BY STEVEN LUBET
When Covid-19 protocols forced Texas A&M to withdraw its football team from this year’s Gator Bowl, the game’s sponsors began frantically searching for a replacement to play Wake Forest on December 31, even if that required recruiting a team with a losing record. Under NCAA post-season rules, the first bid went to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, which finished 5-7 in the Big Ten, because it had the highest academic progress rate among the other 5-7 teams. Rutgers had good reasons to accept the offer, and football coach Greg Schiano had even more, but it might be a different story for the players.
Testosterone-fueled young men will always want to play one more game. For seniors, it will be an unexpected chance to take the field with their friends, and underclassmen will get an extra opportunity to impress their coaches before next season. But that does not make it a good idea. Accepting a game on such short notice – the invitation came only eight days before the scheduled Gator Bowl – is inherently dangerous.
Football players face injury on every play, but it is especially risky when they are out of shape. The Rutgers team last suited up on November 27, with no plans to play another opponent until September 3, 2022. Dispersed around the country for Christmas break, and with only four days available for practice, the players cannot possibly be well prepared for the Gator Bowl. With the eventual lineup still in doubt, everyone’s timing – crucial for avoiding injury – is likely to be off, with no good chance to restore it to performance levels.
There is also every indication that Rutgers will be seriously outmatched, which only makes injuries more likely. Wake Forest is ranked number seventeen by the College Football Playoff committee, with a 10-3 record and one of the highest scoring offensive units in the country. In contrast, Rutgers lost three of its last four games by a combined score of 110-19, and its five victories were all against teams with losing records. The betting line favors Wake Forest by 14.5 points.
It is understandable that the Rutgers administration would want to play a game even under difficult circumstances. Bowl games provide a school with visibility on national television, which helps recruiting for both the football team and student body. Alumni donors love to congregate at bowl games, and Rutgers has not played in the post-season since 2014.
One might expect Coach Schiano to be more protective of his players, many of whom he will need for success next season, but he has his own perverse incentive.
According to Schiano’s reported contract, he is paid an additional $100,000 – over and above his $4 million annual salary – simply for appearing in the Gator Bowl, and another $100,000 if he manages to pull off a win. As I explained yesterday in The Hill, such game-specific incentives should be prohibited as conflicts of interest. Although a coach would never admit risking player safety for the sake of a hefty payout, the prospect of so much money creates a temptation, if only subliminally, that is hard to deny.
Although the conflict remains potential in most instances – will the coach, with the game on the line, keep a star player in the lineup despite a nagging injury? – in this case it is unmistakable. Schiano’s players would be 100% safer if Rutgers declined the game, but the greatest benefits, financial and otherwise, inure to the university and the coach.
The players are no doubt thrilled to be getting to the Gator Bowl, but they make their decisions with the enthusiasm and recklessness of youth. They do have the option of sitting out, but the underclassmen are under heavy pressure, even if unstated, to avoid disappointing their coach. It should be up to the adults to weigh the actual costs and rewards of last-minute post-season play. At Rutgers, it appears that player safety lost.
Given his $100,000 incentive to accept the invitation, Schiano should have been completely recused from participation in the university’s Gator Bowl decision. Instead, he was entrusted with polling the players about whether they were sufficiently “fired up” for the game. “This is a team that will be ready to play,” he predictably assured the administration and fans.
“Trust me,” Schiano declared. When it comes to such glaring conflicts of interest, that can never be the right response.
[Note: As of this writing, the Gator Bowl is still scheduled to be played Friday morning at 11:00 ET. At least five other bowl games have been canceled due to Covid-19 protocols. No schools other than Rutgers have stepped in as last-minute replacements.]
Steven Lubet is Williams Memorial Professor and director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
Lubet is wrong. He makes many dubious claims without evidence, and his proposed reforms are useless at addressing the problems with college football.
Lubet claims that Rutgers players will be out of shape and more likely to be injured. He has no evidence for this. Sadly, college football is a full-time, year-round job and players are forced to undergo constant conditioning. I suspect that it’s more dangerous for students to play with minor injuries every week than it is for them to have a month off to heal up.
As for mismatches, Lubet again provides no evidence that they cause injuries, but there are far greater mismatches during the regular season. The bowl season is the only time where there are no significant mismatches (a team favored by 20+ points).
I see no problem with the Rutgers head coach getting a 5% bonus for the accomplishment and extra work of a bowl game. The real problem is that the lower coaches and the players get no similar bonus. As for Lubet’s belief that this small bonus creates a conflict of interest due to the incentive to play games and win, that’s true of everything about college football. And university administrators also have a conflict of interest because they benefit from bowl games, so their judgment is no better. In fact, head coaches, unlike administrators, have a close relationship with the players and some incentives to treat them well. (And the only thing unusual about Rutgers playing this bowl game is that they were rewarded for the academic progress of players, something that almost never happens in college sports.)
So what’s the real solution (aside from banning college football) to make the game safer and better for students? First, independent doctors (medical referees) must decide when students can play. Second, college athletes need to have their rights as workers recognized. They should be fairly compensated for their high-risk work as athletes, they should be protected and provided with medical insurance, and they must have the right to organize to defend their interests. The combination of health regulation and unionization is the only workable solution to the dangerous exploitation of college athletes.
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You might say that my school, the ever-erring LSU, has partly solved the conflict-of-interest problem by emphasizing, in the contract for the new coach, as “longevity bonus” that requires him only to be present, in town, on July 1st of each year. He need not accept any bowl offerings or get into any other entanglements; he need only exist. Now that is solving a problem by creating another one!
Wilson’s call for evidence in a blog post is silly. Readers can decide for themselves whether there is a significant risk of injury in an extra game, played on short notice, by a makeshift lineup, with few practices, against a far superior opponent. The fact that other games are also dangerous is irrelevant to whether this one should have been added to the schedule.
But in any case, Wilson frequently makes declarations and predictions without evidence in his own Academe Blog posts. For example, writing about a graduation speaker at NYU:
“When administrators publicly declare that a commencement ceremony (perhaps the most important event on campus symbolizing what a university represents) is off limits to controversial speech, it sends to a chilling effect across the entire campus.” https://academeblog.org/2019/05/28/in-defense-of-steven-thrasher/
Wilson offered no evidence that criticizing a graduation speaker has ever chilled other faculty at NYU or anywhere else. He routinely warns of chilling — sometimes wisely, sometimes not — but I have never seen him back it up with evidence on this blog. That isn’t a big deal in a blog post. Not for Wilson, and not for me.
When I argue that censorship has a chilling effect psychologically, I think that’s a plausible position with a long history behind it. When Lubet claims that football games are physically dangerous for the lesser team, that’s a novel, provable claim that ought to have more evidence. Of course, any additional football games are dangerous, but that’s an argument against football, not against this bowl game. I don’t see any evidence that after playing 12 games this season, Rutgers players need weeks of practice to play a game safely when they usually have less preparation time for their other games. Most importantly, Lubet’s dubious argument to cancel one football game has an insignificant effect on the safety of players in a system where over 5,000 college football games are played every year.