drakelead In early 2006, the book, College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth, by Allen Sack and Ellen Staurowsky, was recommended to House Committee on Ways & Means staffers. Why? Because it provided a good sense of the magnitude and the ubiquitous nature of the NCAA cartel’s powerful legal and … Read more
Like Harry Markopolos, who for nine years tried to persuade SEC staff that Madoff’s operation was a fraud, The Drake Group has been working to persuade the Congress that the unregulated operation of the NCAA is disingenuous at best. Here’s the story. »Read more
Cheating in college athletics not only makes cheating in professional sports pale by comparison, but also has more serious long-term consequences. There needs to be more intense scrutiny re: the efficacy of the NCAA’s drug-testing program as well as a demand for more transparency and accountability in the operation of the NCAA and the athletic … Read more
Apparently, no one anticipated the horrific downside to putting athletics oversight in the hands of sitting presidents who are literally caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place—between a public demanding high quality entertainment and governing boards who have the capacity (and all too frequently the inclination) to fire presidents who rock the university … Read more
We live at a time when everyone seems to know about wrongdoing in the world but no one is willing to admit it, let alone do something about it. For the past few decades, government and school officials have known, or should have known, that college athletes have full-time jobs in the college sports entertainment … Read more
Increased television exposure allows previously lower-level competitors to recruit against traditional football powers. Also, NCAA limits on the number of football scholarships have created greater parity among the big-time football programs each of which is competing for ‘food’ in the form of talented recruits as they strive to swim in the ocean of money generated … Read more
The NCAA’s bedrock amateurism principles of many years ago — which required colleges and their business partners to treat athletes like other students, and not as commodities — were long ago undermined by unrestrained commercialism and related academic corruption. »Read more
The Drake Group supports the introduction of strong TAO (transparency, accountability, oversight) measures at the NCAA and in the athletics programs at its member institutions to help restore academic integrity in higher education—reducing the level of academic corruption that enables America’s colleges and universities to pass off athletes who are academically, socially, and/or time disadvantaged, … Read more
The NCAA’s continued success at professionalizing big-time college athletics, while thwarting serious reform puts academic corruption and cheating on par with prostitution, illegal gambling, and speeding violations as acceptable forms of social misconduct in America— it’s OK so long as you don’t get caught. »Read more
There are striking parallels between the uncontrolled, greed-driven, anything-goes operations and excesses on Wall Street, with its misrepresentation of material assets in the form of disadvantaged financial instruments, and those in the NCAA’s college sports business, with its misrepresentation of material assets in the form of disadvantaged academic instruments — so-called student-athletes. In articles exploring … Read more