Tainted Glory: Marshall University, the NCAA, and One Man's Fight for Justice

by B. David Ridpath

In 1997, Dave Ridpath walked onto the campus of Marshall University as a sports-loving athletic administrator with a career on the rise. Less than five years later, Ridpath's quest to reform one of the most corrupt athletic departments in college sports, while simultaneously standing up to the behemoth governing body that is the NCAA, had all but destroyed that career. While serving as assistant athletic director for compliance and student services at Marshall University from 1997 through 2001, Ridpath unearthed violations of several NCAA rules. These violations included overt academic fraud and impermissible, booster-devised employment for members of the Marshall University football team-a team had taken the nation by storm because of its incredible success on the field. Ridpath now chronicles his experiences through this trying time in Tainted Marshall University, the NCAA, and One Man's Fight for Justice. Instead of being hailed as a conquering hero determined to clean up an outlaw program, Ridpath had the tables turned on him. He found himself out of a job when Marshall University and the NCAA determined that the path of least resistance would be to remove him rather than address the issues head-on. With this action, they hoped to avoid damaging the university, the athletic department, and the NCAA overall. This story is about more than the NCAA or Marshall University. It is about the state of the business of intercollegiate athletics told by someone on the inside who lived it-the good and the bad.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 12, 2012

Reviews

[Tory Lindberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I attended Marshall for my BA and MAT. This was an entirely new side of it that I never knew existed. My jaw dropped at some of the stories.

[B. David Ridpath]

Three things in the past year have radicalized me regarding college sports and the need for revolutionary change. First, of course, are the scandals on top of scandals. Some appear to involve morally indefensible actions by respected adult leaders—the Penn State scandal of course, but also other less sensational but morally dubious acts, such as the one leading to the recent sacking of the football coach at the University of Arkansas. Second, Taylor Branch in his magisterial Atlantic Monthly article detailed a history of growing avarice, greed, corruption, etc., showing that the NCAA is arguably an evil enterprise only modestly morally superior to, say, Mexican drug cartels. Third, a great new book, Tainted Glory, by a colleague and friend of mine, David Ridpath, who is a sports-administration professor at Ohio University, is a case study in corruption at one school, Marshall University. It is a great read.

Dave Ridpath was a jock, looks like a jock, talks like a jock, and in some ways acts like a jock. An ex-wrestling coach and long-time military officer, Dave went into coaching and sports administration, becoming in time the assistant athletic director for compliance at Marshall University. As he tells me, he was every bit as much absorbed into the commercial culture of intercollegiate athletics as the typical sports administrator, spending relatively little time thinking about whether the emphasis on sports and the quest for athletic supremacy was causing universities significant damage from both an academic and integrity prospective.

At Marshall, a prominent mid-major school whose football team for a time was the Boise State of its era and won many national football championships at the Division I-AA level, Dr. Ridpath saw a number of things he did not like, observed instances when NCAA compliance rules were not followed, etc. A man of integrity, he tried to fulfill his mission of assuring that the institution was in compliance with the rules governing intercollegiate athletics, for which he was ostracized and attacked by members of the Marshall athletics community and the administration. The book gets into the details.

This experience radicalized Dave, and he left Marshall to became a sports-administration professor, first at Mississippi State and then at Ohio University. He also became a leader in a growing athletic-reform movement, serving as president of the Drake Group, an organization that includes many with close ties to intercollegiate athletics who feel that things are getting out of hand—rules are violated, athletes exploited, resources misallocated, academics overly downgraded, etc. (Another group, the Knight Commission, has similar goals but impresses me as less aggressive in fighting for reform).

Dr. Ridpath has a number of common-sense suggestions for reform, emphasizing less the economic/financial dimension of things (a concern of my research organization, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity), than the academics. For example, he calls for transparency in course transcripts of student athletes, giving full information (without, however, providing individual student names) on courses students take, grades received, etc. He advocates a plethora of sensible reforms: for example, he believes athletics should maintain a 2.0 grade point average to continue participating, that sporting events should never conflict with classes, and that student-athletes should receive multiple-year scholarships to end the invidious practice of dropping academic financial support for kids whose athletic potential takes a nosedive, often because of injury.

If you want to read a well written, compelling account of how the pursuit of victory and athletic revenues can lead a school to lose sight of basic human values and become a corrupting influence, grab a copy of Ridpath’s book. CCAP helped overcome some financial obstacles to its publication and I am delighted with the results. As one sports writer, Rus Bradburd put it, speaking of Ridpath and his Tainted Glory, “He’s in love with college sports…and that’s what makes his story so vivid and compelling.”