Is There Life After Football? (5 page)

Going to college simply isn't the same for elite athletes as it is for typical students. Studies compete with football and myriad related activities for the student athlete's time, attention, and energy. Will Siegel, for instance, saw college merely as sidelight to sports: “To be very honest with you, I was just going there to play football. I wasn't a great student. I was an average student. . . . It was all football, and I had basketball and track, and I just enjoyed the athletic part of it. . . . I took all morning classes. I never cut class. I figured if you just attend classes, you are going to pass, and that is all I did, I just passed.”
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Others weren't as calculating; some were less conscientious. Many players simply give themselves over to football and fit studying in on the side. Still others pile on other “distractions.” Tommy Jones, a veteran linebacker, for example, recalls, “I didn't focus on my classroom work, because I was too focused on the girls and the social life. . . . I struggled at [college]. I had to go to summer school just to be eligible the next year, because I was partying every Thursday, not going to study hall, and stuff like that.”
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Jones never got his degree.

Making the Grade

Colleges protect their investments. A five-year commitment to a football player at a major BCS school may be worth nearly $600,000 when all is said and done—and this doesn't include the costs of academic support programs, strength and conditioning, facilities, administration, athletic trainers, and myriad other sundry expenses.
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Football programs can't afford academic eligibility problems, so they spend vast sums to promote classroom success. At the time most NFL retirees played their college ball, schools offered some form of academic assistance and special considerations. More recent retirees, however, had access to multimillion-dollar academic support facilities, tutors, study halls, technology, and more. According to the
New York Times
, in 2006, Division I schools
spent $150 million on academic support for athletes. USC alone had an academic support budget of $1.5 million, while the University of Georgia spent $1.3 million for academic tutors for athletes—roughly the same amount the university spent on the campuswide tutoring program for its other 25,000 undergraduates.
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Academic support programs and facilities have now become part of the “facilities arms race” for attracting recruits.
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For example, the University of North Carolina's academic support program is housed in the 150,000-square-foot Loudermilk Center for Excellence. The Student-Athlete Academic Support Center provides classrooms for teaching and tutoring, advanced computer technology, a writing lab, reading rooms, and office space.
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At Michigan State, the Clara Bell Smith Student Athlete Academic Center—a two-story, 31,000-square-foot complex—serves student athletes and houses a 210-seat auditorium, a “hall of fame” gallery, two study halls, 60 computers, structured study areas, a student lounge, a conference room, four classrooms, tutoring rooms, a director's office, academic advisor offices, and a reception area. There's also the Student-Athlete Support Service offering an academic support program that assists student-athletes with the transition to college and continues that support throughout the athlete's collegiate career, providing academic counseling, tutorial programs, and career exploration, planning, and placement.
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State-of-the-art academic support facilities are now de rigueur if a program is to compete in big time football.

“Majoring in Eligibility”

While academic support is a vital service, it tends to spoon-feed players their college education. Academic advisors design daily schedules and programs of study to fit both students' needs and the demands of their sport. Support staff members register athletes for classes, typically with priority registration arrangements. They monitor athlete's classroom attendance and performance, and enforce mandatory study hours. This was a mixed blessing for George Koonce:

ECU gave me my schedule with professors and times already chosen and a map to get to class. I had tutors and got help if I needed it. Football players had to be done with class by 2:00 p.m. If there was a class or lab that took place at 3:30, 5:30, or 6:30, you were not allowed to take it. . . . A professor once told me that a student should study about two to three hours outside of the classroom for each class hour. That meant I should have been devoting roughly 40 hours per week in and out of class. That was impossible. The coaches scheduled ten hours a week for study hall. I put roughly 20 to 25 hours per week into my academics. I put in at least 30 hours of training and game time each week, and my coaches encouraged me to do more hours of weight training and film study
.
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Unlike many players at ECU, Koonce picked his own major. In discussions with various advisors, he recalled the work he did around his father's contracting business. He was interested in the financial aspect of construction and wanted to pursue the field professionally, so he declared a major in industrial technology and construction management. This pleased his advisors because, coincidentally, they were steering a large majority of the scholarship football players into this major.
“If you were a football player,”
recalls Koonce,
“there was probably a 70 percent chance that you would be in industrial technology.”
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While this worked out well for Koonce, in the bigger picture, this sort of academic career management may limit players' academic and career horizons. And bucking the system can annoy the coaches. Jim Harbaugh, San Francisco 49ers head coach and former NFL quarterback, recalls that football players at the University of Michigan were steered toward easy coursework to ensure their eligibility. Harbaugh was talked out of majoring in history because it would take too much of his time. “Michigan is a good school, and I got a good education there,” says Harbaugh, “but the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they're in, they steer them to courses in sports communications. They're adulated when they're playing, but when they get out, the people who adulated them won't hire them.” Myron Rolle, who won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship while playing at Florida State, recalls that his college
coaches were concerned about him being a premed major because they feared it would distract him from football.
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Every campus has its reputedly easy courses and “jock” majors. Of course, these “gut” courses and majors vary widely from campus to campus, but athletic department advisors know where to find them. Players aren't prevented from pursuing their own courses of studies, but there are well-traversed paths down which players are steered. The University of Michigan appears to have changed since Jim Harbaugh's days, since, in 2008, 78 percent of UM football players declared majors in general studies compared with 1.6 percent of Michigan students overall. Around the same time, 68 percent of Texas A&M players were majoring in agricultural development (versus two percent of all undergraduates), while at the University of Texas, 41 percent of the football team was majoring in youth and community services, compared to 0.2 percent of all undergrads. Such “clustering” is widespread among FBS football programs. In 2008,
USA Today
found 79 FBS programs with clusters where more than 25 percent of the football team was in the same major and 28 programs with “extreme clusters” where more than 40 percent of a team shared the same major. The “jock” majors varied widely from school to school. There were many of the “usual suspects” (e.g., communication studies, criminal justice, sociology, recreation and leisure studies), but there was also notable clustering in generic nondisciplinary majors (e.g., general studies and university studies) as well as highly specific and esoteric-sounding programs such as apparel, housing, and resource management.
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There are two significant upshots of the special academic handling that college football players receive. On one hand, college football players are likely to get college degrees. On the other hand, even if they receive degrees, big-time college players often get empty educations.
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They make it through school, staying academically eligible, but often find their degrees haven't prepared them for life after college. Many fall short of earning degrees before their eligibility runs out and discover that while they have accumulated considerable academic credits toward graduation,
they are woefully short of fulfilling the specific requirements of an actual degree program. Even when they earn degrees, many of them can hardly be considered college educated because of the way they've avoided academic challenges. Along the way, as a matter of simply getting through college, many players cede control of their academic lives. It's part of the cost of majoring in eligibility.

Special Treatment

Academic support isn't the only special treatment afforded college football players. Indeed, the perceived “perks” of playing ball are legendary around any college campus with a major football program. Some things are obvious, especially to other students. For example, George Koonce lived in an athletic dorm at ECU, and his accommodations were probably better than those of most other students. But in comparison to some campus accommodations for college football players, Koonce was living in “affordable housing.” For almost a half century, athletic dorms were the signature of serious and successful football programs. The NCAA, however, put an end to them in 1996. Why? In 1991,
Sports Illustrated
characterized athletic dorms as a “perverse combination of Plato's Retreat [a notorious New York swinger's club] . . . cocaine den . . . and munitions dump.”
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By the standards of the day, living quarters were luxurious, the amenities lavish, and rules of residence life were loosely interpreted and enforced.

Hoping to stem the excesses, the NCAA banned housing catering only to scholarship athletes, instituting a rule that requires that every dormitory floor housing scholarship athletes must be occupied by at least 50 percent non-athletes as well. In recent years, colleges have been finessing this regulation by re-creating athletic palaces, but allowing equal numbers of non-athletes to live there, too. The opulence of today's accommodations is astounding. In 2013, the University of Oklahoma opened the $75 million Headington Hall housing facility; the six-story, 230,000-square-foot building features an outdoor dining and grilling gazebo in its central courtyard, a 75-seat theater, a formal “living room”
commons that includes a fireplace and oak paneling, a restaurant-style dining hall, a game room, and retail space that is expected to include a coffee shop, a convenience store, and a restaurant. Each residential floor also will have space devoted to individual or group study, a computer lab, a conference room, and an academic center. The residential rooms themselves will be more like hotel suites than dorm rooms. “We wanted to create a living and learning experience,” said an OU administrator. “We know that students and student-athletes come to campus living away from home for the very first time. We wanted them to have the greatest possible start to their career from a living perspective.”
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The concept of housing athletes together, but apart from other students, however, remains controversial. Those supporting athletic dorms argue that student athletes deserve excellent accommodations: they've “earned” them. Further, the dorms facilitate the use of both athletic and academic training facilities and resources. Finally, having players live together both fosters team cohesiveness and facilitates the supervision of young men living on their own for the first time. But others note major drawbacks, often pointing to aspects of the special culture it fosters—a culture that's both a boon and a blight. A cradle of camaraderie and a shelter from outside aggravation, the athletic dorm can also become an isolated hangout for bad habits. Separated from the general student population, athletes aren't well integrated into campus life. They stay to themselves, inhabiting virtual “islands of homogeneity,” and sometimes fail to grow into well-rounded students. They miss out on the socialization that typifies the college experience. As early as the 1970s, the faculty athletics representative at Indiana University warned that “the student-athlete has become a specialized product of contemporary culture” and was in danger of being cut off from the larger life of campus.
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Even more insidiously, athletic dorm culture can spiral out of control, with dramatic implications. For example, during the 1980s, a time when many of today's NFL retirees attended college, a series of scandals rocked the athletic dorm scene. Perhaps the most notorious involved the athletic dorm at the University of Miami. In September 1986, 14 police units were
summoned to Foster Hall because about 40 players were engaged in what police reports characterized as “a brawl” and others called a “riot in the football dorm.” Seven times in 1985, police arrested Hurricane players at the dorm on charges ranging from trespassing to arson. “It was like being the caretaker of an Old West bordello,” recalls Alan Beals, an academic counselor during that time. “Saturday nights were ugly. You'd see girls rolling around outside your window, fighting over [former wide receiver] Michael Irvin. [The players] would just trade around.” University of Miami president Edward Foote eventually shut down the dorm, explaining: “Part of being a college student is learning how to manage the treasure of freedom. It's true, there is more control if you have them [football players] all in one place. But the point of education is not to control but rather to create an environment that is rich in the opportunity for personal growth. Part of that is to make mistakes, to stay up too late or to fail an examination. And to face the consequences.”
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