Twenty years ago this month, CNN’s Special Assignment Unit made its debut with an exposé of the hypocrisy of collegiate athletics. I was then Senior Correspondent for the network’s highly-touted  investigative team. We were being billed as television’s biggest and best muckraking unit—a team of reporters and producers, who had earned dozens of broadcasting most prestigious journalism prizes.

The talent recruited to staff the unit was in sharp contrast to the cable network’s cheapskate reputation, which had earned CNN the reputation as the Chicken Noodle Network.  Indeed, the Columbia Journalism Review published a lengthy article questioning why “some of America’s top reporters gave up great jobs to join an untested unit at the nation’s fourth network?” But in the beginning, our future looked rosy. My ten year tenure didn’t work out as I hoped it would. But I have no regrets.

Our initial series of stories about college athletics—four segments ranging from eight to ten minutes—were a spin-off of a local one-hour documentary I reported  five years before for WBRZ in Baton Rouge. The CNN series, titled Prisoners of the Game, covered the breadth of college sports from recruitment to graduation rates to the final disappointment of athletes, who completed their eligibility without degrees or hope for professional athletic careers. The reports ran in conjunction with basketball’s Final Four craze, thus giving added emphasis to the huge sums of money at stake for colleges that build successful teams. The abuses we uncovered in our reports were widespread. And two decades later, not much has changed. 

Although most colleges with top-rated teams claim that athletic programs are self-supporting, improve school profiles, provide scholarships to kids unable to afford tuition, and keep alumni happy, athletes get shortchanged. Graduation rates are frequently appalling. Worse, some schools offer courses only slightly above basket-weaving that are designed to help athletes maintain academic eligibility. So instead of student/athletes, teams are made up of athlete/students. Or more accurately, athlete/entertainers. Bigtime athletic departments operate like the entertainment business.

The National Association of Collegiate Athletics has a rule book outlining what schools can and cannot do. But rules governing human nature are a matter of conscience, meaning that loopholes are exploited. To quote what Vince Lombardi probably never said, “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.” For coaches, losing games is the equivalent of near-death experiences. Their jobs depend on winning records—making it easy to justify and rationalize loose interpretations of NCAA rules. 

For years, former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown has been one of the most outspoken critics of the NCAA. He believes the regulations encourage, rather than discourage cheating. Since athletes are entertainers who earn millions of dollars for their universities, Brown endorses giving moderate stipends over and beyond tuition, books, housing and food. A large percentage of star players are recruited from low income and impoverished backgrounds and Brown says it is unreasonable to expect these young athletes to resist the temptations of perks provided by alumni and fans. He and probably every other coach of major college teams have seen star athletes driving cars and wearing expensive clothing that were beyond their financial means. It creates a dilemma. Coaches are not trained detectives. To avoid confrontations in which the truth might emerge, they close their eyes to the obvious and pray that others will do the same.

Dale Brown is not alone in his belief that athlete/student/entertainers should receive a level of compensation that leads them not into temptation, but delivers them from cheating. But the NCAA membership is dominated by schools that put education above athletics—an attitude that is considered a distortion of priorities by the most dedicated fans of the nation’s top college teams. When it comes to a vote, any proposal for paying college athletes more than current limits is soundly defeated by the majority. It’s better to be blind.

As a result, cheating continues year after year, decade after decade. 

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.