Staff editorial military bowl
Christmas is coming early for the Terrapins football team. With visions of a Military Bowl trophy and a defeated Marshall team dancing in their heads, the Terps should wake up to the offseason with fresh new PlayStation 4s at their disposal.
As part of the Military Bowl’s gift package to both the Terps and the Thundering Herd, the bowl has made headlines by offering more than 200 of the brand-new consoles, which retail starting at $399. And while the Military Bowl offers some of the most sought-after gifts to its participants — it gave iPad Minis to Bowling Green and San Jose State last season — it’s hardly unique in its generosity.
The lowly Beef O’Brady’s Bowl will give Ohio and East Carolina players Samsung Galaxy Tabs, while the similarly low-visibility Poinsettia Bowl is offering Utah State and Northern Illinois athletes each $205 gift cards to Best Buy.
Meanwhile, inside linebacker Marcus Whitfield, who put up extraordinary numbers against Florida International in August with five tackles and one-and-a-half sacks, won’t see a roughly $30 game ball until after he graduates later this month. And coach Randy Edsall can’t even think about taking a player and his family out to dinner.
In another case of the NCAA’s inability to rein in the college football cash cow it has created, bowl games can offer student-athletes up to $550 in prizes for their participation in the bowl. With the NCAA allowing 85 scholarship football players per roster, the prizes add up to more than $93,000 for scholarship players alone.
It’s difficult to justify allowing a bowl game to drop nearly $100,000 on football players while other athletics rules prevent simple, benign tokens, such as a meal between coach and athlete or a game ball.
After Whitfield learned in September that he would not be eligible to receive the Florida International game ball, sports pundit Keith Olbermann went on to call Edsall the “world’s worst person in sports.” That might be a load of hot air, but there is a grain of truth to Olbermann’s diatribe. The hypocrisy of the NCAA’s amateurism rules can’t be described as anything but inane.
The NCAA’s 2011-12 Division I Manual, a tome meant to guide member organizations’ compliance with their ridiculous mandates — including gems such as how large pieces of paper sent to prospective recruits are allowed to be — is 426 pages. And it’s a disaster.
Among calls for student-athlete salaries in college football and scandals at Ohio State and the University of Southern California, it’s hard not to see that the NCAA is in over its head.
In 2011, the top 15 highest-paid coaches in college football earned $53.4 million. The sport is a business, and the NCAA isn’t prepared to deal with it — silly rules are not going to solve the grander problems of the enormous enterprise. A significant overhaul of the way college football is run needs to come soon.
And Whitfield needs to get his game ball.
