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Cal U. could send a better message

4 min read

A report released last week probing the deficiencies of the football program at California University of Pennsylvania found the belief was widespread across campus that the team, at least until recently, has been treated with kid gloves, has been the recipient of too many of the institution’s limited resources and has been roped off from the rest of campus.

It’s a story, really, that could be told on many campuses. Too many.

Although supporters and administrators like to boast that collegiate athletics bind together communities, strengthen bonds between alumni and their alma maters and generate funding for less-celebrated corners of campus, such as the library or the science center, a small but growing chorus over the last couple of years has been asking if all the sound and fury is really worth the price and whether the “student-athletes” whose exploits lure fans to stadiums and arenas are more athletes than students, and whether they’re getting a worthwhile education for their efforts.

The report that Cal U. asked the Kansas-based consulting firm the Compliance Group to deliver, at a cost of $60,000, found plenty of evidence to back up the suspicions of campus skeptics. It found that now-departed Cal U. president Angelo Armenti Jr. more or less controlled the athletic program, particularly its gridiron division, that fully one-third of all sports scholarships went to football players and that marijuana and alcohol use are rife and “part of the football culture.”

The study was commissioned in November, just days after six members of the Cal U. football team were accused of brutally beating a 30-year-old man outside an off-campus restaurant.

The report states that the university had been recruiting players with “serious criminal backgrounds,” and that practice should end. It also said that many of the football players don’t respect either campus police or officers in the borough. They seem to think they’re above the laws that govern the rest of us.

However, the report’s recommendations on dealing with this problem don’t have much in the way of teeth.

Among other things, it says police officers should have a formal talk with players and coaches each year, drug and alcohol testing policies should be reviewed, that a “tracker chart” be established to keep up with arrests and that players “self-report” any arrests that happen away from the California community.

We have to confess to some doubt about how much “self-reporting” will actually occur. And with Cal U. players having racked up over 20 arrests over the last two years, that tracker chart could end up getting awfully full awfully fast.

Three months ago, we argued that the best way for Cal U. to change the culture that has grown up around its football program is to root it out entirely.

Nothing in this report has dissuaded us from this view. As we noted in November, if Cal U. decided that its money would be better spent elsewhere, it wouldn’t be the first such school to take this step.

Late last year, in the heart of the pigskin-mad South, the University of Alabama at Birmingham ended its Division I football program, arguing that its $20 million annual cost was just too much to bear.

East Tennessee State, Hofstra, LaSalle and St. John’s universities have done the same in recent years.

Cal U. would do well to heed the words of David Ridpath, a professor of sports administration at Ohio University.

Discussing the world of big-time college sports in December, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Classrooms are falling apart, faculty salaries are not keeping up with inflation, other infrastructure improvements are delayed – then you see massive spending for athletics.

“It sends a bad message.”

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