He had stepped away from great success in a highly lucrative coaching position at the University of Florida, where his teams had won the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) national championship game in 20 (Buckeye Biography, 2013). When Meyer took the head coaching job at Ohio State in the fall of 2011, he had been on a hiatus from coaching due to job-related anxiety.
Reid also shared with Meyer an anxiety born of the job that led to deterioration of his own health. In addition, as the highest-paid coach in the country at the time, Reid became the focal point for discussions about excessive coach compensation, much like Ohio State's Urban Meyer (Staurowsky, 2011) or Alabama's Nick Saban today (Brady, Berkowitz, & Upton, 2012). For one thing, the media had to be managed, and deception was not out of the question. For example, a diary maintained by Harvard football coach Bill Reid in 1905 indicates the preoccupations that accompanied the job (Smith, 1994). Indeed, one encounters an almost parallel universe when comparing today's headlines with those that appeared in earlier years when the structure of college sport was being put into place. In fact, regardless of whether we are talking about small, selective institutions in the least competitive arena of what the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) refers to as Division III - where athletics is viewed as critical to the overall admissions process because of its power to bring tuition-paying students to campus (Stevens, 2007) - or about large public universities with multimillion-dollar athletics programs that draw more than a hundred thousand fans to football games, the relationship between athletics and academics has rarely been harmonious (Desrochers, 2013). At such institutions, administrators invest more and more in "consumption amenities," such as athletics complexes and other kinds of entertainment, that lend the air of a resort community to the experience of campus residential life as a way to maintain market share and garner publicity. These tensions were recently revisited by Scott Carlson (2013), who explored the evolution of the "country club" college. Indeed, more than 100 years ago, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University and later the 28th president of the United States, observed that the centerpiece of higher education often competed for attention with other offerings that both students and the general public found more alluring: "The sideshows are so numerous, so diverting - so important, if you will - that they have swallowed up the circus, and those who perform in the main tent often whistle for their audiences, discouraged and humiliated" (Wilson, 1909, p. For example, a college president faced with the challenge of attracting a student body and meeting enrollment demands in the early 1900s was as likely to fret then as she is today about the threats posed by athletics to academic integrity. Yet this flurry of broadcast and journalistic analysis bears a remarkable resemblance to concerns expressed generations earlier and dating back as far as 150 years or more. Today, the intense media scrutiny that is characteristic of twenty-first-century society highlights an array of issues for Americans to contemplate related to the college sport enterprise. Though the value of college sport may be obvious to some, its shape and contours have been forged out of controversy and ongoing calls for reform.
#FLYING WEDGE FOOTBALL INFLUENCE GENERATOR#
And there will be still others who celebrate the capacity of college sport to serve as an anchor for institutional identity, pride in place, a generator for publicity, and a bridge between higher education and broader communities. There will be others who point to the benefit college sport provides in creating avenues to education, inspiring work ethic, goal orientation, and focus that predicts success in academic settings. There will be those who extol the virtues of participation in college sport, the bonding, the camaraderie, the tests of courage and will. Poll a dozen people about their perspectives on the value of college sport to higher education and a dozen different answers are likely to be expressed. This is an excerpt from Administration of Intercollegiate Athletics by Erianne Weight & Robert Zullo.
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