Is There Life After Football?

by James A. Holstein

  “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.52

  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.”53

  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.54

  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.55

  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.56 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.”57 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.”58

  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.59

  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.”60

  For better or worse, athletic dorms often become “athletic islands,” isolated from much of student life.61 While he doesn’t lay all the blame on athletic dorms, George Koonce thinks that football diminished his college experience.

  My social circles were limited. Just about all of my friends were teammates, not classmates or fraternity brothers. . . . One of my biggest regrets about being a student-athlete is that I did not get a chance to take part of all of the things a university has to offer. . . . I didn’t have a balance.62

  And the balance is further upset as players find their college life closely tethered to their training facilities. All the top football schools have shining new athletic complexes that provide meeting space, weight rooms, rehab centers, and recreational outlets. Indeed, the “arms race” for training facility superiority is positively nuclear. With multimillionaire donors such as financier T. Boone Pickens (Oklahoma State: $265–400 million) and Nike’s Phil Knight (University of Oregon: $300 million) paying the way,63 universities are building increasingly extravagant sports palaces to attract the best recruits and “nurture” superior players. The University of Oregon’s Football Performance Center tops the list. With a cost conservatively estimated at $68 million, the 145,000-square-foot complex is a palace designed to satisfy nearly all of a young sportsman’s dreams. Giant screen TVs, video games, lavish furnishings, locker rooms, training facilities, and more. It’s enough to make a young man feel special.

  Premium Perks

  The NCAA boasts of a plethora of additional benefits beyond tuition, room, and board. The official list includes: degree completion and postgraduate scholarships, life skills training, and development grants. Among the primary financial benefits is the NCAA Catastrophic Injury Insurance Program to assist student-athletes who suffer catastrophic injuries while participating in an intercollegiate athletics activity. The NCAA also provides other insurance programs and also helps student-athletes with unmet financial needs through the Student Assistance Fund.64

  Nevertheless, additional perks—many of them “off the books”—are widespread and legendary, if not systematically documented. These include direct financial payment to players by coaches, alumni, and boosters, financial enticements offered to recruits, money made by selling football awards and memorabilia, shelter from university and criminal justice sanctions, academic fraud to preserve players’ eligibility, provision of prostitutes to players, and special incentives and “bounties” offered for game performance. Such transgressions at high-profile programs are too numerous to catalog, and have been going on for decades. Recently, for example, former players at Auburn University made a series of startling, yet all too familiar allegations: coaches were paying football players; payments were offered to players to forego entering the NFL draft; prospects were offered illegal recruiting enticements; players were commonly engaged in illicit drug use; players were sheltered in dealing with the criminal justice system; grades were inappropriately changed, and on and on.65 Similarly, the University of Miami has been accused of illicit payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars, implicating 72 former Hurricane athletes.66 At USC, a Land Rover and airline ticket were provided to a key football player.67 Ohio State players were guilty of accepting improper benefits and selling awards (including Big Ten championship rings), gifts, and university apparel valued from $1,000 to $2,500.68 Some of these “bonuses” are negligible and many are written off as the consequence of players merely trying to tap into the tremendous financial profits turned by big-time football, although all players are apprised from the start about NCAA regulations relating to financial benefits. But other rewards are far from trivial, occasionally approaching six-figure payoffs. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Southern Methodist University boosters maintained a $400,000 “slush fund” for paying athletes—with the knowledge and cooperation of coaches and the complicity of university presidents and members of the university Board of Governors, including a governor of the State of Texas. The situation got so out of hand that two players hijacked the entire slush fund without repercussion because coaches were afraid the players might expose the program to the media if they were punished.69

  Such payouts have been around from the beginning of intercollegiate sports, and tales—both mythic and true—have long circulated regarding special treatment accorded campus football heroes.70 While the magnitude of contemporary perks is often staggering, old-timers remember legendary LSU running back and former NFL star Billy Cannon making extra money by selling off entire sections of Tiger Stadium seats.71 Clearly, rules and regulations didn’t fully apply when you could run the ball like Billy Cannon. George Koonce recalls that they might even be bent for inside linebackers who seldom touched the ball.

  Boosters were always around. They wanted to be involved. . . . After a pep rally, or the hotel on the road, they would try to get to know you. They had “Feed the Pirate” nights. A booster’s family would take a player into their house for dinner. . . . Now and then I got some handshakes with some hundred-dollar bills. . . . I appreciated it, because I didn’t have any money. So, I basically used it for gas or to get a sandwich. It’s not like I was getting a lot of money to go to the mall or buy some jewelry.72

  To be sure, Koonce was getting sandwich money, not Mercedes money, but special treatment filtered all the way down to a JC transfer linebacker. The point is not to belabor illicit gains by scholarship athletes. Rather it’s to underscore the pervasive ways in which “being special” manifests itself in the lives of college players.

  Certainly Special

  “NFL Draft Day.” They wait in the “Green Room” in New York or at home by the phone. It’s a moment of defining truth, the moment when dreams are fulfilled or shattered. The elation and anguish is played out each spring on ESPN as top-rated players wait to see where they will be drafted—or if they will be drafted. Outcomes aside, however, the NFL draft culminates the process most players have pointed toward since early childhood.

  “This is a dream come true,” exclaimed Eric Fisher, the first pick in the 2013 draft. “I’ve worked for this all my life.” “It’s the best feeling of my entire life,” said Luke Joeckel about being the second overall selection. “That’s wh
at America is all about,” gushed Jon Gruden, ESPN analyst and former NFL coach. “A kid comes out of nowhere to become the number one draft pick in the NFL.”73 For the very few who are actually tapped on draft day, dreams have indeed come true. They have worked hard to get to that point as they arrive on the doorstep of their ultimate destination. On the road to the NFL, however, where else, metaphorically, has the lifelong pursuit of the dream taken these special players?

  First and foremost, on the field, they’ve become accomplished athletes—the very best in (and on) their fields. They’ve forged their bodies and honed their skills. They’ve developed disciplined habits around their games and learned the mental aspects of the game. Off the field, compared to most of their peers, elite athletes have been surrounded by material luxury. They’ve lived in swank athletic dorms and eaten at sumptuous training tables. They sport a nearly endless supply of athletic garb and footwear. They study in electronically tricked-out facilities with tutors and advisors at their beck and call. If troubles arise, someone from the program is quick to intervene.74

  At the same time, however, many players reach adulthood with limited experience in how to actually manage their own lives. Of course all children are cared for and guided by adults, but elite football players have been under heightened scrutiny and control since they were mere boys. Coaches, onlookers, and adult benefactors have guided their decisions on and off the field for years.75 Teachers have known that many players need special consideration or their hopes for a better future will evaporate. Snoop Dogg lavishes junior players with attention and nicknames. Hall of fame coaches and college recruiters dangle enticements in front of 12-year-olds. Millionaire boosters want to be seen with 19-year-old linebackers. The college provides players with the finest dorms, but coaches tell them where to live and who to live with. Extravagant meals are prepared for them. They order from seemingly endless, but set menus, both literally and figuratively.