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Industry must address player safety, future of college sports

The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered by former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue during a public community forum last month in Walnut Creek, Calif.

“Sport” can be many different things, for different people, in different contexts — some of it unique to America, some global. Obviously sport is participation and physical exercise; it is demanding competition; it is a unique learning experience; and sport can be education. As the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put it in a speech to the NCAA: “I’m so passionate about … [sports] because I’m convinced that, when priorities are in order, there is no better way to teach invaluable life lessons than on the playing field or court.”

The complexities of America’s engagement with athletics may best be seen in the differing purposes and values of collegiate and professional sport. In the 1980s, Bart Giamatti, Yale’s president, wrote that the “tragedy of much of today’s intercollegiate athletic scene is that a significant number of institutions believe that athletics means only certain revenue-producing sports, and only at the varsity level.”

Questioning aspects of college sport that he saw as “television entertainment … in search of product,” Giamatti wrote: “I find the smarmy pieties of certain television sportscasters who do college football games repulsive, as they alternately decry the state of big-time sports in their client universities and then run as much college football as late into the year, in as many contrived bowls, as possible.”

And Giamatti assailed what he saw as illusion or artifice in the positioning of NFL football for its mass television audience:

“[The piety] is of a piece with television’s habit, when televising professional football, of flashing on the screen the college or university a player attended, thus perpetuating the illusion that this is just a game for big boys; perpetuating the illusion that there is some connection between education and professional expertise at football; perpetuating the illusion that the majority of the pro athletes shown have graduated from college, when they have not. But television is in the business of illusions, and caveat receptor.”

* * *

Yet the nation faces a very serious crisis in funding cuts in youth sports in elementary and secondary schools throughout the nation. A recent report estimates that $1.5 billion were cut from school sports budgets during the 2010-2011 school year — and that this was on top of the estimated $2 billion cut during the 2009-2010 year. Low-income communities are doubly impacted, first by program cuts and then by the imposition of fees required to be paid for participation in the remaining sports. Currently, 40 percent of school districts nationwide are charging fees for sports participation, known as “pay-to-play.”

Television-driven conference realignment is bringing troubling implications for college sports.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
But before I conclude, I will highlight two of the most complex and critical macro matters being addressed by leaders in professional and amateur sports.

Safety in Sports/Concussions

In the early 1990s, there were growing efforts by physicians and scientists to expand and deepen research into the brain’s functioning and to use new or developing technologies for these purposes. During the same period, the NFL examined new opportunities for funding research on aspects of these matters related to football.

In recent months, there has been substantial public attention on the issue of head injuries and concussions in professional and amateur sports. These injuries afflict athletes in the NFL and other sports, including college and high school football, youth soccer, ice hockey and bicycling.

The NFL has been a leader for almost 20 years in addressing and sponsoring research into the health issues raised by concussions.

In 1994, as NFL commissioner, I established a medical committee to examine the vulnerabilities and causes of concussions in the NFL. Among other things, that committee spurred research, funded by NFL Charities, to alert teams to risks, to guide playing rules analysis and to aid equipment manufacturers in designing helmets that better protect against head injuries of all kinds, including concussions. And for years, the NFL’s competition committee has continually monitored and modified the league’s playing rules to reduce the risk of injuries, including head injuries.

In the recently concluded collective-bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players, the parties have jointly committed to spending $100 million over the next 10 years on medical research — the vast majority of which will go to research on brain injury. This will help support deep, cutting-edge research on a wide range of issues and possible preventive measures.

The NFL has also established a new head, neck and spine committee — with a mandate to guide the NFL’s member clubs to best practices, both for concussion prevention and management, and for protecting against other head, neck and spine injuries.

The league has also been active in promoting state legislation that protects young athletes in all sports from undiagnosed concussions and returning to play too soon after a head injury. California is the most recent state to adopt this legislation. Among other things, it provides that young athletes suspected of suffering a concussion in any school sport may not return to play that same day and thereafter until they have been evaluated and cleared by a licensed medical professional.

Thanks to expanding research on many fronts, leaders in sports now know much more about the science of concussions and how they can be prevented, diagnosed and treated.

My successor as NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, has emphasized that nothing is more important to the NFL and its teams than the safety of NFL players, and there is no issue of greater importance when it comes to player safety than the effective prevention, diagnosis and treatment of concussions.

Academic-Athletic Tensions in Intercollegiate Sports

For over two decades, a special commission of distinguished university leaders and others — the Knight Commission — has been examining the relationship between collegiate academics and intercollegiate sports.

The most recent Commission Report, issued last year, notes that because of the growing commercialization of college football and basketball “tensions have grown significantly over the past few decades.”

Many observers now see troubling implications in what seems a television-driven round of conference expansion and “realignments” and in conference ownership of equity stakes in major sports television networks. If conferences are unrestrained competitors for members and for the sale of television rights, why are they entitled to avoid competition in the setting of scholarship terms for student-athletes?

The Knight Commission has now for the first time proposed specific changes in the allocation of postseason football and basketball revenues to reward not just athletic performance but also stellar academic performances by collegiate teams.

The Commission’s recommendations do not, however, appear to be restraining current conference expansion or television decisions or the accelerating pace of commercialization of intercollegiate sports.

Pressures for change are now escalating as a result of lawsuits aimed at invalidating the NCAA’s current student-athlete scholarship system and replacing or supplementing it with additional financial rewards for college athletes — a “pay for play” model. Critics supporting these claims — and proponents of the current model — are now feverishly debating these issues.

In this environment, the Knight Commission’s efforts may be laudable but inadequate. They may indeed suggest that continued analysis of these problems — and of potential solutions — within the existing collegiate structures will be unproductive and ultimately lead to dead ends. Whatever the outcome of antitrust and other legal claims, the sharply increasing commercialization of sports may threaten the not-for-profit status of institutions of higher education.

A hard and urgent examination of new structural models seems essential to produce significant improvements on the side of academic performance. In our economy, major changes in long-settled business models can be driven by external processes or internal decisions. The external include forced reorganizations when business models become no longer viable; enactments by legislatures; and court judgments producing court-supervised decrees. Such outcomes can be wrenching for the directly affected institutions.

Either the Knight Commission or the NCAA itself should determine whether the fundamental ground rules for student-athlete participation in intercollegiate sports should continue to be set on a centralized basis, or whether a sharp structural reorientation of the system would offer clear long-term academic, athletic and legal advantages.

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