College sports means big money for big time programs. That means big money for the schools with successful teams. And all of that money gives immense leverage to the coaches producing those victories. A 2017 analysis by ESPN highlighted showed that in 39 of 50 states, the highest-paid public employee wasn’t the governor; but a college athletic coach. America’s highest paid coach is Alabama head football coach Nick Saban, whose annual salary is $8.3 million.
And this leverage has spilled over into other areas of the university, giving some coaches free reign to get away with or cover up scandal.
This looks to be the case at THE Ohio State University and the University of Maryland as the two schools deal with controversies not on the football field, but in the head coach’s office. At Ohio State, the issue was on whether football coach Urban Meyer lied—for months, if not years—about one of his assistant coaches, Zach Smith, who is alleged to have abused his now-ex-wife. At Maryland, as Gregg Easterbrook’s explains, the school is dealing with the disgrace of its actions related to the death of freshman football player Jordan McNair from preventable heatstroke.
Both scandals highlight how far each school’s athletic, academic, and booster communities bent over backwards to protect the programs and the men who run them. That’s apparent by the initial punishments handed down by the two schools. At OSU, Meyer was given a three-game suspension for lying to the university essentially since the first day of his employment. When asked by ESPN why he kept Smith on staff for nine years, the only excuse Meyer could offer was his “cherished relationship” with Smith’s grandfather, Bruce Earle; who was Meyer’s mentor and a previous head coach at Ohio State.
At Maryland, head coach D.J. Durkin was placed on “administrative leave” by the school, with many believing his outright termination was pending. But the school’s Board of Regents not only reinstated Durkin as head coach, but announced that it would also be retaining the services of Damon Evans as the school’s athletic director. Who was leaving? Only University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh, who had already announced his retirement.
Eventually sanity prevailed a day later when Loh fired Durkin outright. But that only happened after intense public pressure from state politicians, the media, boycott threats from the team’s players, and the specter of daily student protests.
It’s not just football programs where the high-profile coaches behave as if they’re kings. In basketball, University of Louisville head coach Rick Pitino was only let go after an FBI investigation found his program was working with shoe companies to pay for prostitutes (and other favors) in order to lure recruits to the school. Michigan State University—already stung by the Larry Nassar gymnastics case—kept both its football and basketball coaches despite numerous sexual assault accusations against players. An internal investigation by ESPN’s Outside the Lines claimed that administrators “put the school’s reputation above the need to give fair treatment to those reporting sexual violence and to the alleged perpetrators.”
If you believe any of this will change, you haven’t been paying attention to college athletics. If anything, expect the scandals to get worse. The NCAA is a paper tiger with no real authority to punish programs beyond sanctions.
And even that minimal authority could be undone. Many of the big conferences have been plotting to get out from under the NCAA for years. The entire college football playoff system is done outside the aegis of the NCAA and is a beast controlled by the five biggest conferences (SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, and Pac-12) in an alliance with television networks. How long before these conferences bid the NCAA farewell completely and govern themselves?
There are plenty of clean schools and clean programs, but the moral hazard is too big to go away on its own. As long as school administrators and program boosters put the desire to win above everything else, coaches are going to believe that the schools exist to serve them, and not the other way around.
Coaches can become legends on campus. But they should never be kings.
