Athletics at UCF could use dose of transparency

The University of Central Florida says it’s committed to being transparent about spending money, whether from taxes or the tuition and fees paid by UCF’s more than 60,000 students.

But the university has cloaked some of the university’s most high-profile functions — such as the athletics department — under a veil known as a Direct Support Organization, an entity that can keep most of its business confidential.

DSOs are the university equivalent of CIA black ops or super PACs. The net effect is secrecy. We have the Legislature to thank for that.

State statutes specifically say nearly all records kept by DSOs are exempt from public-records laws, including donors.

Presidents of Florida’s 12 public universities have been eager to take advantage, setting up dozens of such organizations across the state.

But until this week, UCF had a special distinction as the only public university in Florida that refused to release the contracts of its coaches, including football coach George O’Leary.

That’s because the UCF Athletics Association is at one of only two universities in the state that operate their athletics departments as private entities, or DSOs.

The other is the University of Florida, which has continued to make coaches’ contracts public even though the university said it wasn’t required to by law.

Clearly, with a 0-7 football season, UCF’s strategy of secrecy wasn’t helping the team on the field. (Meanwhile, Florida State University, which treats coaching contracts as public records, has three football national titles.)

On Monday, I asked UCF why it continued to refuse to release the contracts.

That same day a television reporter asked O’Leary during a news conference whether his contract allowed him to name his own successor.

“No ... there’s nothing in there,” O’Leary said.

UCF’s stance was that we had to take O’Leary’s word for it.

In an email sent Monday night by UCF General Counsel Scott Cole to Vice President Grant Heston, Cole said the contracts are not only exempt from the public record, but a court ruling made it illegal for the university to release them.

“This is an appellate decision from our district which states that when documents are designated by the Legislature as both confidential and exempt from the public-records law, they cannot be released, even if the public entity desires to do so,” Cole wrote. How convenient. At nearly every other public university in Florida, officials would be breaking the law if they

didn’t make contracts public.

But at UCF, officials would be breaking the law if they did.

The irony is that UCF argued that its athletics department is a public entity in order to dodge a $10 million jury verdict related to the case of football player Ereck Plancher, who fell ill during football practice and died.

The Florida Supreme Court sided with the university in May, ruling that the UCFAA is controlled by university President John Hitt, a state employee covered by sovereign immunity, which limits court judgments against state agencies to just $200,000.

So, if it means avoiding a big jury verdict, the university wants the athletics department to be seen as a public agency.

Yet, when it came to coaching contracts, UCF wants to hide behind the UCFAA’s claim to confidentiality.

This seedy arrangement is all the worse considering students foot the bill for close to half — 42 percent — of the athletics department.

Students are required to pay $14.32 per credit hour for athletics. It’s basically an athletics tax.

All of this adds up to really bad optics for UCF.

Then, suddenly, UCF had a Tuesday night epiphany.

The university decided it could get around what it saw as legal constraints by asking coaches to release their contracts.

And, in a major policy shift, UCF said it will make sure coach contracts as well as the agreement with the new athletics director are public going forward. That’s a start. Even better, though, would be for the Legislature to stop letting university athletics hide behind DSOs.