A political comedy for Election Day

Big colleges and universities with big, expensive football programs are seldom if ever models of public transparency even on their best days. The familiar term “bunker mentality” might have been coined to describe the philosophy of shielding details, not all of which are sordid or embarrassing, from public scrutiny.

The University of Georgia didn’t invent this phenomenon, but at its coach’s urging, and with the fawning assistance of the Georgia General Assembly, the state has taken it to a new (low) level.

You know a lot of this already: When new UGA head football coach Kirby Smart made a celebrity appearance before the legislature back in the spring, somebody asked him the difference between Georgia and other programs (i.e., mighty Alabama, from whence he came to Athens), and Smart reportedly said disclosure requirements.

Abracadabra … and one of those eleventh-hour under-the-wire laws got passed that gives college athletic departments in Georgia a massive bye on the time limit for providing public information.

For most government institutions, that limit is three days. For Georgia’s taxpayer-funded college jock bureaucracies, it’s 90.

As the AJC’s Bill Torpy quipped in his “At Large” blog, “It was to prevent state secrets from falling into the hands of enemies — you know, Bama, Florida, Putin.”

Torpy asked Sen. Josh McKoon of Columbus (who voted against the bill) about it: “This is no joke and I’m not saying this facetiously or tongue-in-cheek,” McKoon told him, “but supporters were saying ‘Kirby Smart wants this. It will help with recruiting.’”

Well, sure. If there’s any public-interest goal important enough to shove aside open government laws for three months, it would have to be athletic recruiting.

One of the details disclosed after an open records request by DawgNation back in February, before Smart’s visit to the Gold Dome and before this monstrosity of a bill became law, was that Smart had spent more than a half-million UGA dollars on airplane rentals in December and January — three times the tab of his predecessor Mark Richt.

(Why didn’t he do what a blessedly long-departed Auburn regime did 13 years ago — when it tried to sleaze away once and future Louisville coach Bobby Petrino — and just use a rich alum-trustee’s private jet?)

Joking aside, the implications of this cavernous loophole are obvious, and obviously bad news for anybody who believes in the principles of open records and official accountability. Georgia First Amendment Foundation Executive Director Hollie Manheimer pointed out last spring (as noted in these pages) that the law allows athletic departments to shield a lot more than just recruiting. Contracts, expenses (like rented airplanes), legal issues, etc., all get a three-month shield.

Look … we all understand, as Southerners, that Saturday college football is the first half of our two-day weekend of religious observance.

But really, now.

This story was originally published November 7, 2016 at 5:57 PM with the headline "A political comedy for Election Day."