,,,sordid zoo run by inmates....

For many, there is an impetus to legalize and expand 'sports betting' of any kind, against a backdrop of corruption and match fixing scandals around the globe.

The article below details current practices that are being largely ignored or at best, given meaningless rhetoric.



Monte Poole: Big-time college athletics are sordid zoo run by inmates
By Monte Poole
Bay Area News Group

Major League Baseball can't escape its epic scandal, an era of players using drugs to cheat, with Barry Bonds on trial and Roger Clemens coming soon.

The NFL has to live with its recent scandals, from illegal spying to dogfighting to the strip-club shootings to a greed-driven Super Bowl ticket fiasco.

The NBA was embarrassed by the Tim Donaghy gambling revelation, the NHL shamed by the Rick Tocchet gambling ring.

As slimy as some of these matters are, it's generally conceded they are deviations from the professional sports norm. And when a professional sports figure ignores ethics and morality, or commits a crime, the legal system intervenes and the resultant stigma never completely fades.

Meanwhile, in big-time college sports, cheating is the norm. It's a sewage plant of corruption practically ignored by the government. As for the supposedly not-for-profit NCAA and its enforcers, they are co-conspirators or overmatched security guards -- or both.

With corruption not only suspected but presumed, major college sports is a zoo, rotten at its core, with rats running wild because cheating is the easiest path to more cheese than they could ever eat.

Coaches, mostly in football and basketball, routinely benefit -- sometimes obscenely so. Athletic directors, mostly at power schools, get theirs. Bowl executives -- folks hired to facilitate one game a year -- get in on the dirty profits, as do their friends.

It's a world of secrets, furtive movements, cold cash handshakes and one sleazy hand "washing"' the other. Like Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, the Football Bowl Subdivision and NCAA hoops are institutions where crime does pay.

Consider John Calipari, who on Saturday coached Kentucky in the Final Four against UConn. On his watch at both UMass and Memphis his programs got busted and their finest hours were deleted from history.

Yet Calipari is the definitive upwardly mobile coach. He has climbed the ladder of ethical decay all the way to a salary of $4 million per year, the highest in college hoops.

The highest paid coach in college football, at nearly $6 million, is Alabama's Nick Saban, branded a cheat by many of his fellow coaches and a liar by some of his former players. He was, after all, snagged in a cheating scandal nine years ago at LSU, where he was vigorously defended by Chancellor Mark Emmert. Remember that name. Prior to Saban becoming college football's paycheck king, the crown was worn by Pete Carroll at USC. His Trojans won a national title in 2004, only to have it forfeited when cheating was uncovered. Carroll, during the NCAA investigation, fled to the NFL and the Seattle Seahawks, where he makes $7 million per year.

Seducing many souls into cheating is, of course, great and consuming gobs of cash. Whether it's a baseball star or a FBS coach or a major college coach -- or a street agent -- the incentive is the same.

Get as much as you can, by any means necessary.

HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" is the latest to pull back the soiled sheets of college sports. Its latest installment explores the exploitation of teenagers, the twisted priorities and the stark contrast between the wealth of those who operate the games and those who play them.

It reveals a microcosm of a society in which the wealth gap grows by the hour, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer -- and greater in number.

"These kids have economic value, they do," former Stanford A.D. Dr. Ted Leland said in one segment of the show. "And we have a system that doesn't allow them to benefit from that.

"When I was at Stanford and we negotiated a lucrative Nike contract, I had this conversation with one of our basketball players: 'Wait a minute. The story is, I wear the swoosh and the coach makes $300,000? Is that the system we're in?' " That's precisely the system. Young men in shorts sweat for the profit of men in suits. Great players beget athletic success, which begets more money for the coach and the A.D.

Cheating, then, pays. It can pay even greater after you get caught. So coaches, athletic directors and bowl executives -- and NCAA officials -- snap the rules to reach the deep end of this vast sea of dirty money.

The system works well for them, so they protect it as fiercely as the Confederacy protected, um, "states rights." Will it get cleaned up anytime soon? Not without legal intervention.

Certainly not with the status quo, not when you consider the history of the new NCAA president, who was welcomed in November and says he's going to get tough.

His name is Mark Emmert.