Going Beyond the Mitchell Report: Cheating in College Sports
Via Performance Enhancing Drugs and Academic Corruption1
By Frank G. Splitt
To be successful, one must cheat. Everyone is cheating,
and I refuse to cheat. – Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1939.
INTRODUCTION – It is regrettable that George Mitchell missed a unique opportunity
to make a significant contribution to the betterment of our society. All he needed to say is
Major League Baseball (MLB) provides a salient example of the rampant cheating in
almost all sports in America. His reported 20-month, multi-million-dollar investigation
only scratched the surface of a much more deeply rooted national scandal – confirming
what astute observers of sports in America already knew for years: performance
enhancing drugs (PEDs) have replaced Wheaties and Ovaltine as the breakfast and drink
of champions.
GREED, MONEY, AND CONSUMMATE HYPOCRISY – The commissioner and
the owners in MLB knew that cheating was going on but didn’t try to stop it because
there was too much money at stake. Those tied to the financial fortunes of the game
colluded for years in the fiction that super-sized bodies are the natural result of good
habits, healthy living, and hard training.
Sadly, the same could be said of the NCAA and its member institutions about academic
corruption and the likely widespread use of PEDs that not only keep academically
unqualified college athletes eligible to play, but also enhance their game performance —
generating an ocean of tax-exempt money for participants in the college sports
entertainment business. Unfortunately, the use of PEDs in MLB seems to be getting all of
the media’s attention even though the drug culture in college and high school athletics
embraces more athletes and can have more devastating physical and emotional impacts.
As a matter of fact, the Mitchell report cited national Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention statistics estimating that hundreds of thousands of teens – between 3 percent
and 6 percen