Tag Archives: Vince Young

UT-Austin doesn’t really care to educate football players

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Dallas Morning News August 26, 2017

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/25/ut-austin-really-care-educate-football-players

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Thomas G. Palaima, Contributor

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I have followed and written commentaries about big-time sports at the University of Texas at Austin for some 15 years. Between 2008 and 2011, I was the UT and Big 12 representative on the national Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. I was invited to lunch by former athletics director DeLoss Dodds, who knew and adeptly practiced the art of keeping your enemies closer. I sat in his and President Bill Powers’ skyboxes. The idea seemed to be that I would find this misuse of adult time and tasteless display of conspicuous consumption — which should find no place at a public university — so desirable that I would not rock the boat in the future.

It did not have that effect.

At Dodds’s insistence, I even had personal sit-down time with soon-to-be-disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. His revered high school mentor, Fr. Thomas Bermingham, S.J., had once been a dear colleague of mine at Fordham University. And I heard Graham Spanier, then president of Penn State, emphasize to Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics reps in January 2011 what high moral standards he enforced within his entire NCAA athletics program, top to bottom. Ten months later, Jerry Sandusky.

In 2009-10, I thought we had reached the promised land. Then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who had been a student athlete at Harvard; then NCAA president Mark Emmert; and then President Barack Obama all called for “independent faculty oversight of NCAA programs at universities and colleges.” Emmert told us that it was a bad idea for any institution of higher education to have separate fundraising organizations for academics and athletics, as UT Austin still does: Texas Exes and the Longhorn Foundation. I brought these proposals to the floor of the faculty council.

It turns out that no University of Texas president wants to lift his rod and take us across to the promised land of real education for all student athletes and serious integration of sports into the academic, cultural and scientific mission of our great public university. Instead we stay in the land of smoke and mirrors, make-believe, and even immoral looking-the-other-way.

Recently, I went online with the Longhorn Foundation to see what ordering season tickets for this fall would entail. Three tickets in Section 28 for 6 games were each $660, total $1,980. But those tickets will not be sold to anyone without a $2,500 “donation” to the Longhorn Foundation for each ticket. So, three season tickets cost $9,480, and $7,500 is considered a voluntary tax-exempt donation to higher education. I would say this is the morally gray world our university leaders tolerate, but it is just black-and-white wrong.

Okay, so they raise lots of money this way. What does the football program do with it? Well, our program this spring videoed its new head coach Tom Herman taking a sledgehammer to football lockers in good repair. They were all replaced with $10,500-apiece lockers that the UT director of high school relations proudly proclaimed via Twitter as “unfreakingbelievable.” The Dallas Morning News called them “uncharted territory” in a “college football world where a teams’ facilities are pretty much indistinguishable from a high-end Vegas hotel.” Worse yet, UT President Greg Fenves explained, “You have to impress 16- and 17-year-old kids when you’re looking at locker rooms across the country.”

I disagree. No, you do not. You are not a pimp or a drug-pusher.

What you should do is sit down with those players and their parents or guardians or favorite teachers and tell them this:

“If you come to UT-Austin, we run a tight ship. We don’t want to outdo Las Vegas in order to fool you into thinking a few years spent in glamorous facilities will mean something to you and your families in 10, 20, 30 years. We’ll give you a real education. We’ll limit your playing and practice time to the NCAA regulation of 20 hours a week. We won’t be like all those other conniving programs where players spend 37 to 43 hours, according to the NCAA’s own survey. We’ll teach you how to keep to a budget so you won’t blow $28 million in NFL salary, as UT’s Vince Young did, or the $30,000 to $50,000 you’ll hopefully be making at first after you graduate. We’ll look out for you.”

But no, we won’t.

Thomas G. Palaima holds the Armstrong Centennial Professorship of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. Email: tpalaima@austin.utexas.edu

Longhorn Football: Hubris, Counterfactual History and Mythological Lessons

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Longhorn football could learn a thing or two from Greek myth

The Daily Texan Published on-line September 18, 2013 Print edition September 19, 2013

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2013/09/18/longhorn-football-could-learn-a-thing-or-two-from-greek-myth

By Tom Palaima

In my many years of teaching ancient mythology, I have absorbed, as I hope my students have, the important lessons about life that the original myth-makers embedded in their stories.

One lesson is to be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. A variant is to make sure you follow through on your side of whatever bargain you strike. A third is not to get too big for your britches — the Greeks called this hubris.

The immortal and ageless goddess Dawn falls in love with a handsome prince of Troy named Tithonus. She steals him away and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Zeus asks her, “Do you want anything else?” She says no.

Zeus makes Tithonus deathless, but not ageless. He grows older and older, shrivels up and finally turns into a chirping cicada—not what Dawn had in mind.

A similar fate befalls the Cumaean Sibyl. According to Ovid, Apollo loves the Sibyl so much that he offers to grant her one wish if she will make love with him. She asks to live as many years as the grains of sand she holds. When she later refuses to give up her virginity, Apollo gives her long life, but lets her, too, grow old.

Counterfactual history, like Winston Churchill’s famous 1931 essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” focuses on key moments and their consequences by wondering “What if?” What if Dawn had thought through her request? What if the Sibyl had followed through on her promise?

Given the major distraction that the poor performance of the Longhorns football team has become lately at our university, it is worth posing a big counterfactual historical question. What if Vince Young had not scored the winning touchdown with nineteen seconds left in the 2006 Rose Bowl, considered by ESPN the fifth greatest play in the history of NCAA football?

The touchdown won the national title for the UT Longhorns, just weeks after William C. Powers, then dean of the UT Law School and long a sports enthusiast, was officially named the 28th president of UT Austin.

Winning the national championship was for head coach Mack Brown the NCAA sports equivalent of being head of a team of researchers awarded the Nobel Prize. As national champions, the football program brought in a bonanza in revenues from marketing souvenirs and our UT trademark.

The chief financial officer of the self-operating UT athletics program Ed Gobles has proclaimed, “We eat what we kill.” Translation: whatever monies athletics raises, it spends. Athletics director DeLoss Dodds has crowed, “We are the Joneses.”

The die was cast. From the Vince Young Rose Bowl onward, there has been no restraining athletics. Hubris has prevailed.

Stadium expansions, large salary increases coaches — not only in football, and a $1 million annuity for the athletics director were approved by the cronies within the UT sports silo, the regents who attend football games in the president’s skybox or their own, and the wealthy donors who, according to a local sportswriter, really decide whether head coaches are hired and fired.

The sense was that we would win another national title.

And we almost did. The Longhorns lost to Alabama 37-21 in the national title game following the 2009 season. Trouble was, right before that loss, Mack Brown was given, over the strong protest of a core of faculty leaders, a $2-million raise. That set in motion the decamping of his heir apparent Will Muschamp.

Without Muschamp’s defensive coaching genius, the Longhorns fortunes have faded. Talk now is of winning Big XII titles. But this hope is almost counterfactual, given that teams coached by Mack Brown have only been Big XII champions twice in his fifteen years at UT (2005 and 2009).

One more counterfactual thought. If UT had lost the 2006 Rose Bowl, perhaps Vince Young would have played another year of college football, reined in his hubris about his own abilities, and faced the transition to the fame and fortune of professional football with more maturity.

One positive fact: Young has now earned his degree in Youth and Community Studies and has a loving wife and child. He can do some real good in the world before old age overtakes him, as it overtook Tithonus, and overtakes us all, even our greatest athletes.

Palaima is the Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics.