Somewhere in the hard drive of one of my old, now-impenetrable laptops is an Excel file with a breakdown of members of the 2012 U.S. Senate. It was annotated by, among other things, where they went to college and how they might have voted on a hypothetical piece of legislation to end the educational tax exemption for big-time football and basketball.
I made the spreadsheet as part of an exercise to assess the odds of a scenario I viewed as a possible, if unlikely, outcome of the mess that college athletics was back then, amid yet another period of crisis that included not only the ever-growing commercialism and the usual major recruiting scandals but also child abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse. In an Inside Higher Ed news article in January 2012, I predicted,
“A few dozen universities, tired of being constrained in their ambition and spending by the association’s less-wealthy members, could form themselves into a handful of ‘superconferences,’ create their own national football playoff system, and possibly even peel away from the NCAA and create their own basketball tournament, destroying the NCAA’s gold-plated chief asset in the process.”
The End of the “Learn to Code” Era (opinion)
