Time to Kill Miami Football
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Allegations that University of Miami athletes were provided cash and hookers
should trigger the death penalty at a school that’s become a national disgrace,
says Buzz Bissinger.
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When news of the athletics scandal at the University of Miami started
exploding Wednesday, I just wasn’t feeling it. It seemed strange, given the
unprecedented size and scope of the allegations. Between 2002 and 2010, a single
booster, according to a remarkably exhaustive investigation by Yahoo Sports,
allegedly gave “thousands of impermissible benefits”—from money to sex—to as
many as 73 different football and basketball players.
But so many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning
meaningless football and basketball games that it was hard for me to muster much
excitement. Improper conduct has happened too many times in the past. It seemed
bound to happen too many times in the future, given that college coaches and
college players are opportunists, liars, loyal to no one but their own careers
and their own pockets, manipulative, duplicitous, morally autistic and
clinically narcissistic in equal measure to the ego that requires them to excel.
But the more I read about the Miami scandal Wednesday night, the more my
outrage meter began to move into the red zone. There may even be a rare
opportunity to do something bold and decisive here, with reverberations far
beyond the palm trees of the Miami campus at Coral Gables.
Maybe, just maybe, there finally will be some recognition that the major
college sports of basketball and football are rotten, and that the only way to
root out the rot is with the tandem action of draconian punishment and cutting
the snake off at the head. No more slaps on the wrist by the NCAA with the
taking away of scholarships or depriving teams of Bowl game or playoff
appearances. Now is the perfect time to send a loud and clear message to other
schools about what the consequences will be if you flagrantly break the rules.
Here is what must happen:
1. The Miami football program must be given the death penalty by the
NCAA. Not for one year. Or two. But forever. Gone. Kaput. Who will really
suffer? Only the Wahoos who care about the Hurricanes more than they do their
families—and need to get another life, anyway. The coaches? The players? If they
have talent, they will all land somewhere else. In the real world, three strikes
and you’re out. In the athletic world, three strikes and you’re just beginning.
Who benefits? A university that perhaps may realize its primary mission is, can
you believe it, academic and not athletic.
It isn’t as if the Miami program has been the white dove of peace in the
past. No college football team has had a greater legacy of disgust. According to
the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, here is a sampling:
In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and
former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50
bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.
In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various
Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the
January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight
different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial
awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own
drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls,
one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with
Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his
helmet as a weapon.
2. Miami president Donna Shalala must immediately resign, either
voluntarily or under pressure. Her prepared statement in the aftermath of the
Miami tsunami—“I am upset, disheartened and saddened by the recent allegations
leveled against some current and past student-athletes and members of our
Athletic Department”—is a shameless renouncing of her job description. She is
responsible for what takes place at the school, is she not? That includes the
athletic department, does it not?
Shalala is a well-known sports proponent herself: When she was chancellor of
the University of Wisconsin in Madison, one of her biggest priorities was
revamping the football program into a top-10 power. She achieved her goal. She
is hardly some sports naif. She knows what goes on and what doesn’t, what should
happen and should not.
But resignation is not enough. She should be hauled before Congress, where
the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid
nonsense paraded about in Washington.
Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened.
If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin
Shapiro—such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for
Miami players to gorge on, like grapes—she should be charged with perjury. It’s
a wobbly charge. But if it was good enough for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, it
certainly is good enough for Shalala, whose university is now a national
disgrace. She can’t say she did not know Shapiro: Among the exhibits produced by
Yahoo Sports was a picture of Shalala next to Shapiro as he gave a $50,000 check
to the athletic department at a fundraiser.
3. Booster programs supporting football and basketball at all colleges
and universities should be banned. The money these boosters give out only leads
to ethical and, in some cases, criminal compromises. Nevin Shapiro, who is
currently serving a 20-year federal sentence for overseeing a $930 million Ponzi
scheme, had ridiculous access to the Miami football and basketball programs
despite the fact that at least some coaches saw him for what he was—a little
5-foot-5 rat of a white guy who, for his own psychosexual reasons, obviously got
his rocks off hanging around African-American college athletes with big muscles
and great leaping ability.
Perhaps he should have been given rat poison. Instead, he gained carte
blanche to Miami players. It’s only a guess, but I imagine the $150,000
contribution he made for a student-athlete lounge at the school did not hurt
any. According to the Yahoo Sports investigation, much of it based on interviews
with Shapiro, he supplied players with an all-you-can-eat buffet of illegal
perks that included money, televisions, gourmet meals, rides on his yacht,
paying for an abortion, and an alleged $50,000 payoff to one player through a
sports agency Shapiro says he once co-owned so the player would become a client.
Shapiro also played the bounty game, offering $5,000 to any player who knocked
either Florida quarterback Tim Tebow or Florida State quarterback Chris Rix out
of the game.
Sadly and typically, too many members of the Miami sports community are
taking the defensive crouch of the persecuted victim. Former star Miami
quarterback and current board of trustees member Bernie Kosar bemoaned how the
players and coaches on this year’s team are “busting themselves in 95-degree
heat, getting ready for a promising season, and now there’s a cloud hanging over
them.” Former Miami coach Jimmy Johnson called Shapiro a “scumbag,” a little
like George W. Bush calling Rick Perry a stupid Texan, given the team’s
reputation as “Thug U” when Johnson was at the helm. Al Golden, the new coach at
Miami, said the allegations will only bring the team “closer together.”
Maybe Golden is right. The team should pull together—for one final meeting in
which Golden announces football at Miami is no more.
Will the sun still come up the next day? Maybe not in Coral Gables. But in
the rest of the world, the real world, the weather should be fine.