The super business known as Division I athletics and the entities that create it’s power (ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS, and ABC just to name a few) continue to create larger than life news stories. The details of the crimes being accused against a former football coach are grotesque to say the least, as well as the cover-up by soon-to-be-named, money driven administrators. But the numbers of people who are guilty, or should share some of the guilt, in this story go beyond the names that we have been exposed to by our media outlets. So, who is to blame in all of this?
The vast majority of people believe what they hear on Sportscenter is the latest in breaking news and that everything they report is current. The personalities at ESPN are paid to get the latest information on everything, and for college football, they are allowed special access to facilities, coaches, and players. With their popularity, they also have tremendous ties to former players and now NFL players. They are about as connected to the major programs as any booster or friend of the program. Football programs use ESPN for coverage which will help recruiting and ESPN pays an incredible amount of money to these institutions which help run programs like baseball, softball, tennis, and golf. So…with this access to all of these types of players and staff over the last 10 years, do you really believe that ESPN (or other news agencies) wouldn’t have heard anything about these accusations long before the news was actually reported on its air waves? I have no way of knowing if they did or not, but I do feel that they withhold information or do not completely investigate a lot of the potential stories that are out there. You can’t tell me they couldn’t have found something illegal going on at Auburn last year. But destroying the SEC would kill ESPN’s revenue for advertising and viewing ratings cannot be compromised. So again, I wonder, did they know something about the Penn St. scandal…if so, they are as much to blame as Joe Paterno.
All of this has really made me realize that we put way too much stock into some of these so-called ‘icons’. What do we really know about guys like Joe Paterno other than he won a lot of football games, and he donated a lot of his outrageous salary back to the university to build a library? What do we really know about him as a person or his morality? So, while I believe I really like some coaches out there (I believe Kirk Ferentz and Paul Rhoads are good men who seem to set a good example), I’m hesitant to go all in with them. We have people like Jim Tressel, Joe Paterno, and Bruce Pearl who ruin it for me.
So, it makes the answer to the following question pretty easy…”Why do you like Division III?”
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