College Football 2010

[ursus arctos]

College Football 2010

Cheating in Div III is pretty much on the level of buying your star quarterback a frozen custard after the game.

[jason voorhees]

College Football 2010

Again, I see the NCAA as an absolute horseshit organization. Kids got free jerseys ? Kids got free tattoos ? Kids weren't allowed to use their knitting skills to sell knitted hats (the kid from Boise State who proposed and married the cheerleader) ? Get A Fucking Life.

I hate the NCAA with every ounce of my soul. Absolute bastards.

[The Exploding Vole]

College Football 2010

There is something intensely perverse about the potential for everyone connected with big-time college football to make loads of money apart from those who actually play the game.

[Reed John]

College Football 2010

The reason players can't sell stuff like that is because in the past, it was a way for players to get paid by boosters. They'd get paid a lot for some do-nothing job or they'd sell something for way more than it was worth or just sell something that they only got by virtue of being a player, which appears to be what has happened here. If that was allowed to happen unchecked, then the sports would be far less competitive than they already are. After all, even the NFL has a salary cap.
You'd certainly never see VCU or Gonzaga in a final four.

I don't have any sympathy for players or coaches who try to get around the rules and say that the players "deserve" it. I might think I deserve to get paid more as a reporter, but that wouldn't make it right for me to take bribes from PR companies or moonlight for a competitor or plagiarize. The rules are the rules.

The players know what they are signing up for when they signed the scholarship offers. The revenue from basketball and football subsidize the other sports. That's how it works. If they don't like it, they can play professionally in Europe or whatever.

If the player wanted to be a professional, then he should go out and try to find a professional team that will take him on. See how well that works out. If you really "deserve" it then the market will prove you right.

Having said that, I recognize that there are some artificial barriers. The NBA needs to get rid of their stupid one-year rule and perhaps some kind of minor league football circuit would help, but I'm not sure that could sustain itself financially. The truth is that college football is as much, if not moreso, about the "brand" of the university and the campus experience, not the quality of the playing. So in that way, the players need the university a lot more than the other way around.

I do think that players on a full scholarship who aren't allowed to work should get some kind of modest "walking around money." Their books, room, and meals are paid for, why not also their laundry and a few bucks to go out with their girlfriends or whatever? It seems sensible. Of course, that would be an added expense and not all schools would want to pay that. In that case, maybe it's time for the richest programs - roughly the BCS, but not even all of them - to split off and form a Premier League separate from Division 1. We already have three divisions (there are actually five divisions of college football already) based on how much the school can and wants to pay for sports. Maybe we need more.

There's a lot of room for improvement - and I think the NCAA has made some great strides in this area - but I don't think the scholar-athlete business is nearly as much of a farce as it's often purported to be. In some cases, yes, but you have to consider the alternative. It seems that the people who say that imagine that if there weren't so much money sloshing around in college sports, that would all be like idyllic ivy-league & service-academy-land where players are all renaissance men planning to go to med school, etc. Or that somehow the youth of America (the world too) would suddenly become a lot more interested in their studies if there were no money in sports. But there are tons of college athletes who know they have no chance of having a career in sports (rowers, fencers, women's lacrosse players, etc) and yet still commit a huge amount of time and energy into it. So it's not just the money that's distracting kids from school. It's just how young people are. So encouraging them to keep their grades up to stay eligible for sports will help them later on when they're more mature and understand why education is more important.

And as long as there are people willing to pay money to see sports, there will be professional sports, and as long as there are professional sports, there will be young people aspiring to play at that level. So if there weren't college scholarships for these sports, we'd have a system like Europe in which kids make sports a priority at a very young age. To a lesser extent, that's what junior hockey in Canada does too. Is that really preferable? I don't see how it is. For example, the statistics I've seen show that about 80% of guys who play NCAA hockey end up eventually graduating from college, whereas only about a third of guys taking the major junior hockey route ever get a university degree. Of course, more CHL players make the NHL, and it's good that players have a choice, but if it were my kid, I'd want him to get a degree, regardless.

So I tend to see the situation more as a glass half full. Yes, there are too many athletes who go to college and don't really study and never graduate. But I'd hazard to guess that in almost all of those cases, if not for sports, they'd never have even thought about going to college anyway. Meanwhile, there are a lot of guys who do graduate from college who never would have aspired to attending college if it weren't for sports. Either they wouldn't have had the motivation to get their grades up, they wouldn't have been able to afford it, or it's just not a world that they'd ever have been exposed to. The existence of this latter group justifies the risk of the former, I think. At least in some cases. There are D1 schools, like Penn State, which graduate athletes, black athletes, basketball and football players at much higher rates than anything you'd want to compare to. So that shows that it is possible.