College football season in hands of school presidents
Few people in higher education are as qualified to assess the cross-currents pulling college football into different ideological camps amid the COVID-19 pandemic as Harris Pastides.
Not only was Pastides the president of the Southeastern Conference while leading the University of South Carolina, he chaired the NCAA’s Division I board of directors and sat on the board of governors, meaning he was heavily involved in just about every major-college sports decision of the past halfdecade.
Now, he’s a professor emeritus of epidemiology and biostatistics at South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, meaning his retirement last summer came shortly before his interest in college sports and his lifelong academic work would have converged. It’s a situation he doesn’t envy being in the middle of.
“It’s always lonely at the top,” Pastides said, characterizing the uniquely difficult moment his former presidential colleagues now find themselves in.
“Even if you lead through consensus and all the people around you are advising you and saying, ‘You’re good to go, let’s open,’ if there’s a mistake it’s always you who has to take the fall.”
That weight of responsibility now sits squarely in the middle of a seesaw that college presidents have been riding for nearly six months, with college football skirting the edge of staying on board or falling off completely.
Most of the college football universe, led by the NCAA’s lower divisions, made a relatively early decision that it wasn’t worth the risk or the trouble to try to play this fall. Among the higher-profile schools, the Big Ten and Pac-12 came to the same conclusion this month along with the Mountain West and MidAmerican Conferences, leaving the other six Football Bowl Subdivision leagues to press on.
The inconsistent patchwork of decisions and divergent risk assessments from conference to conference and school to school has confused and angered people on both sides of the debate. But it has also highlighted the vari
ous pressure points being applied to the college presidents at the big-time football schools who actually have to make the call.
“I feel for these folks,” said Holden Thorp, who served as the University of North Carolina’s chancellor from 2008 to 2013 and is now the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. “They’re getting up at 6 a.m. and getting on Zoom calls and not getting off until 10 p.m. They’re exhausted, and every time they get a plan together, they have to go around and try to get everyone on board with it and there’s always some constituency that won’t get on board and it turns the merry-go-round on again. They’re under tremendous pressure.”
Thorp understands how issues related to athletics can generate outsized pressure on a university president, the vast majority of whom do not have a background in sports. Though Thorp rose to the presidency on the strength of his career as a chemistry professor and dean of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, he resigned in 2013 largely because a football scandal had overwhelmed his tenure.
Even for someone who had been deemed successful in managing other areas of the university, having a highprofile football program on campus can invite a level of peril and scrutiny that simply doesn’t apply to issues involving the medical school or the history department. And that can get very complicated during a pandemic, as schools are struggling with everything from how to manage on-campus learning to millions in lost revenue from simple things like food service.
As Thorp pointed out, a school like the University of Michigan has far more to worry about in maintaining $1.62 billion in research expenditures and nearly $5 billion in revenue for its medical center versus a $187 million athletic budget.
“There are a number of presidents and chancellors that, right now, college athletics and maybe specifically college football is a pain in the ass,” said Jim Livengood, a longtime Division I athletic director at multiple FBS schools who is now a consultant in the college administration space.
“It’s not that they don’t like college football or don’t understand what it can mean for the university, but in terms of the underlying of what they’re trying to do in a setting of higher education, in a lot of ways it conflicts with what’s going on. I think college presidents are incredibly conflicted, and they’re getting input from lots of different sources from regions and trustees, boosters and fans, faculty and staff. Everybody’s got a dog in the fight.”
Inevitably, one of those dogs will closely resemble either an elephant or a donkey. It has not gone unnoticed that the Pac-12 schools span six states, five of which have majority Democratic governors. Across the Big Ten states, there are six Democrats and five Republican governors. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has consistently tweeted his support for a college football season.
When asked what separates the thinking of the leagues that postponed from the Atlantic Coast, SEC and Big 12 – territory that generally leans more conservative – Thorp said it was clear to him political pressures were weighing on those presidents starting from the White House and filtering down to university system governing boards, which are largely run by political appointees.
“It’s very easy for the people on the campus to say the president should just stand up to these trustees who insist that we open or insist that we play football, but those are your bosses,” Thorp said.
And in states where Republicans are appointing the bosses, it is impossible to separate the desire to play football this fall from the other politically driven issues that drove Southern states toward more aggressive reopenings during the pandemic.
“The states strongly considering or planning to play football are the states that primarily voted for Trump,” said Stephen Butler, a political consultant at the Atlanta-based Connect Public Relations firm. “The voters who elected Trump were not predominantly concerned with taxes. They were more concerned with ‘Making America Great Again,’ which is a cultural phenomenon that has dovetailed into a political base. Most board of regents members in those states making these decisions are political appointees and typically share the political and cultural views of those who appointed them.”
Which means, regardless of whether college presidents in the SEC, ACC and Big 12 think it’s a good idea to play football this fall, there is at least some incentive to try that didn’t necessarily exist in states where a tweet from the White House isn’t going to move the needle with politicians.
But as more colleges decide that oncampus learning is too risky for the general student population, as North Carolina and North Carolina State did last week and others are threatening to do if on-campus spread of the virus worsens, the optics of pushing ahead with football could be problematic. Instead of hitting the reset button on the importance and opulence of athletics, it could serve to further the stereotype that football is running these universities.
“College presidents have never had control over athletics,” said Donna Lopiano, the former women’s athletic director at Texas and current president of The Drake Group, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to defend academic integrity in higher education. “In the last survey of college presidents, 80% of them in Division I said they couldn’t control their athletic programs, so why are we expecting them to be sane at this moment in history?”
That generalization probably doesn’t give quite enough credence to the complex range of factors that presidents are having to consider and the competing interests they’re weighing, including the impact on athletic budgets and the desire of players to compete this season, not to mention medical advice that can be interpreted different ways.
“I’m not sure who’s right and who’s wrong,” Pastides said. “I do believe the presidents and ADs have student-athlete welfare above all else in mind, and look, if they have to pull the plug before the first game or during the season, I believe they’re going to be prepared to do that. But I think it was a close call for all five power conferences. These weren’t 90-10 decisions, it’s 51-49 one way or the other, and time will tell who was right.”