Corruption IN Collegiate Sports

Internal Auditor, April, 2000 by Joseph T. Wells, Richard B. Carozza

Men's basketball coaches, such as Jim Calhoun at the University of Connecticut and Mike Krzyzewski at Duke University, reportedly pull in seven-figure incomes. In 1993, Krzyzewski also was reported to have signed a 15-year, $6 million sponsorship contract with Nike. When Rick Pitino left the University of Kentucky for a coaching position in the NBA, he reportedly earned $3.3 million a year in salary, endorsements, radio and TV deals, and summer camps. According to The Arizona Republic, title-winning Lute Olson of Arizona University makes $530,000 per year plus $300,000 from a shoe contract. Even the NCAA reaps rewards, having recently renewed its contract with CBS to broadcast the NCAA men's basketball tournament for a reported $545 million each year.

D. Stanley Eitzen, professor of sociology at Colorado State University, tackled these big-money issues in "The Paradox of Sport: The Contradictory Lessons Learned" (The World & 1, July 1996). "Big-time college coaches are rewarded handsomely if they win. In addition to generous salary raises, successful college coaches receive lucrative contracts from shoe companies and for other endorsements, media deals, summer camps, speaking engagements, and the like. With the potential income of college coaches sometimes exceeding $1 million at the highest levels, the temptations are great to offer illegal inducements to prospective athletes or to find illicit ways to keep them eligible, such as phantom courses, surrogate test takers, and altered transcripts."

Andrew Zimbalist, author of Unpaid Professionals: Commercialism and Conflict in Big-time College Sports, agrees. "With big bucks dangling before their eyes, many NCAA schools find the temptations of success too alluring to worry about the rules," Zimbalist writes. "Schools cheat. They cheat by arranging to help their prospective athletes pass standardized tests. They cheat by setting up special, rinky-dink curricula so their athletes can stay qualified. And when one school cheats, others feel compelled to do the same."

For the most part, school administrators do not fire coaches guilty of shady transgressions if they win. As sportswriter John Underwood has characterized it, "We've told them it doesn't matter how clean they keep their program. It doesn't matter what percentage of their athletes graduate or assume a useful place in society. It doesn't even matter how well the coaches teach the sport. All that matters are the flashing scoreboard lights."

The task of reigning in controls and mitigating risk in this type of environment may seem overwhelming to university auditors. Clearly, the audit department faces considerable challenges in ensuring that ethical practices remain intact and that the school does not stray from its primary objective of educating students.