As they say in Australia, “everyone and their dog” has written about the NCAA college basketball scandal. All we needed was for the Rice Commission to publish its recommendations late last month and for the FBI to release more details about who paid who and who knew what.
First, and let’s emphasize this, when your brand (be it the NCAA or State U.) and the feds are mentioned in the same sentence (without any reference to Mulder or Scully), it’s not good. In fact, it’s very bad.
Look what happened to the brands of Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods when the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Armstrong) or the local Florida police (Woods) got involved in their lives. Now granted, a single athlete is not the NCAA, nor is USADA the FBI.
But as Sports Illustrated writer Charles Pierce noted recently: “Here is one thing I have learned in my years on this planet. There is no such thing as an informal chat with the FBI.”
So, we’d suggest FBI efforts to resolve the teenager recruitment puzzle is pretty notable. Numerous iconic brands and human livelihoods are at risk. But setting that aside, let’s dig a bit more into this brand damage concept.
For starters, let’s ignore the NCAA brand and focus on specific universities like Arizona, Baylor, Louisville, Minnesota, Michigan State, North Carolina or Penn State. Now, let’s try to be counterintuitive and get at business components relevant to SportsBusiness Journal readers.
Has there been (or will there be) damage to these historic brands for past events or, with new evidence, for future accusations? Or, and this will bother purists, is it possible there’s no branding problem here? Are NCAA scandals business as usual? Does no violation, regardless of its nature, matter?
Penn State sponsors largely stuck with the school in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.Getty Images
These days, we’re so inundated with negative stories in professional and intercollegiate sport, is it possible the idea of innocence and amateur purity is quaint, but not particularly realistic?
NCAA scandals are nothing new (they have existed for more than 100 years) and rarely seem to damage the college game. And while various universities often find themselves at the center of NCAA jurisprudence, is it possible the strength of a university’s brand is too big to get hurt by athletic scandal?
Penn State University, by most accounts, saw limited admissions damage from the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal of 2011. Perhaps the same will hold for Michigan State and their gymnastics tragedy.
But here’s where we get curious. In brand research, comparable properties provide a source of data input. So think about the International Olympic Committee, NFL, NCAA or FIFA. These umbrella brands seem to weather all storms. Doping. Concussions. Gambling. Bribery. Sexual assault. Gross negligence. Work stoppages. Strikes. Money laundering. Spousal abuse. Even football deflating and signal-stealing.
One could say the hard rains Bob Dylan and John Fogerty sang about consistently bounce off those sport umbrellas.
Close to home, teams playing under those shields generally thrive in North America’s closed sport system. Teams can’t be relegated or removed. They may lose draft picks or have players suspended, but the brand benefits from parental protection. In the case of Penn State, the NCAA levied strong sanctions only to rescind them when the university put on a legal push.
In the more recent example of Russian doping, while the country was briefly banned from competing in Pyeongchang, the coalition of Soviet athletes was not. Which meant that although they couldn’t fly their flag or enter the official Olympic record book, the Russians could still win the men’s hockey gold medal.
Admit it: Commentators referred to athletes as Russians, limiting any impact the banning once promised. This despite the fact that renowned IOC member Dick Pound led a heroic challenge at the IOC Congress just before the Games. It seemed like the IOC barely blinked.
It makes us recall David D’Alessandro from IOC sponsor John Hancock and the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics scandal of more than 15 years ago. D’Alessandro said enough was enough and threatened to pull his organization’s money from the Games. For once, the threat worked.
Interesting. You mess with sponsors and now we’ll talk about brand solutions. Think about the aforementioned Armstrong and Woods scandals. That’s where sponsors acted decisively.
But in this NCAA matter, no big sponsors have threatened to abandon March Madness or even (that we know of) walk away from expensive school-specific deals. It feels like the academic roots of the institution are too great for an “infractions” storm to blow down the tree.
In the Penn State scandal, AdAge’s Michael McCarthy noted in 2013 that the university paid heavy fines but sponsors largely stuck with Penn State football and even those few who left quickly returned.
So, back to the NCAA basketball recruiting dilemma that Condoleezza Rice and her commission reviewed. Will college brands get hurt? Or is it like the scene in multiple old movies (but most wonderfully in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”) where the outlaw is asked if he has a badge?
“Brand damage,” the universities might sneer? “We don’t worry about stinkin’ brand damage.”
How can this possibly be? Of course, they worry. But has anyone measured whether colleges lose applicants when there are strippers in the dorms or bags of money are passed to teenagers and their parents?
We’re not sure. But while many sport organizations are focused on the fan experience, empty seats and social media’s ongoing erosion of television ratings, as Syracuse sport communications professor Dennis Deninger says, the compartmentalization of a university may insulate it from the specificity of an athletics issue.
“Universities are such multifaceted institutions with hundreds of programs and thousands of people, the transgressions of one subset doesn’t deter the vast majority of potential students or employees from going there.”
Sounds like the basketball cliché, “no harm, no foul.”
Rick Burton (rhburton@syr.edu) is the David Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University. Norm O’Reilly (oreillyn@ohio.edu) is the Richard P. & Joan S. Fox Professor and Sports Admin Department Chair at Ohio University. Their new book, “20 Secrets to Success for NCAA Student Athletes Who Won’t Go Pro,” was published recently by Ohio University Press.
