When Amateurism Finally Collapsed| Engel Angle

I keep talking to my dog thinking one day she's going to answer me and when she does, that's
when I've got problems.
Mack Engel for Worcester Telegram, Engel, Engel podcast, here on the Sunset Lounge,
going to talk to you about a subject that is very near and dear to my heart and that is
the state of college sports.
I love college sports.
College sports was essentially my point of entry into the profession that I've been in
now for more than 20 years, a big part of my life was the first thing probably I fell
on love with as a sports fan and I worked in college athletics for five years, two is
assistant, part of me as a student assistant in the University of Kansas Athletic Media
Relations Office, one year as an intern at the Missouri State University Athletic Department
and its media relations office, and then two years as a graduate assistant in the Athletic
Media Relations Office at TCU and that goes without saying more than 20 years of covering
both small mid major and major college athletics since then and I love it and like so many
of you I really don't recognize much of it because not just necessarily that the athletes
are being paid, although that's a big part of it, but just the whole nomadic nature now
that exists in what is now a four higher mercenary world of big time college sports, which is
the sports that we watch in college.
Probably most of you don't know that there are more than 720 universities that sponsor
a college football team.
We watch about 50 of them, that's where all most of the eyeballs are and so when we talk
about the change in college athletics, we're talking more about the changes that exist
and other ones that we follow and I gave this a lot of thought I was like how did we get
here, how did we get to this point where we barely recognize something that was so big
for so long and how much of this is our disdain for the current state of it rooted in our
disdain of change and the fact that it goes against tradition and really what this goes
back to is not just the history of NCAA sports but amateur sports and what is the biggest
amateur sporting event in the world.
It's coming up the Olympics, yes, the Olympics.
If you look at where we are now in college sports, it traces back to the evolution of
the Olympic games.
Hear me out on this and this and there's one particular part on this two particular
parts on this, I really can't stand and I have a solution for one of them.
The other one I don't know if I can fix but one of them I can fix.
So for you history nerds who don't know, the modern Olympic games came back in 1896.
They were brought back by this very wealthy man, a man named Beron Pierre de Coubotin,
who was French, what gave that away and he created something called the IOC, the International
Olympic Committee.
And his ambition was to bring back the ancient Olympic games, remember those competitions
that existed centuries ago that stopped wars where everybody stopped and it was just
about sport, it was just about competition.
And that was the Coubotin's ambition, was to bring back a global event that put everything
else aside but the game, wrestling, running any number of events.
There weren't many of them back then in 1896 but the whole idea was what we're watching
is just a sporting event and nothing else.
There's no commercial enterprise, there's no money involved, there's no politics involved,
it is just man versus man in a game from any country that wanted to participate.
And you think about that and I'm like, wow that's a really noble ideal and it was, of
course there was money to be made and the people who put on those events realized that
there was an enormous attraction for the consumer to just watch a sporting event where
they knew the participants were only involved because of the game and not for any money-related
interests.
Because at the time 1896, 1906, around that time there really weren't that many sporting
events to watch where people made money, there were a few, let me think about it, baseball,
major league baseball existed, boxing, horse racing, golf a little bit, and boxing.
That was about it and the Olympic Games would come on every four years just like they did
in the ancient times and it would be just sport where all of the competitors were amateurs,
they could not make any money and once they made money they were professional and could no
longer compete in the games.
That was the rule and it was the rule that drove the Olympics for decades.
In fact, when a man, an American, former American athlete, Olympic athlete got involved.
He took that rule so seriously that he punished arguably the 20th century's greatest athlete
in Jim Thorpe.
Now it's not a coincidence that Jim Thorpe who won the Decathlon by a thousand points
kicked this man's butt in the Olympics, his name was Avery Brundage and Avery Brundage
is credited for the evolution, a big part of the evolution of how we recognize the Olympics
today.
But Avery's big priority was the athletes have to be amateur, they cannot have any money
involved in this.
So at some point Jim Thorpe accepted a little bit of money.
We're talking like a couple dollars, fourteen dollars, something like that.
It was a really small amount of money and Avery Brundage stripped him of his medals.
Now again, Avery Brundage was a frustrated jock and he really wanted to be great but
Jim Thorpe was the best and Jim Thorpe kicked his ass so Avery Brundage never forgot it
and a lot of people think that's one of the reasons why they stripped Jim Thorpe of his
medals and they weren't returned until Jim had been dead for some time.
But that was the priority with the Olympic Games was this was just about competition.
We are off to the side by doing so everybody who's involved in this process with the exception
of the competitors made money.
And as the Olympic Games grew and became a bigger and bigger event, more money kept coming
in and none of it went to the athletes.
So fast forward to the mid 70s.
We are in the middle of the Cold War at which point competitors started to recognize that
a lot of the Eastern block country competitors were essentially professional.
It was their job to be Olympic athletes.
It was their job to be great swimmers.
It was their job to be great boxers and to win on a global stage which was essentially
a way to pronounce their perspective countries and political ideologies superiority I guess.
And it became kind of a joke.
So in the mid 80s, there was a lot of pressure and if you look in the mid 80s, the one probably
the most celebrated sporting event in the 20th century for America is the 1980 winner
Olympics when the United States men's hockey team defeated the Soviets in the semi finals,
not for the gold medal, but for the semi finals.
The United States won the gold medal in the next game.
But one of the reasons it wasn't just about politics, although that clearly was the biggest
reason why the biggest reason why that was such an amazing upset is because the United
States team were really amateurs.
They really were amateurs.
They were college kids and they defeated a team of adults and professionals.
That team, that Soviet team that the United States defeated were essentially professionals.
They were being paid and it violated the biggest rule with the Olympics.
So in the mid to late 80s, I'm guessing about 86 or 87, the international Olympic committee
finally decided, you know, what we're going to let the professionals play.
It is too much, it's too unfair to let all of these Eastern Black country athletes who
are essentially pros and fully formed adults competing against these young college aged
students, college aged students.
That's important in an athletic competition.
So we're going to open it up to everybody and professionals can play.
That decision led to the creation of the dream team.
The dream team, the NBA All-Star team, essentially, that is the single biggest reason why basketball
and the NBA became the second most popular sport in the world.
Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, they were all pros and now they're all playing
in the Olympics.
And if you look since that point, basketball has become global and that is why you are
seeing some of the best players in the world now come from all over the world.
Akadansk, Dirk Vitsky, Janice, there's tons of them now.
All of them coming in and that Olympic Games, that decision to allow the dream team is why.
And in doing so, the IOC opened the door for athletes to start making money off of their
abilities and performances in the Olympics.
Not as it related to necessarily winning the gold medal, but just participating and they
were no longer amateurs.
And that's how we got here.
And then along the way, they also started to let athletes who were born in one country
participate for a different country.
It used to be the athlete was born in one country and that was the country that they represented
in the Olympics.
And then along the way, the IOC decided, okay, you were born there but you've got, you've
been living there so you can play for them now, okay?
And that opened the door now where you were seeing athletes who were born in one country,
maybe now participating for multiple countries over the span of two or three Olympic Games.
That's ridiculous.
In 2004, I covered the Summer Olympics in Greece and it had baseball back then.
Baseball has been a sport that's kind of yo-yo back and forth.
Sometimes they have it.
Sometimes they don't.
That particular year, there was baseball.
And the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, a man named Peter Angeloos, was Greek and he
put a huge priority on having a national team participating in the Olympics.
Even though there were no baseball fields in Greece at the time, so the city of Athens
had to build a baseball field for the Olympic Games.
And because it was the host country, it was guaranteed a spot for a team to participate
in those games.
Even though there was nobody in the country who played the game, so the country of Greece
was represented by Americans that had some trace of Greek heritage to say they were Greek.
But you had, and I remember talking to some of the players, you had all of these players
wearing the Greek national team uniform, walking in Olympic Stadium at the opening ceremonies
and that was the first time they had ever been to Greece.
None of them spoke Greek.
Not very few of them had ever even tried Greek cuisine outside of Silvaki, I guess.
It was preposterous and now you were seeing it all over the world.
Athletes who were born in one country, maybe their parents lived there, something, it's
just an absolute joke where you're seeing these athletes representing one country, even
though they have really no lineage to it.
Has it stopped or even have any of these changes had any effect on the popularity and
our willingness to consume the Olympics?
Not at all, it's just a change.
In this particular change, I don't really like, but as I went over those alterations and
that evolution of the Olympics to where we are now, you're going to see here shortly
how it also explains why major college athletics in the NCAA is where it is today.
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So the modern Olympics returned in 1896.
Not coincidentally, ten years later, the NCAA was born and it has become the largest
governing body of college sports.
And if you look at its evolution, again, you can see faint fingerprints of the Olympics
all over it.
So forever and ever and ever, the NCAA's primary goal was that the student athlete had to be
a student athlete and they could not get paid for anything while they were a student athlete.
Being fair for about the first 40 or 50 years and then television got involved in the
60s and as television became more and more popular and common and households, advertising
dollars went up and the rights fees to televised football games started to really flow in.
No one took more advantage of that eyeball situation in living rooms than Notre Dame University
and its contract with NBC sports.
So in the mid 70s, TV keeps growing and growing, NCAA College football, which has existed
since the late 1800s, becomes the popular NCAA brand to market.
Still though, despite the popularity, despite the eyeballs, despite the money, the priority
for the NCAA was the student athletes have to be students and they cannot be compensated
at all because if they are, that means they're a professional and if they're a professional,
that taints the whole thing.
Even though by that point, let's say 1980, everybody was aware that a lot of these players
were being paid with $1,000 hand shakes by boosters, donors, jock sniffing fans.
As long as you weren't caught, it didn't matter, so to speak.
Throughout the 1980s, the NCAA continues to hold the line on this rule.
You have to be an amateur.
The rule book expanded from, let's say, 30 pages to more than 700 pages.
This was like, you couldn't even imagine how big it was.
And it was a recipe for violating the rules, right?
And it all had to, the priority was, don't pay the kids.
Okay, that's fine.
Don't pay the kids.
Don't pay the kids.
Don't pay the kids.
That was the priority.
Somewhere along the line, the big money started to come in and as the big money started
to come in, coaches and administrators started making six and now seven figures.
All the while, the players kept making nothing and the coach who wanted to move from one
school to the next without penalty, they could do it.
The student athlete, they had to wait out a year or in some cases, they had to wait two
years to continue their athletic careers.
So a lot of different things had to happen for us to get where we are today.
There were many lawsuits, a Supreme Court justice ruling was involved.
At one point, this was four or five years ago, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh rules
against the NCAA and says, basically, these kids aren't being compensated.
The Supreme Court justice said that and have all the things that have happened against
the NCAA since then, this is the one that has always bothered me the most because for
the better part of 30 years, pundits would say, this is ridiculous, the players should
be able to be paid.
With all this money is going to float around, you should be able to pay the players and
my argument had always been, listen, there are only two sports in these college athletic
departments really making money.
How are you going to pay for the rest of these sports if you're paying the student athletes
too?
And I had maintained that because of my experience in college athletics and seeing how kind
of the money float around where at certain places, there was a lot of money and other places
there wasn't very much at all.
But I started to see just some idea of what this kind of looked like and I thought there's
just no way with Title IX involved, which says, which came in in 1973 and says, if you
pay the football player $10, you get to pay the women basketball player $10 too.
I'm generalizing.
But to me, I always thought the players were being compensated.
They were a scholarship covered everything plus oftentimes, if they got a Pell Grant,
they were paid cash on top of it.
And if you were smart, you could walk out of a four year college situation with money
in the bank.
Now you had to be pretty smart about it, but you could.
And I always railed against that idea that they weren't being paid.
They were being paid in the form of a college scholarship.
And the reason why I think that is such a big deal and such a screw up and miss on the
part of Kavanaugh and anybody of these other Supreme Court justices who determined that
that compensation didn't exist asked mom and dads and kids who were trying to pay their
own way through school for four years.
Ask those parents who are going out of their way to help their kid have an athletic career
in high school with the prayer, maybe, maybe they'll get a 30% scholarship when they
go to college.
Or God willing, they get a full ride.
That's compensation.
Are you going to tell me the punter or the backup guard at Stanford wasn't being compensated?
I remember talking to men's basketball players at the University of Michigan.
This is about in 2015.
That team was really good.
But they had backups, backups who were never going to see the floor.
And I asked those guys, do you think you should be paid?
And their point was, that guy, that guy, and that guy, they should have been paid.
I shouldn't be being paid.
I'm already getting paid.
And their point was, I'm going to Michigan for free.
I'm like, yeah, okay, that's right.
So I thought there was no way they were really going to be able to make this work.
And I thought it was totally insulting to all these different people who are paying their
own way, looking for help, and the idea that the student athlete isn't being compensated
in some way.
They were.
Now, if you wanted to make the argument, they weren't being compensated fairly, or that
the rules were draconian regarding transfers, I couldn't argue against that.
They were ridiculous.
They were outdated in there, and they were antiquated.
Meanwhile, while this is going on, the NCAA fights tooth and nail to keep amateurs as
amateurs.
Don't pay the players.
Finally, the NCAA loses, and not only does the NCAA lose, they get destroyed.
To the point now where you would say the NCAA is basically the Washington generals in court.
For people who don't know, the Washington generals are the team that played the Harlem
Globe trotters and never win.
So now you have what we look at, the current state of major college athletics.
Players can be paid, players can move around, virtually without penalty.
Most of the same allowances for coaches now basically are being applied to players, and
it's a mess.
And it has made people, let's say, over the age of 35, I would say somewhat disappointed
and confused as to what we're doing here.
And I don't know how you're going to put all of these animals back in the barn, because
all of these coaches and administrators are bitching a storm.
I want to say is you all were the adults in the room, and you're the ones who screwed
this up.
And remember this, their priority is not the game.
Their priority is their six and seven figure income.
That's their priority.
And I get it, right?
Anybody would get it.
That is their priority.
I want these things to change, but what I really can't change is my secure job employment,
because I've got all these expenses all over the place.
I get kids in private school, I get a family to take care of, maybe I have an ex-wife
to take care of.
All of these different things, and that is their priority.
Self-preservation may make sense.
So I don't know how you necessarily change anything.
I wouldn't want to take away the kids' opportunity to make money through name, image, and
likeness, even though name, image, and likeness as it's being applied is not at all what
its concept was.
The concept was the kid can make a little bit of money off of their chance of being a
student athlete at Kansas, LSU, Texas, or whatever.
Instead, it's basically been backdoored as a way to just pay a kid for playing for the
school.
The part that I think that they can actually do something about, and to me, it's ridiculous,
ridiculous like you seeing an athlete participating for multiple countries in multiple Olympic
games, is the idea now that we are seeing 24, 25, and 26-year-old
adults playing sports, college sports, against 18-year-olds.
It is patently, college is for college kids.
We can talk about change and all these different things, and a lot of times people will
rail against the way it is because it's changed.
And just because something is different doesn't mean it's wrong.
There's a lot of things we did a long time ago that weren't right, just pick.
Well, that applies here too, and just because it is different doesn't mean it's wrong.
People are still consuming it, people are still watching it, God knows people are betting
on it, but there's one part of this that I think fundamentally, everybody can agree
on.
Yeah, there's something wrong about this.
College is still for the college kid, and we are seeing now former pros coming back
successfully to play college ball.
That's ridiculous.
And I don't want to say it's dangerous, but you are seeing a significant size disparity
sometimes in these events, specifically basketball.
I think most people can agree, college is for about 18 to 23.
If you want to push it to 24, okay, there's always been some exceptions to this BYU for
years.
One of the reasons BYU had been so good in football for so long is that you would have
a freshman go there.
This is in football.
And then at some point, earlier on their athletic career and academic career, they would
go serve a two year mission, mission, mission, and in part, they would also train on the
side and get a little bit bigger because they were just getting older.
Well, then they would come back as a more fully developed young adult, and when they're
playing college football, that gave them, especially on the offensive and defensive lines,
a pretty big advantage.
Well, that was kind of a hard thing to enforce against because it was part of BYU's mission.
But the point about this now is that we're seeing consistently all of these older people
playing college sports.
There's one exception to this that will, I think, go away in the next year or so, is that
anybody who was playing college sports in 2020, they got an extra year of eligibility.
So those people are going to age out here quickly, but we are seeing now consistently.
Student athletes bounce around from three to four to five different universities in four
years sometimes that go for a semester, doesn't work out, they transfer on and on and on.
I don't know how you're going to legislate that because part of the change is to allow
a student athlete the same allowances that is that the regular student body has.
And as we know, sometimes it doesn't work out and they transfer, but this looks ridiculous
when we're seeing 25-year-olds play against 18-year-olds.
Recently, Baylor University added to its men's basketball team, mid semester, by the way,
at the semester break, a basketball player who had been drafted by an NBA team traded
to another NBA team, did not play NBA minutes, played in Spain, and then came back at the
age of 21.
Like what are we doing?
And now, most recently, the University of Alabama has signed a player who is 23 years old,
who had played professionally in the NBA's G lead, and he's a college freshman.
That's ridiculous.
What are we doing here?
And there needs to be an age restriction for this.
And I realize part of this is taking the restrictions off.
And I get that, kids are getting paid, kids are going to transfer.
That's part of it now.
It hasn't affected our thirst to consume it, which is a big part of this.
What the Olympics was in 1896 or even 1956 is not what it is today.
And sports in 1906 is not what it is today in 2026, nor should it be expected.
Things change, the Olympics changed, college sports has changed, but one thing should not
ever change is that the college sports scene should be for the college kid.
See you next time.
I love college sports.
I do.
It's a enormous part of my life.
Let's redo this.
Three, two, take five.
Three, two, one.
One thing that's, three, two, one, not getting, oh, let's try that again.
Mack, Engle, Fort Worth, start telling, shit, uh, it's the coffee.
This is a stolen water media production.