Losing Their Religion

Once again, the last article in Sports Illustrated this week has piqued my interest. The article, Losing Their Religion, by Selena Roberts, gives an interesting take on the hiring of former Hawaii football coach June Jones at SMU.

I don't think I have to restate my views on what goes on surrounding major athletics. Clearly, I resonate with the suggestion of the article that the goals/methods of big time college football are not entirely compatible with the values of a Christian school. Big time college athletic are primarily about the money, and so yeah, I don't see that as a program that lines up with a Christian world view. Even worse, such a pursuit can pretty easily reinforce a negative stereotype of the modern day American church - that what the church is really after is people's money.

And yet, I do understand the point of the SMU AD, who says calls athletics the "front porch of the university". I saw that repeatedly during my time at Messiah College, a rather anonymous D-III school. People get an impression of your school through your athletic programs that would likely never come in contact with it in any other fashion. The image of Messiah College in the region, and indeed, even nationally, gets a tremendous boost from the school's athletic program, both from the conduct and character of the student athletes who represent the school, and from the kind of success that many of the teams have enjoyed.

Obviously Messiah is a D-III athletics program, that doesn't generate income from any of it's teams, so there's something of a case of apples to oranges going on here. At the same time, for a school like SMU to have a high profile program like football in total disarray does speak rather poorly of the school, and on much larger scale than what we're dealing with. All of that is to say, if SMU is going to have a D-IA football program, which they have for quite some time now, it's not good for the school to keep it as a bottom feeder (1-11 in 2007). Basically, they are left with only two viable choices - upgrade the program, or eliminate the program. It's obvious which course SMU has taken. And yet the whole situation does really illustrate the conundrum that the larger "faith-based" schools face when dealing with their athletics programs.