Do you acknowledge a significant % of the players we are discussing are African-Americans in less than desirable family circumstances? If you won’t acknowledge that, talking is pointless.
Yes, their athletic ability GOT them to college, but academics is KEEPING them there.
Once again, I will not apologize for taking school more seriously than extracurriculars.
Not the way the system works now. This has been pointed out to you multiple times before - if a player gets injured and can’t continue playing after recovery, he loses his scholarship. If the school recruits a better player at his position, he loses his scholarship. If he devotes too much time to his studies and not enough time to football, he loses his scholarship.
If college athletes approached school the way you seem to think they should, they’d be kicked out after one semester. Why are you so opposed to changing the system?
Why do you think the race or ethnicity of the player is germaine to this discussion? And why do you seem to think that all African-Americans live in “the hood”? :dubious:
Why do you ascribe such importance to “academics” when you have no idea what courses you might be talking about? At some schools a player can remain academically eligible by taking classes in subjects that are tailored to athletes and have little or no “academic” value.
In fact, months and months and pages of pages into this thread, you still seem unbelievably ignorant on this subject AND you seem determined to hold on to your ignorance and even flash it as a badge of honor or something.
If the schools themselves cared about the athletes’ academic success they would do the following:
Return the schedule to 10 games per season.
Reduce practice time to 10 hours per week plus necessary travel time.
Abolish spring football.
Require athletes to meet the same academic requirements for admission and ensuing eligibility as every other student.
Steps like these will help kids get degrees. A player getting a $2,000 monthly stipend check from the Booster Club or shooting a couple of TV ads in July will have zero effect on his academic work. The whole concept of earning money harming academics is a boogeyman created by Head Coach Control Freak.
Right. To the extent that student-athletes find it difficult to put any energy into academics is that the school doesn’t want them:let them/create a situation in which it’s possible.
Do you have ANY idea how college scholarships work? If you get a ride to the music program, you play music - when and where they tell you to play music. Ditto for any number of other program-specific scholarships. When your ride is paid for by the Athletic Dept., you play athletics first or you lose your ride.
Jesus, etv78, why do you think some coaches are making a big deal out of the fact that they offer four year scholarships AS A RECRUITING TOOL!? Even the damn coaches in the damn system disagree with you.
Your posts don’t reflect your claim to value education since this has been written about…oh I don’t know, maybe a fucking million times. Try reading a few articles.
As you can obviously tell, I don’t follow the intricacies of how D-I athletes spend their time. The system of placing sports over academics shows how we’ve let the inmates run the asylum. Given the choice between going to practicecor class, do you believe any athlete would choose class.
Reform is clearly needed, starting with actually forcingbkids to go to class, and pass their classes. If athletes can’t be bothered to do that, let them go pro.
You don’t follow intricacies. You don’t bother to find out any facts at all about these people’s lives. You ignore every single fact about how the college and professional industries are run.
But you feel so secure in sitting back and spouting the same stereotypical nonsense over and over and over again. You feel so secure about dictating what student-athletes should be satisfied with and what they shouldn’t. You feel so secure about declaring what their priorities would be.
And you do all that while using reprehensible analogies such as “inmates running the asylum.” That’s absolutely disgusting.
Are you ever going to read anything that people are saying in this thread? Are you ever going to look beyond your racial stereotypes and your middle-class prejudices?
The athletes aren’t nearly as stupid as you think they are. Most of them know that College is the prize they’re going to get for being a fine athlete. Most of them go through high school dreaming that their sport will net them a Scholarship.
They have to balance two separate ideas. Focusing enough on the sport to keep the scholarship while diverting their focus enough to get something out of the scholarship. The school is the one demanding the sport focus, not the athlete.
"The N.C.A.A. has reached a preliminary settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by former college athletes to institute wide-ranging reforms to its head-injury policies.
The settlement is the latest attempt by the N.C.A.A. to address concerns over athletes’ rights. It brings a significant change in the care and safety of all current and former college athletes — male and female, in all sports and across each division — including a $70 million medical monitoring fund and a new national protocol for head injuries sustained by players during games and practices."
But the settlement covers only diagnostic medical expenses.
A big part of the NCAA’s defense during the recently concluded trial was that athletes being allowed to earn outside income would cause great harm to their “student experience,” or some such similar phrase. It occurred to me yesterday that we actually have a sort of precedent regarding that – SMU of the early 80s (among others).
For those who don’t remember, SMU was nailed by the NCAA for its boosters (with at least knowledge by school officials) repeatedly funneling cash and other benefits to recruits and players, including Eric Dickerson and Craig James. So wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask Dickerson and James and all the others how getting paid under the table hurt their student experience? How did Reggie Bush’s campus experience suffer after his parents got a job and a house from USC boosters?
There are plenty of well off kids on most big campuses. How does a few more mess things up?
The so-called Big 5 conferences are expected to gain preliminary approval Thursday to break away from some of the strictures of the N.C.A.A., a significant change that would give them more freedom to govern themselves and could allow athletes to share in the wealth of college sports. Under the proposal, the N.C.A.A. would clear the way for sports powerhouses like Alabama and Ohio State to pay their athletes a few thousand dollars more than what the current scholarship rules allow, loosen restrictions against agents and advisers, and revamp recruiting rules to ease contact with top prospects.
This doesn’t look like a big enough change to satisfy anyone.
I believe the Power 5 breakaway is a strategic attempt to buy some time and win some favor from the increasing number of critics – while the schools appeal the almost inevitably unfavorable imminent verdict AND lobby Congress for special exempting legislation. IMHO, the latter is their best chance to retain something close to the status quo and even that’s not a particularly good one.
A secondary purpose is to put a little more distance competitively between themselves and the smaller budget schools.
The way it’s written, it seems like it’s “one set of rules for the Big 5, and a much more stringent set for everybody else.”
Here’s something I see happening: whoever wants to release the next NCAA Football or Basketball video game has to pay the conferences for the use of its schools’ trademarks, colors, and mascots. The excuse will be, “Nobody buys these so they can have Western Michigan play San Jose State, so why shouldn’t we get more money from them?” This also wields recruiting power; “You can get more money for your name if you go to our school than if you go to a no-name school.”
…until it reaches the point where Division I football consists of the Big 5, FCS-A (the rest of the BCS schools), and FCS-AA (the current FCS). That way, the big schools get a much bigger piece of the postseason football pie. There’s also the chance that they’ll form their own basketball division as well, but what happens if the next Butler wins the “I-AA men’s basketball championship” and there’s serious talk that they’re better than the I-A champion? (In my opinion, this, applied to other sports - for example, ice hockey - is why the top conferences haven’t already done a complete break from the NCAA and formed their own association.)
Your guess is as good as mine as to how this all eventually shakes down. In fact, it probably won’t shake down, college sports have been and will continue to chase the ever-increasing television dollar in ways that will make a mockery of traditional structures.
I thought of two other things recently that are simply too crazy to fit into the NCAA’s defense. The first was Florida State kicking in as much as $60,000 to help Jameis Winston purchase an insurance policy, a perfectly allowable transaction under current rules.
The second was hearing of a kid who was playing college football while under a minor league baseball contract. I had forgotten about that rule and how controversial it was in the past when first addressed. The point I’m trying to make is that the schools appear to be pretty arbitrary when deciding what’s an allowable benefit and what isn’t. And it seems that what they’re objecting to is something that, in some cases, they’re already doing.