Sandusky scandal’s costs approach Bellotti’s

2/14/2012: From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn State has now begun to post documents about the scandal and about university operations in general (budgets, contracts) at http://openness.psu.edu/

Meanwhile here at UO we still don’t know what the Kelly/Lyles scandal will cost – just that the jocks have convinced Randy Geller that the academic side must pay half the costs so far. And NYT columnist Joe Nocera continues spelunking the sewer that is the NCAA:

The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.

The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.

“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.

I’d have written “athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is themselves, not the player.” These exploiters will leave UO in a heartbeat for a better offer – but if an athlete tries that, the NCAA enforcers will take away their eligibility!