Johnny Football and the Case of the Missing Paycheck

First appeared on September 13, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

So Johnny Football put his Johnny Hancock on a few footballs and a stray mini-helmet or two and the world loses its mind. Meanwhile Syria continues to eat itself from the top down and Senator Dianne Feinstein goes on television to talk about intervention vowing to vote against her constituents because “quite simply, they don’t know what I know”. What a wonderful world indeed.

Though the same can’t be said for Senators, it used to be Heisman Trophy winners conducted themselves with class. They’d score their parents a luxury apartment on a “friend of the programs” dime and arrive at award shows via limousine, or in other cases flush a Hollywood career down the toilet after being accused of killing their ex-wife.

So Johnny Football sells some autographs, gets booted from a summer camp and does the same thing 97% of college students do with regularity anyway and suddenly he’s public enemy number two behind Bashar al-Assad. If History’s any guide, we should cut the kid some slack. After all, those who’ve come before haven’t exactly been ripped from a Rockwell painting.

For many years the argument for paying college athletes has welled up like a great reservoir of greed, equality, compassion, righteousness and justice (the last two we recognize as distant possibilities) behind a dam that is the NCAA. And here comes Johnny Football, full head of steam, shoulder lowered, charging towards an already much assaulted, aging and crumbling dam.
And what should be a dislocated shoulder becomes instead an earth-shaking moment as, with the power of ESPN and the rest of the college football media behind him, young Johnny hits the dam with all the force of a Ram Pick Up.

So as the torrents rage from behind the dam, we pause on our long journey down the road towards equality to take a long look in the mirror. Is this about making things right with college athletes or making things right with ourselves? We know full well college athletics are dirty and there’s obviously little the NCAA can do about it. This means, in order for us to keep cheering our favorite teams on in good conscience, we’re suddenly fine with athletes being paid.

When everything’s “over the table” we somehow feel as if we still hold some control over the six headed monster we refuse to believe busted its chains and left the reservation a long time ago. Putting everything “over the table” supposedly eliminates “friends of the program “and those greedy ambulance chasers lurking in the shadows. It levels the playing field and makes the SEC an actual entity of the NCAA instead of Minor League Football.

Putting everything “over the table” makes college athletics the Frankenstein to our Gene Wilder. And we stand alongside beaming with pride at how we’ve tamed this gruesome beast using a crude brain transplant machine, a hunchbacked assistant and a fortuitous bolt of lightning. The audience claps and cheers with happy amazement until the stage lights begin exploding and Dr. Frank-un-schteen loses complete control of his great experiment.

As with most things in the real world there are no simple answers. Simple answers exist only on The Brady Bunch or in Third Grade. The NCAA will react in the way we’ve become so accustomed to seeing the NCAA react as the problem continues to grow uglier and faster than a malignant tumor. One thing’s for sure, we don’t have to worry about Washington mucking this deal up anytime soon. It appears they’re far too busy tossing the old political football around out on the Mall to worry about little Johnny Football.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams