RST: Gordon, you have been a tiny bit slower than your usual speedy self getting back to me, because you’ve been busy with the Senate bill on intercollegiate athletics. You testified two weeks ago, after spending years trying to get this mess sorted out.
EGG: It is funny that I am in a position to talk about football. I’m 5-foot-5 and weigh 140 pounds, and at 82, I really should be playing canasta on a beach.
RST: Stop right there. Those are three truths and a lie. Maybe two lies—are you sure you’re still 5-foot-5? I know you hate the ocean as much as I do.
EGG: Well, I miss the pageantry of the college game. I still remember sitting in the stands with the students when they bodysurfed me after we made a touchdown. Unfortunately, we lost the game, which ended my surfing days.
RST: My contributions to this field consist of writing one opinion piece for IHE where I argued that football should be banned because of all the research on head injury. As an admissions officer at Duke, however, I can tell you I was often hopping mad about students the coaches forced us to admit, especially in certain sports.
EGG: Rachel, you are an athlete and have run many ridiculously long races. My athletic prowess is getting on a treadmill every morning and chugging along for 30 minutes, a little lifting and a lot of stretching. I have done this consistently for 50 years; that is a lesson I learned from observing student athletes. They are very disciplined and perform better in the classroom for it. Indeed, the highest grades among football players are the semester they are playing. Fact: 50 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 100 companies have been student athletes, and 80 percent of the female C-suite leaders have been student athletes. So how about that? Does that change your narrow mind about athletics?
RST: Actually, what changed my mind was when I started teaching. I’ve long said that I’d be happy with a class that consisted of farm kids, military vets and athletes. Because I agree: Talent without work ethic amounts to very little. But still, I sure didn’t like admitting dumber than dirt golfers from wealthy families who didn’t have nearly the academic qualifications of most of the applicants.
EGG: Do not get your exercise hopping to conclusions. In all institutions, but particularly those that are highly selective, you have to think about the recruited class as a mosaic. For example, if you have a university orchestra, you need oboe players. Talented oboe players often do not perform as well academically as physics majors.
RST: Gordon! Are we going to get a bunch of hate mail from oboists?
EGG: I played oboe! But we need that oboe player in order to play Mahler. And we need that running back in order to beat Michigan. If you think of filling a class with the talent needed, it does make sense to have unique standards for unique individuals. Do you buy that?
RST: Yes, I do now, because I understand that universities are in deep financial trouble, even the fancy-pants ones like Duke. And I also know that for a lot of athletes, a college degree is a ticket to the middle class. But it’s the money part that makes me think big-time athletics has jumped the shark. Things have gone cuckoo bananas. I had to ask Doug Lederman to explain to me why Duke was now playing Stanford and Notre Dame. Students are flying across the country for games in the Atlantic Coast Conference. That’s nuts.
EGG: Rachel, I do believe that we face an existential crisis in college athletics. And much of that was brought about by my presidential colleagues and me. In many ways, I may be the poster boy for bad behavior: paying coaches and athletic directors enormous salaries, not allowing student athletes to be valued and recognized as students by creating unusual and even silly requirements which took them out of the mainstream of academic life, and then abrogating my responsibilities as a university president to athletic directors and conference commissioners. The end result is that we now have an unsustainable system which, more than likely, will destroy the best of the American collegiate spirit—which is fostered through college athletics—unless we take bold steps.
RST: When I talk to presidents these days, athletics is right up there with budgets for what’s consuming their time. I have a lot of questions, because I just don’t get it. Can we have a little primer on the money—the House settlement, the SCORE Act, NIL—and how it’s all playing out?
EGG: It is a morass. Executive summary: Universities operate under a membership organization called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This organization, like universities, has become bureaucratic and not focused on the student athlete but only on very silly rules affecting athletes while among other things we have let coaches’ salaries soar.
RST: For which you were at fault, right, Gordon?
EGG: I already claimed poster-boy status, Rachel! How many mea culpas do you need? In any case, some very good lawyers recognized that universities and coaches were making money while the student athlete was not getting a fair share of the revenue. Cases were filed and the NCAA lost in the courts trying to preserve the status quo, which resulted in a settlement referred to as “House,” which allows students to be paid for their contributions (NIL, or name, image and likeness) to the athletic department. But because this settlement has many holes in its fabric and little ability to exert guardrails, the world at the moment is the wild, wild West. NIL has become play for pay, and the NCAA created portals allowing students to transfer without penalties. Morass turned into a mess.
RST: Giant mess. Many presidents have told me it’s going to take an act of Congress to figure it out.
EGG: Fortunately, Senators Cantwell—
RST: My senator!
EGG: —and Cruz have introduced a bipartisan bill which will give limited antitrust exemptions to universities and colleges by expanding the Sports Broadcasting Act to include academic institutions. This expansion will create appropriate guardrails to grow revenue and particularly preserve women’s and Olympic sports. Just writing about this exhausts me, but we have a crisis that must be solved.
RST: So what’s the solution? Bring. It. On.
EGG: My solution would be to make football players major in philosophy and wear leather helmets. Short of that, the next best solution is to follow the lead of the Cruz/Cantwell bill by having limitations placed on NIL and portals, limiting growth of athletic budgets, and using a skinny antitrust exemption to allow universities to negotiate as one group and then pool resources so that there are sufficient dollars to keep all institutions competitive. Of course, there will have to be tiering so that the Ohio States, the Texases and the Notre Dames of the world are rewarded for their market power. But by pooling, all ships will rise.
RST: The Texases! What are the chances this bill passes? What kind of pushback did you get at the hearing?
EGG: I got three and a half hours of pushback. It is a bill that does not give any group what they exactly want, which means that it is a good piece of legislation. And, of course, every armchair coach has an opinion, so there is a lot of chatter. But it represents thoughtful provisions that address the majority of the challenges facing the athletic enterprise but also leaves room for discussion and further compromise. This bill is our last best hope to prevent athletic Armageddon.
RST: Should players be considered employees? Are we exploiting their labor?
EGG: That is a third-rail issue.
RST: You know me. Those are the only rails I ever want to touch.
EGG: If we make athletes employees, we immediately strike the word “student” from student athlete. I would not oppose collective bargaining, which could bring some structure to the governance of athletics. But to answer your other question, undoubtedly we have exploited athletes, as we have graduate students, medical residents and others. The word “exploit” probably is too harsh. We have not treated our students fairly, and now we are facing the reality that the law and policy have caught up with universities. But presently without any rules governing NIL, suddenly we have turned student athletes from being exploited to being the exploiters.
RST: As with all exploitation, it’s only very few who are coming out on top. Women and track athletes won’t be making bank on all of this. And surely you agree that, ahem, women runners, especially distance runners, are the best, smartest and, let’s be honest here, most deserving (and funniest) of athletes.
EGG: Rachel, it really irritates me when you lobby for your own kind. Nothing in the bill protects geeks, so back off!
RST: Gordon, I hope you realize that the geeks have already inherited the earth.
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