I get irritated with the folks at my church sometimes when they talk of mission fields. I always laugh when they say people around the world need help. People need help right here. It may not be as sexy or inspiring to talk to about, but people right around the corner need help.

For the lack of a better term, the Texas Longhorns have become a mission field. They have voluntarily become that because the mission field is actually an income stream sorely needed by the university.

How you ask?

Texas and many other great academic institutions around the country like Michigan, UCLA, Virginia, Cal–Berkeley, USC, Texas A&M, Georgetown, North Carolina and Wisconsin have all decided to make their revenue producing sports their mission fields. They recruit these players to their universities because they understand the business of college sports and what it brings to the university setting.

They invite players to their campus and offer them an all expense paid stay when many times they are not academically, emotionally or socially prepared to deal with the college experience. Many of these players on their own academic merit have no business at his or her respective university, if being in college at all, but it’s about pleasing the ever demanding alumni and raising revenue through winning.

Only one school in the country will not have these issues creep up from time to time and that is Stanford. It has made a conscious decision to “suck” at the revenue producing sports. It can jump up every once in a while and field a competitive football team and maybe more often a basketball team because it doesn’t need the numbers but it won’t be able to do it consistently. Why? The Stanford Cardinal decided long ago that they would not lessen their academic standards to allow athletes into school. Everyone else has chosen to go for the money, the campus experience and the pride tied with football.

So as with any mission field, you get a mixed bag of results in hits and misses.

The hits of course are the things that I love. The kid shows up on campus and may have no business there but during the course of school the bell rings, the stop light turns green and the light comes on. The kid who probably had no business at the university gets his degree. Many times he is the first in a whole family to go to college. He probably marries a girl with a college degree and their kids are going to go to college. In that case, you have changed the course of a family. You have changed a generation and a last name. Even if a kid doesn’t graduate, he is much better off having been on a college campus for four or five years than if he had gone into the work force directly from high school.

If you are going to have the hits, you are going to have some misses. Misses are the kids that find their feet running into mischief and get into trouble. There are different kinds of trouble.

We would all be crazy to lump all of it into one bucket. The decision making process that goes, “I have had a few beers but I think I’m cool driving the short way home,” is totally different from the thought process that says, “Ya’ll ready. I got my gun. Let’s go do this.” One is poor decision making and one is poor character.

So what does a school do once it has decided this road for its athletic department?

Digging into the background even more and tightening the reigns on the recruiting process would be a start. The fear is that coaches that find themselves on the negative end of some press coverage usually make their recruiting standards even stricter and they take themselves out of the running for many of the premier athletes.

For football coaches, reigning in recruiting is only part of the answer because you have to deal with the 120 kids that are on campus right now. There are curfew options and team-wide sanction options.

They could move the players back on campus but that could cause uproar in on-campus housing.

At the end of the day, the coaching staff, the university and its support staff can do only so much to try and catch bad apples before they get in, because they are going to get in. At that point it becomes a management situation.

No matter who you pull for, problems are going to happen. You have to take the good with the bad because the schools have decided that winning and the football experience for the student body and the alumni are paramount. They have decided that the risk is worth allowing students into school that many times have no business being there. They have hitched their wagon to football, to the pageantry of the experience. As a genuine college football fan I am happy as I can be.

Something has to be done. The mission field is having problems all over the country with crime, drugs and inflated egos brought on by the media and the fans. The product is bringing in cash at an alarming rate so we know that change is not on the horizon. The revenue sports are too important to the vitality of the university.

As long as that is the case, you will have some hits and you will have some misses. Texas has surely had more hits than misses but the Texas staff has missed on a number of kids lately. Here’s to getting back on track. The mission field awaits.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 9:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.