You can be a cynic about the Caleb Swanigan situation if you’d like.
Caleb Swanigan has lived through too much to put up with the NCAA’s garbage
The story of Purdue’s Caleb Swanigan feels like a heartwarming basketball redux of The Blind Side. But his adoptive father is an NFL agent, so the NCAA wants to pick a fight. It’s dumb.
Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
The McDonald’s All-American turned Purdue freshman’s journey from Indianapolis to Utah to Fort Wayne is well-detailed in this piece by Bleacher Report’s Jason King. It’s a story that’s grabbing and jarring -- one that makes it seem almost fantastical that the young man evolved into a five-star basketball recruit in such short order.
His father an abusive crack-cocaine addict that bounced in and out of his life, Swanigan spent his younger years bouncing between homeless shelters and the occasional apartment in Salt Lake City. None of his siblings spent more than two semesters in high school. Some have spent time in jail for various crimes. This is not a profile that lends itself to making it to major Division I college basketball. His environment wasn’t the only obstacle either -- Swanigan was morbidly overweight, weighing 360 pounds as an eighth grader.
Roosevelt Barnes changed all of that.
At the behest of Swanigan’s older brother, Carl, Jr., Barnes adopted the youngster known as “Biggs” and brought him back to Fort Wayne, Ind. He gave him stability. He helped him academically. He taught him how to eat right, bringing his weight problem into check. Swanigan wanted to be a basketball player, so his father used every means he had to get help him achieve his dream. In any other situation, this is a universally heartwarming story of a wealthy, successful man giving his time and money to help an impoverished youngster.
But it’s college athletics. It’s the NCAA. So we have to care exactly who is helping the youngster. And why.
In this situation, sure, there’s enough for you to be cynical if you’d like. Roosevelt Barnes is an NFL player agent, and a very successful one at that. He’s an alum of both the Purdue basketball and football programs. Barnes has even admitted making his thoughts known to Swanigan on where he should go to school.
“Of course I expressed my opinion. I’m his dad,” Barnes told Bleacher Report.
Another program Swanigan considered, California, is coached by Purdue alum Cuonzo Martin. You can be upset and scream RULEBOOK here if you’d like. That argument requires the assumption that Barnes knew he could turn a 360-pound eighth grader into a basketball star, but sure, fine. You can talk yourself into being mad here. Barnes is an agent, agents aren’t supposed to do these things because agents are bad. This is what the NCAA would have you believe, because it is the rule and rules are rules.
Even if rules were broken, why do we care?
Roosevelt Barnes did a good and honorable thing by attempting to help a kid attain a better life. That kid is his son. But now the NCAA wants to break down and poke holes in the bond formed between an adoptive father and son in the name of amateurism. They want to ask what he gave you and what you received. We have state laws and federal adoption agencies aplenty, but that is no matter. The nation’s foremost cartel is here to redefine the paternal relationship -- and they’re prepared to wreck a young man’s life in the process.
Granted, this whole Swanigan saga should not surprise you. College athletics are not for poor people. It took Shabazz Napier yelling about going to bed hungry on national television for the NCAA to lift a limit on free meals. Former Baylor running back Silas Nacita had his NCAA career ended because he grew tired of being homeless and moved in with a friend. Leave the idea of true "compensation" aside: it requires at least some familial money to get the necessary exposure, lifestyle and training to attain the interest of coaches, from which a scholarship comes.
For those like Swanigan, if they elect to shun the help as the NCAA wishes, they’re often damned to another generation of poverty. If they take the help, the organization will pick them apart as if they’re an overly curious sixth grader dissecting an owl pellet.
For a group that likes to bill itself on diversity and inclusion, there is no sports organization in this nation that actively establishes more rules to create socioeconomic barriers to entry than the NCAA. Not only do they not want to pay you money, they will actively keep you poor if it so serves the idea of amateurism.
Sure, there have to be mechanisms in place to protect poor athletes from exploitation. This case does not appear to be such on its face, but the NCAA may very well not care. Barnes and Swanigan are father and son. But one is an agent, and the other a player. Money undoubtedly “changed hands” because it requires such to raise a child. They might hold him out of play, citing amateurism.
They’ll have you believe that this thing is just bad.
They just won’t be able to give you a cogent reason why.
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