Padecky: The NCAA is not protecting its student-athletes

Even now, as Keith Dorney reads the words of 114 years ago, he stares at them as if they are on fire, a burning hypocrisy. In fact actually anyone who can read a STOP sign will react the same way. It was a promise made. It not only turned into a promise abandoned, it became a promise ridiculed, as if it was something to wipe your feet.

In 1906, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which became the National Collegiate Athletic Association four years later, was formed for one expressed purpose. The year before, 18 players had died playing football. President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to save the sport. He gathered representatives from a number of colleges to establish a collegiate governing body with one very specific goal in mind.

They came up with this. You may want to stop eating your breakfast for a moment.

“To protect young people from the dangerous and exploitative athletics practices of the time.”

In 2009, the National College Players Association surveyed Division One athletic programs, asking them to disclose their medical policies. Ninety percent refused. The NCAA does not mandate its colleges to provide health coverage for athletes.

The NCAA protects its young people the same way a squirt gun protects you from an alligator.

“Take a match,” Dorney said, “and burn it (NCAA) to the ground. Start over.”

A Sebastopol resident for 27 years, Dorney has every reason not to light that match. He was a consensus All-America offensive tackle at Penn State, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. He played for Joe Paterno. He was a eight-year standout for the NFL’s Detroit Lions. He can bend over and tie his shoes and knows his own name.

“I’m one of the lucky ones, I’m healthy,” said Dorney, 62, a financial planner after working as a special education teacher and an assistant coach at Cardinal Newman. “But if you play college football you break bones.”

Here’s where the nastiness of the NCAA rears its duplicitous head.

In a game, a running back is driven out of bounds. A coach is distracted, gets nailed and needs surgery for that mangled leg. An employee of the university, the coach files a workman’s comp claim and the insurance covers any subsequent health care costs.

Same game. Same running back driven out of bounds but instead of hitting a coach, the student-athlete smacks his left shoulder into his team’s wooden bench. Shoulder is in pieces. His season’s over. His career’s over. Insurance? The kid better hope his parents have some.

The difference? That hyphenated word: student-athlete. In the 1950s the NCAA cleverly linked those two words. It has made all the difference. It is the single most important decision the NCAA has ever made. In fact, the NCAA commissioner Walter Byers used the word “crafted” in explaining it, so proud was he. And he should have been.

It absolved the NCAA of any health care liability concerning “student-athletes.” Byers couldn’t just use “athlete.” That would imply professionalism and Lord knows the NCAA is pure. The kid is not an employee of the university and therefore not entitled to health care coverage. Couldn’t use “student,” either, because that wouldn’t explain the estimated 50 hours a week the average D1 kid spends on sport.

In recruiting, universities don’t bring up insurance coverage. In fact, the NCAA handbook devotes 38 pages to how and why a kid must remain an “amateur” (a concept slowly losing its grip on colleges). But less than a half of a page is devoted to health care coverage.

This from an organization founded 114 years ago to protect the athlete.

Dorney is the first to admit he fell into the trap of a teenager being wooed by the promise of gridiron glory. When he was being recruited by Penn State, health insurance wasn’t critical in determining if he would play for the then-legendary Paterno.

“The NCAA has preyed on people like me,” Dorney said. “I was going to play for Joe Paterno. I totally played right into it. I didn’t need money. I was going to Penn State.”

Penn State was 122 miles from his Pennsylvania home of Macungie. Paterno surprised Dorney one day by showing up unannounced in Dorney’s living room when the kid came home from school. JoePa came all that way to see me? How lucky can one kid get? JoePa had Dorney at hello.

“It’s a travesty,” Dorney said. “Just so old rich white men make more money?”

Dorney doesn’t buy the logic that the college athlete gets a free education as compensation. Not if it’s a 50-hour work week with your sport and THEN whatever leftover energy for school. Oh, and whatever body is left.

“I know a lot of folks out there who only played one-two years and are broken,” Dorney said.

The money’s there. Of the 154 public-college employees in America who make at least a million dollars annually, 70 percent of them are coaches. In 40 of the 50 states, the highest paid public employees are coaches. The four football coaches in the last FBS college playoff had a salary almost four times greater than the governors of the 50 states.

The millionaires walk without a limp and with a smile on their face. The ones who made them millions encounter the opposite fate.

A truism, however, remains in effect.

“A man is usually more careful with his money than his principles,” so said the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Wealth has a sticky finger. Wealth doesn’t release currency easily, if at all. Do you think Clemson’s Dabo Swinney is going to take some of his $9,315,600 annual salary and put it toward the health care of a former player who is 30 and working on his second knee replacement?

Do you think a chicken can make a meatball sandwich?

Common sense is making some headway. The state of California recently mandated that a university which generates more than $10 million in annual revenue from its athletic programs is required to cover health care costs of a sports-related injury for up to two years after the student leaves the sport. Santa Rosa Junior College has an extended but limited medical benefit option.

College athletes are asking for a seat at the table. They want to be paid for their likenesses, image, names. The NCAA is moaning. What are we coming to? Equity? Where’s Walter Byers so he can throw some more shade?

Or we can go with the nuclear option.

“This is not my idea but why not play for a team that isn’t in college?” Dorney said. “Let’s say it’s Dallas semi-pro that plays Ohio State? Dallas has great health insurance. They are regarded as a great feeder system to the NFL. Some kids want to go to class. Some don’t.”

The NCAA would scream as if it just got a hot foot. But for a lot of players who dream of the NFL, playing college football is the only option now. But if their bodies are insured and scouts are in the stands and the other team doesn’t have Larry, Moe and Curly, why not?

The NCAA doesn’t need to exist for Patrick Mahomes to play in the NFL. The PAC-12 doesn’t need the NCAA’s blessing. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, a few more lawyers are going to get rich. The NCAA could lower its ego and finally admit — not in writing, of course — that maybe what Illinois Representative Bobby Bush had said in 2014 might be right.

“The NCAA is the last plantation in America.”

And we know what happened to the plantations.

To comment write to bobpadecky@gmail.com.