College sports need federal intervention

The Daily Herald Editorial Board served their readers well when it said: Kept in perspective, athletics play an important role in college life (“Keeping bowl fever in perspective,” Our View, Jan. 3). However, the American public’s sports fever — stemming from seemingly unbounded love of college sports entertainment at any cost — makes it difficult to maintain this perspective. Worse yet, this sports fever can be readily exploited by skilled marketing professionals to the long-term detriment of the integrity and health of higher education in America.

The incremental cost of such exploitation to build an ever bigger college sports entertainment enterprise, such as advocated by Larry Scott, the Pac-12 Conference Commissioner, amounts to the cost of expanding on a heretofore eminently successful business model. Simply stated, the cost involves the further prostitution of America’s already compliant colleges and universities without any requirements for transparency and accountability, as well as with apparently acceptable artifacts of this prostitution- tax-free revenues, unbridled greed, manifold corruption, and blatant hypocrisy.

Based on over eight years of research on college sports reform, my experience indicates that intervention by the federal government is the only way to bring about desperately needed reform to help constrain the uncontrolled growth of big-time football and men’s basketball programs with its potentially devastating impact on America’s colleges and universities.

Frank G. Splitt

Mount Prospect