BCS and NCAA Blind Side Everyone

Michael Oher

If you have not seen the film “Blind Side,” do yourself a favor and buy a copy of the DVD for your collection. We watched “Blind Side” again this weekend. It is a heart warming feel-good family story. The great thing about Blind Side is it is a true story. The bad thing about the film is that near the end of it we are given valuable insight into the self-righteous NCAA and the potential for catastrophic consequences as a result of its so-called policing efforts. Blind Side teaches us many important lessons. One of those lessons is that the NCAA is an organization without a soul, because the NCAA might well have destroyed all the good that came to the life of Michael Oher if it had its way. Fortunately for Michael Oher, there was just too much family love involved for the hypocrisy of the NCAA to kill.

In the sports news over the weekend it was reported that several Ohio State University football players including quarterback Terrelle Pryor got in trouble for selling off some of their “gear” for a few bucks. No doubt when the news reached the NCAA the executives were “deeply concerned.” It would seem that the only thing America’s gigantic industry known as NCAA college football cannot muster any concern for is…….the many creative ways in which young players are used and discarded by the system.



Terrelle Pryor



Yes, scholarships are handed out to players. And yes, there is some opportunity for competition on the playing field. But make no mistake. There is no industry in America, involving so much money that is more rigged or rife with anti-competitive practices than the NCAA-sanctioned and BCS-dominated system of college football. How and why is this so? In college football the financial stakes are so high for the entrenched stakeholders there is a systematic dumbing down of class and degree program choices for young players. Developing the player’s minds is routinely subordinated to keeping the players academically “eligible.” Coaches get paid astronomical salaries, not to develop student’s minds, but to advance their own careers. It gets worse. Only the NCAA has found the gall to look the other way while anti-competitive conference merger deals are brazenly constructed to concentrate power. The kinds of deals made in 2010 by conference commissioners with the blessings of university presidents, would not pass the Department of Justice’s laugh test if they were attempted in the business world. Where are the anti-trust lawyers when you need them in college athletics?

In all other sports where money flows freely, leagues impose reasonable roster count limits. In the NFL, the roster limit is about fifty players. The NCAA allows major university football programs to use their insidious competitive advantages to hoard eight-five players, far more than they need. The result of this rule is that good players ride the benches at big schools while smaller schools never have a chance to compete for those athletes. Whereas the NFL structures a draft system to maintain the delicacies of competitive balance, the NCAA institutionalizes a system that insures just the opposite. While the NFL takes it upon itself to assure competitive scheduling, the NCAA allows four or five dozen so-called “major” conference programs to systematically avoid scheduling games with up and coming so-called mid-majors like Boise State or TCU.

There are more charades on the way. Right after the NCAA executives and the major conference universities cash their BCS bowl appearance checks and successfully block efforts to create a fair playoff system, they will look into the punishments doled out to those horrible Ohio State Buckeye players. After all, they cannot look the other way and allow greed and corruption to rule. Can they?