University of Virginia Library

No Joke

Congratulations are due to the coaching
staff of the Virginia Cavalier football team.
Although last season was disappointing, the
coaches have isolated the problem and taken
steps to alleviate it. The reason the Wahoo
offense wasn't generating a lot of punch last
year was simple: the players weren't going to
church on Sunday. From now on, the football
players will be going to church and keeping
their hair cut, and the upshot will, in the
opinion of the coaches at least, be a
competent and winning team. Even if they
don't have the most successful football team,
they'll at least have the most pious and
clean-cut.

The temptation is strong to think that the
new rules for the football team (printed in full
on page three) are some sort of joke, but
Coach Blackburn has assured us that they
aren't. It's hard to believe that they will be
enforced, but one of the team's captains
thinks that they will, and the very fact that
they were issued leads to the logical
conclusion that the coaches mean it.

The football players aren't going to be
happy about this, but their discontent will
probably never surface. In fact, the odds are
good that we will soon publish a letter from
the co-captains, or perhaps from the entire
squad, to the effect that the team supports
the new rules, even though the members were
not consulted about them and the co-captains
were given only a vague idea of what kind of
law was going to be laid down.

It's fairly easy for the coaches to
intimidate the players and get them to go
along with gross infringements of their rights
as students such as are contained in the new
rules. Their power of intimidation is implied
in the last rule under "Penalty for Rule
Infraction." The second part of the penalty
statement simply states that, "Training rules
for Intercollegiate Athletics are considered
rules of the Institution. (Paragraph No. 2
Atlantic Coast Conference grant-in-aid or
Scholarship Application.)"

What this means is that a football player
(especially one who isn't a particularly good
football player and whose scholarship could
be used on a better prospect) who breaks one
of these rules can have his scholarship taken
away. Last year the NCAA, at the behest of
the football powerhouses which run it, passed
a rule that said a grant recipient who violated
established Athletic Department policies
could have his scholarship taken away if the
school's scholarship committee agreed to do
so. The football players, with good reason,
feel that the Scholarship Committee at the
University is not going to back them up if the
coach wants to take away their scholarship.
So if they happen to be talented and want to
play football, they'll keep their mouths shut.
And if they aren't so talented, and want to
keep their scholarships, they have all the more
reason to keep quiet.

It seems obvious (in fact, it is obvious to all
but the owners of football mentalities) that
it's unconstitutional for a state institution to
tell its students that they have to go to church
every Sunday or get their hair cut, etc. More
importantly, it seems obvious that anyone
who believes that the University has students
who happen to play football is living in a
dream world. The Athletic Department is
simply hiring a group of muscular
mercenaries, keeping them scholastically
eligible through various means (More than one
football player who was failing some courses
after the season has gone to a friendly doctor
and had himself declared psychiatrically unfit
to carry a full load and dropped his
troublesome courses without incurring an F;
and there are plenty of courses in the
education school where an A is available to
any football player who needs a little help
with his cumulative average), and keeping
them under rigid discipline so that they will
produce on autumn Saturdays.

Coaches, of course, are under pressure to
win, and it is almost understandable that they
would go to such lengths to produce a winner,
especially after a season like the last one. The
real tragedy lies in the probability that in the
entire University administration, there isn't
one man with the nerve or the inclination to
draw the line for them.