Will Higher Education Ever Reform Major College Sports?

University of Maryland football player, Jordan McNair, died in June from complications associated with heat exhaustion. The university accepted the blame. On August 14, the school’s president and athletics director admitted that the football training staff didn’t respond adequately to McNair’s condition.

McNair isn’t the first college football player to die during training. From 2000-2016, 33 college football players died from football—most of them from issues caused by intense training.

But McNair’s death isn’t just about training and staff negligence. On August 10, ESPN published an article describing the Terrapin football program as “toxic,” rife with player abuse. And, a few days later, The Washington Post reported that the university president had rejected an earlier proposal to transfer training staff oversight from football operations to the medical school.

What happened at Maryland isn’t a football story only. It’s very much an indictment of higher education, the institution.

What happened at Maryland isn’t a football story only. It’s very much an indictment of higher education, the institution. That said, it’s unlikely that McNair’s death will be a tipping point for change nationally. One reason is that there’s ‘too much Maryland’ in the story to prompt wide scale change.

Across the country, school partisans will look at the Maryland scenario and attribute cause-effect to Maryland’s institutional particulars. “What happened there can’t happen here,” they’ll conclude. That’s because the words, ‘what happened,’ will be defined granularly, enabling a response that fits neatly into a preferred narrative, AKA, “Deflect and Defend.”

What would it take to propel a reform narrative? One answer is money.

Almost $10 billion dollars are spent annually on major college athletics, and athletic donors contribute mightily to the cause—to the tune of nearly $1.5 billion in 2015. The lion’s share of donor money helps schools “Keep up with the Joneses,” funding things like facility upgrades and coaching endowments. In effect, athletic donors play a lead role in fueling ‘the arms race’ in big-time college sports.

But there’s absolutely no reason—save lack of will—why donors couldn’t invest in athletics reform. What would that look like? Among many things, it could provide funding for research on head injuries/concussions, launch programs to improve gender/racial diversity in athletics administration, and create post-eligibility scholarships to enable student-athletes to finish degree work. That’s a far cry from donors putting their names on new athletic buildings, refurbishing locker rooms, and astroturfing a practice field.

At NYU, donors are working with the university to underwrite free tuition for all medical students. It’s a bold way to address a major issue in great need of reform—skyrocketing tuition costs. So why can’t more athletic donors invest in college sports reform? Besides, if donors only fund the system that exists, then they should start sharing blame when the system fails—as it did at Maryland.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. You can’t tell donors how to give. Reform has to be investment-worthy, valued and wanted, as much as is winning and all that goes with it. And universities would have to view this investment as a priority, not as a zero-sum (that is, taking money away from ‘the important stuff’).

Dartmouth shows how it can be done. Dartmouth is addressing head injuries via a no-tackle policy at practices and by using engineered tackle robots. And the head coach is serious about gender-diversity in football administration: he recently hired two women as coaching interns.

But big-time schools don’t pay much attention to places like Dartmouth. The stakes there—in athletic terms—are low.

When you put it all together, it’s unlikely that higher education will change much in response to Jordan McNair’s death. Yes, Maryland will honor him, but when it comes to big change—the kind that shakes up the system—the script nationally is likely to follow what Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849:

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

(Trans: The more it changes, the more it stays the same.)

Frank Fear