How to Keep Agents Off the Field

By MIKE GARRETT
NYT

THIS college football season, the play on the field has often been overshadowed by the steady reports of players being held out of competition while their contacts with agents are investigated. The confessions of one former agent, Josh Luchs, who told Sports Illustrated that he had given money to at least 30 college players, gave a sense of the depth of the problem. I’m all too aware of the damage done by agents who tamper with student-athletes: the football program at the University of Southern California, where I was a player and later athletic director, now faces a two-year bowl ban and three years of N.C.A.A. probation for violations stemming from such tampering.

Yet, despite endless reporting and much pontificating, the problem of sports agents in all the big-money sports remains poorly understood outside the world of collegiate athletics. Until the 1990s, academically under-prepared but athletically gifted students were typically drawn to college sports by the offer of a free education. My hope when I entered college, like that of many other minority student-athletes, was to get an education and thus be prepared for a life after football. But times have changed, sports is big business and agents have followed the money. They perform a necessary function, but too many today have shown little or no concern about protecting their clients’ eligibility.

The student-athletes themselves have also changed. Many of the highest-performing ones, pampered in various ways long before their admission to college, now have an attitude of entitlement, and feel they are above the N.C.A.A.’s rules. Parents, too, have changed. It used to be that families were stabilizing factors in a student-athlete’s life, but nowadays they can be part of the problem, acting in some cases as if they were quasi-agents of the worst sort.

So how can one possibly control agents from compromising the amateurism of student-athletes? One approach has been for the N.C.A.A. and the colleges to make student-athletes more aware of the consequences to themselves, their teams and their universities if they violate the rules on agents. Still, the temptations remain too great and the consequences remain too small for the actual culprits — after all, the player who gets his team put on probation has usually already moved on to the professional game.

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