Thursday October 4, 2001

When the Knight Commission Report on college athletics was released earlier this year, you could hear the collective breath of every athletic director in the country being sucked in.

When the commission released its first report 11 years ago, wholesale changes were made in the way colleges run their sports teams. For the most part, those changes were widely embraced.

Things were different this time.

The new report lambasted intercollegiate athletics in just about every area. There's too much money. The players aren't graduating. Coaches are paid too much. It seemed, if the report was to be taken at face value, that nothing was being done right.

At the time, UA athletic director Jim Livengood expressed some of his concerns with the report, not the least of which was the building sentiment that intercollegiate athletics were destroying academia. At the time, however, he probably didn't expect what he was to face last Tuesday at the Arizona Board of Regents meeting.

Two men, one an ethicist named Michael Josephson, the other a former president of Tufts University, John DiBaggio, were brought in by the board to grill Livengood about his athletic department. They asked him to justify the existence of smaller sports. They asked him to justify the amount of money paid to coaches. They asked him why less than 50 percent of the athletes graduated. Then, these men told Livengood that the athletic department shouldn't be run like a business. They said things were going to change.

Livengood, for his part, tried to downplay the board's actions.

"The Board of Regents is well within their privy to ask these questions," Livengood said. "I applaud them for wanting to clean up collegiate athletics."

The Regents would like to see UA and ASU begin to comply with some of the suggestions made in the Knight Commission Report. However, it would likely mean that neither school could continue to compete in the Pacific 10 Conference, removing one of the most important affiliations this institution has.

While Livengood is quick to say he doesn't think measures will be enacted causing UA to pull out of the conference, he did point out just how important remaining in it is.

"Being in the Pac-10 is not just about athletics," Livengood said. "I have a hard time believing that our faculty, our students, might not make a different decision if we're not a Pac-10 school. Our faculty members are colleagues with Stanford, with Cal-Berkley, with Washington."

One of the points Livengood was questioned about was the existence of small, non-revenue earning sports. The example Josephson used was women's golf, which he likely did not know had won two national championships in five years, and boasts the top golfer in the nation this year.

While the success of the women's golf team would seem to be enough to justify its existence, what's even stranger about this line of questioning is that these men are picking on the sports that actually uphold the ideal they're trying so desperately to adhere to.

"Sometimes the programs that are attacked are the purest forms of amateurism," Livengood said.

That aside, it seems money is the motivating factor behind ABOR's newfound concern and criticism.

Recently, Arizona State re-upped their head baseball coach, Pat Murphy, with a $350,000 per year contract, far and away making him the highest-paid baseball coach in the Pac-10. Andy Lopez, UA's newly hired skipper, has signed on for less than $100,000 per year.

Regent Chris Herstam called salaries like the one given to Murphy "obscene," yet he voted to approve it when it came up for review. Where was this vigilance when it was most needed?

The Knight Commission Report did little except stir the pot and make it easy for bureaucrats like Herstam to double-back and slam college athletics, even though he and his cohorts are part of the problem.

For years, the board sat back and approved fat contracts for coaches, and now it want to say things are out of proportion. Its solution? Cut sports. For some reason, it seems like the wrong people would be taking the hit.

At the root, there's nothing wrong with college athletics now that hasn't been in the past. For some reason, however, there's an attempt to blame all of academia's ills on sports. Instead of grilling Livengood and Co. on what they've been doing wrong, ABOR should be asking themselves why they waited so long to confess their moral obligations, not trying to blame everyone else for its problems in an attempt to absolve it of responsibility.

Now that's obscene.