Colleges mull new measures for agents
Just how widespread the old profession of player-agent relationships is has become disturbingly clear recently. Not so long before Alabama coach Nick Saban's "pimp" comment in describing less-principled agents, commentator Frank Deford - decrying the fact that athletes in so-called "revenue" college sports of football and basketball are unsalaried - wrote that "a scholarship boils down to a device to keep the players on the premises where they can perform their services for free: OK, they get a lot of perks. They live well. They're the equivalent of what we used to call 'kept women.' "
What set off Saban, of course, was the flood of agent-related inquiries that followed severe NCAA sanctions imposed this summer in the Reggie Bush-USC case. Bush, during his college playing career, was found to have been provided cars, a house, travel and other gifts, violating NCAA amateur rules, and Saban's national champions were among the four Southeastern Conference teams subsequently being investigated for similar infractions.
Saban and fellow SEC coach Urban Meyer of Florida publicly railed at what Meyer branded an "epidemic" for which bad agents should be "severely punished." And from several angles have come strongly worded - and vastly different - suggestions for reform.
Darren Heitner, proponent of a federal agent-registration system and who is CEO of Dynasty Athlete Representation and founder of SportsAgentBlog.com, argued that the NCAA and individual states need to begin enforcing rules already on the books. All schools have compliance officers to monitor such rules and 39 states are signed on to the Uniform Athlete Agents Act, which gives schools the right to sue agents who break the law.
North Carolina State athletic director Debbie Yow threatened to take legal action if there was impermissible contact between agents and her school's athletes - though, if such a suit went forward, it would be the first time an agent was prosecuted. Saban and Meyer joined a group of prominent college coaches convening a conference call with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL Players Association. The idea there was to threaten agents with league decertification.
Whereupon Los Angeles-based sports agent Donald Yee, in a Washington Post editorial, wrote about a 10-point plan that included the Deford model of putting college athletes on the payroll.
"The primary culprit," Yee wrote, "isn't the people around the game; it's the NCAA's legislated view of amateurism. It lacks intellectual integrity."
After noting, in the Bush situation, that USC's football operation was punished while Bush, then-USC coach Pete Carroll, then-USC assistant coach Steve Sarkisian (now head coach at Washington) and new USC coach Lane Kiffin all have wound up "millionaires," Yee began his list of proposals with the idea of colleges leasing rights to operate their commercial football programs to independent outside companies.
USC would become USC Football Inc., he said, sharing profits with the university on a negotiated basis. And that corporation would create leagues, pay player salaries, offer educational opportunities (if the players wanted them) and, by the way, eliminate the NCAA. Further, he said, coaches would stick strictly to coaching and colleges strictly to education.
Such a plan goes directly against recommendations issued in June by the Knight Commission, an NCAA watchdog group, that schools instead be rewarded for "making academic values a priority" and "treating athletes as students first and foremost - not as professionals." Three months earlier, Education Secretary Arne Duncan advocated making any college basketball team that failed to graduate 40 percent of its players ineligible for postseason play.
