College sports: Please, no help from Congress!

As Rahm Emanuel famously quipped, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Well, the corollary to that quip is, “Every crisis predictably brings out the worst in Congress.” Look no further than Dodd-Frank or COVID-19 response legislation for verification.

The latest example of this is the college sports “crisis.” No one can deny the deplorable status of college sports. The crisis has been building for decades. Innumerable scandals involving fake classes for athletes, under-the-table compensation, circumvention of NCAA rules, classroom cheating, megacontracts for coaches — and now the outright direct payments to college athletes. The mythical “student athlete” no longer exists. The sad truth is the athletic programs of Division I colleges bear absolutely no relationship to the educational mission of higher education.

Enough is enough! It’s time for a dose of painful realism — and radical change.

But the answer is not a congressional Band-Aid as proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). It’s particularly painful to see Cruz, who is generally a principled conservative, fall for the mirage of federal regulation. Anyone who has faith in regulation has never spent much time with regulators!

As Milton Friedman observed, “Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations.” The market is totally capable of efficiently sorting out both educational institutions and professional sports teams. The problem here is that Cruz’s proposed regulation would perpetuate the inefficient — and unseemly — marriage of higher education with professional sports. Colleges can compete for scholars, and professional sports teams can compete for professional athletes, but regulation cannot bind the two together in any kind of coherent union.

The colleges themselves created this mess. Over decades, they have eroded their educational mission by engaging in the big business of subsidized athletics. The predictable result is professional sports programs indefensibly appended to institutions of higher education.

There is a clear solution: offer no more athletic scholarships.

Athletics has a legitimate place in collegiate life, but only within the traditional concept of the student athlete. Students should be encouraged to compete in athletics, and colleges should continue to provide academic and need-based scholarships. But colleges should issue no more athletic scholarships for athletes whose goal is to nab a lucrative professional contract. If pro teams want a development league, they can finance it, just like Major League Baseball. If athletes want to attend college while separately playing semipro, even better.

While this prescription may sound extreme, it has happened before in college sports. Any number of colleges have either eliminated or de-emphasized subsidized athletics over the years. An instructive illustration is Washington & Lee University. In 1954, the university’s board of trustees, in response to a football academic cheating scandal, ended the subsidization of all athletes and left Division I sports. The action was taken less than three months after the scandal broke and after the football team had recently returned from the Gator Bowl.

A heated outcry from some alumni followed the board’s decision, but the school defended the decision as crucial to protecting its academic integrity. Today, athletics is alive and well at Washington & Lee with more than a dozen varsity sports and one of the highest student athlete graduation rates among NCAA Division III schools. Most importantly, Washington & Lee’s stellar reputation remains intact. Despite predictions that alumni giving would plummet as a result, the school’s endowment currently totals $2.2 billion and at $978,000 per student is in the top 25 of American colleges.

This crisis calls for congressional restraint — not action. Congress has far more important challenges now — e.g., the $40 trillion-plus federal debt. America’s colleges can solve this problem if only they will reaffirm their original mission as institutions of learning and research and rediscover the traditional concept of the student athlete.

Garland S. Tucker III is retired chairman and CEO of Triangle Capital Corporation and an author.