Episode 16: Student-Athletes and Political Voice with Dr. Tom Schaller

3:28PM Apr 4, 2022

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Jefferson Rivas

Sophia Possidente

Dr. Anson, Jefferson, Sophia

Dr. Tom Schaller

Keywords:

sports

teams

athletes

book

georgetown

programs

college

umbc

sports writers

1980s

coaches

black

schaller

decade

student athletes

miami

football

social scientist

racial

people

Hello and Welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

The fields of 64 have been narrowed down to 32, then 16, then 8, 4. And finally, this week we will find out who will be crowned the national champions of women's and men's division one college basketball. I'm sure I'm not alone in falling victim to a serious case of March Madness this year, as I do every year, because the single elimination format of the NCAA Tournament is just so darn fun. The bracket predictions, the upsets, the Cinderellas. As somebody who was fully indoctrinated into the light blue side of the Tobacco Road college rivalries as an undergraduate. I can't help it admit that it's always my favorite time of year. But behind the pageantry and the fanfare of college hoops, there's a sometimes uncomfortable social reality that often gets lost. These high stakes, nationally televised games are played by college students, many who are first generation attendees of four year colleges and universities. And those students are working. Yes, working, even though they may love the sports they play, without remuneration. The tickets may cost hundreds, the TV deals may be valued in the millions, but student athletes aren't part of this equation. Only recently, the NCAA revised its rules about student athletes profiting from their likeness, allowing for advertising deals and other agreements that opened the door to compensation for wearing a colleges jersey. At the end of the day, this means the student athletes are gaining more opportunities to have a voice. Sure, it's nice to benefit from one's labor, but perhaps even more important, student athletes in the modern era are coming to understand that they can also speak out about social and political issues. But to better understand this story arc, we need to take a step back, way beyond the three point line and way beyond the confines of the present. That's the assertion of today's featured guest, Dr. Tom Schaller, Professor in the UMBC Department of Political Science. Dr. Schaller's recent book details the way in which two specific college sports programs: the University of Miami football team and the Georgetown University men's basketball team changed the national discourse about race in the 1980s. In this era as college games we're just starting to appear more frequently on national TV both teams redefine success, while giving a new platform for black athletes and coaches. I'm excited to bring you my recent interview with Dr. Schaller as we explore these themes in depth. Let's listen in.

All right, Dr. Schaller, thank you so much for agreeing to be with us today. So I want to talk today about this book that you've recently published with the University of Nebraska Press. The book is called "Common Enemies: Georgetown Basketball, Miami Football and the Racial Transformation of College Sports." So again, thanks very much for agreeing to be here.

I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Great. So obviously with March Madness and full swing and you and I both being UNC alums of various capacities are very invested in this this year. A lot of us are thinking about underdog stories. We're thinking about Cinderellas, all the exciting narratives maybe that college sports can bring us but in your book, you're focusing on the Georgetown Hoyas basketball program and the University of Miami Hurricanes football program. And I really want to know, what is it that drew your attention to these two teams specifically as a social scientist?

Well, it was less as a social scientist then just as my own personal career arc. I grew up in upstate New York where Syracuse basketball is really big. And I was born in 1967, so the Big East Conference in basketball was formed when I was 12 years old. So the Big East, and it's really its great decade of the 1980s was basically my high school and college years. And Georgetown of course, was the Darth Vader, if you will of the Big East Conference and the team that everybody, except for DC residents and Georgetown alumni, love to hate. I went out to get a master's degree after I got out of undergraduate and I started in 1989, so my period in the 90s was coinciding roughly with the dominant era for Florida State football and coming off the decade of a dominance of the team with the best record in the 1980s, for football, which was Miami, and they are still rivals today, even though that rivalry is not as intense as it was in the 80s and 90s and even the first decade of this century. And so I found myself weirdly hating both of these teams and sort of convincing myself that I hated them for affiliation reasons for where I grew up and where I went to school, and there's certainly some truth to that. But as I wrote the book, and as I write in the foreword to the book, the preface to the book, like I, I am guilty, probably as a kid who grew up in as a white guy in the suburbs of upstate New York, of sort of buying into this not so subtle, I was gonna say a racial undertone and a really a racial overtone, that both of these programs carried as sort of a quote unquote blacker program than some of their competitors, even though of course Syracuse and Florida State had ample numbers of African American, and in the case of Florida State, Latino athletes on their basketball and football rosters in the 1980s. And in that preface, I end by saying something to the effect, I wish I had written this book, then because I would have been able to appreciate those teams in a way that I hated them back then. And so basically, the emphasis of the book is very personal for me, because I love sports, as you know, and as you do, and I was a freelance sports writer during my graduate school days in Chapel Hill and covered the Tar Heels. So I covered mostly women's sports, women's soccer, women's basketball, but I was always the second beat writer for men's basketball and men's football. So I usually covered the opposing locker room, and the opposing coach and the opposing press conferences, I didn't get to do the lead stories, I would get to do a lot of feature stories on athletes. And so I love sports and college sports in particular. And I just, it was sort of a book as a journey for me through the 80s and 90s, of my own sports fandom. And subsequently, my own research, as you know, writing a book with Tyson King-Meadows, our former colleague about Black state politics. And so it was a weird intersection of my sort of lifelong ambition to be a sports writer, which was unfulfilled, except for as a freelancer, and my technical full time career occupation, as a political scientist, who writes about matters of race. And I guess with the luxury of tenure and a book contract from, from a University of Nebraska Press editor and a literary agent who took a chance on somebody who's never really written anything formal in sports, gave me a book contract to write about what was the meaning of race in the 1980s, broadly in college sports, but with a specific focus on these two programs, which I argue were sort of on the leading edge, or at least very much pioneers of black affect and the black style, as Bill Rhoden of the New York Times calls it. And I think these two programs fundamentally changed college sports in an indelible way, even if they're not the programs and not the sort of outliers that they were 30 years ago.

That's a fascinating personal history into this topic, the idea that you're able to sort of pursue your passion of sports writing as well as intersecting this topic with political science and the broader sort of discourse about race in American politics. And certainly, you know, some of our listeners or current students, some of our listeners maybe don't remember this era of the 1980s and the way that's sort of different different sports teams at the time were depicted or talked about in sports media, or media more broadly. I want to ask you a little bit more about the climate or about the political context of the 1980s, specifically. So what exactly is it that's going on in the 1980s in this national political environment that in your opinion, makes these groups or these teams that is so significant in terms of their ability to sort of change that discourse on both the level of sports and the level of politics?

Yeah, there was a convergence of a variety of factors, some of which had nothing to do with those two universities or the athletes and coaches who played and coached there. For example, ESPN was formed in 1979. And that changed accessibility and viewership and connections to college sports that transcended the traditional sort of alumni and regional basis, there was more of a national following possible for college sports teams because of television. The Supreme Court had a key ruling in 1984 in the Oklahoma University case that changed the way that teams and conferences could compete for television contracts. But mostly, and what I focus mostly on, is my argument that the 1980s were a pivotal decade because of the racial history of the country broadly, and the racial history of sports specifically. And what I mean by that is, I have an entire chapter, chapter two, sort of the drop back research literature review chapter, if you will, sort of open, you know how a book works. So you do, sort of write your opening argument and preview the book and then you sort of drop back and show your homework a little bit. I spent a significant amount of time on that chapter. It's actually by word count the longest chapter I believe chronically some, not all, of the racialized history of major college sports. Let me be clear, I'm focusing on major college men's football and basketball, so there's there's no treatment of women's sports in here, though, there's very important pioneering figures there, and I'm not looking at even other major college men's sports that don't get televised, like say baseball or hockey and so forth. And, you know, through the 60s and into the 70s, the racism was really overt, which is not to say it disappeared in the 80s. It was still there. But the kinds of things I use the metaphor of the Don Imus characterization of the Rutgers women's "nappy ho." that kind of behavior is completely unacceptable today. It will cost you your job and your career and reputation maybe inside of a week today as it, as it should. But that kind of behavior and those kinds of comments were rife and expected and commonplace in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and still filtered through into the 80s. And so we had this transition period where the most of the overt racism, direct discrimination, segregated dorms, teams kicking black players off of their rosters at the University of Wyoming and the Indiana 10 Because they were protesting racial segregation or racial discrimination. Wyoming kicked all its black players off because they refused to play BYU, which doesn't allow black members in its church. Kicking their entire black rosters off that - was commonplace, and there were no cases brought. Nobody even turned really an eye at this kind of behavior. That stuff was over. But we weren't where we are today. And so how do you get from point A to point B? And I argue that that key transition between the overt racism of the postwar decades and what we now come to expect, and for the most part see, in terms of racial equality. Not in the coaching ranks, not in terms of the way players are compensated perhaps. There's still a lot of residual effects of that. But the overt like yelling of racial epithets, by coaches toward other players. I mean, Wilt Chamberlain was physically assaulted sometimes by opposing teams and coaches. That kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore. And so what happened in the 80s? And the short answer to it is, athletes led the revolution. And at the pro level, it's interesting, I'm not saying it's not, but professional athletes have agency that college athletes do not. They have money, they have power, they have arbitration rights. After Curt Flood, they have the ability of free agency, they literally have agents and managers. College athletes, first of all, they're teenagers in college, and they have almost none of that power. Right. And so I was fascinated that how did a group of individuals, and it's not exclusive to Miami football and Georgetown basketball, there were other racial pioneers at respective universities, including track athletes and so forth. At San Jose State and other places which gave us Tom, you know, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos at the 68 Olympics. There were other pioneers in other sports, including women. But I argue that these two programs, because they were televised programs, and because they were considered quote-unquote black programs, and because they had the first ever black coach in John Thompson to ever win a team division one national championship, a distinction he'll hold forever, that these two programs were at the leading edge of it. And so I spent a lot of time looking at their similarities and their differences.

It's fascinating to think that these two programs are really coming to national prowess right at the same moment that national televised sporting events are really starting to become more commonplace. As you're mentioning, with the rise of ESPN, the notion that these teams are suddenly more visible at the national level and are being talked about in, you know, they're coming into people's television sets and in their living rooms of people all across the country, not just in, you know, Coral Gables or in DC, right? So you're positing I guess that that these developments in the media technology are also amplifying essentially the voices of the student athletes themselves, who otherwise don't have that much agency really that much power, or certainly they're not unionized, right. They don't have, as you're saying the kinds of resources available to professional athletes, but the changing sort of mediation of the teams' performance themselves sort of speaks for them in a way is that kind of what some of the argument is?

I think both of those things for the first one, obviously, there's, you know, they start to have regional national cable coverage of college sports, particularly football and basketball in a way that didn't exist. I don't have the exact statistics. I'd have to open up the book and read it, but I did a comparison of like how many bowl games there were on how many different days on how many different networks with how many total teams before the 1980s, like in 1979. And it was like 14 bowl games with 28 teams spread across eight or nine days in a two week window. Now we have like 76 teams playing 38, right, so there's just the growth and the scale of the magnitude of television, for sure. But keep in mind that even when we look at the technological and specifically media and more specifically television advances, those athletes at Georgetown and Miami and other schools as well in the 1980s didn't have social media, they didn't have the internet. So they were, compared to today's standards, significantly handicapped in their ability to control the narrative, put their positions out in a way that we have seen in the last decade. Sort of the Kapernick decade. College athletes uprating and calling for change. Calling for change at the University of Iowa recently where Kirk Ferentz, the longest continuous division one coach, you know how to play a run around with a with a garbage basket around his, on top of his head with his family at practice in the audience. And Chuba Hubbard, who's now in the pros who played at Oklahoma State, calling out his coach for you know, wearing an OAN sweatshirt and making, you know, sort of veiled references to sort of Trump's misogynistic and racist behavior. And validating that you have athletes with a much bigger microphone, though it's a very small little pocket device in their, you know, in their front pockets in the form of their iPhones or smartphones, they have far more power and far more reach today than those athletes which actually makes it even more remarkable. I'm not saying they didn't have the advent and expansion and growth of television, particularly cable television. They absolutely did, and I don't think that revolution would happen and didn't happen in the 70s. Because of that, but they were significantly handicapped from a media standpoint. To your second point, I say very clearly, nobody probably would have noticed a lot of these changes if Miami and Georgetown were middling programs that kind of funneled through the decades. In fact, they were the dominant programs of the 1980s. Georgetown went to the tournament all 10 years, they went to the Sweet 16, I believe eight of those 10 years. Miami had the best overall record during the decade. They won three national championships, and depending on how you count 1990-'91, a fourth. And they won those championships under three different coaches, which is amazing. And they had this run where they had won 34 consecutive games. And they could have won two more championships. They lost to Penn State one year and they lost to Notre Dame to prevent them from having a chance to have another undefeated season. They could have easily won half of the championships in a decade. And they produced more All Americans, I believe, and they produce more first round draft picks than any other program. So they were clearly the dominant programs. And so you couldn't ignore them. You couldn't ignore them. So they created that platform for themselves. They didn't invent television or ESPN, but they won games. And they won them in a very flashy and demonstrative way, particularly Miami. Georgetown's manner and mane was a little bit different. They were much more of a military style discipline team. And so as I talked about there, there's two different versions of the black style that are sort of, it's a performance, that are exhibited by John Thompson's very sort of locked down, buttoned down Georgetown program, and the Jimmy Johnson and Miami Hurricanes of the 80s, which were far more bombastic and expressive.

So in terms of detailing these differences and understanding the way that these teams had impacts on the national conversation, I want to talk a little bit about the research methods that you employ to sort of unveil some of these patterns. How is it that you're going about finding out all this stuff about these teams and their impacts?

Well, I guess in my dreams I view myself as a standard, you know, sports writer, but the truth is, I'm really not. And so I don't have the access to the athletes and the coaches and the reporting chops to really do. And I tried to contact a lot of people and really had a hard time getting people to be willing to talk to me. So in the end, most of my interviews, all my interviews are really with other analysts, other sports writers and people who comment on culture and things like that. Dave Zirin and people like that that I talked to, for the book. Alejandro Danois, who's right here in Baltimore, who wrote a book about, about Dunbar High School of Baltimore. There's also Dunbar in Washington, at Georgetown. Drew a lot of athletes from both of those Dunbar schools named after the same black poet, Paul Dunbar. He wrote a book about the Dunbar basketball team of the 1980s. That's considered the greatest high school basketball team really ever assembled. And so I talked to experts like that, you know, and, you know, they were very helpful. But in terms of the research, like a lot of what I did was like, watch old games. I mean, it sounds, I don't know if that's a research method. It's probably soft methods in your view, because I know you're a technological and methodological wizard, but to me, it was just fascinating to go back and watch these bowl games, for the performative aspects of it, even for the media coverage aspects and the way teams were discussed and so forth. I talk a lot about the racial dynamics of commentary in sports writers because there really weren't any national beat sports writers in the 1980s still, and almost all the play-by-play commentators, all the color commentators, were almost uniformly white men. And people like a young Mike Wilbon, who was a beat writer covering Georgetown in his early, mid 20s, wrote a very controversial piece about how black athletes are talked about by white commentators versus how white athletes who are considered plucky and smart and gritty, but black athletes are physically talented and gifted, right? And so they're the adjectives, right? They're always, they call it the brain versus brawn disconnect. And then there were sport black sports writers who actually went and did word content analysis of live broadcasts or taped broadcasts and said, you know, a majority of the brain references are given to white players, but a majority of the brawn references are used to apply to describe black players. So the way players were talked about, the way they were covered and interviewed. John Thompson famously said that a lot of the media people were afraid to even talk to and ask questions of his athletes like like Patrick Ewing. And so they would write things not really knowing him or not really talking to him and they were intimidated by Georgetown. And so a lot of these things, which now for the most part I want to say are vestiges of history, are gone. But for me, it was literally look, I spent a lot of time looking at rosters and what I was fascinated to find and after I had a long conversation with Chuck Todd who is a big Miami hurricane fan is how white programs were instilled until the 1980s in the mid 80s. Like when when Miami played in the in the Orange Bowl, the first true national championship game before we had the playoff system and even the Bowl Championship Series before that. Nebraska started nine white players on defense I looked at their roster as I was writing the book in 2017-2018 they had 10 Black starters on defense, Nebraska, every team is separate really Oklahoma and a few other teams had, Notre Dame certainly Penn State, even though many of the stars were African Americans, they were majority white rosters. The Clemson team that won the 1980 National Championship I literally had to go and find you know, their, their, their media guide and have to count as best you can just looking at pictures was a 60% white team. Then Clemson's teams that won the two national championships recently, we're about 70%, black. So literally the faces of the teams. Tthe coaches. Tom Osborne in that championship game had one black assistant coach, something that would be completely inappropriate today, frankly, for lack of a better word, right. And so you've seen a change in the rosters, certainly first. And then to a lesser degree, you've seen a change in the coaching staff, and then to a lesser degree among, you know, athletic directors, and even to a lesser degree among conference administrators. And I looked at all that data. There's an organization down in Central Florida and a professor there who collects all this data on the percentage of non whites, the percentage of women from every level, from sports administration, directors, down to conference directors, to school, university sports administration directors, to coaches to athletes and compares the racial gap. And not surprisingly, as I said, that racial gap gets wider the higher you go up the hierarchy.

Fascinating insights into the the sort of process of triangulating some of these narratives through a variety of different methods. I have one question for you that I ask of every interview guest on Retrieving the Social Sciences, and that is if you have any advice for students who are fittingly hoping to go pro in the social sciences?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I would advise them is to pick your graduate school wisely, right. I started out at Florida State, it was a program that was sort of at war with itself and the faculty with some sort of behavioralist and, and more traditionally, and, and, you know, sort of formal theorists, which is a conversation, you know, I understand, but maybe, but the point was, like, I went to a department that was not a comfortable place to be at, and I got a master's degree out of it. but if I had a chance to do it all over again, I would have started where I finished, which is, you know, where you and I both went University, North Carolina. And you can't know everything about that as an undergraduate, but you can talk to your professors and pick the right school if you want to be a social scientist. I think the other thing is, this sounds really stupid, maybe, but subscribe to magazines. I mean, to me, I have subscribed to The New Yorker for more than 30 years. I subscribed to The Atlantic for at least a decade now. And I love magazine, as a magazine writing as a forum and I'll tell you why. A magazine article typically to me is similar to sort of the opening precede chapter of a book and you can get, for the most part, not all the details, not all the underlying research, not all the underlying data points and so forth in the supporting information behind your claims. But you can get the gist of the argument from a magazine article, much like you can get the gist of a book by reading its opening chapter if it's a well written book in the social sciences. So, and I like to read things outside social science, too. There's stuff on, you know, television and film and sports and science that are areas where I feel less comfortable and knowledgeable, and I feel I need a magazine level entry for that rather than a book entry. And so I always tell my students, if you want to be what I say cocktail party conversant across a wide range of subjects, you may not have a deep knowledge in any of them. But you have a working knowledge and conversational knowledge at a cocktail party level, read good magazines, and you can pick them ideologically across the spectrum. I like The Atlantic. I like the New Yorker. For years I've read The New Republic. I've read conservative magazines like the National Review and subscribe to them to see what people who have different viewpoints from me. I find having a magazine article on my coffee table, in my car, if I'm stuck somewhere, you know, over lunch, sometimes I just bring a magazine article with me, I find that that's like the GEP equivalent of being a social scientist. It's the, you know, general introduction to the college experience of a liberal education. And, and it forces you to probably read some things that you wouldn't proactively Google or search on your own. So for example, I have a lot of interest in evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, as it applies to humans as it applies to plants and species, and I find myself riveted by articles that find out new things about the evolutionary history of that and you wouldn't think that about me because I'm a social scientist and political scientist. But all of that came from, you know, sort of reading magazine articles. And then I'm reading Stephen Jay Gould books and his essays, you know, from Science Magazine, and things like that. So that's what I tell students is like, you know, do the entry level GEP course of life as a, as a thinking person and as a person who's curious about the world by subscribing to a magazine that's going to force into your eyeline in a way that you don't always get by searching, because that's an active search, forces into your eyeline topics and writers and subjects that you might not otherwise have fall into your, to your line of sight.

Fantastic advice, not just for aspiring social scientists, but really for anybody who wants to be conversant and I think that's a really valuable insight. The book is: "Common Enemies: Georgetown Basketball, Miami Football, and the Racial Transformation of College Sports." Dr. Tom Schaller, thank you so much again for agreeing to talk to us today. Really excited to learn a lot more about college sports and really looking forward to reading the book.

Thanks for the opportunity. Be well.

Campus Connections (6x)

Now it's time for a Campus Connection, a part of the podcast where we connect today's feature to other research happening on UMBC's campus. Take it away Jefferson and Sophia.

In today's featured segment, Dr. Schaller provided us with some key insights on sports economics, with special attention to the ideoscapes of college athletics. For this week's installment of Campus Connections, we're examining the work of Dr. Dennis Coates, a professor in the UMBC Department of Economics.

Dr. Coates recently co authored a research paper entitled "The Impact of Professional Sports Franchises and Venues on Local Economies: a Comprehensive Survey." The paper details a thorough and systematic study of the role of sports institutions and venues and shaping local economies. The paper adds additional context by taking a deep dive into previous economic study outlining the progression of research over time. Through this approach Dr. Coates, gives a multifaceted perspective on the overall economic impact of organized sports.

Dr. Coates' paper describes three main observations. Firstly, and perhaps surprisingly, is that sports institutions do not typically have a perceptible effect on local economic activity. Secondly, while there are benefits to hosting sporting events, their average budget levels are not entirely justifiable, partially because of the previous economic aspect and partially because of the negative effects of hosting like heavier traffic and increased crime rates. Finally, elaborate sporting venues do not seem to provide enough community benefits to rationalize their heavy funding, especially considering that most of it comes from local taxpayers. This isn't to say that the presence of sports is a negative thing, or that it can't bring communities together. It's simply setting forward the observation that the majority of current sports budgets may be out of control.

The paper concludes by describing the impact that academic research like this can have on public policy. Many studies on sports economics provide a solid basis of findings that spur policymakers to make changes in their community. However, the extreme funding of sporting venues has remained an exception only increasing in the face of research that advises towards the opposite. To rectify this, Dr. Coates suggests that researchers and community members alike should take an active role in shaping their communities. In this way, we can all do more than just hope for change.

Thanks, as always, Jefferson and Sophia, for reviewing the connections between our future guest's work and the work of other UMBC social scientists. In a society that loves sports and athletic achievements, it's no wonder that there are so many connections between sports, the economy, and politics. Until next time dear listeners, be sure to root for the home team. And as always...

Keep questioning!