The Hundred Yard Lie
Degnan, James P.
CONTRADICTORY TERMS THE HUNDRED YARD LIE The Corruption of College Football and What We Can Do to Stop It Rick Telander Simon & Schuster, $17.95, 223 pp. James P. Degnan A recent indictment of...
...Such teams would no longer compete against the more academically inclined and usually smaller college teams, which in turn, Telander believes, would allow the smaller teams to become truly amateur football programs for legitimate student athletes...
...that intercollegiate football and higher education are contradictory terms...
...What Hutchins realized but Telander apparently still does not is that intercollegiate football, whether small- or big-time, is by its nature entertainment...
...Asked what Chicago or any other school that followed suit might do to fill the vacuum, Hutchins replied, "Why not have horse races...
...These players, subsidized by the NFL, would have no "grade or educational requirements whatsoever," and would constitute a minor professional league analogous to baseball's minor leagues...
...About the only thing at all new-and it's hardly original-in the book is Telander's plan for reforming college football, a plan to make big-time college football what it already is in everything but name: professional...
...that they are often admitted to college when they are unqualified for admission, are given passing grades when they should have been failed, and sometimes are allowed to graduate without being able to read or write...
...and that the purpose of a university is the cultivation of intellect, not the provision of entertainment.tertainment...
...As such it has no proper place in a university...
...Reading Telander's plan, spelled out in twenty-eight tortuous steps in the book's final pages, I am reminded of a more succinct and wiser plan articulated by Robert Maynard Hutchins...
...It also reminds us, as critics have reminded us for almost fifty years, that many college players are far from amateurs-that, in violation of the rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, such players routinely receive financial payments from alumni and boosters...
...To succeed at intercollegiate football, Hutchins noted, it is inevitable that "one must cheat, and I won't cheat...
...It tells us that college football has nothing to do with education, that, indeed, it is inimical to education...
...Reasoning that college football programs, and big-time college teams in particular, are little more than farm clubs for the National Football League (the University of Miami has actually advertised itself as "a pipeline to the pros"), Telander proposes that such teams-e.g., Miami, Alabama, Oklahoma-form their own professional football league...
...He suggests it be made up of players from eighteen to twenty-two years old and be called the Age Group Professional Football League...
...Having declared college football hopelessly corrupt, entertainment rather than education, he abolished the university's popular football program...
...As president of the University of Chicago in 1939, Hutchins did the unthinkable...
...What Hutchins realized and acted on is a simple truth generally ignored today: that scholarships should be for scholars, not athletes...
...James P. Degnan A recent indictment of college football, Rick Telander's The Hundred Yard Lie, doesn't tell us much that is new...
...It tells us that college football players are not students but entertainers...
...Each college could have its own stables and colors, fans could make bets and cheer on their favorites, and-best of all-the horses would not be required to attend classes or to make passing grades...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 8
