Managing an athletics crisis

The shocking allegations revealed at Penn State last week are a reminder of the crisis management required by universities when something related to athletics goes awry.

For many schools with NCAA Division I programs, athletics is a core function of the universities even if this role is not explicitly defined in their mission statements, said Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds professor of public policy and author of “Big-Time Sports in American Universities.” At public universities like Pennsylvania State University, media attention can be crushing following an athletic scandal because, as Clotfelter added, coaches and players at public universities often serve as ambassadors for their schools to local citizens and the broader public.

“If you think about what these universities mean, they certainly do mean research and teaching, but they also mean sports,” Clotfelter said. “The research part of [a] university is a bit forbidding and elitist, but football is not. So this is the human face that perhaps ties citizens to universities in a way that nothing else does.”

Schools with particularly prominent athletics programs receive added public scrutiny, however, and a number of other universities join Penn State in facing image challenges following recent allegations of misconduct.

In August, a University of Miami booster was accused of providing benefits violating NCAA rules to dozens of athletes over the course of nearly a decade and with the knowledge of some of the program’s coaches. Ohio State University’s football program faced allegations that players sold memorabilia for benefits, including tattoos. And not far from Duke’s campus, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s football program self-imposed two years of probation and vacated two seasons of victories in September following an NCAA investigation related to accusations that players engaged in academic misconduct and received impermissible benefits.

John Burness, former senior vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke, said he thinks allegations that former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky sexually abused young boys would likely not have received such intense media attention had the charges involved a member of the faculty in an academic department, such as physics.

Athletics’ value at a university can be measured beyond titles and loyal campus fans. Universities with major athletics programs often make considerable financial investments in their teams.

Duke athletics’ budget is just under $65 million this year, according to figures provided by Executive Vice President Tallman Trask. He noted that there are seven or so other large football programs that spend close to or more than $100 million annually.

Crisis management

Penn State leadership now faces the issue of managing public relations to protect the university’s long-term interests, a challenge not entirely different from the one some of Duke’s top leaders faced during the 2007 lacrosse case in which three players were falsely accused of rape. In fact, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Patriot News, the daily newspaper in Harrisburg, Pa., both ran stories last week that referenced the case.

“I’ve lived through something which is different, but it’s not that different,” Trask said of the allegations at Penn State. “Lacrosse was not fun.... When athletic episodes end up on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The [Los Angeles] Times, they’re usually not positive stories.”

Trask said it would be difficult to give advice to those at Penn State because the story’s details as told by the media seem to change each day.

Burness, who oversaw Duke’s public relations efforts during the lacrosse incident, began his response by noting that he—like other top administrators—cannot speak about the lacrosse case because of ongoing litigation. In reference to the Penn State story, he said officials should take the time they need to sort through the details before making public disclosures.

“The most important thing you can do is make sure you have as much accurate information as you can before you say anything,” Burness said. “You need to be clear about what you know and what you don’t know and have to sort of get your values out there.... The dilemma frequently is that you don’t have complete information.”

He noted that a crisis like this one consumes the attention of top administrators. He declined to comment on specifics of his role during the Duke case but noted that once it began he “did nothing for virtually a year besides lacrosse.”

Representatives from Penn State’s public relations office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The impacts of scandal

Schools with NCAA programs will wait to see how the Penn State allegations will affect the college sports landscape.

Scandals can leave a lasting impact on a campus. Even now, the Duke lacrosse case remains a sensitive topic on campus. In addition to the administrators who cannot speak as a result of the remaining lawsuits, a number of professors who are free to speak about the case chose not to comment because they said they preferred not to rekindle the anger evoked by its discussion.

Steve Baldwin, a professor of chemistry who was critical of the administration during the lacrosse case, recently joined the University’s athletics council. Baldwin said he was recently interested in having Academic Council’s executive committee discuss lessons learned from the case, but some opposed the idea of stirring the pot once again.

“Basically, that’s what’s said. We bring up the word lacrosse, and everything shuts down,” Baldwin said.

Clotfelter said that if he were still working on his book, the Penn State case would require significant discussion. In fact, he noted that if the allegations are true, this might go down as the biggest scandal in college athletics history.