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Back in 1970, when I was editor of the Mirror, the
campus newspaper at the University of Northern Colorado in
Greeley, I thought I had my hands on a major scandal. I had
found the by-laws for the Rocky Mountain Athletic
Conference, the league that the UNC Bears played in. One
rule was that student-athletes shall not be given any
preference for campus employment.
Anyone who ever walked across the Greeley campus saw big guys leaning on rakes and shovels, putting in their time on the groundskeeping crew. Often they wore letter jackets, so I presumed they were athletes, but I wasn't sure.
So I called the superintendent of buildings and grounds
and asked how students got jobs there. When we need
people,
he said, I just call the athletic
department, and they send over as many guys as I can
hire.
There it was, on the record, a clear violation of the league rules. Student-athletes were getting preferential employment. But I didn't have to deal with coaches and players regularly. Our sports editor did, and I wanted to give him a heads-up on the coming story what would surely win me a Pulitzer.
The sports editor was Nick Larson, who died way too young a little more than a year ago. After Nick left Greeley, he wrote for newspapers in Fort Collins and Boulder before joining the Post in 2000. Even in college, he was an excellent writer, and those of us on the news side of the Mirror were always trying to talk him into abandoning sports and coming over to write real news about things that mattered. But Nick loved sports, and refused our entreaties.
Nick almost yawned when I warned him about the
athletic-department scandal I was about to break. Go
ahead and run it across the front page under a big
headline,
he said. It won't affect my work because
absolutely nothing will happen.
He explained that the RMAC basically had a staff of one person, the commissioner, who wouldn't have the time to investigate anything. UNC was a Division II school in football, and the NCAA had its hands full trying to regulate the big-time Division I athletic programs.
But surely, I insisted, somebody must want to enforce the rules. Nick laughed and said I was wrong; nothing would happen, no matter how hard I flogged that story. And he was right.
My story didn't even provoke a statement from the college athlete director, let alone any governing body. And if Nick were around today so I could ask him about the most recent University of Colorado football scandals, he'd likely make a similar prediction.
CU President Betsy Hoffman kept the same people in the same positions while announcing there would be some new policies, like higher academic standards for football recruits.
These policies will endure until CU has a truly wretched season. Then the sports columnists, player parents, Buffalo boosters and other supporters will stress the importance of having a competitive big-time football program at CU, and the cycle will begin anew. It's been happening that way for as long as I can remember, back to 1962 when Coach Sunny Grandelius got fired after making cash payments to about 20 players.
Hoffman had a golden opportunity to solve this problem forever by eliminating football at CU, and she could have produced a long list of good reasons:
· The program does not provide educational opportunities. Only 53 percent of football players graduate within six years; the average is 62 percent at all Division I schools, and 64 percent for all CU students.
· The program does not bring honor and glory to Colorado or its flagship university; it brings shame and ridicule.
· The cost of the current investigations must run into the millions, and this is money that does not buy a single book, test tube or computer to further the university's proper mission. Why continue this financial drain when both the university and the state have fiscal troubles?
· The University of Denver abandoned football in 1961 and the University of Chicago did so in 1939. Neither institution's reputation appears to have suffered thereby.
Hoffman may well be sincere in her desire to reform the athletic department and enforce new rules. And if she's lucky, she'll have moved on before the next CU football recruiting scandal arrives. There will be another coach, another athletic director, another university president -- and the same kind of squalid mess.
What Nick didn't tell me about college athletic department scandals was that even when something happens, nothing really changes.
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