No Sense in College Football’s Payroll

Why do we see Lou Holtz selling cheeseburgers on television, but we never see Jake Plummer? Bobby Bowden but not Danny Wuerrfel? Joe Paterno but not Troy Davis? Why is it good for big-time college coaches to make millions of dollars, but it’s a sin for big-time college players to make a nickel? Just wondering.

Why couldn’t colleges do what the Olympic folks finally did? Create a trust fund for athletes. Let college players make the money they’re due for their work in creating a multibillion-dollar industry. But give them the money when they graduate.

If colleges really want the education of athletes, what more powerful incentive could they offer than earned money held in a trust available only upon graduation? Just wondering, really, about our proud universities, those repositories of moral values, those exemplars of excellence.

How long can they practice shameless hypocrisy about athletics? Actually, they’re well into their second century of it.

They want us to treat college football as an amateur game played for the benefit of student-athletes when it’s clearly professional entertainment staged with the slave labor of players who are paid not in money but in $2-an-hour scholarship chits.

Just wondering.

Why shouldn’t Darnell Autry get the money? The Northwestern football star is a theater major who last summer was asked to appear in a movie filmed in Italy. The NCAA said he couldn’t do it and went to court to prevent it. There Autry won the right to work in the film with one proviso: He couldn’t be paid.

Any other theater major, any music major with a cello or any botanist with a microscope could have done summer work at the going wage.

But not if he also plays NCAA football.

Does that make sense? Maybe gadfly Dick DeVenzio has it right. Once a Duke University basketball academic All-American, DeVenzio today campaigns for college athletes’ rights. He has suggested that NCAA stands for National Conspiracy Against Athletes.

Just wondering, too, why there still is no playoff to determine a national college football champion. As argument against a playoff, some people say they like the . . . arguments.

They like the indecision of a Bowl Alliance system that allows for debate as to which team is best.

Just because Florida State won ‘em all or didn’t win ‘em all, so what? Does that make the Seminoles better than, say, Nebraska, which didn’t win ‘em all but might beat up anybody any day? Because the Bowl Alliance is flawed, it works well with such a flawed idea.

The Alliance is not so much a system as a power move by college pooh-bahs eager to please bowl organizers and TV networks to whom they long ago sold themselves, body and soul.

So four big-shot bowl games and their affiliated TV bankers are guaranteed to get a “national championship” game once every four years.

To do that, two teams are given byes to the championship game.

So when the Alliance rotation coughs up its “national champion,” we all can stand around the water cooler and . . . argue.

We can argue that the best team wasn’t advanced to the championship game. We can claim that an early defeat meant nothing to our heroes who were mighty in November.

For that matter, Big Ten and Pac-10 teams have chosen to stay out of the Alliance, pledging allegiance to the Rose Bowl.

So how true a national champion do you get by ignoring the likes of Arizona State and its Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Jake Plummer? (What? Plummer didn’t win the Heisman? Surely you jest. Didn’t he defeat Nebraska when Nebraska was thought to be an NFL team? Didn’t he take Arizona State undefeated to the Rose Bowl? Didn’t he throw and run so spectacularly as to put folks in mind of Steve Young.

What you get from the Bowl Alliance is a “national champion” in name but not in deed.

Every other NCAA varsity sport decides its champion on the field. That’s solid circumstantial evidence proving playoffs are a good idea.

Even in football, every NCAA division has a playoff--except for the big boys.

Such a playoff system could be created in a minute.

Like this: A selection committee chooses 16 teams.

They play the first round of eight games on college campuses.

The second round becomes the Fiesta, Orange, Peach and Cotton bowls.

The semifinals are the Rose and Sugar bowls.

Each year the championship game happens at Mickey Mouse World (or the first such place that puts up a stadium seating 125,000 people).

Just wondering why such a simple system hasn’t been created.

And trying not to be cynical about it.

But hey.

Why not be cynical when the worst we can think of college athletics often turns out to be the truth? So the cynic’s view is that the big boys of college football will do what they’ve always done.

They’ll create a playoff system as soon as their TV godfathers tell them there are massive amounts of money to be made.

Just wondering, finally, about Steve Spurrier.

The best college football coach alive said he would stay at Florida.

He said it after telling Atlanta sportswriters he was a “very good listener” who would listen to any offer from the NFL’s Falcons.

In fact, he listened to the Falcons not at all--but gained a measure of satisfaction for the Falcons’ snub a dozen years ago after his success in the U.S. Football League.

“I made the Falcons an offer then,” Spurrier said. “Pay me $200,000 and a lot of incentives. But they said they already had their man in mind.”

This time, hat in hand, the woebegone Falcons would have given Spurrier anything he wanted.

Only he wouldn’t even talk to them.

Do you suppose he simply teased the Falcons? Do you think he then laughed out loud for a week? Just wondering.