Mike Celizic

I’m not sure there’s a more unintentionally hilarious moment in sports than when college coaches rise up in outrage to lecture us about the evils of greed.

It’s all the rage at the SEC media days, where Nick Saban rose up the other day in righteous indignation to condemn agents who contact college players. “Pimps,” he called them for their desire to get control of the athletes so that they — the agents, not the players — can enrich themselves.

You can see why the coaches would be so angry. Making money off poor and naïve college athletes is reserved for coaches and athletic directors.

You’d think the agents would have gotten that memo by now. Or maybe they know it’s forbidden for them to contact players and simply don’t care, so great is their lust for lucre. It doesn’t matter if the lucre is filthy or fresh from the shower, it’s wrong. It’s evil. It’s a sin so monstrous one trembles just to speak of it.

Fortunately, not all the great sports moralists agree with Saban. No less an expert on the subject than Dick Vitale said it’s not the agents. It’s the athletes themselves. And, far from being pimps, they’re prostitutes.

“If you stick your hand out and ask for cash and other goodies from these agents and their representatives, you are essentially selling your body. You are acting like a prostitute, and that is an illegal act,” Vitale wrote for ESPN.com. “[T]hese are not little kids. Athletes should know right from wrong.”

Actually, promising a percentage of your future earnings to an agent isn’t illegal. Vitale does it himself. So does every coach worth his free car, five- and six-figure speaking fees, seven-figure apparel contracts and eight-figure coaching deals. It’s called getting paid for what you do. In the case of sponsorship fees, it’s getting paid for who you are. No matter how you cut it, they all make their money off the unpaid labor of college athletes.

Video   Gators deny NCAA violations July 22, 2010: Florida football coach Urban Meyer says no one on the Gators' staff improperly contacted Maurkice Pouncey.

When coaches exploit kids for their millions, it’s good, honest pay; the American way. When an agent does it, it’s a vile and heinous crime, even if there are no laws that forbid it.

And what makes it so hilarious is that the agents at least offer to kick some of the money back to the kids. The coaches and colleges keep it all to themselves.

I’m not going to suggest that the bottom-feeding agents who try to get their hooks into poor and naïve players who grew up without an iPhone to hiss in are bastions of rectitude. But they’re no worse than anyone else in the great and bloated industry that makes billions off the sweat and effort of kids who get tossed aside without a second thought the instant their eligibility is up.

Vitale and Saban know shoe company reps who fund summer basketball leagues and hang around high-school playgrounds in the hopes of steering kids to one officially sponsored camp or another, or the addled alumni who try to get talented kids to go to their school rather than to someone else’s.

It’s against NCAA regulations for a student to have contact with an agent, so Saban blames the agents, who aren’t, by the way, associated with the NCAA or beholding to their rules. I understand Saban’s displeasure. These street-level agents can make his kids ineligible.

But the fault there is with the system, not the agents. The NCAA virtually guarantees cheating by denying kids the right to be paid for their work and to have professional representation.

A kid is expected to make the decision on what school to go to — a choice that can affect his entire future — with no help other than his parents and his high school coach. These are usually not sophisticated people. Rather, they’re folks who are easily blinded by the fame of a coach like Saban.

If the kid came to the table with a lawyer to represent his rights, the colleges would be outraged. If that lawyer were working for a percentage of the kid’s future earnings, they’d declare the kid ineligible.

Why do coaches have rights and not kids? Why do coaches have agents and not the kids who win the games for them? Why do LSU fans say that the only thing Saban knows about ethics is that he doesn’t have any?

High school kids are a vulnerable lot. You try growing up poor and without the benefit of serious education but with great athletic talent. Very early on, you’re recruited by coaches who have offered college scholarships to kids who are barely teenagers; to kids who can’t even spell scholarship.