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The Moral Decay Of Big-Time College Sports Starts At The Top

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The Moral Decay Of Big-Time College Sports Starts At The Top

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Some of them behave egotistically. Some of them abuse alcohol. Some of them objectify women. And many of them are paid handsomely despite their transgressions. The past few months have truly highlighted a moral decay within the world of big-time college sport!

But, before you read any further, let’s just be clear. The wrongdoers who are leading the moral decay of big-time college sports are not the athletes, as some may think. Rather, these wrongdoers are a subgroup of football and men’s basketball coaches—the very individuals that NCAA member colleges entrust to lead and educate the athletes.

Over the past two months, there have been more than just a few instances of coaches at NCAA Division-I member colleges failing the basic tests of legal compliance and morality. For example, at Gonzaga University, there is Mark Few who last month was arrested for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol—an act that potentially could have caused the death or serious bodily harm to someone in his community.

Then, there is Ed Orgeron. The LSU head football coach presently earns $6 million per year to lead his football team. Yet, according to numerous reports, Orgeron will be leaving LSU at the end of this season for a wide range of questionable behaviors. Among them, he purportedly pulled up to a woman at a gas station and suggested that they “work out together,” even though the woman told him that she was married and pregnant. As it turns out, the woman Coach Orgeron purportedly propositioned was the wife of a high-ranking LSU official.

Also, there is Urban Meyer—the long-time college football coach, first at the University of Florida and more recently at Ohio State University. Meyer recently had left the college ranks for a head coaching job with the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. But, rather than use this pro opportunity to showcase professionalism, Meyer earlier this season skipped out on a post-game team flight only to turn up in a bar with a young woman other than his wife. As future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers astutely noted, Meyer might have gotten away with that behavior when he coached college. But, in the unionized workforce of the NFL, players demand more accountability from their coaches.

These three examples, of course, are not all of the instances of NCAA Division-I coaches behaving poorly. Other examples include Rick Pitino, who will be back this season as the head basketball coach at Iona University, a Catholic school, despite his multiple sexual-related scandals. And, the list also includes DJ Durkin, who remains a paid football coach on the University of Mississippi staff despite that one of his former players at the University of Maryland, Jordan McNair, died from heatstroke under his arguably reckless watch.

Some college coaches truly put their athletes’ interests first—even at the Division I football and men’s basketball levels. Nevertheless, the problem with the moral fiber of NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball coaches runs reasonably deep. And, their behavior provides the greatest threat at present to the long-term integrity of college sports.

For far too long, NCAA bureaucrats have devoted most of their time to trying to sanction the receipt of pay by college athletes. Now, it is time for them instead to address their own coaches’ misbehavior.

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Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, Sports Ethics Director of the Robert Zicklin Center on Corporate Integrity, and the founder of Edelman Law. He is the co-author of “The Future of College Athlete Players Unions.

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