The Operation Varsity Blues scandal made more visible the extent to which higher education has become a pay-to-play game. In this episode, we speak with Kirsten Hextrum, an associate professor at Oregon State University and the author of Special Admission: How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban Athletes.

Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IjWMwEpZ_VEj76A8Tbl70BFgxFjS1L2aefOdIlvMP84/edit?usp=sharing

Show Credits

Only If You Get Caught is written and hosted, by Patrick Redford.

It’s produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin, with production support from Jae Towle Vieira. Editorial support from Tom Ley and Audrey Mardavich. Justin Ellis is Defector’s projects editor. Mixing by Samantha Gattsek Show art by Jim Cooke. Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn are Defector’s business guys. Thank you to the Defector staff.

Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber based media company.

Only If You Get Caught is a proud member of Radiotopia.

If you like the show, the best way to help us is a five-star rating and review wherever you are listening right now.

The Connor Stalions story is the perfect cheating scandal through which to understand college football, the most cheating-ass corrupt sport we have. Stalions is an insane character and the stuff he did was as blatant and obvious as it gets. The question of whether or not he cheated is unambiguous, but what he did was, A) something that all of Michigan’s rivals were doing, B) a violation on a technicality rather than anything as illegal as it sounds, and C) fundamentally more about NCAA control than anything else. The NCAA is basically a parasitic outgrowth on the flank of college sports, a guarantor of exploitation. This episode looks at the Stalions scandal, places it in the correct context, and looks at the evolution of the NCAA through its legal challenges.

Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g9Z0ZEQa1elN_0BgB0sD6K11z0sq7fQAcn1SSFMm-7Y/edit?usp=sharing

Show Credits

Only If You Get Caught is written and hosted, by Patrick Redford.

It’s produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin, with production support from Jae Towle Vieira. Editorial support from Tom Ley and Audrey Mardavich. Justin Ellis is Defector’s projects editor. Mixing by Samantha Gattsek Show art by Jim Cooke. Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn are Defector’s business guys. Thank you to the Defector staff.

Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber based media company.

Only If You Get Caught is a proud member of Radiotopia.

If you like the show, the best way to help us is a five-star rating and review wherever you are listening right now.

The simple story of the early-aughts baseball steroids scandal is that Congress caught a bunch of star players juicing. That’s mostly true, but that reading fails to properly place the scandal in the most relevant context: labor relations. You don’t get the steroid “crisis” without the 1994 strike, nor can you fully explain the insane public spectacle of congress making a show of criminalizing these guys without framing it within the past, present, and future of labor exploitation.

Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10JmE5S9OfKupVjPAh_rOLCCywussI5wDr1mNqWZQq5o/edit?usp=sharing

Show Credits

Only If You Get Caught is written and hosted, by Patrick Redford.

It’s produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin, with production support from Jae Towle Vieira. Editorial support from Tom Ley and Audrey Mardavich. Justin Ellis is Defector’s projects editor. Mixing by Samantha Gattsek Show art by Jim Cooke. Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn are Defector’s business guys. Thank you to the Defector staff.

Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber based media company.

Only If You Get Caught is a proud member of Radiotopia.

If you like the show, the best way to help us is a five-star rating and review wherever you are listening right now.