Canham's common sense

You can love the game, as Don Canham, the late Michigan athletic director always did, and still wonder how college athletics got so big, so excessive, so out of control.

It is mainly weeks like this that make you pause. It always did with Canham, who somehow knew how to run a big-time operation while understanding that, in the end, this is just an extracurricular pursuit.

Here we are preparing for conference football championship games that will be played for no purpose other than squeezing even more money out of unnecessarily oversized leagues. In fact, the conference title games are so profitable that leagues such as the ACC expanded against all logic – and student-athlete welfare – for the sole purpose of cashing a check.

It is a week when the ludicrous Bowl Championship Series again is under fire, where a playoff supposedly is tabled because university presidents are concerned about missed class time despite the staging of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge – a midweek, made-for-TV, no-shot-at-attending-lecture basketball event.

This is a week when the presumptive Heisman winner was paid off by a booster two years ago. When the BCS title matchup will likely feature one football program (Ohio State) that is on probation for major rule violations against another (Southern California) under investigation for major rule violations.

It is a week when colleges across the country are firing football coaches despite owing millions from bad contracts they were bamboozled into. Michigan State owes John L. Smith $3.1 million. Alabama will pay Mike Shula $66,667 per month through December 2011. Last year, Tennessee paid three different head basketball coaches.

The combination of bad coaching hires, horrible contracts, quick trigger fingers and, of course, the rampant construction of unnecessarily opulent facilities (Ohio State, Canham claimed, has a quarter billion dollars in debt) circles right back around to why colleges have to stage these championship games, why they had to expand the regular season to 12 games.

Everyone's broke. The more they make, the more they lose.

An All-American and national champion track athlete in the 1940s, Canham was Michigan's track coach from 1948 to 1968, then genius AD from 1968 to 1988. His unique perspective on it all, a perspective that remained even after his death in an auto accident in May 2005, is well worth bringing to light.

Before his death he was working on a recently unearthed position paper that, in his typical blunt, no-nonsense style, called out those he saw as responsible for the professionalization of college sports – the university presidents.

Until 1990, major athletic decisions at most campuses were made by the athletic director and a faculty board to make sure things didnt get too out of line.

But in 1990, university presidents seized power, claiming the need for reform and greater oversight on athletics with an increased emphasis on academics, cost controls and proper collegiate values. The presidents didn't trust their ADs and faculty.

The ironic thing is that rather than scaling back, everything just got bigger and more expensive. More class time was missed. More money wasted. Less common sense was applied. And ultimately, there was less concern for the athletes.

It turns out career sportsmen such as Don Canham cared more about values and education than the Ph.D.s who now are in control.

"How did college athletics lose its way?" Canham wrote in his paper. "Quite simply a few presidents convinced their peers that (they) could do a better job than the athletic directors and faculty boards could. … In reality they have done (worse)."

There are a million examples of this, and Canham cites plenty. You could tell, at 87, he was pained by where college sports were headed.

He couldn't imagine how anyone could think there was a need for weeknight football, super conferences, Taj Mahal facilities, basketball games in casinos, in-stadium corporate advertising, you name it. But he was most outraged at the presidents' two-faced claims.

"When [NCAA president] Myles Brand asserted in February of 2004 that 'college sports is not a business' it became clearer than ever that he and some presidents whom control and manage intercollegiate athletics have no idea what they are involved in or what they are doing," wrote Canham.

Sixteen years of presidential control has proved this. Every problem these supposed intellectuals were going to solve has gotten worse. The burden on the kids they were so concerned about has increased. The amateur game has become a monster business, no matter Brand's claims.

Canham predicted all of this in 1990. If not for a fatal accident he would have, even approaching 90, been fighting against it now.

His goal always was the same – get the too-political presidents who lack commitment, focus and backbone out. Return college sports to the ADs and faculty boards who kept things in check for decades. There was, he noted, some movement to do so, although having presidents cede control is no simple task.

But for the sake of college sports, isn't that the only way?

"There are two scenarios for the future," Rice University president Malcolm Gillis says in Canham's paper. "Scenario one is increasing commercialization until, over a period of 10 to 15 years the teams in the big conferences will be semi-professionalized, with athletes getting paid. Scenario two is that presidents come to their senses."

Don Canham may be gone, but here during this week, the big money week, his voice, his perspective and his honesty shout as loudly as ever.

The current system, the presidents' system, can't sustain itself. If anyone still bothers to care, then something has to give.