Beer and Circus by Murray Sperber Page A

pressure constricts your daily life, and narrows your college experience; for athletes this occurs because “coaches arrange aspects of your life (such as meals, housing, [etc.] … ) so that you will interact primarily with other athletes, and thus be more completely under the control of the coaching staff.”
    Similar to highly stressed vocationals, intercollegiate athletes tended to remain within their own group, directed by their coaches’ extreme emphasis on sports and frequent neglect of everything else, including academics. Coaches phrased their priorities more positively, usually invoking the word commitment , as in demanding an athlete’s commitment to the program .
    The Figlers explained “commitment” in a section titled, “Winning versus Your [Athletes’s] Welfare: Coaches feel that the time commitment they
demand of athletes is necessary in order to have a winning team.” Yet, these writers never discussed the benefits to coaches in high-profile sports who win consistently: annual incomes that in 1991 averaged $300,000 (and today average closer to $600,000, with an increasing number of coaches topping $1 million annually). Winning coaches receive among the highest salaries at their universities, but their supplementary earnings—endorsements of sneakers and other products, lucrative summer camps, public-speaking engagements, et cetera—generate an even larger proportion of their annual incomes. All aspects of their jobs depend on winning; for example, no trade association ever paid a losing coach $20,000 to speak at its convention.
    Fred Akers, a NCAA Division I-A head football coach from the 1970s to the early 1990s explained the process: “The more you win, the bigger the bucks. But you can never win enough—I won at UT [University of Texas at Austin] but got fired for not winning more.” Akers then went to Purdue, but had some losing seasons there and was fired again. He commented: “I was out of step. Most coaches believe that the best way to win is to put their players in the most intense training possible. Keep at ’em from dawn to dusk and into the night. I never did that, I didn’t feel it was fair to my guys, I wanted them to go to class and have time to study. But I’m not in college coaching anymore.”
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    Nevertheless, college athletes are not entirely the victims of obsessed coaches; the jocks have long participated in their fates. If they possess the talent to win an athletic scholarship, they enter university hoping to star at the college level and then move up to the professionals. As a result, many college athletes regard their university years primarily as minor league training for the pros and secondarily as an opportunity for an education. That only a small percentage of collegiate athletes ever achieve their pro sports dream is irrelevant to its power over them and its role in shaping their lives at school, especially their willingness to devote so many hours a day to athletics.
    In 1991, the NCAA instituted a rule that provided a basic test of the athletes’ and the coaches’ commitment to their sports, as well as the NCAA’s commitment to reform. Under pressure from the critics of college sports, including such members of Congress as Bill Bradley and Tom McMillen (authentic student-athletes in their college days), the NCAA moved to control the excessive number of hours that intercollegiate athletes spent in their sports and, by implication, not in their studies. The association passed a rule limiting “a student-athletes’s participation” in his or her sport “to a maximum of four hours per day and twenty hours per
week.” The NCAA hailed the rule as one of the most important pieces of legislation in its history, and even some critics were impressed.
    Unfortunately, the rule contained an immense loophole: the NCAA defined the four daily/twenty weekly hours as “mandatory