Enough with professionalized "big-time" sports at NC universities

Published 4:01 p.m. today

By Alexander H. Jones

The longtime North Carolina sportswriter Art Chansky has written a piece that I wish I could have found shocking. In Chapelboro, Chansky describes the gaudy riches two former major-league coaches are harvesting from the coffers of UNC-Chapel Hill. The basketball coach, Michael Malone, is set to receive $7.5 million before coaching a single game as head coach at the college level. Bill Bellichik and his ridiculous girlfriend have acquitted themselves with a handsome $10 million yearly take. Such profligacy at a university facing budget cuts should be shocking. But UNC and other institutions across North Carolina long ago surrendered to the fatuous glories of bigtime sports.

Sports have always been a kind of golden calf in North Carolina higher education. A false object of worship. Originating over 100 years ago, college football and basketball have been wildly popular sources of mass entertainment here. Higher education administrators who deigned to challenge the supremacy of the hardcourt have risked being chucked into the professional dustbin. The legendary Frank Porter Graham, for example, arguably came closer to losing his job as UNC president when he tried to curtail college sports than when he ended the Jewish quota at Chapel Hill’s medical school or defended the right of a Communist Party politician to visit and dine with a UNC professor.

College football elicited passionate screams from Carolina sports fans in the first half of the 20th century, a fan following that would be exceeded in fervor when the state (and State) began to win big-time basketball tournaments. The enterprise always had an ugly ethical underbelly. In the 1950s, the state’s universities were embroiled in a sordid athletic scandal called the “point-shaving” affair. UNC system president Bill Friday tried to impose some measure of restraint and reason on the carnival of college athletics after the scandal. But he was up against hopelessly powerful headwinds, and the domination of North Carolina universities by professionalized sports only became greater and more expensive over the following decades.

NC State coach Jim Valvano was the first person to face serious professional consequences for the excesses of college athletics. In the 1980s, the News and Observer ran a series of exposes on the Wolfpack program’s use of financial compensation to attract and retain top ballplayers. The team had paid star players between $14,000 and $60,000 to play at the university.

How quaint.

Athletes at UNC, NC State, and private powerhouses like Duke University now make well into the seven figures. Malone, the UNC coach, tried to coax his star big man Henri Vessaer to play one more year for the Tar Heels by offering him $4.5 million in “NIL money.” That sum equates to the yearly earnings of roughly 25 full professors at UNC or roughly 150 university cafeteria workers. To play basketball under the school’s giant and possibly soon-to-be-replaced b-ball rotunda and pretend to be a “student.”

Belichick is worse. To attract the grizzled NFL legend, GOP-appointed UNC leaders John Preyer and Lee Roberts agreed to massively increase the program’s NIL budget and lower academic standards so Belichick could recruit better football players without demanding that they crack a book once in awhile. Like administrators at football factories like the University of Alabama, Roberts and Preyer have dispensed with any pretense of an emphasis on education and attempted to build Belichick’s “thirty-third NFL team” at the expense of the school’s academic focus.

Forgive the cliche, but this is insanity. Forgive this cliche too: college sports are out of control. Athletic departments are throwing around vast sums of money at a time when our public universities are facing budget cuts, firing employees, and considering their first tuition increases in a decade. It reflects the decadence of late capitalism and the know-nothing ignorance with which administrators like Lee Roberts have mismanaged our state’s educational treasures. I do not expect Belichick to go anywhere anytime soon, though one can hope. But perhaps we can at least begin to have a conversation as a state about whether we want to make a mockery of higher education by fielding professional sports teams to the cheers of lusty crowds.

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