In theory all the players in college sports are first meant to get an education and second play the sport. These days I think most know it is the reverse but, nevertheless, they are still students and still meant to take classes and pass them.
So, how does their education continue when they spend a few weeks far, far from their classrooms to play basketball? No tests? No papers or other coursework? I assume they give at least a cursory nod towards this. I am curious how this works in practice.
Weeks? No - they spend Thur/Fri away from campus, and travel back Sunday night or Monday morning. At most they miss each of their classes once a week while still alive in the tournament - and that’s if there are no remote options available.
I would think it’s not much different than playing a couple of road games during the regular season. Away for a couple days, then back again. And after the first weekend of the tournament it’s only an issue for 16 teams. The rest can get on with their studies.
Having been a tutor for some of the basketball players at a big name basketball school 30+ years ago (both men and women went to The Big Dance) this is the least of the concerns of the men’s team. Women’s team was indeed trying to get an education. There was effectively no pro women’s basketball back then. The players weren’t in Engineering, Pre-Med, Math or Physics but were working toward normal degrees, not just doing the minimum not to get kicked off the team for academic reasons.
The men’s team was there to win basketball games. There was a lot of pressure to facilitate cheating. I did not. The coach was pressing the academic success office to kick me and several other grad students off their stipends. The previous year the coach was a nobody, the new coach was a Big Name, later more famous for academic fraud than success on the court.
NONE of the men I tutored has any business being in ANY college, never mind a selective one.
How very sad - for you, for them, for other students, for society. What a strange system and culture we have. Among other things, with racist overtones, in several respects.
(I say this as a college instructor who spent a decade in Lawrence, Kansas, arguably the – or an – origin point of college men’s basketball).
Remember, this was made even worse last year when a court ruled that student athletes can be paid:
Schools are now free to begin paying their athletes directly, marking the dawn of a new era in college sports brought about by a multibillion-dollar legal settlement that was formally approved Friday.
I wonder how long it will be until some athlete sues the school for hampering his earning ability because he had to study for a test rather than improve his game? Seems crazy but these days it would not surprise me in the slightest.
how do you figure that, especially from MM’s post?
Yes. Now, there’s no reason to keep that thin tether between “college” and “elite college sports, namely Division 1 men’s basketball and football.”
What would cutting that (farcical, fake) tether mean? Create a college-age professional league for these folks – still with the college names and locations, to guarantee a fan base and give actual students something fun to cheer on? Or completely unassociated with colleges? If the latter, the NBA has its developmental league. Maybe rearrange its venues to coincide with certain colleges?
Because we have created two sets of “students”: one set that is there to learn, and another that is there to entertain the first set (plus several million other people nationwide).
Especially because a disproportionate number of the second group are men of color, this has overtones of enslaved entertainers, at least as long as they were prohibited from being paid. Now, that part is changing – but we still have this “let’s all pretend there is one group of people – students, some of whom happen to be athletes” canard, that MM exposed in very stark terms (in their anecdotal, but surely telling, experience).
True, there are plenty of white college students who have “no business being in college” (to use MM’s phrase) – I’ve taught many of them (they tend to be business majors). So, the problem goes beyond elite sports. But this two-class (so to speak) system for D1 men’s basketball players (starting 5 on each team, at least) is ridiculous, and (I think) being an “open secret,” it confuses learning with entertainment in ways that can evoke racialized cultural expectations and assumptions (among other problems).
It is true that the majority of basketball players are African-American for whatever reason (I’m not going to speculate here on why that is because it is a whole other discussion), but that’s not the case for football. And in any event, do you think it would be any different if the majority were white? I don’t see anything racist going on here. The problem is that instead of considering them as traditional students who pay money to be taught, the schools primarily consider these players as employees at this point, to make money from them because they provide a service that provides value to the schools. But there is nothing being done here that wouldn’t be done the exact same way if the demographics were different. They do the same to the football players (which has a higher percentage of whites). They do the same to anyone playing these high value sports, regardless of their skin color. It’s a messed up system in some ways, but I don’t see any evidence that it is racist.
On the other had, there are plenty of college athletes who do take their academics seriously. I went to school with plenty of people who I sat next to in class who had been up since 4:30am for a morning gym or pool session, and wouldn’t be getting back to the dorm until late.
There’s a long-standing meme that circulates around this time. It shows a normal-looking guy with a caption that says something like:
“This is Kevin Anderson. He’s going to be an accountant next year, but this year he’s about to ruin 10 million people’s bracket.”
IMHO, at the very least, it (unjustly) reinforces racist stereotypes for some folks. “Some people are here at college, pretending to be students, and many of them are Black. Chances are that’s true for other people of color here in my college.”
That sort of mentality.
I’ll drop it, because you’re right, the problem is much bigger than this component of it.
(I was also reminded indirectly of Slam magazine’s reaction when Phil Jackson gave each of his Lakers players a book to read, e.g. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to Shaquille O’Neal: that it “smacks of noblesse oblige.”)
I’d be curious to hear @Mighty_Mouse’s take on this…but if we prefer to drop this aspect of it in this thread, that’s fine, too. Like I said, the problem is bigger than the racial part.
Exactly! That’s why I was surprised at Mighty_Mouse’s blanket statement: “NONE…” (caps in the original).
And why it would be hard to draw the line at who “belongs there as a student” and who doesn’t. Maybe “if they require tutoring”? No, often it’s the better students that take advantage of tutoring opportunities. Hmmm…
That is sad, but also rather odd. If I picked five college-aged young men at random, seems like I’d probably have one or two that would be (greatly oversimplifying here) smart enough to attend college.
Either big-time college sports only admits those who wouldn’t get in to college legitimately, or those that do play are somehow discouraged from showing their intellectual chops.
That’s an interesting thought. To get back to race (sorry!), this was basically the theme of linguist (and Black American) John McWhorter’s book Losing the Race: how his white classmates with intellectual curiosity tended to continue expressing that into their teens and beyond, while – due to unfortunate cultural pressures rooted in historical inequalities and segregations – his black classmates tended to stop displaying their intellectual curiosity, at around age 12. He attributed this to a societal pressure that subtly associated “being intellectually curious” with “giving into the White man’s world.”
Okay – I’d better get to work. I’ll check in here tomorrow sometime.
It could be cultural, as you describe. Or maybe success in athletics, even at the school level, requires so much time, dedication, and energy that there isn’t any left for intellectual pursuits.
Or maybe @Mighty_Mouse was unlucky that none of the recipients of his tutoring seemed to belong in college. (Or the athletes who take their studies seriously don’t need tutoring.)
All good points. The “time, dedication, and energy” – for sure. I’m dealing with this with my ninth-grade kid, who sits on the bench for his high school JV team!
Maybe my standards for who belongs in college are skewed. But I think half the students in college in the United States don’t belong there either, not just basketball players. So perhaps I am too harsh. I myself had just come from a country where fewer than 5% of the population went to the equivalent of a four year college, and had graduated from an elite university there.
Again this was 35+ years ago. You normally couldn’t get into the school with a 3.5/4.0 GPA in high school. Most of the basketball team had a GPA of 2.4 or below. Many of them exactly 2.2, which was the minimum to graduate in that state (and I suspect many other states). Which led me to believe that in their high schools their academic “progress” was curated carefully to ensure that they met the guidelines for getting into college. Many of them attended private schools, some Catholic, some secular.
All the players got tutoring, it wasn’t really just tutoring. A big part of the job was working with professors and TAs on grace periods for assignments and make up tests. Because practice and games took precedence over midterms and group project meetings.
Only 53% of Division I men’s basketball players are Black (https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1767&context=student_scholarship et al). I don’t have numbers incorporating all levels of the NCAA but I would be completely unsurprised if something like 65-70% of all players were white when accounting for Division II and Division III.
The 30 or so teams who are serious contenders to win the NCAA tournament in the next 5 years are their own world (and are certainly not 100% Black either).
Essentially everyone who is playing Division I basketball is going to go professional in basketball. Only a few dozen of them will make the NBA, but almost all of them will play in Europe or Asia or become high school coaches. DI basketball, even at the “low major” level, is something you do after being filtered through a pyramid of best-of-the-best-of-the-best people who spend 60 hours a week on basketball from age 7 onward. It is not a side hobby for future accountants or chemists, with extremely rare exceptions.
The business model of the NCAA is currently in turmoil, but I highly doubt the outcome will be the severing of sports from colleges. The most extreme possibility is something like “The University of North Carolina basketball team is open to anyone who has played four or fewer seasons for a college-sponsored team and has not previously been in the NBA. The participants are fully compensated employees of UNC who are not necessarily students. The purpose of the university sponsoring the team is as an entertainment amenity for its students, a branding exercise, and a business expected to make a profit on ticket, TV rights, and merchandise sales.” The idea that colleges will just stop being involved with sports and cede 18-23 year old basketball to the G-league is not a real possibility because I think that scenario would happen first.
Not only is this what I think might happen, it’s what I think should happen. The farce that is currently in place that these are truly “student-athletes” is silly and not benefiting anyone. Allow these athletes to obtain a college degree if they so desire, but mandating they attend classes and work toward a degree is just for show at this point. Allows the schools to call it what everyone recognizes it to be at this point, a professional team affiliated with the university composed of paid athletes, who are not mandated to be students of the university.