Hickey: Delany, NCAA bring back robber barons
Last Modified: Monday, December 03, 2012 6:06 PM
By Alex Hickey / American Press
The robber barons were the men who
helped grow the American economy into the world’s giant. Many of our
finest universities
bear some of their names — Duke, Stanford, Vanderbilt.
They just
happened to build it on the backs of underpaid immigrants and the
occasional child laborer, which was all fine and
dandy until those people started demanding rights. They got them,
eventually, and into history went the era of the robber
baron.
However, there is one important thing these men taught us
which is still relevant: exploitation is a terrific business model.
It’s just so darn hard to practice these days.
Fortunately, the commissioners of the NCAA’s major conferences and their compliant university presidents — men like Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany — have found a way to bring robber baronhood back into vogue. It’s called making millions off unpaid student-athletes.
The Rockefeller of the new robber
barons is Delany, who saw dollar signs to be made from plowing over the
old traditions of
college sports and building something new.
For years the Big Ten
talked about moving up from its 11-team structure so it could have its
very own league championship
game. Once the Southeastern Conference became the dominant force
in college football with its title game becoming a de facto
national semifinal, the time came to push talk into
action.
Nebraska, tired of Texas’ shadow in the Big 12, made the jump.
Sensing blood in the water, fellow robber baron and
protector-of-the-Rose
Bowl tradition (while killing all others) Pac-10 Commissioner
Larry Scott came up with a bold plan to further decimate the
Big 12 and become a 16-team operation.
Texas AD DeLoss Dodds saved
the day by declaring his school’s intention to stay put and keep the
league intact after the creation
of a sweet new TV network created by ESPN to show nothing but
Longhorn sports. Well, that’s not entirely true. It was also
originally going to show high school games (later prohibited by
the NCAA), which caused rival Texas A&M to throw a major fit.Mike
Slive’s SEC was more than willing to take in the Aggies and their access
to the Houston and Dallas TV markets, and threw
in Missouri as a nice door prize.
From there it became a domino
chain of madness that gives us something called the Big East despite
Boise State and San Diego
State joining the league. For football only, of course. San Diego
State will be in the Big West for its other sports. And
don’t even get me started on Tulane.
The chain of madness filtered all the way down to Southland, with Texas State, Texas-San Antonio and Texas-Arlington making the jump up to the WAC as that league hoped to stay viable before the money-go-round stopped spinning. Like many a now-anonymous small businessmen swallowed during the Gilded Age, it didn’t.
That’s what happens to the smallest fish in a sea of sharks.As counterintuitive as the whole process was, at least we thought it was over heading into this year. We thought incorrectly.
The past week demonstrated just how out of control things have gotten in the “not-for-profit” world of major college athletics.
Delany further decimated the regional tradition that helped make college sports so popular in the first place by adding Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten, starting yet another domino effect as each ensuing league desperately tries to patch its holes with duct tape. Or, Tulane.
On a competitive level, neither Maryland nor Rutgers adds anything to the Big Ten as a football league. Culturally, they add even less.
The Big Ten is the Midwest, plain and simple. It was not meant to have schools from states with a shoreline, unless that shore is along a Great Lake. Crab cakes and pork tenderloin do not mix. Neither does anyone who looks like Snooki and anyone from Iowa.
Indiana will end up playing Rutgers (736 miles away) more often than Illinois (149 miles away) in the new divisional setup.
None of that matters to Delany.All he sees is the $200 million that would be added to the conference coffers by having the Big Ten Network added to cable providers in the Washington, D.C. and New York City metropolitan areas.
That’s chump change compared to what ESPN is throwing around. The network recently signed a $5.64 billion deal to televise the BCS bowls and new four-team playoff from 2014-2026.
College football can even pay you big money for doing nothing at all. Fired Auburn coach Gene Chizik will make $208,334 per month for the next 36 months as a reward for getting clowned in eight consecutive SEC games this season.
Heck, I’d be willing to do just as lousy of a job for a quarter of the cost.
I suppose I shouldn’t have an issue
with all this splurging. We live in a free-market society, right? Gotta
seize it if it’s
there.
Only there’s one small problem. The ones creating all this
profit, the athletes, aren’t getting a dime out of it. Sure, most
are on scholarship. And in the old model of college sports, being
on full scholarship was a just reward. It still is at schools
in the lesser leagues getting left behind by the largesse at the
top.
However, Delany and his cronies are throwing out the old model of
college sports. What’s happening now is exploitation. It’s
not about tradition or regional rivalries; it’s about profit.
What
sense does it make to send kids from Maryland to Nebraska for a midweek,
regular-season volleyball match? How is that
fair to student-athletes, or to parents who probably assumed most
of their games would be somewhere within driving distance?
Dollar signs have a funny way of trumping logic and legitimate concerns. And the beauty for Delany and his brethren is they won’t have to share any of the growing pie with the kids they are sending all over the country.
Make no mistake, the robber barons have returned. Only now instead of having colleges named after them, they’re the ones running them.
•••
Alex Hickey covers McNeese State athletics. Email him at ahickey@americanpress.com
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