As scandals over improper benefits played themselves out like TV dramas across the college football landscape this summer, the media and coaches at various programs came out strongly against the agents who paid college football players huge sums of money, and criticized the players for violating NCAA rules against “student” athletes taking money during their collegiate careers. Blame was cast (most famously by Alabama head coach Nick Saban, who called agents “pimps”), punishment was meted out and the sport has collectively moved on from the issue to focus on the season currently underway.

The role of one critical group was overlooked, however, and I think it’s time we addressed the place of the college football coach in this entire landscape. How did coaches fail to notice the fact that college kids from less-than-wealthy backgrounds were suddenly rolling into practice in brand-new SUVs? Or, why did they see it and ignore it?

The answer is really quite simple. College football coaches are not teachers, professors or anything of the sort. They are not paid to encourage graduation, academic achievement or even NCAA compliance.

College football coaches are paid to do one thing and one thing only: win football games. It is this singular metric upon which they are evaluated, and at the end of the day, it is winning, not academics, that college football coaches will promote above all else.

To put it in other terms, coaches are not in the business of making sure players take tough academic courses and stay away from agents and boosters. It might even be to their advantage to encourage the opposite. Players with light academic loads can devote more time to football (increasing their chances of playing well), while money from outside sources can serve as an extra inducement to play and practice as hard as possible.

There is virtually no incentive for a college football coach to actually mold his players into smart, responsible citizens—if they turn in a 13-0 record and then leave college with no other skills besides playing football, it works out quite nicely for the head coach in question.

Several examples across the college football world serve to illustrate this trend quite well. To start with, let’s look at Notre Dame, where head coach Charlie Weis was recently fired for failing to win enough games during his tenure at the school. Over a four-year period, Weis’s teams scored a 978 on the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rating, a measure of how well universities’ athletic teams are performing in meeting academic benchmarks. Notre Dame’s score came in near the top of football programs nationwide, scoring between the 90th and 100th percentile. However, Weis was not evaluated based on how well his players did on tests; he was evaluated on whether or not his players went out and won games. They didn’t win, so he got fired.

This same dynamic prevails across the entire college football landscape. Even at Stanford, supposedly more academically motivated than most other football programs, coaches are hired, paid and fired based on their on-field performance and nothing else.

To look at another illustration of this idea, just head over to Chapel Hill, N.C., where North Carolina head coach Butch Davis is currently under investigation for hiring a tutor (with his own money) to give academic assistance to some of his players. While I certainly disagree with Davis’s actions, it’s not hard to see why he took them. The Tar Heels enter this season with some of the highest expectations in recent memory, and if Davis didn’t meet those expectations, he would be at risk of losing his job. When faced with the possibility that some of his players might be ruled academically ineligible for this season, Davis did the logical (but irresponsible) thing: he did what he could to save his job. Unfortunately for him, NCAA probes uncovered these violations, putting UNC’s hopes for an ACC title into extreme doubt.

Of course, coaches can choose to take the moral high road and emphasize things like responsibility and accountability over just winning a few football games. Until they are incentivized to do so, however, we will continue to see coaches who prioritize their own well-being far above that of their players.

Kabir Sawhney is just bitter about football coaches after not getting the job at USC, despite numerous phone calls. Help him with his resume at [email protected].