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College football goes against everything colleges should stand for

Colleges supposedly are about the betterment of their students, but college football is motivated only by profits.

THERE'S ONLY one way to fix big-time college football: Get rid of it. Kick it off campus. Sell it on the open market to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds to endow professorships, scholarships, research facilities. You know, things that actually serve an academic mission.

Mission. Baylor president Ken Starr used the word three times last month in a statement regarding the sexual assault conviction of former football player Sam Ukwuachu, and it's a word most of us find creative ways to ignore when confronted with the latest evidence of college football's insidious effects on the campuses where it flourishes.

We blame the corrupt NCAA, the corrupt college presidents, the corrupt media - anything to avoid the simple truth that corruption is the inevitable result of the concentration of power in the hands of those motivated by profit. To eliminate corruption, you must eliminate the concentration of power or the profit motive. To field a nationally relevant college football program, you must invite both devils onto your campus.

This is the nature of competition. To be the best, you have to beat the best. To beat the best, you have to be more talented than the best, which means you have to outbid them for talent, which means you must dedicate money, resources and power to the sole purpose of winning games. Tell a human being you will continue to give him money, resources and power if he continues to win football games, and guess what that human being will try to do?

This is about the natural inertia of power and profit. A student with a history of violence who was kicked out of his previous university becomes a much more attractive candidate for admission if he has the ability to enhance the future earning potential of somebody with decision-making power. If that student happens to be accused of rape shortly after he arrives on campus, as Ukwuachu was, it behooves the decision-maker to grant a certain amount of weight to his side of the story. If that student is indicted for sexual assault, as Ukwuachu was, it behooves the decision-maker to let the legal process play out.

Maybe the internal inquiry Starr has commissioned will reveal that none of these innate pressures reared their ugly heads. The only thing that matters is that those pressures are there, and they will always be there, and that their mere presence is argument enough against the institution that is major college sports.

The simple truth is this: The athletic mission is diametrically opposed to the academic mission. They cannot coexist.

That's what this is about. Not rape. Not administrative malfeasance. Not the NCAA. It is about the inevitable conflict that universities welcome onto their campuses in the name of winning football games and the ancillary benefits that come with those victories. Almost all of those benefits are concentrated in the hands of the powerful few, sold to the masses as campus camaraderie and institutional prestige. Major college football is a vanity project for administrators who lack the individual resources to purchase their own professional sports franchises.

Mission. Let's get back to that word. On its website, Baylor says its mission is "to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community."

Every college says something similar, and every college that boasts an athletic program guided by the profit motive is operating in direct opposition to that mission. Auburn, where athletic officials lobbied the school's provost to keep an academic program friendly to athletes, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. North Carolina, which was recently hit with charges of rampant academic fraud.

What, exactly, is the mission of a university? How, exactly, do major sports programs fit that mission?

Maybe America deserves the college football it gets, which is the college football it has, which is the college football any rational person would expect, given the institutional forces in play.

Let's say a group of 30 to 40 Division I universities want to get out of the for-profit athletics business. They leave the NCAA and sell their football programs to ownership groups unaffiliated with the school, who then create their own league. Everything is included in the sale of the team - trademarks, history, facilities, etc. - so you'd still have the Michigan Wolverines playing at the Big House against the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Who loses out on the deal? Follow the money, and the power. We all know it won't lead to the students.

On Twitter: @ByDavidMurphy