Photo by Clay Maxfield
COLLEGE SPORTS ARE DANGLING over the edge of a precipice. We are tipping over into an unknown chasm where the transfer portal and millions in name, image, and licensing (often referred to as NIL) dollars come into play. Athletes now receive income and can move about the college landscape chasing the highest bidder year after year. This kills the “student” in “student athlete.” The game at this level becomes a professional league, where players are drawn to the Benjamins and not the schools.
I get why college student athletes are getting paid now. The effort to become great hasn’t changed, nor has the physicality of the game, so paying players is no more warranted now than it was in years past. But I get it. Times have changed. The money is there. Nobody makes phone calls over a landline anymore, and paper paychecks are also a thing of the past.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, everyone knew schools—or boosters—were paying players under the table and getting away with it. Occasionally, a school would get caught and punished by the NCAA, restoring the belief that all was well with the college system.
The 1994 movie Blue Chips portrayed the dark side of college basketball. In an age of feel-good endings—think Rudy, A League of Their Own, and Field of Dreams—this epic, believable storyline, while a cinematic box office bust, provided the first cynical look at college hoops recruiting at the time.
But as it turns out, was this look cynical or prophetic?
In the film, Nick Nolte plays Pete Bell, a coach at the fictional Western University in LA, who is under pressure to win, with boosters offering him money and ill advice to “buy” elite players for his team. In the movie, the father of recruit Ricky Roe (Matt Nover), a sharpshooter from Indiana, receives a new farm tractor for his son’s services. The mother of another recruit, Butch McRae (Penny Hardaway), gets a job and a house from the university. These scenarios are uplifting, so many viewers at the time felt that this underhanded way to secure athletes was OK.
In the end, Bell’s conscience gets the best of him, and he blows the whistle on the university, its boosters, and the whole money scheme, then walks off into the sunset, a final scene showing him giving pointers to kids shooting playground hoops late at night. For Bell, it was always about coaching, not necessarily winning.
In the movie, Western wins after purchasing its players. In real life, we are finding out that just because a player can play doesn’t mean that person, for all that money, is the right fit for a team. And just because a program can use a university’s stockpile of cash to stack three or more five-star players doesn’t mean its plan always yields success.
