Far be it from us to disparage the game of college football. We'll be watching as Alabama and Texas battle for the BCS college football championship tonight, and we'll hope for a victory that brings credit to the SEC.
Yet with so many young football players and coaches in high school and college watching the game, along with many of their parents, the occasion of the game tonight presents a unique moment to explore both the accelerating issue of long term brain trauma damage from repeated blows to the head and concussions.
It's also an apt time to consider the soaring multimillion-dollar contracts awarded to big-college football and basketball coaches while their universities are grappling with severe budget cuts, slicing jobs and classes, and raising tuition on students who can't even afford to buy a ticket to their regular college games.
Strapped schools, rich coaches
The coaches in tonight's game are especially well insulated from the dire financial straits that haunt their universities. Texas coach Mack Brown and Alabama coach Nick Saban are among the highest paid college football coaches in the nation.
Mr. Brown recently negotiated a permanent $5.1 million-a-year contract, and he would make a $450,000 bonus tonight if the Longhorns win. Mr. Saban has signed a contract extension that brings his salary to $4.7 million a year, and he got $200,000 bonus for getting Alabama into the championship game.
Both coaches make far more than their college president counterparts, and both get other income opportunities. Mr. Saban's top SEC counterparts may not all earn as much as he, but they're still in the multimillion-dollar levels. Many critics reasonably consider such salaries for coaches obscene, especially when their universities are drastically cutting back while imposing onerous tuition increases on strapped students and families.
It is axiomatic that successful college football and basketball programs are treated by far different standards than those that govern the academic side of universities. Though 100 of the 119 NCAA schools with Division I football programs lost money on athletics in 2006, according to a NCAA study, big universities continue to give their big football and basketball programs rich budgets and abundant resources in the hope of attracting fans, financial supporters and future students.
Ethical quagmires
As much as we appreciate the value and lessons of team sports, that seems myopic and financially unsound. Such an unexamined mindset about the primacy of big college sports also wrongly perpetuates an ethical quagmire. Universities' unpaid players are too often treated like fodder for the athletic machine. Too many fail to graduate. And too many end up charged with crimes that smear universities' standing. Yet the systemic dichotomies of what have become college farm teams for the NFL and NBA -- the blatant hypocrisies of dual university standards and goals, one set for regular students, another set for players -- barely raise an eyebrow.
The imperfections and excesses of the big semi-pro college teams are all the more reason for high school and college coaches, as well as NFL coaches, to take more seriously the recent advances in medical knowledge of the grave and potentially lifelong consequences of concussions -- and the policy changes at the NFL level that are accompanying the new knowledge.
In recent weeks, for example, the NFL has finally acknowledged the apparent causal link between brain trauma from concussions suffered in games by their players, and the subsequent cognitive disorders and brain disease that disproportionately plague retired NFL players. Symptoms of the players' disorders include early memory loss in their 40s and 50s that may broaden to depression, erratic behavior, cognitive impairment and, ultimately, early-onset dementia and death.
Younger players more at risk
The growing body of evidence of progressive cognitive impairment due to concussions and lesser blows to the head, especially coupled with early return-to-play before the brain has healed, has led the NFL to fire its top two (skeptical) overseers of brain trauma policy and to tighten rules on treatment of concussions. Since November, it requires that players who have had concussions be withheld from play until an independent brain-injury expert, one not employed by the team, gives them clearance to play again.
Prompted by another congressional hearing this week before the House Judiciary Committee, it appears the league's will soon come under additional pressure to institute stricter rules on head contact and hits, and to make a thorough study of equipment needs to better safeguard players.
Given the rising evidence of worse effects from concussions and head blows to players at earlier ages -- from youth leagues to high school to college-age players -- the coaches and parents of younger players should demand stricter standards of care for younger players who suffer concussions. Younger players, in fact, are now believed to be more at risk of long-term brain damage if their concussions are not properly treated.
Stricter rules on head contact
That may pose a tough position for coaches to take with players with a game on the line, and for parents whose young athletes are all too willing to play through the pain or brain fog to help their team. In fact, it will require a concerted effort to institute tough new rules against head contact, and to alter the entrenched football ethic of playing tough regardless of concussions.
Coaches, schools and parents will have to lead the way to make stricter contact rules the norm. With glamorous games like tonight's championship battle between ultra rich coaches and overly expensive programs setting the standard, such rule changes will be hard to establish. Yet both issues should lead to change.
Public universities should not lavish multimillion-dollar contracts on coaches while they slash the budget for academic education and raise tuition beyond affordability. And the rising awareness of the consequences of concussions begs stricter rules, especially from coaches making a fortune on their unpaid players.