The rays of the sun are beginning to take on a particular angle: an angle that sets off a physiological reaction in die-hard college football junkies that cries out through the sinews, "Football season is coming."
You can begin to hear the faint echoes of a college marching band's tattoo erupting in your brain like a divinely inspired call. Already my e-mail box is starting to fill with "smack talk" and "counter-smack" from the dulia-filled faithful anxious; reminiscing about the glories of yesterday, these e-missives must be designed to influence the gods of football to remember past alliances and assure future victory.
But no matter how much paraphernalia these keepers of the gridiron faith pour into "the football room," their bobble-headed idols have eyes that see not and ears that hear not. The true "gods of football" live in Indianapolis and they are angry and spiteful deities. And so, verily, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) thundered earlier this month: "Thou shall not take names in vain."
The NCAA has declared a ban on the use of "hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships." And what exactly is such a "hostile and abusive" moniker? According to the Executive Committee, names like Seminoles, Indians, Chippewas and Choctaws are offensive, but tags like Fighting Irish, Quakers and a whole slew of "demons" and "devils" are not. In defending this capriciousness, NCAA vice president for diversity and inclusion, Charlotte Westerhaus, stated, “We have not gotten information from any group that represents Irish or (anyone of) Irish ancestry … that they believe that [Fighting Irish] image is hostile and/or abusive.” Westerhaus's comments notwithstanding, the NCAA is merely one more organ of the totalitarian ideology of cultural Marxism, a.k.a. political correctness, and given its origins, this is not surprising.
The NCAA's genesis came at the behest of the ever-meddling, proto-neocon Theodore Roosevelt. The familiar centralization tactic of calling for an "imperative response" to an "imminent danger or crisis" is present. Apparently the "flying wedge" formation was blamed for the serious injury or death of some undisclosed number of college football players and, as a result, certain schools were dropping their football programs. (Even if one accepts that this crisis was real, one could safely assume that market forces would have influenced college football coaches to abandon the flying wedge so as to save their own jobs from being eliminated.) Out of T.R.'s grandstanding came a centralized rulemaking body, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS), which in 1910 changed its name to the NCAA.
The next "crisis" the NCAA faced was post-World War II recruiting practices. As schools discovered that football was a revenue-generating sport at the gate, they began to recruit and give scholarships to football talent in order to draw larger crowds. The new medium of television was also providing a fresh source of revenue. As George Stigler could have predicted, with such a pile of loot on the line, it was time to enlarge the NCAA from merely a rulemaking body to a regulatory agency and create a monopoly.
There is no reason why market forces should not be allowed in the recruitment of college football players. Student athletes should be free to attend and compete at any college or university whose entrance requirements they meet. They should also be free to transfer, without penalty, to another school at any time. Colleges and universities should be allowed to grant as many athletic scholarships as they find feasible. The limiting of scholarships is supposedly done in the name of "promoting competition" but is really anything but. (Does fairness demand that outstanding academic schools limit the number of academic scholarships it awards because there are not enough baby geniuses to go around?) Rather than improving sports or the life of the college athlete in any way, the NCAA is merely a regulatory behemoth that serves only itself.
It should come as no shock that where arbitrary power is concentrated, there you will find the forces of cultural Marxism. The president of the NCAA claims that the organization is "taking the high road." If the high road consists of putting a politically correct face on a monopoly designed to intimidate members and extort student athletes, then he's right. I prefer to think of it as the road to perdition.
August 15, 2005
C.T. Rossi [send him mail] is a recent law school graduate who lives in Washington, D.C.
