Bonus!

As football approaches, let’s get financial incentives into sports reporting

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. _  Sports after Labor Day are, in a word, awesome. 

The NFL opens its season, college football gets into gear, baseball hits the playoffs, and later on, college and pro basketball get rolling along with the NHL. Rest assured, almost everyone in Happy Valley is hoping the Delta variant doesn’t spoil the White Out, scheduled for Sept. 18 against Auburn.

But these days, in my role as armchair editor, I increasingly wonder why journalists aren’t telling fans something more about the true stakes when major college and pro teams compete in the glamour sports — football and basketball, in particular.

And by true stakes, I mean the money that’s up for grabs. 

Sports writers should routinely report about the financial incentives at stake for coaches, players and other interested parties when a big game is coming up. This happens too infrequently, and that matters because it distorts the public’s perception of sports, particularly at the major college level, making them seem more amateur than they are. 

There was a time when such reporting would have been considered gauche. But the financial imperative of sports has never been more clear — see the growth of legal sports betting, the NCAA’s long fight and defeat against name image likeness, and the Tokyo Olympics taking place over the objections of the Japanese people as recent examples. It’s time to give fans a clearer picture of who stands to benefit when big-name teams collide.

Even game shows do this.

The grand prize on “The Voice” is $100,000 plus a recording contract. “American Ninja Warrior” also guarantees $100,000 to the winner, and that competitor could walk away with up to $1 million. Hyping the prizes heightens the drama.  

Many college coaching contracts are laden with incentives based on wins and titles, and fans should be reminded when such a sweetener is on the line. They are often paying, after all. For example, if the Big Ten title game this season winds up to be a rematch of the Penn State-Wisconsin opener, each coach — James Franklin and Paul Chryst — would stand to make $350,000 for a victory. 

In March Madness, what’s called units — certain amounts of money which are recalculated each year, partly based on television revenue — are distributed to conferences for each win their teams get. So, if Michigan State was playing Duke in an Elite Eight game, any preview or game story should note how much money the winner makes or made for their respective conference, along with how many units the conference had claimed overall since the beginning of the tournament. 

At the pro level, reporters should be as familiar as possible with players’ and coaches’ contract terms. Information about pro contracts often surfaces at the time of signings. The website Spotrac has truly impressive databases of pro contracts in several sports and posts some nice analysis pieces to go with them.  

Steven Berkowitz of USA Today, which maintains a database of NCAA football coaching salaries, is one of the few people I know of (note the caveat, there could be others) who does the kind of smart, informative reporting I’m talking about. He’s on Twitter at @ByBerkowitz. Reporters on major college and pro beats everywhere should follow his lead for their coverage areas.

An astute reader may be wondering why this hasn’t happened already with college football or basketball. Reporters’ first job is to seek truth and report it, right? That’s what the Society of Professional Journalists’ code says. 

But sports journalism writ large has long toggled between two views of its purpose. One view is that it exists to mythologize sports. As I learned last year from reading the fine book “Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame and Technology” by Chris Lamb, the much-beloved reporter Grantland Rice, he who wrote the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame lead, advocated this view.

“When a sports writer stops making heroes out of athletes,” he once said, “it’s time to get out of the business.”

The other extreme is covering the games we love and the athletes who play them with so little flair that all the passion and power and community-building of sports gets drained from the coverage. 

I’d argue that the pendulum for too long has pushed toward mythology, mainly because that’s what leagues and teams and athletes and networks and publishers and even fans want, which is understandable. It makes the key people look good. It generally sells better. 

But a little disillusionment is good for the soul. It means you see things more clearly, not as you wish them to be. And, speaking personally, I’ve grown a little tired of the white-washing of history, and even of the present.

It's a reality that players and coaches and owners have financial skin in sporting events from a young age. Why be afraid to say that? Let sports reporters bring it on. Touchdowns will still be awesome.