Road to Draft Shouldn’t Be One-Way Street

Larry Smith has the very best interests of his USC football players at heart. I think anybody who knows anybody at the university would tell you that.

That’s why I sincerely hope that the coach changes his mind about striking back at the National Football League for tampering with undergraduates by not giving scouts easy access to practices, films, stopwatch-timings, etc., that involve USC’s players.

I do not believe you can hurt the NFL that way. But I do believe you can hurt the kids that way, and even hurt yourself that way, once unscrupulous agents or ambitious opposing coaches decide to use your methods against you.

Suppose somebody is trying to keep some kid away from USC. All he would have to do is sprinkle doubt inside the kid’s head, distort the facts to convince the kid that, by playing for Larry Smith, his path to pro football will be doubly difficult to negotiate.

It’s a lie, of course, but many a young man’s head has been turned by a misrepresentation of the truth.

Listen, maybe it hurts a coach to lose the likes of a Barry Sanders or a Major Harris or a Junior Seau before his college eligibility has run out, but there is no sense compounding the problem by warring with the NFL.

The seniors-only eligibility rule was a Berlin Wall that needed to come tumbling down.

We cannot create a world that is more fair to baseball, basketball and hockey players than it is to football players.

We cannot ask football players to continue to help raise money for America’s university and then deny them the privilege of any free American to work for anybody, anytime, past the age of 16.

Football players are people, too. They have a Constitutional right to make up their own minds. They should not be punished just because they don’t have a minor league farm system the way the baseball players do, or junior hockey.

Why should Jennifer Capriati, at 13, be able to play professional tennis, while a third-year college student is forbidden to play professional football? She’s getting rich, and they’re playing for room and board.

College shouldn’t be something a person cannot leave without permission, like an Army hitch or prison term.

The NCAA finally got around a week or so ago to permitting juniors to turn pro without needing special dispensation. To qualify for the 1990 draft, all a kid need have done was be enrolled in school in the fall of 1987. And, he must declare himself--as Harris and Seau have--by March 22.

There is one other catch, though, and it is a reprehensible one:

The athlete must renounce all subsequent college eligibility.

Why must we inflict these ties that bind? Why must there always be rules so strict, so confining?

As NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz now says--seconded, by the way, by Smith and other coaches--football players should be free to be drafted, just as baseball and hockey players are, to get an idea of what their market value would be, just so long as they do not sign contracts with any agents or teams.

Simple.

Rodney Peete would have never been able to come back and play quarterback and lead USC into another Rose Bowl if his eligibility had been stripped from him for having been picked by the Oakland Athletics in an amateur baseball player draft.

And, Peete could have been spared the indignity of last year’s NFL draft circumstances if he had been an undergraduate trying to decide what to do. By being able to test the waters without giving up his senior year, Peete would have known that his NFL value was as a sixth-round pick, not a first-round pick. He could have acted accordingly.

Just as Junior Seau could be doing right now, if the NFL and NCAA would stop butting heads. If Junior the junior could try the NFL draft, could wait to see how high he is drafted, then, like any other free and thinking individual, he could stay in college if he so chose.

What the NFL is doing, in effect, is expelling Junior Seau from school. And Major Harris, the Heisman Trophy hopeful from West Virginia. And Scott Mitchell, the outstanding quarterback from Utah. And maybe, before this thing is through, Mark Carrier, the first-rate defensive back from USC.

Larry Smith, certainly a clear thinker, was hardly a happy man on the day he lost his All-American linebacker. He wasn’t unhappy with Seau; he was unhappy with the system.

“The NFL has its head in the sand,” Smith said. “They say they don’t want underclassmen, but what have they done about it?

“The manipulation starts with the agents. There’s no law that stops them from calling these kids and letting them know what they’re worth. There’s got to be drastic changes in the NCAA and NFL. There have got to be tighter controls over tapes and films and who comes to view practice.”

Smith has given some thought to keeping pro scouts away from his players. Not just agents, but scouts. As with John Thompson of Georgetown, who was dead-set against Proposition 48, the USC coach presumably figures it will take a drastic, dramatic action on his part to get the NCAA’s and NFL’s attention.

I don’t want him to go too far, because I don’t want it to be used against USC.

But, here’s hoping his message penetrates some of those thick NFL and NCAA skulls. What we want--what we need--is one draft, one draft that excludes nobody, one draft that accommodates everybody.

Give athletes options, not orders.