When I was at the University of Idaho I did a group project with a member of the football team. He repeatedly told us that we didn’t need to do anything because he was on the team. He was such an obnoxious asshole about it that we gave in and attended the next class completely unprepared. We got an A.
It was bizzare, the football player just started visiting with the teacher when it was our turn to present. We never did anything and she called up the next group. Unreal.
That said, who gives a damn? Worshiping sports and athletes is bullshit but we all know it’s bullshit. When you’re introduced to someone who played college football do you expect him to be smarter than a brick?
The good probably outweighs the bad. If athletes/staff commit crimes we should do our best to ferret them out and prosecute them like we would anyone else. Can anyone offer some examples of how athletics hurts the rest of the student body?
For one thing, all the scholarship money thrown at some 6’ 2" lunkhead who can throw a football 75 yards could have gone to someone who actually wanted an education out of college instead of a primo spot on the board come Draft Day.
only if that scholarship comes out of the general fund. if it comes from proceeds directly generated by the athletics department then the money for the non-athletes scholarship would still not be there.
i want to say that if it is discovered that a majority - not even 90% just 51% - of schools are found to be cheating, then i would certainly agree that the whole system needs to be completely overhauled. hell, i might even agree if the percentage was just large.
but then, if we look at it from a fairness perspective i think that we would need to examine all school/athletics programs. meaning even high school. i mean it is not fair that the academic team has to sell cookies in order to pay for a bus trip to go to a regional meet when the football team gets 3 buses to travel out of state for a game and they don’t have to do any fundraising. or the basketball team that gets to go to florida for a tournament.
I’m sure there’s some truth to that but how many people would be donating if it weren’t for the existence of college athletics?
My grandparents love Vandal football, they buy season tickets, when times were better they were boosters. I don’t think they really give a shit about the educating going on at UofI, they just donate to football.
It rubs me the wrong way. However, I’m forced to acknowledge that football money does contribute to campus projects like the student rec center and the remodel of the SUB.
I don’t think college athletics hurt me while I was a student and they did provide some benefit. Ridiculing and exposing preferential treatment is a good thing but banning college sports seems reactionary and shortsighted.
Sure. I’m not even claiming that my personal experience is any way dispositive, just that I know it happened, and it happened every term that I taught at a school with a serious athletic program, to me and to every grad instructor in the program that I spoke to. But that doesn’t prove anything. OTOH, it certainly doesn’t make good evidence for showing that athletics programs are squeaky-clean, either.
And sure Lit. is subjective. But I was often teaching (to these guys) basic composition, which has right and wrong answers: can you use a comma properly, can you compose a complete sentence? Can you keep your tenses straight? like that–not too subjective, and when someone earns an F for not being able to write, it’s a pretty easy call. Besides most of the issues that I was concerned with had to do with plagiarism, which again is an open and shut case, if I had the original text and the copied text on hand. Plagiarism = failure, according to the English department. Except where athletes were concerned. Then it was “Give him a second chance,” “he made an innocent mistake,” “cut the poor kid a break,” none of which ever applied to a non-athlete caught submitting plagiarized work.
Don’t make this more complicated than it was, or you risk being seen as an apologist for corruption.
I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like you are venting against your own impotence here.
McQueary witnessed a crime. I have read no account in which he was coerced even mildly to not report the crime to the police. Everything that I have read suggests that he passed it up the chain of command and called it good. While there was certainly plenty of corruption involved, the first failure seems to be McQueary’s failure to realize his duty to report a crime to the police.
Some quick googling found many schools have NCAA anonymous reporting procedures / hotlines / etc.
I’m sure your University or College has something similar. You really should report what you know. Even if it leads nowhere now, it contributes to the body of evidence should additional or even more serious violations be discovered.
Quit using such broad brush strokes and you will quit being seen as a vigilante with an axe to grind.
You have started to get pretty weaselly about what you intended to say versus what you stated in your OP.
That is pretty unequivocal, yet in the face of people pointing out numerous examples to the contrary, rather than admit any error you stick your fingers in your ears, blather more loudly that you have seen it first hand, and continue to ignore the fact that major revenue sports make up a small percentage of the total number of programs in college athletics.
EDTA: Again I will remind you that I completely concur as far as it goes with major revenue sports and their huge TV deals. Broken system, rife with corruption. But I absolutely can not extrapolate that to all college athletics.
Broken link, but here’s one that is only a junior that has already graduated with an undergraduate degree in political science, will complete a masters degree in communication this spring, was in the Heisman discussion earlier this year, is working toward making the U.S. Olympic track team next year, and wants to enroll in law school next fall, while playing football his senior year.
That’s admirable, but for every junior who already graduated and will complete a masters degree, etc. off a sports scholarship, I’ll show you 23 cornerbacks, 19 right tackles, 14 power forwards and 37 point guards who took the free ride and then ended up right where he always planned … making millions of dollars playing professional sports.
Which brings up a good point. Instead of scholarships from the schools, why wouldn’t a bank leap to offer a blue chip prospect a student loan? Odds are once the contract gets signed after dropping out after junior year, they’ll get paid back toot sweet.
Jack Batty makes a good point. It is very true that my link is an exceptional case. We certainly know for a fact quite a few athletes in football and basketball leave early. And yet, linking to actual data and not anecdote, it appears this happens at a rate lower than for the general student population. Worse it ignores the thousands of other athletes that attend, play, and graduate. Female athletes graduate ate rates well above the general student population, as well as ahead of the general female student population.
Something that is often over looked is that sports in general require cognitive ability. Strategy, plays, counter actions, analyzing an opponent while in the realm of coaching, the higher the level of play, the greater the demand on the players cognitive abilities. While there is, and always will be the case of the physical specimen that is so good as to not need any brains, I contend that is the exception rather than the rule.
According to this NYT article, fully half of NFL players have college degrees and as many as 100 return to school in the off season to continue their education. Major league baseball says that nearly 70% of players return to the classroom. Many degree rates are lower in the NBA than in football. The article also describes the appalling rate at which pro athletes go broke after their careers are over.
And again, for every one of these D-1 Football and basketball players that make a mockery of the system there are dozens and dozens of men and women at all the other levels and in all the other sports playing, learning, and succeeding at a greater rate than the general student population. So, how about we try to fix the problem, D-1 football and basketball?
Actually, it’s pretty equivocal, since I didn’t define “college athletics” and you have chosen to define it for me. I have pointed numerous times in this thread that I felt that in the broadest possible definition, “College athletics” is cool with me and that I enjoyed my own intramural experiences and even the organized athletics where I went to college (Ivy League) was pretty uncorrupt and benign–no athletic scholarships, no looking the other way on illiterate pseudo-students, no obscene salaries for coaches, lot of pressure on athletes to maintain legit GPAs, etc. And my current employer no longer hs much of competitive athletics program to corrupt it, either, so I can approve of their low-budget, mostly intramural and club programs as well. But the places I taught in years ago (way past the statute of limitations) stunk on ice, and I maintain that that was a very common experience among college instructors at big time athletics programs institutions. I knew a lot of instructors at other institutions and we all agreed that athletics were rife with corruption, and I haven’t seen any evidence in the years since to begin to persuade me otherwise. If you’ve got it, let me see what you’ve got.
Very few college athletes make it to the NFL or the NBA or MLB. The last place they will play organized sports is normally in college. Without the scholarships, most wouldn’t be able to afford the education. Scholarships are not a reason to consider college athletics corrupt.
Is it? You can’t prove you’ve stopped beating your wife if you’ve never begun to beat your wife, but you can show studies that demonstrate how student-athletes on athletic scholarships graduate at a rate similar to other students, how rare illiteracy is among student-athletes, how tiny the percentage of NCAA violations is nationally, etc.
Ah, yes, I can see it now. The ~3300 or so colleges in the US are all in Division 1 Football, Division 1 Basketball, and Division 1 Baseball. Every university plays in a round-robin tournament against every other university in the country. Each team plays ~10ish games per day, every day, 365. Every university has 100000 seat football stadia, 50000 seat baseball stadia and 20000 seat basketball arenas filled to the brim every game such that ~600 million American college sports fans can crowd into them nonstop. For the really rare dumbass football AND basketball player, substitutions are made easy by sliding down a fireman pole from stadia to stadia, since you see, university stadia are built like a cake, three deep, 500 foot tall structures, baseball in the lower level, football in the middle level and basketball in the top level. :rolleyes: ok this has gone on enough :D.
In all seriousness though, let me play devils advocate: seems like you are part of the problem. I was a TA and I never cut anybody any slack, and never received it. Plus, you are literature professor? Are you really in a position to have a holier-than-thou attitude about sports not being academic enough? :dubious:
I was part of the problem, as was every other grad student I spoke with about this problem. Our supervisor (the head of the writing program) advised us all to go along with the “deferential” attitude he wanted us to show to the athletic department when they came along to dispute our grades and most of us found that doing that was the path of least resistence. We were there to get our Ph.D.s, not to wage a war against the institution that was granting the Ph.D.s, and fighting with the supervisor, who was a professor in the doctoral program, wasn’t very smart or time-efficient.
It isn’t necessary for my case that every instructor in every program in the country was pressured to change grades, so maybe you’re an exception.
I don’t understand your question about my being “literature professor” (and I’m not talking about the missing article), nor about my being in a position to criticize. Is being a professor of lit. supposed to be DISqualifier in your book, or something?
So your definition of corrupt is the fact that scholarship athletes have a lower standard of admission than say the general population of students?
Considering the average graduation rates of all U.S. college students is around 55%, I’m not sure that even if the average scholarship atheletes graduation rate were even below that it would be a case for corruption.
Since there’s not a national data base on the % of school policy violations for the general student body (drug use, vandalism, failing classes, etc. etc.) You can hardly compare the average violation rate of scholarship athletes to the general student population.
Of course, if you start a thread with anecdotes and continue to make assertions without providing any references that support your claims, then it is unlikely that you are going to persuade anyone to your position. At that point, this thread is deemed a rant, not a debate, and it will likely be moved to The BBQ Pit.
If you actually believe that you are participating in a debate, then let’s see some evidence beyond your own anecdotes. You are arguing the affirmative to your position. No one else is required to provide these studies to which you allude–you need to provide the countradicting studies.