Giving 'Em Fitz: Latest college football scandal is a product of the college system

This latest installment of Miami vice - the unfolding football scandal at the University of Miami - isn't the fault of boosters, no matter how many are small-minded jock sniffers.

It isn't the fault of the college athletes - paid or unpaid - no matter how many are spoiled and short-sighted.

And it isn't the fault of greedy coaches, compromised ADs, head-in-the-sand presidents or demanding corporate sponsors.

The problem with college athletics is college athletics.

The system is inherently corrupt. It's money and not character that it's designed to create.

The two guiding principles of college sports are as follows:

1. Generate enough revenue in football and basketball to produce football and basketball teams able to generate enough revenue.

2. Sell whatever you must to achieve that goal, whether it's advertising, naming rights or your school's soul.

At some level we all know this. And yet whenever an unseemly scandal like the one at Miami surfaces, we always seem surprised, outraged, indignant.

Ten years ago this fall, The Inquirer ran a lengthy series of stories on the insidious ways big money was infecting the college sports environment.

Among its other findings were these:

"At Penn State and scores of other large universities, sports is a multibillion-dollar business fed by corporate sponsorships, television and cable deals, booster payments and advertising.

"Games have become marketing tools to promote the college brand and gain national acclaim. Entertaining alumni and boosters has become more important than encouraging enjoyment and participation among students and athletes - the original idea behind college sports.

"A flood tide of television and corporate dollars has allowed athletic departments to operate like separate entertainment divisions of their universities, with their own employees and budgets, not subject to the same financial scrutiny as academic departments. Now television networks, boosters and corporate sponsors have as much a stake in a team's success as the university."

The intervening decade has only exacerbated all those ills. Now we've got schools such as Texas with their own TV network. Others will soon follow suit. Then Texas or some other sports factory will come up with some new money-raising scheme.

It's been going on since Jim Thorpe and Gil Thorpe.

The culprits will tell you that the system is necessary. How else, they claim, can we support all the other sports. Football and basketball pay the bills.

In some cases, that's true, though many of those same places where basketball and football are supposed to support the other sports have eliminated lots of those other sports, like wrestling, gymnastics, even baseball.

But at the overwhelming majority of schools, sports are siphoning money that, God forbid, might have been used for academic purposes. This could explain why a lot of college students understand a "Cover 2" but not the Civil War.

There's little that can be done. Ask all those good-intentioned do-gooders like the Knight Commission. The horse is not only out of the barn, it's got an analyst's job on ESPN, a primary corporate facilitator of the broken system.

The NCAA doesn't have enough investigators or money. Controlled by the ADs and college presidents who helped create the problem, it also doesn't have the will.

Fans, boosters and administrators are perfectly willing to take the cash and yield control of the system as long as their schools reach the NCAA tournament or the top 25.

Twenty-plus years ago, Iowa State football coach Jim Walden said "not more than 20 percent of the football players go to college for an education."

Believe all the empty platitudes you want about student-athletes, but it's a virtual certainty that the percentage has shrunk.

Miami's just a symptom. It's the system that's diseased.

The San Francisco 49ers reacted to a violence-marred preseason game with the Oakland Raiders by banning tailgating after the game starts.

This prompts a few questions:

1. Can't we extend the ban on tailgating before the game starts as well?

2. Who came up with the concept of tailgating before events you're not attending? Al Davis?

3. Wouldn't it be easier to ban preseason games with the Oakland Raiders?

In a breathless Comcast-Spectacor news release last week, we learned that 18,000 cup holders were being added to seats at the Wells Fargo Center.

Wow!

As part of the same grand strategy, Comcast-Spectacor is also planning to purchase six new trash cans, add a page to all Flyers programs and - maybe, just maybe - change its paper cup supplier.

For all of you eager to witness the redemption of scandal-marred Ohio State QB Terrell Pryor, you're out of luck.

The Western Pennsylvania product was picked in the supplemental draft by the Oakland Raiders, the black (and silver) hole into which scores of troubled athletes have disappeared.

Keep him away from the in-game tailgaters.

UFC president Dana White is engaging in a war of words with boxing promoter Bob Arum.

Arum better watch out. White kicks, bites, scratches and pulls hair - and, come to think of it - so do UFC competitors.

What, by the way, does UFC stand for?

Unusually Feminine Competition?

Unruly Freaks Combat?

Read Frank Fitzpatrick's blog, Giving 'em Fitz, at www.philly.com/fitz

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