Pop quiz, hotshot: which is worse: the PED plague taking over sports, or the seedy underbelly of amateur athletics? Which blows up sports first? What do we do?
(Bonus points for anyone who correctly guessed the Speed reference.)
In one corner, we’ve got doubt casting a long and eerie shadow over pretty much every sports feat we’ve witnessed over the past…past…what? That even makes this performance enhancing drugs business even more difficult to process. How long have we been living under a rock at the magnitude of this epidemic?
In the other corner, we’ve got athletes selling conference championship rings, signing memorabilia for cash and taking duffle bags of dough from agents. Again, the question of when this became more than an anomaly is vague as well, but I remember seeing Johnny Be Good, any despite immediately knowing it was a terrible movie, had a sinking feeling that recruitment of a high school athlete could indeed be that shady and lacking any moral regard.
For either issue, the how and when don’t really matter all that much. It’s more telling to focus on the why. Why do athletes take PEDs? Why do people prey on young athletes with a carrot of cash? Why are athletes dumb enough to take either when they know the rules?
And the answer lies in the green the runs the entire operation. It’s bigger than any system, bigger than any person. And if we learned anything from Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas is that money never sleeps.
It’s a person’s desire to live a life different than a normal person. The same reason some people play the lottery – the want of more. But rarely can people tell you why, or at the very least keep answering why’s until they get to the root of it all.
As time has passed, because we don’t address either in a fully comprehensive manner, it has manifested and multiplied into this current state, slowly eating away at the fabric of sports, and in many ways, our culture.
People want to win. It’s why we keep score. But we’ve always acknowledged in life and in sports when it’s done the right way. When that started to change was when someone discovered you could win without doing things the right way – with shortcuts. We establish rules because they allow us to go fast. Think of brakes on a car in the same manner – they allow you to go fast, safely, with the idea that using them when needed prevents danger from becoming a reality.
This logic is the backbone of nearly everything we do. It’s there because 98 percent of us don’t need the rules to tell us what is acceptable and what isn’t, but rather to protect our hard work and honesty from the 2 percent that do not follow the rules.
And over time, in sports and in life, we’ve needed to add more rules because more and more people have lost that navigational compass – a conscious – that guides them along the way. But when you don’t address it, the problem gets worse. When you turn a blind eye instead of maintaining relevancy, you secure a future filled with less certainty and more chaos.
This is where athletes who get engaged in the use of PEDs find themselves. Caught in some fog of needles and pills. Is it right that the guy trying to take your spot might be taking PEDs and if you don’t, you’ll be cut or traded? No. Is it right for you to take them to gain a performance edge which allows you to get a raise and break records? To most, the answer is no.
But it is fair that your sport, for some reason, is targeted heavily while others remain blissfully passed over in the public eye? Again, no.
We cannot be naïve enough to believe that this has been largely limited to Major League Baseball, and if we are, there’s some oceanfront property in Utah I’d love to show you sometime. Then again, perhaps we’re not being naïve. Maybe we’ve just chosen this path, to stick our heads in the sand, for fear of what would happen to us trying to process that nothing is real anymore.
If we allow ourselves to start asking all the questions we should, it would require something that cannot be done: an alternate reality.
We already laugh when we’re told the 1992 and 1993 Fab Five teams didn’t make the NCAA Final Four. They did, and you can take down the banners and forbid them from school grounds, but it happened.
The same as if we’re to try wipe off McGwire, Sosa and Bonds juiced fingerprints off the home run records. We’re going to pretend Maris’ 61 still stands? Or what if we allow ourselves to wonder if a number of teams would have won a championship had a key player not been under the PED influence? Can it be wiped away? Did the Red Sox not win the 2004 World Series? The Yankees the 2009 title? Or would they? How can we know?
We begin entering some weird, strange reality where Doc Brown can’t even stop the space time continuum from being destroyed.
This state of chaos and confusion is also where the NCAA now finds itself. It’s been reduced to the media uncovering broken rules around eligibility and recruitment. It’s openly mocked in social media by a well respected former athlete turned lawyer turned intelligent analyst of college basketball, but really, so many things.
Yesterday, Jay Bilas pointed out the hypocrisy that has been occurring in the NCAA for quite some time. He tweeted screenshots of the official NCAA online store, that allows you to search the name of a player and actually displays matching results. So, if you type in Manziel, a Texas A&M #2 jersey comes up.
Ruh-roh.
To really drive the point home, the NCAA has repeatedly stated it does not make a profit off a player’s name or likeness. Which doesn’t pass the straight-face test at all considering when I play an NCAA football video game and there’s a right-handed QB #7 under center for USC who has the same skill attributes, as say, oh, Matt Barkley.
So yes, this is a problem. Big problem.
An even bigger problem for the NCAA, which is in the midst of a lawsuit with former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon that threatens to blow up their monopoly on making money off the athletes – even long after their amateurism ends. (Again, think video games, highlight videos, retro jersey sales).
Like anyone caught in the act, the NCAA turned off their search functionality by mid-day.
Too late.
On the other hand, you have the reigning Heisman Trophy winner dumb enough to be recorded doing a signing session and telling the broker to pretend it never happened.
Can all of these people actually be this dumb? Can the NCAA not have someone ensuring they are remaining compliant with their own claims? Can athletes who know the rules – especially in 2013, especially a Heisman Trophy winner already under fire – not be silly enough to break them.
Should college athletes be paid is a debate that has been going on for some time and will continue, but what cannot be debated is that currently, the rules don’t allow you to accept payment for your autograph, no matter what NCAAShop.com is doing.
At some point in time, it all made sense – student-athletes were just that. And for their time, effort and commitment in the extracurricular, they were awarded scholarships which paid for their school. But there was a tipping point, as there always is, where TV and merchandising made it painfully obvious that student-athletes weren’t really students first at these massive conference institutions.
Why?
Because TV pays lots and lots of money and the better you are the more you are on TV and the more merchandise and hype you sell. It’s fifty shades of green: from advertisers to broadcast media to colleges and universities to presidents and athletic directors and coaches.
Don’t believe me? Have you seen Oregon’s new center of football operations?
This isn’t just an old building in need of refurbishment. This is like a apocalyptic movie where an entire major city is destroyed and only fragments remain.
If you think I’m being crazy and spouting hyperbole, you can read on and you will think again.
Imagine a world where college athletes could be treated more like free agents, or paid by schools or their conferences. Imagine a world without the NCAA tournaments or playoffs, where championships are driven completely by corporations and TV conglomerates who bid the highest amount to show the games.
Don’t believe that would ever happen? Why not?
What holds the NCAA together is member institutions. What happens when those institutions start breaking off. If conferences and universities can start creating their own networks – which they have, obviously – then they have already begun the process of removing the middle man.
We are only a few steps away from an agreement not between CBS and the NCAA, but between the Big Ten, Big XII and ACC and CBS. And as the conferences continue to re-align and grow into super conferences of schools who are good in multiple sports, there’s even more money to be had.
And where there’s more money to be had, there will be even more people with their hands grabbing for it.
So whether it’s the PED circus crushing baseball (and soon enough, the other major sports) or the shamatuerism of college athletics, the real question then isn’t going to be why, when or how. It will be: what’s next?
What lies beyond the end of the NCAA and the fall of non-professional sports seems less optimistic than what lies beyond PEDs. If history has taught us anything, what happens after the downfall ultimately determines the course of the future.
And where there are shades of green, there will be shades of gray.
What do we do?
What can we do?
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