a cancelled World Series or hockey losing an entire season in 2004-2005.

All professional sports are afflicted by the trend of large market owners buying up the best talent. Left on their own most sports would degrade to permanent oligarchies with permanent winners and losers and very frustrated and lost fans. It would also degrade the talent competition where one small group of teams would regularly trounce others based upon bought talent. Many of the union authorized mechanisms on revenue and drafts are to protect owners from destroying their sport through the dynamics of inequality in revenue as how to allocate costs among players.

In the last seven months the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had their collective bargain agreements expire. The NFL involved a four-month lock out, ugly negotiations and recriminations and immense public pressure to settle. The NBA negotiations have imploded with the NBA verging on a lost season. Baseball, which has the longest and most bitter history, has a handshake agreement to put a new agreement in place without a lockout or strike four months before the start of spring training.

Why the difference? All the negotiations involved complex and unique aspects but the chasms exist over percentage of revenue dedicated to owners and players as well as devices such as salary caps and luxury taxes to save owners from themselves and sustain some competitive balance and quality product for fans and media.

What interests me is that two sports along with hockey have used salary caps to address the issue of escalating salaries and competitive equity. To me this has always made sense, and it drives me batty that baseball has never used one. Baseball permits oligarchs to dominate talent by letting teams develop players and then the oligarchs like Boston, Philadelphia and New York buy that talent when they become free agents. The irony is that the two leagues with salary caps have generated two different economic and competitive cultures that lead to the labor chaos. Yet baseball has eschewed the rational approach, but evolved this deeper peace and even a common venture model.

While unions are dying everywhere in the United States, they thrive in professional sports because of the monopoly and monopsony of the leagues and the very limited and highly skills population from which players develop. The contacts also insulate the enterprise from many anti-trust and restraint of trade charges. So why the immense differences in outcomes of the last three negotiations?

The issue driving owners remains as always maximizing profit, long term investment and maximizing their freedom and status from being owners. Given whom the owners are, they strongly prefer not to have unions or long-term agreements with their employees.

As an example, the bitterness and contractual brinksmanship in football makes the least sense. Professional football has become the most popular and profitable professional sports enterprise in the United States. If owners are to be believed, only two teams are losing money.  Attendance and contracts rise yearly. The Super Bowl like March Madness has permuted into a cultural institution. The major device to generate quality of fan interest and quality of product has been a percentage split of revenue with players and a relatively hard salary cap.

With no guaranteed salaries, the football teams can seem to pay outlandish salaries but guaranteed salaries mean little. The real money has migrated to extremely high rookie bonuses and singing bonuses. This in turn softened the salary cap considerably. This hypothetical equality is augmented by some marginal revenue sharing to prop up smaller market teams who have trouble even reaching the salary cap minimum, but more than a few teams, as in baseball have not even spent their revenue sharing money on talent or salaries.

Part II will examine how the history and incentive approach influenced the approach and outcomes of these three labor negotiations.

The Penn State Scandal: How Good Men become Moral Failures

This is very hard to write. I have been associated with intercollegiate athletics for 25 years and served for the last ten years in an official position in the enterprise. I have helped my institution through two major scandals. Always in the turmoil and craziness of this professional world, many of us could look to Penn State as a signal that intercollegiate sports can unite integrity and winning. They had a superb President and fine Athletic Director, and they hired coaches of skill and integrity; they won the right way. At the top of the pyramid with his model permeating the organization stood Joe Paterno who could coach, win, educate and do it without any major scandals. Paterno was not a saint but had become a symbol.

Now one of the beacons of an already stained world has fallen. I know many are writing about this unfolding tragedy so I will confine my discussion to the question of how honorable and good men could fail so profoundly to protect the lives and souls of ten-year old children. As I gaze upon the wreckage from a distance I only feel moral heartsickness for the children whose personhood was invaded and stolen while others watched silently.

We have all heard the story before. An admired and respected figure in an authoritative and hierarchical organization is accused of abuse of power. The members of the organization all know each other and work with each other in intense closeness. They know and trust each other. They have hired and promoted each other from within. They know that one of their own would not abuse their power especially not child molestation. No, this is not my Catholic Church, it is modern collegiate sports.

This problem is not only about child abuse, it is about the moral failure of people who are trustees of institutions. Organizations instinctively cover up abuse that can hurt their reputation and stature. Hospital teams tolerate surgical mistakes, police departments studiously ignore institutional corruption, corporations tolerate dangerous products.

We can say with certainty that as this tragedy unfolds two issues will become clear:

• 1.     More and more children who were abused by the Assistant Coach and Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky will step forward. A pattern of predation will be revealed that required a pattern of blindness, evasion and willful ignorance from those who worked with him.
• 2.     It will become evident that more people, assistant coaches, trainers, grad assistants knew or strongly suspected Sandusky's depravity. Football teams and athletic departments are very close worlds. The assistant coaches all know each other’s business including who is having an affair, who has drinking problems and who is skirting rules. Trainers and staff support are all drawn into a tight intimate web of knowledge and mutual support. Nothing stays secret in these worlds.

 College football lives in a we /they world. Teams are built as much upon loyalty as on competence. “I got your back,” is not a meaningless slogan but a reality on the field and in the dog eat dog competitive world of coaching and staffing. Being around folks you can trust and give loyalty defines players, coaches and staff.

This world of loyalty refines and hones its members and replicates itself by hiring and promoting from within. Even outsiders usually come in with personal connections; the world of elite intercollegiate athletics is very small.

This internal world of self-reinforcing loyalty, trust and personal networks is reinforced by the way so many of us lavish our trust and loyalty on these institutions. We identity with them, their leaders and players. This trust and loyalty grant them strength and privilege; in many programs the coaches loom far more powerful than the athletic director or the University President. Penn State epitomized this where Coach Paterno had ignored his athletic director and president’s desire to get him to step down for years.

This is the world that protected Sanduskys’s rape of children. His relation to the Penn State program as a defensive co-ordinator and a regular member of the community continued for 35 years. Even after he retired he had the free run of the facilities. He used his access to bring young boys, the vast majority of them minorities, to the facilities as reward. He gave them presents, many of them from the endless stash of stuff Nike and others bestow on schools. He took them to games and paraded with them at banquets and bowl games. These visits and gifts impressed and groomed the young boys for his exploiting. Many Penn State players performed their public service by working for his charity, The Second Mile, to help underprivileged youth.

So Sandusky used his affiliation and status with the program to seduce the children and as a place to sodomize and fondle and get oral sex from ten year old boys. The janitors saw and knew what was going one. They did not tell anyone out of fear of losing their jobs. They believed that no one would believe them. In the Grand Jury testimony the critical testimony comes from a then 28 year old graduate assistant who saw Sandusky sodomizing a ten or eleven year old in the Penn State shower room. The graduate assistant and now an assistant coach did nothing. He watched and did not intervene. He was shaken, talked to his father and reported it to his head coach Joe Paterno. Then, having discharged his conscience and duty. He then spent the next decade rising in the coaching hierarchy while watching Sandusky come in with children day after day. He did nothing to report or stop it.

The Head Coach claims he only heard about “horsing around” or just fondling and sexual touching. He did nothing. He did his legal responsibility of reporting this to his athletic director and to the Vice President who oversaw the operations. In a clear dereliction of moral responsibility, he did not nothing else. Maybe a slight reprimand, never followed up to stop horsing around. He permitted Sandusky to continue to have access to facilities and to bring children in to them.

The senior administrators knew they had a problem and knew they had an legal obligation to report this activity to the police. They did not. They claimed they took away Sandusky's key to the shower! The athletic director and Senior Vice President admit that they never enforced any prohibition against him. Their own testimony feels self serving and defensive. and basically just thought the graduate assistant was just "uncomfortable." The athletic director and Senior Vice President decided no crime had occurred At least the high school barred him from campus and reported him to the police when they heard an accusation about Sandusky's "inappropriate" conduct. But the University had other interests than protecting children.

The President, one of the best in the country, learned something had happened. How the graduate assistant’s picture of anal sex mutated into fondling and sexual touching and mutated into horsing around is a story in itself. Many organization compress and pare information so that senior leaders often miss the full nature of what goes on. For whatever reasons, President Graham Spanier did not ask the police or his administrators to pursue or look into this.

Several things happen to people under these conditions. First, if they see an immoral action of someone they trust and respect, they literally cannot believe what they see. The mind will often perform surgery and reinterpret what they see into a frame compatible with their respect and trust for the person. So rape becomes fondling, and fondling becomes horsing around. People’s minds will reconfigure the information and their mind will deny what they see. This happens first.

Other pressures augment institutional denial and cloaking. The Grand Jury report provides the grizzly initial narrative but below it lies other mixed motives. People who believe their jobs are on the line will also deny or change their perception. They believe they will not be believed because the trusted respected figure could not be a child molester. So janitors who need the job or graduate assistants, even strapping strong healthy 28 year olds, not only deny what their eyes show them, but rationalize it away to keep their jobs or keep open their upward mobility. This is abetted by the way organizations let people off the hook. A person has the responsibility to report what he saw to a superior and that is enough. The superior is supposed to take care of it. This hierarchy reporting lets people off the hook. They can say to themselves, "I did my duty," even when they fail their moral responsibility.

As rumors spread or people get hints, like watching Sandusky rest his hand on the thigh’s of young men during drives, the men who surround him as friends and colleagues cannot afford to admit what they are seeing. They see him taking ten year olds to banquets or to hotel rooms while on the road and explain it away as his "mentoring." In self-deception a person refuses to draw out the full implications of what they see. These are not stupid people, but they are “friends” with Sandusky. They have gone through the trenches of football combat and the ups and downs of winning and losing. They are bonded by fires of competition and having each other’s back.

If they spell out to themselves that Sandusky, their friend and colleague, abuses children, then they must face themselves. They will be human beings who have as a friend and mentor a moral monster, a man who uses his affiliation with them to recruit, groom and sexually abuse children. To unmask him would expose themselves to moral attack and guilt for their own moral failure of their choice of friend and model.

The intensity of this circle of loyalty and identity is reflected by the fact that these incidents occurred in one of the most homophobic institutions in America. The engraved homophobia at the heart of men’s sport’s culture should have exploded this incident. The fact that colleagues looked the other way not just from child abuse but from the homosexuality hints at how powerful this frame insulated people from seeing or acting upon Sandusky’s actions.

Finally, institutional loyalty and preservation play a role. Officials have obligations to protect and build their institution. The rise of Penn State to national prominence was built upon a solid foundation of athletic accomplishments, but the emotional driver and symbolic lodestone had been the football program, and the football program was Joe Paterno. Any threat to athletics threatened 25 years of building the university. An athletic director, a vice president and a president all have obligations to build and protect their institution. The reporting process, the discomfort of people to face the moral truth of a person they know and might admire combine to invite people to self-deception. The culture that limits responsibility to reporting to a superior makes it all the morally convenient. People can avoid being responsible to take action or even report to the police to stop the evil they saw. This legalism releases them from responsibility and falls apart if the superiors fail in their own moral stewardship.

It is too easy to deny or hide abuse. It happens in marriages where wives protect husbands who abuse children; it certainly can happen at a university. These men knew to act publically might bring dishonor and disgrace upon the athletic program and person who personified the Penn State brand. When push came to shove, the leaders found the language and the rationalizations to downplay immorality that could tarnish or scandalize the university and the football program that symbolized and contributed to its rise.

The failure here is profound and simple. Any one of these men could have stopped the evil. Instead they were morally lazy. They settled for benign interpretations that excused them facing the brutal facts and making hard decisions. All they had to do was report it to the police; all they had to do was obey the law even if they washed their own hands. All they had to do stop Sandusky’s access. 

They did not.

They all deserve to be fired for moral dereliction.

We are not talking about dishonorable or bad men. That is the horror and lesson. This collective moral blindness can happen at any institutions to whom we give trust and who live by loyalty, “got my back” and competence. But they failed. They refused to see what was before their eyes. They refused to risk friendship or self-worth or their own institution’s reputation to protect innocent children.

In this they mirror of our frailty and remind us of own willingness to vest our own loyalty without accountability. Our own credulity gave them the warrant to continue their own moral blindness.

What is a "Sports IQ?"

“He has a great basketball IQ!” an announcer exclaims after a fine pass from a point guard. “She has great soccer IQ,” an Irish brogue proclaims after a player slides into position to meet a great pass and head it in. I could go on but you get the picture. Lots of commentators and coaches believe in something they refer to as  “sport IQ.” Coaches value it highly when recruiting athletes, sometimes as much as pure talent or skill. I think it is worthwhile to reflect upon what they mean by a sports IQ.

Let’s start by what they do not mean. First, coaches and commentators are not denigrating athletes. Americans tend to think of IQ as genetically determined like inherited talent. A genetic approach does not do justice to the immense investment of work and attention required to develop a sports IQ. Second, both announcers and coaches use it unconsciously to offset the “dumb jock” stereotype. The term reminds people that top quality team athletes deploy the attributes we associate with high-level intelligence.  I also think that this language rebuts people who argue that black athletes are not as intelligent as white athletes—the same argument that denied black quarterbacks a chance to play for a generation. Finally, this language separates operational judgment and perception from sheer talent. The theory of multiple intelligences of Howard Gardiner talks about kinesthetic intelligence that would refer to independent aptitudes linked to natural musculature, vision and coordination. A sports IQ presumes far more than having talent or ability; these alone do not guarantee active engaged expertise and judgment.

IQ is supposed to measure a wide-ranging capacity for an individual to recognize, engage and solve complex problems. As we learn more of how the brain works, it becomes clear that intelligence involves the integration of multiple parts of the brain to blend perception, cognition, memory and emotion into the ability to turn sensory data into information and solve complex problems. Intelligence synthesizes both the general ability to employ the brain’s multiple resources and the trained ability to recognize the challenge and apply specialized knowledge to them.

In this sense, it does not make sense to talk about sports IQ any more than a legal IQ or engineering IQ. Instead the term covers refined and trained mastery or domains of expertise, but what the heh!

Sports IQ does fine, and here is what I think it means and suggests about athletes.

1. It means that athletes must know the game. Not just the rules, but also an athlete must cognitively master the intricacies of the game, its deeper logic and patterns. This takes study, practice, error, learning and more practice. The average time to “master” a field including athletics involves 7,000 hours of study and practice.
2. This knowledge requires study and practice and to see the game in a particular way. All competitive team sports unfold in patterns of flow. Teams design defenses and offenses as prototypes that players master during practice. Opponents learn them and also practice against them. These configurations have their own internal logics and give aways. The high sports IQ athlete learns to comprehend and act on these. The higher skilled athlete studies tape and practice to see the patterns and know how to recognize the patterns and act. 
3. This means a high sports IQ requires cognitive preparation and knowledge as well as practice that refines perception, cognitive processing and muscle memory so that under the split second demands of sports, the athletes recognize the pattern. Pattern recognition is the foundation of most accomplished professional skills.   
4. This trained recognition permits an athlete on a team to perceive the unfolding patterns of play and make out opportunities presented by them. Because they understand in an intense and trained way what is happening, they see possibilities opening up before them. Good athletes then judge and act with incredible swiftness and precision. Often coaches will comment on how well an athlete sees the court to describe this operational aspect of sports IQ.

Think of a football receiver who sees a cornerback shift their balance to anticipate a run. The receiver bursts through to create a seam to get open. Think of the quarterback who sees this unfolding and ignores his receiver check offs to pass to the receiver who found the opening. Think of a volleyball setter who becomes aware of the defense’s middle blocker shading to a left block. She suddenly changes to a middle quick set while in the air. Then her own middle blocker has to anticipate her action and be there to hit the ball.

In both cases one player sees an opening or opportunity and the other recognizes that their co-player has created this moment. They act in synergy. Basketball and soccer players always look for mismatches and play off each other hoping to create one. The player with the ball must be able to see when one occurs and instantly get the ball by foot or hand to the player with the mismatch.

 

A high sports IQ is enhanced when a team plays together for a while. Like in all teamwork being comfortable with each other, knowing each others tics and knowledge base and getting a feel and anticipatory sense all matter. The efficiency of teams depends upon building trust, respect and recognition. To maximize the sports IQ of the best players requires team cohesion. This permits that football receiver to know how best to position himself for the highest quality pass that the quarterback is comfortable with or for the volleyball setter to know exactly the optimal height for their quick set for that particular middle blocker. A high sports IQ without an experienced and cohesive team is not enough.

The whole language of sports IQ really means expertise and judgment in that particular sport. Good athletes have devoted the time and attention to develop into experts at what they do. They know the game, understand its structure and have through study and practice internalized perceptual, muscular and emotional knowledge and judgment to be at the right place at the right time. It sounds like a cliché but defines the truth of being an expert.

NCAA Reform: Great Start & the Battle Has Just Begun

Last week the NCAA Presidents on the Board of Directors passed some of the most significant athletic reforms in thirty years. The NCAA Presidents confirmed their initial start at their retreat and expanded their work. Prodded by scandals, their own desire to reform and Mark Emmert’s relentless leadership, they acted on four major changes.

The reforms cluster in two related but vital areas. All are designed to improve student welfare and improve student athlete academic performance and they will face stiff resistance from many coaches and athletic directors.

•  They authorized Conferences to permit schools to raise the full grant in aid to student athletes by 2000 dollars over the existing room, board, books and tuition. This attempt to achieve real “cost of attendance” and give student athletes enough money to pay for transportation, snacks, movies and normal living of being a student. This emulates common scholarship offers to top academic students.
• They prohibited school teams who do not graduate their student athletes at a rate of at least fifty percent from participating in NCAA tournaments or NCAA certified bowl games. This technically covers schools that do not achieve what is called an APR of 930. This is an algorithm that measures the rate at which players on a team stay in school and stay eligible. This decision builds on an early decision to raise the minimum APR requirement to 930. The original APR number had accreted so many exceptions that it no longer measured a fifty percent graduation rate. Like all major changes it will have a three to four year vesting period.
•   They put new limits upon the qualifications that student athlete freshman must meet to be eligible. Unlike past attempts to raise qualifications, this does not take away a year of eligibility. The new approach permits a student athlete to keep four years of eligibility but forces them to have restricted practice and devote more time to academics during their first year in college.
• They authorized schools to award grant in aids as four year blocks rather than on a year-to-year basis. This gives schools the option to do this and will put immense pressure upon everyone to do this since if one school does it, it becomes a considerable recruiting advantage.

The first point to remember is that this was not easy. Reformers and faculty have been pushing for cost of attendance for decades. The reforms have been stopped by the death by a thousand cut process of the NCAA and by the virulent opposition of the midrange football schools and many basketball schools who do not want to spend the money and fear it will only reinforce the have and have not world. Basketball coaches will be up in arms over their inability to play freshman immediately under the new academic eligibility rules.

The whole process could still falter. The NCAA is a membership organization and Emmert’s strategy has depended upon using the Presidents and the Board to get things accomplished. This bypasses the paralyzed and cumbersome process that takes 2-3 years and kills most good ideas. If enough membership schools can get a petition, they will seek an override vote. First they can send legislation back to the Board and then seek a full membership vote. Membership votes have  killed many good ideas in the past where the midrange schools and basketball schools ally and stop “expensive” reforms. Already coaches and athletic directors are mobilizing to stop it. It is also where coaches have great sway given their input with athletic directors.

For me the increase in awards are about simple justice. The average elite student athletes now works 20-40 hours a week for nine months a year on their teams. Even in off-season they work on conditioning, tape watching and skill development as well as informal scrimmages. These student athletes have no time to hold outside jobs given their commitment to the team and the implicit conditions of their scholarships.

In addition a high percentage of athletes in the revenue producing football and men’s basketball teams come from poor backgrounds. They have very little money and scrape by with no way to call parents, return home on holidays or spend funds on small things like movies or hanging out with friends. During the breaks between dorms and apartments, they live a precarious life sleeping on the floors of friends or spending holidays with a few caring parents. Another strong hope is that actually giving them enough to live rather than scrape by at penury will lesson the incentive to take small sums of money from agents and runners or sell their paraphernalia for pocket change. This won’t stop all of it but a surprising number of the cases of money from agents or selling paraphernalia involves very small amounts doled out to help students live.

This is not a perfect solution but much better than what we have now. Most of us who have fought for this would much prefer $3200 that is the best estimate we have of the real cost differential.

Quite frankly, all the schools have gotten away with grant in aids that are too low and should have to pay the real cost for their student athletes. These schools have held the NCAA and student athletes hostage for years. This makes strong sense for reasons of justice and fairness to the student athletes. All the BCS conferences will do this and reluctantly the other conferences will follow suite. The nice part about this is that once one conference does it, everyone else will have to do this for competitive reasons. That is what the Presidents and Emmert are relying on.

Coaches and athletic directors hate the next reform that permits schools to award grant in aid for four years subject to meeting basic academic progress. The Presidents insisted on this one, and it is important. Right now all grant in aids are given for one year at a time. The coaches and athletic directors believe four-year grants will lose them leverage over problem players. They will be forced to keep players whom they regard as poisonous or disruptive or ones who do not try and hurt the team.

 

To be honest most schools do their best to make an award a four-year award. First, it is good policy because if you run players off, others will counter recruit against you. Second, most coaches accept that they must be willing to live with their mistakes on talent. If a player brings effort and commitment but may not be as talented or develop as high as coaches hoped, the vast majority of schools live up to the implicit bargain of making a one year grant a four year grant. Most schools, if a player really does not match the school for talent or academics, will help the student athlete find a better fit school and transfer in good standing.

Most schools is not good enough. The real crunch times occur when new coaches come in under pressure to win fast and want their kids to match their system. It also happens when a sitting coach is under pressure and needs to win quickly and wants to change their talent level. It is not unusual for such coaches to try and run student athletes off or use informal and even abusive tactics to get students to leave. The Presidents are clearly aware of these dangers and cases like South Carolina make it clear that given the pressure coaches are under, these abuses could continue. Even though I believe most schools treat these boundary carefully and do not abuse it; enough examples exist to make what the Presidents do make sense.

The Presidents also believe that the much larger financial commitment of a four year award—200,000+ at a private or 120,000 for out of state public—will help silence critics who claim schools exploit student athletes with limited return. This is the Presidents voting no confidence in their athletic administrators and coaches. Expect athletic directors and coaches to fight a guerilla war on this on a school-by-school and case-by case-basis.

The last reforms pump up the APR and culminate a decade long growth in reform that began with Myles Brand and the Presidents. The press rigidly ignores the steady increase in graduation rates among student athletes over the last decade. They also ignore the success in the most at risk and money driven teams of men’s basketball and football. Even the rates of minority graduation have gone up.

The key driver to all this has been the APR rate. This rate monitors retention, staying eligible and meeting required benchmarks. Fear of losing scholarships and worse drives this success. If a team or school does not graduate their athletes at a fifty percent rate as predicted by the APR, they lost scholarships and access to NCAA championships.

This changes everything. Suddenly the coaches’ self interest aligns with academic performance. Coaching jobs depend upon talent on the field. This depends upon recruiting and if they lose scholarships, they lose competitive advantage.

For those who work in the trenches of academic support, the transformation has been amazing. Now coaches willingly meet weekly with athletic support to follow each student’s progress. When coaches evince intense focus on academics student athletes pay attention in a way they never could quite take from the blandishments of academic support staff.

Now the Presidents have upped the ante again. After a four year phase in which makes perfect sense given how hard it will be to change behavior, failed APR teams will not get to the tournaments or bowls. The entire post-season world changes.

This may matter most for the basketball schools that already graduate a paltry number of minority athletes. They, however, depend heavily upon post-season participation in the NCAA tournament and March Madness. Being in the tournament brings them the visibility and stature they crave.

The overwhelming purpose for most schools to invest in sports at this level pays off through the tournament or going to a bowl. Now academic failure immediately eliminates the raison d’être of the team. This change amplifies and powers up the pressure to get academic achievement not just from coaches but to push schools to invest in the level of academic support athletes need. If it really works, it will drive schools to invest more money in academic support to help their underprepared athletes become real college student athletes.

This brings us to the last reform and a very vital one. Most elite football and basketball programs bring in a number of superb athletes who are not academically or culturally prepared for college. Not that they cannot succeed at college but for reasons of situation and talent, they are far behind their compatriots in academic preparation and socialization. They enter college very underprepared often at reading and math levels in the mid or high grade school level. With intense support and commitment, these underprepared student athletes can develop into qualified students, but it takes time.

To be blunt, bringing in an underprepared student athlete who identifies as an athlete not a student and is asked to practice 40 hours a week and compete in a full season and then be a student is too much. Given several lost lawsuits, the NCAA has been paralyzed about raising academic aptitude standards around SAT and ACT tests. They rely heavily upon grade point average that can be a very powerful indicator but often distorts real level given the uneven quality of high schools.

For fifteen years the NCAA has moved to increase the requirements at the high school level to increase student athlete preparation. It has helped slowly but steadily. But it is not enough and too many underprepared and “at risk” student athletes come in and are overwhelmed trying to compete in the first year as students and athletes. This is especially the case in basketball where teams rely heavily upon freshmen.

This new rule, which will depend heavily upon the exact standards set, now permits seriously at risk student athletes to enter college and keep four years of eligibility. But it limits their practice time and will not let them compete there first year. It represents a modified return to freshman ineligibility that no one can afford but most coaches and faculty would love to see returned.

This year of “academic readiness” hopefully will help acclimate the young players who most need it to the culture shock of attending college and learn to be a college student. It gives them a respite to learn to be a student and preserves their future as athletes. But expect huge push back on this. The basketball only schools will be incensed that they actually have to educate their players and many elite coaches who live off of one and done players will oppose this. For basketball more than any other sport, freshman players provide quick fixes and the coaches will be loathe to give this up. They will lobby their athletic directors and Presidents to nullify this rule. 

If done right, it can also address another embarrassment, the one and out basketball players. Most incoming highly recruited basketball players who plan to be one and done are not academic balls of fire. The hope here is that if they are not academically prepared and know they will have to sit a year, they will forgo college and go right to the pros or Europe, but not come to college to sit for a year. It also means that coaches will have to think hard before they go this route and also push student athletes harder to get a better high school preparation.

This is the second installment; a lot more needs to be done. The athletic directors and coaches will fight back one rule at a time, and the Presidents have to stay involved at the campus level. The moral cesspools of recruiting and agents still remains, but in six months the Presidents and Mark Emmert have broken a twenty-year logjam. It is a good start but the effort cannot slack. .

Membership of the NCAA Board

Division	Committee Positions	Title	Name & Institution	Conference	Term Expiration
FBS	Member	President	Harris Pastides   University of South Carolina, Columbia	Southeastern Conference	APR 2015
FBS	Member	President	John G. Peters   Northern Illinois University	Mid-American Conference	APR 2013
FBS	Member	President	Lou Anna Simon   Michigan State University	Big Ten Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Nathan O. Hatch   Wake Forest University	Atlantic Coast Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Sidney McPhee   Middle Tennessee State University	Sun Belt Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Stan L. Albrecht   Utah State University	Western Athletic Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President, President	David Schmidly   University of New Mexico	Mountain West Conference	APR 2012
FBS	Member	President, President	Edward Ray   Oregon State University	Pac-12 Conference	APR 2012
FBS	Member	President, President	Guy H. Bailey   Texas Tech University	Big 12 Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Chair	President, President	Judy Genshaft   University of South Florida	Big East Conference	APR 2013
FBS	Member	President, President	Steadman Upham   University of Tulsa	Conference USA	APR 2014
FCS	Member	President	David J. Skorton   Cornell University	The Ivy League	APR 2015
FCS	Member	President	F. Ann Millner   Weber State University	Big Sky Conference	APR 2012
FCS	Member	President	William R. Harvey   Hampton University	Mid-Eastern Athletic Conf.	APR 2013
FCS	Member	President, President	William A. Meehan   Jacksonville State University	Ohio Valley Conference	APR 2013
DI	Member	Chancellor	Timothy P. White   University of California, Riverside	Big West Conference	APR 2015
DI	Member	President	E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C   University of Portland	West Coast Conference	APR 2012
DI	Member	President, President	David R. Hopkins   Wright State University	Horizon League	APR 2015