U.S. college athletics remain the closest thing sport has to a lawless frontier

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The topline news item at the University of Michigan is that the football coach had some sort of illicit relationship with one of his staffers and, after being found out, snapped.

According to prosecutors, head coach Sherrone Moore drove to his former affair partner’s home, and then threatened himself and her. He’s been charged with stalking and home invasion. The university is still untangling the particulars.

But don’t worry. The football program is fine. You can see them in two weeks when they’ll be playing at the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl. In the interim, the team will be coached by a hedge-fund guy named Biff Poggi.

I’d say you can’t make this stuff up, except American college football keeps managing to do so.

Moore’s story has made international headlines because of its lurid nature, but in the last few years Michigan football has become a sort of laboratory testing the limits of how many means you can come up with to justify the ends.

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Moore got his break as offensive co-ordinator when the guy doing that job was charged with computer crimes after accessing personal athlete accounts across the country and stealing photos and videos.

He got the top job because the man formerly in charge, Jim Harbaugh, was mixed up in a baroque sign-stealing scandal that involved staffers dressing up as coaches from other teams. Moore was also implicated, but managed to slip through and thrive. Harbaugh quit.

In a professional or Olympic context, everyone involved here would have been hammered back into the last decade. When you cheat out where people can see you, you put the business at risk. That’s how Bev Priestman went from coaching the Olympic gold medalists to coaching a jumped-up house-league team on the other side of the world.

But in U.S. college sports, cheating – even the most ridiculous sort – is just part of it. It has become the closest thing sport has to a lawless frontier. As long as you win, and are clever enough not to get caught, nobody cares how you do it.

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It’s been like this for decades – little envelopes changing hands to get this or that player to come to your school.

The little envelopes are now much bigger and they call them Name, Image and Likeness rights. Michigan’s current quarterback was yoinked away from LSU with an offer of US$3-million. The little envelopes are now part of the American high-school ecosystem, where the parents of kids as young as 13 and 14 are getting pay to play.

For a long time, there was one flimsy, guardrail on this system – academia. The school was the primary concern, and the sports team its subsidiary.

Then colleges realized that for most 17-year-olds, the football team is the thing. Almost 60,000 of them apply each year to go the University of Alabama, and it isn’t because it has a hot environmental sciences program.

I’ve been to a lot of very big sports events. None of them comes anywhere close to an Alabama football game. It’s like a religious revival with an open bar that takes over an entire town. The chance to do that six, seven times a year is as good a reason as any to spend your money in Tuscaloosa. Even teenagers understand that one Bachelor of Arts is very like another. It’s the perceived quality of your experience that now gives you status.

So you could go somewhere and get a solid foundation in the classics, or you could get to tell stories about how wasted you got at Homecoming the year ‘Bama beat Ole Miss.

That has become the service American universities who are football powers provide. It cannot be interrupted.

Can you think of another business in which the person in charge threatens one of his subordinates with death, and then everybody just shows back up to work the next day?

If this made any sense, they’d burn the whole thing to the ground, let the rubble cool for a year or so, and then start over.

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If they really took their academic mission seriously, they’d bin football altogether. Because right now, what does it say about the university? ‘We are not bound by any rules’.

So maybe that’s the point. You go to Michigan and other schools like it because it appeals to your Machiavellian streak. They are cultivating winners. Maybe you can be a winner, too.

A lot of things about America amuse and confound me, and their college system is a standout. I marvel at the idea that people are borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they will never be able to repay in order to get communications or political science degrees.

I have a political science degree. I read Rousseau for three years. That was it. That was the whole degree. It’s worthless. But I only paid about five grand for it, and I had plenty of time to work nights. It’s not like I was doing anything better at the time. I’d call it a wash.

It’s been a long, long time since anyone’s asked me where I went to school because up here, no one cares. Of all the little cultural zigs and zags we’ve taken to differentiate ourselves from America, this is one of the best.

Down in America, you aren’t investing in an education. You’re purchasing a deluxe party experience. You’re buying the hope that you’ve picked a school that will impress shmucks in job interviews when you bring it up (and I’ve never met an American of a certain class who does not mention their alma mater within the first 10 minutes of conversation).

In order to be that place, schools have to provide students with a few things, but mostly it’s aura. They’re selling you a vision of success, no matter what they have to do to get it.