ShareThisJay Bilas' parents schooled him to embrace opportunity, so, when officials at Duke nominated him to sit on the NCAA's long-range planning committee as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, Bilas said yes.
Then a 20-year-old standing 6 feet 8 inches with a full head of brown hair, Bilas was the starting center on Duke's basketball team and had not met much resistance in life. He was a Southern Californian with a quick wit, and, in the Blue Devils' locker room, there was a feeling that Bilas could do just about anything he wanted.
But Bilas ran into a wall in those meetings with the NCAA. He had ideas about how to improve the life of a college athlete, but it felt like nobody in that room was listening.
Once, he brought up a grievance about NCAA transfer rules. If a head coach was fired or left for another job, Bilas did not feel the coach's players should have to sit out a year if they were to transfer from the school.
"You would have thought I said every athlete should be paid a million dollars," Bilas recalled.
He was told that an athlete's commitment was "a marriage between player and school," but Bilas pleaded his case.
"When I got to campus," Bilas said, "I was picked up by the coach. I was shown the university through the eyes of the coach.
"I understand the marriage analogy, but, if I were to get divorced, that doesn't mean I have to stay and live with my wife's parents after she leaves me."
When Bilas left the NCAA committee, he was discouraged, but he has spent much of the past three decades acquiring experiences that have combined to make him one of the most powerful voices in college athletics.
His platform as an ESPN college basketball analyst is big enough on some nights that he can be heard by millions, and Bilas does not want to abuse that power.
He is meticulous in his preparation and fearless in saying what he thinks about any topic -- a refreshing quality in a world where talking heads just keep talking louder and louder.
Bilas, 48, rarely turns up the volume, and his words hold more weight among fans with each passing year. In 2010, Sports Illustrated named Bilas college basketball's best game analyst. He relishes his ESPN role, because it keeps him on the inside with the coaches and the players -- the scene he gave up in 1992 when he took a job as an attorney at a large, Charlotte, N.C., corporate firm. He has a Duke law degree, litigated cases for seven years before going into broadcasting full time, and is a card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1990, Bilas played an alien cop in "Dark Angel," a movie starring Dolph Lundgren.
Trying cases taught him how to argue a point without losing his cool, and acting made him unafraid of the spotlight.
"He's very talented," said Harvard coach Tommy Amaker, Bilas' teammate at Duke and a lifelong friend. "He can talk in different languages to a lot of different people."
Last summer, ESPN aired a roundtable show called "College Football: Blueprint For Change." Bilas, a noted NCAA critic, was the only person with no affiliation to football invited to join the panel. Surrounded mostly by skeptical ears, he described his plan to fix college athletics: an Olympic model in which players are not paid directly by their schools but can benefit from outside sources using their name or likeness.
"A music student who's on a full music scholarship can cut a record," Bilas said that day, "can play at Carnegie Hall, can be on TV, can be in a movie, whatever they want. Regular students get paid all the time."
At one point, Alabama coach Nick Saban, who makes more than $4 million a year, said, "It's not a business. ... Nobody's really making money. I mean, we get paid salaries."
Bilas responded, "I'll say."
Last fall, Bilas got a call from NCAA president Mark Emmert, asking if he could spend some time with Bilas talking about the issues his organization faces. Bilas gladly agreed.
"I didn't expect anything to come out of it," Bilas said. "It was a wonderful opportunity for me. He doesn't have to talk to me or acknowledge me."
Just like when he was a student nearly 30 years ago, Bilas always will say yes to an opportunity -- especially one for discourse. He is open to being convinced that he is wrong about the future of college sports. It just has not happened.
(Contact J. Brady McCollough at bmccollough(at)post-gazette.com and on Twitter (at)BradyMcCollough.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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