All of the arguments about the football players being paid with an education assumes one thing - that the university cares whether or not the athlete graduates. These schools go after top athletes that could never make it at a university level on their own. Rather than offering extra tutoring, they are given easy classes and professors are told to make up grades for them.
Do you know why schools want athletes to leave early? Because the fact that these top athletes wont graduate despite being there 4 years is an embarrassment.
If the NCAA were truly concerned about the student athlete, they would strip a school of its D-1A status if its football-player graduation rate fell below 70% (yes-above the average). If you leave for the pros early, you’re a dropout unlessunless you are concurrently finishing up your degree.
Bit of a broad brush, don’t you think? Many schools have strict entrance requirements that all students must meet, athletes or not. Some schools accept “partial qualifiers” and others do not. The NCAA has rules (Prop 16) about eligibility (tied to GPA and test scores).
I certainly think graduating from college is important. But a lot of state schools, for instance, have relatively low graduation rates. Finishing is important at very elite schools like Harvard (96% graduation rate) but a state school might have a rate in the 50s or 60s. Not every student intends or wants to graduate.
I grant there are probably quite a few “stud” athletes who are in school and in classes because they get a lot of help from tutors and even a pass on some requirements from faculty. But again, I think of a friend of mine who played pro football after college. He was a diligent student, had close to a 3.0, and had so much structure to his day (practice, required study hall, etc.) - it looked a lot like what cadets at service academies have to do. Most of the college athletes I knew were not “studs.” They were competing in a sport that didn’t have a professional league and short of collegiate competition and perhaps the Olympics, that’s as far as they were going. I also went to college for an honors weekend and received a small scholarship - there were two football players I knew of in the same program. One left football eventually but the other played - not a starter, but a scholarship athlete.
I know for a fact some coaches in other sports besides football consistently have graduation rates on their teams that exceed that of the university (Bobby Knight, for instance). Not sure what happens on a football team. But I don’t think that a low graduation rate necessarily equals low academic standards.
What?! A student coming out of high school needs to score above a 4.0gpa and top scores on the SAT to even be considered for UCLA. USC, Berkeley, and even UCSB are similar. How many of the top athletes even come close to that? Oh, you meant the paper requirements? So how many high school students with a 3.0 and 1200 SAT score get in if you DON’T play football or basketball?
Ummmmm . . . immaterial. My point was that the schools pull in these athletes who are not academically ready with the intention of making (tax-free) money off them. In other words, the set up these athletes to fail to make $.
Second question to you: you tell me the graduation rates are low for schools as a whole - who cares?! What is the graduation rate for students with FOUR-YEAR FULL SCHOLARSHIPS! That is what we should be comparing.
Listen, I used to work in admissions at an Ivy League college… not every successful applicant at said college had a 4.0 GPA. You mean to tell me that that’s not the case elsewhere?
Not only that, grade inflation is not just a collegiate phenomenon. There are kids with high GPAs that aren’t admitted because perhaps they didn’t do anything but go to school. A kid with a so-so GPA, great recommendations, an afterschool job and activities might get his or her spot. It’s about maximizing one’s educational opportunity. That’s how kids with high 4 GPAs get turned down by elite schools, and some kids with low 3s are admitted - maybe their school has very few honors, AP, or IB courses. When you look at the unweighted GPAs of the fall 2006 frosh class at UCLA, you’ll see that 20 percent of the class had GPAs between 3.7 and 3.3 (cite). That’s a lot of B students.
All the schools you mentioned are a in a particularly high strata of selectivity. You need to consider schools like Boise State, WVU, Auburn, and Arkansas, for example.
A lot of students are coming to college who are not academically ready.
It’s not just football players. Your previous quote has your uncited claim that athletes are not given tutoring, but easier classes and professors are told to make up grades for these students. There are verifiable cases of this - see the University of Minnesota basketball scandal a few years back - but I have colleagues who have worked as counselors in Division I athletic programs. The UM scandal has increased oversight for tutoring programs everywhere. Again, at my university the athletes that I knew had mandatory tutoring and study hall hours, even if the student was doing fine in the course.
Don’t forget that there are walk-on players as well. Second, it’s doubtful that there is a central clearinghouse for full scholarship completion rates. Some “full” scholarships pay tuition, some pay board, some pay for everything and give stipends. I can tell you that in 2006, 56% of male athletes graduated within six years, compared to 58% of male students overall - that’s from the Department of Education and the NCAA. Given the restrictions on what NCAA eligible athletes can do to make money while in school, that seems like a reasonable comparison. As others have noted, non-athletes can earn money with their skills with no regulation. Jeremy Bloom, a University of Colorado football player, was also a champion skier and earned endorsements for his skiing to pay for school. He was declared ineligible by the NCAA, even when he stated that he would return the money. If he didn’t play a sport he could have kept the cash for himself, like every other college kid who works in the summer and plays in the school band, for instance.
Yes, they should be paid and there is already a name for them. They’re called pro-football players. If they don’t need a degree and they’re good enough then they can pass go and collect $200,000.
Good argument. But not entirely true: witness Maurice Clarett.
The NFL has a rule that a player must wait 3 years after graduating from High School in order to declare for the NFL draft. So, to clarify your statement:
If they don’t need a degree and they’re good enough then they can wait three years after graduating high school and then they can pass go and collect $200,000. Until that rule gets changed their best option is to spend three years as a journeyman in college. Where the NCAA and their University can make tons of money off of them - and they get paid room and board and a scholarship towards a college degree they don’t want or need.
I love how angry a lot of people get about the “star treatment” college athletes supposedly get. What other profession exists where, if you have world-class talent, there’s an entire infrastructure already in place to profit from your labor without providing you with any of the benefits reaped therefrom? Sure, these kids get a free education – a, what, $80,000 value? Meanwhile the schools are raking in, as Doctor Who said, hundreds of millions of dollars at least, while the athletes are being forced into a holding pattern (for a year, or even three years depending on the sport) until they’re even allowed to receive a paycheck for their work. Great trade; I’ll take the millions all the same.
The OP said that college athletes already receive spectacular benefits, including the fact that they “get” to appear on national TV. This is exactly backward. Ohio State didn’t give Troy Smith the opportunity to be on TV, Troy Smith gave the school the opportunity to be associated with his ability to play football. Ohio State received a giant payout for their trouble. Troy Smith, and others like him – the actual commodities – did not. In fact, what the players got was a complex set of restrictions placed upon them to prevent them from doing things like appearing in commercials, in calendars, signing autographs at shows, etc. It’s total bullshit. If there wasn’t this perception that the football and basketball players were thugs, idiots, and malcontents, a lot more people would be a lot more angry about it, I think.
Correct me if I’m wrong but colleges don’t charge as much as pro-teams for tickets so the pay-out is not comparable. Athletes are paid with tuition, which is a considerable amount of money for a teenager. College football is the baseball equivalent of a minor league team. Without a college degree Troy Smith is just another entertainer with no real job skills. I’d say he was handed a lucrative career with almost no effort on his part. I know a lot of musicians with a shit-load more skill than Smith. But schools that give out scholarships for it are few and far between.
Any college player that doesn’t like it can flip burgers for 3 years and audition like everyone else.
I don’t know exactly what this means. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that college players should get paid NFL-style salaries, if that’s what you mean. That’s not economically feasible. What most of us are saying is that these kids are generating enormous amounts of revenue for the NCAA, their conference, and their university - and for some reason there’s resistance to them seeing any of it.
And they are not allowed to license their name or likeness to benefit themselves - which would generate a considerable amount of money. Why is it okay that they get “paid with tuition” and not okay that they get paid in other ways?
If you believe this, then why do you have any resistance to paying college players? They pay minor leaguers - and they pay many of them more than it would cost to pay for tuition + room + board.
A few points: (1) Troy Smith worked his ass off between practices, weight training, voluntary practices, missing class time for competition, etc. Nobody handed him anything that he didn’t earn. And (2) Troy Smith won the Heisman - meaning of ALL the players in college football this year, he’s the BEST. I guarantee that you DON’T know a “lot of musicians with a shit-load more skill” at their particular craft than Troy Smith has at his. I detect some real anti-athlete resentment here, and I just don’t understand it. I think that football players, musicians, dancers, singers, entrepreneurs, salesmen — ANYONE who’s good at what they do should be compensated commensurate with their ability. There’s no need to try to denigrate Troy Smith because some of your musician friends aren’t recognized to the level that they deserve. That’s sour grapes.
I assume you mean in place of playing college ball? Because as we’ve already established in this thread - they can play ball, but not flip burgers. Or they can flip burgers, but not play ball. That’s the stupidity of the NCAA at this point.
True but they get paid the day they sign a pro-contract. Again, not bad for a couple years of effort playing a game. Just like being a minor league baseball player.
big fucking deal. He exercised and skipped classes. I worked my way through school and I played a college sport. I didn’t have a tutor while studying by the crappy lights on buses. I don’t know what he got his degree in but I use mine for the purposes of earning a wage. Troy used his to get exposure to become a paid football player.
That’s your opinion. IMO I know musicians with 30 years of hard work who have WAYYYYY more talent than a Smith has. That’s the nature of the entertainment business. A person is not paid for skill directly, but on the paying public’s desire to view that skill (No I’m not denying a relationship, just a linear one).
No, that’s the reality of the entertainment business. If you want to call it sour grapes that a high school kid can make over a million dollars a year after 3 years in college then so be it. Musicians rarely get such an advantage. I don’t see the financial suffrage that the article talks about.
Letting a teenager play football out of high school is different than other sports given the size of the players. It makes sense to grow their talent in college along with a little muscle. I’m happy that Tony will do well in life but the article didn’t garner any sympathy from me over a 3 year ride to the promised land.
I was an athlete in a non-revenue sport (baseball) at a major university in the Big Ten. My “scholarship” basically gave me in-state tuition since I was from another state, so I was paying about the same as 80% of the students were. Of course, I had to make the team each year and maintain progress towards my degree or else I would lose that benefit. No taking a semester off or changing majors for me.
My day consisted of several classes each morning (all AM classes since I had to be at practice by 2:30 every day.) Our “locker room” was the visitors locker room in the football stadium, so I had to go there every day by 1:30. I’d change and then ride my bike about two miles to the baseball field. While all my friends were playing frisbee and smoking pot, I’d be stuffing towels down my pants and practice blocking balls in the dirt with my body, no glove. Practice was from 2:30 to 5:30 every day in season, after which I would ride back to the stadium, shower and change, then race back to my dorm to get dinner before the cafeteria closed. Every day I got whatever was left - all the good stuff was gone when I got there. By then it was 7:30, and I was tired and sore and not well nourished, and then I could start to study. I never got to see my professors during office hours because I was at practice.
What did I get from this? Pretty much nothing. There were 100 people in the stands at home games, and none were pretty girls. No favors from the profs - I got so tired of them rolling their eyes when I told them I couldn’t participate in activities because I had to practice, or beg them to let me in a morning class that was already full.
The football and hockey players had it even worse. Imagine going through school for four years with that schedule, with your body being basically one big bruise. 98% of us never earned a dime from being an athlete, but we brought in a lot of money to the school.
Incidentally, in the time I was there, I only remember one guy who dropped out of school, and that was because his dad died and he had to go back and run the family farm. A couple of guys went on to med school, at least one went to law school and last I heard was a legal counsel for the Milwaukee Brewers, many were in state kids who got their Ag degrees and went back to farm. One football player I knew became a star in the NFL then moved back to town and became a great member of the community and a big supporter of the University. His son is going to play football for the U starting next year.
Through it all, we as a group were pretty poor. We were the ones who were still in the dorms over holidays. Us and the foreign students. $200 a month would have meant the world to us.
Not like a minor league baseball player at all. Minor league players are paid regular salaries while they’re in the minor leagues - those salaries often escalate or are renegotiated when they hit MLB. Most of them are paid barely a living wage, but the best prospects are playing for multi-million dollar contracts. Nobody’s suggesting that every college player should be earning millions of dollars, but they’re not getting anything near market value in the current system.
I don’t know you from Adam, but I’m willing to bet that you’re not the athlete that Smith is. You use your degree to earn a living because it provided you the best opportunity to leverage your skills and talents into the life you wanted. Smith used his time in college to gain exposure as a football player because that exposure gave him the same opportunity. You both worked within the system to do what you thought was best for yourselves.
Musicians get such opportunities about as often as athletes do. For every Troy Smith, there are thousands of other kids playing quarterback who’ll never make a dime as professional athletes. You could look at professional athletes as analogous to musicians - there are lots of people who work their asses off to make a decent (though not spectacular) living at it, and a very few lucky and talented folks in their early 20’s who make millions. Still, the vast majority of people who write and play music or who play sports don’t make a living doing it - they have to work other jobs to support themselves and their families.
The arguments against paying athletes tend to presume the “dumb jock” stereotype, and that somehow athletes are living the good life that other students can’t. I know that football players had a floor in the dorms at my college. It was nice, but a lot of ordinary students lived in better private dorms or in apartments and condos off-campus. They also had unlimited passes for the cafeteria. Not much of a prize if you ask me.
In return for their scholarship, athletes have to maintain their GPA, perform on the field, avoid trouble with the law, make themselves available to the media, and risk injury and bodily harm daily through practice and games. I had a full scholarship with one condition - maintain a minimum GPA. If I could make the grades by taking easy classes, doing my work at the last minute, no problem. I know a guy who received a scholarship like mine who got busted for shoplifting. He didn’t lose his scholarship - I doubt anyone even knew about it. More importantly, the likelihood of me injuring myself reading or writing my way to my degree was pretty small.
Look, there are examples of athletes getting preferential treatment, as there are of the kids of prominent alums and politicians. This doesn’t mean that all athletes or legacies get those same privileges or abuse them. I would say given the responsibility that athletes have beyond academics, they deserve to be compensated. This is coming from someone who never played HS or collegiate sports, was an honors scholarship student, and is currently working in academia. There’s certainly no benefit for me or students like me in having this view. Just like the student who earns an endorsement deal for skiing or skateboarding, or is an actor, they have a right to earn money for their extraordinary talent. Not every kid with a talent is going to luck into a lucrative moneymaking venture, but some certainly will.
No cite, but Ohio State student tickets are about 30 bucks a game. I don’t know about pro tickets, or how much other seats are at OSU, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the OSU tickets are more expensive. I think you underestimate how much more support the Buckeyes get than say the Browns. OSU sells out a 103,000 seat stadium every single game. We also get 10s of thousands more that simply come to the stadium area to tailgate.
The Brown’s stadium only hold 73,000 and I don’t think they sell out every game. It’s true that they get more home games a year, but still the support for the Browns doesn’t come close to the Buckeyes. I have very little doubt in my mind that the OSU football team brings in more revenue than the Browns, and that doesn’t account for the salaries of the Browns players.
You must be kidding? Troy Smith handed a lucrative career with almost no effort on his part?
I had the same experience. I was a chemistry tutor at Notre Dame.
The kids in athletics were being used. They were thrown into classes they couldn’t handle. They missed tons of classes because of travel. They weren’t learning much. And most of them weren’t good enough to go pro.
They were just being chewed up and spit out without any real prospects.
I’m going to disagree with you on this. Getting a $20,000/year scholarship (or less) is very much like the low wage paid to a minor league player. The payoff comes when they’ve proved themselves capable. It’s very much like the minor leagues. As I pointed out earlier, football is different then a sport like basketball because of the physical nature of it. I’ll admit the possibility that a high school teenager “might” be able to play pro-football but I have never personally seen a kid who was big enough to risk it. I think it’s prudent to delay the event through with a transition league and college is the perfect venue for this.
I agree 100%.
Again, I agree with most of what you’re saying. But I can’t think of any venues for musicians that provide the exposure of college football. We’re talking about a unique sport from the perspective of how players gain exposure. There isn’t a minor league in pro-football like there is in baseball. Colleges perform that function. If it were less of a contact sport, such as basketball, then a highschool kid could bypass the vetting process and go professional immediately. In that sense, basketball players have the best of both worlds.
I understand the premise of the article but it’s flawed from the perspective that these kids are being taken advantage of. Most, if not all, jobs have a vetting process. Salaries are based on a resume of achievement. In the entertainment world you have the added benefit of exploiting your popularity. To say Troy Smith is not making money on his name is not entirely true. He is generating wealth on endorsements as we speak. It won’t be realized until he signs a contract but when he does the income will be immediate and substantial. You can’t say he did nothing to earn that income because he did. He’s doing it now. If it was legal he could easily sell stock in his name.
After further research I concede the amount of money brought in to OSU is higher than I thought. Pro teams still bring in more money but your point is valid.
And not to discredit Troy Smith’s achievements, I was referring to the relationship between what he’s done and what he’ll earn. If I had the opportunity to make large sums of money for playing my favorite sport I would certainly do it. But I would acknowledge that I’m getting paid for the entertainment value of it and not for skill level of it. IMO, an ice skater or basketball player have much more skill than a football player. And in the same light, a surgeon has a higher value-skill than any of them.
I hope Smith makes a boatload of money and retires young. I’ll respect him if he does so with the humility that he was paid well by the fans who supported him.
Why do you think Pro teams bring in more? I can’t imagine where the Browns would be making more money.
No offense intended, but who the hell are you to decide what level of skill each of these sports/professions take? Besides, what’s the difference? It’s not about the skill level, it’s about the amount of money football players bring in to the University.
So basically, it looks like we fall into two camps:
A university is for higher education only. A top football player should use their ability to get a scholarship and nothing else since the payoff for them is down the road.
A university is a minor league for the pros. No one cares about the athlete being a student - it’s all about the $, for the school and the athlete.
IMO, although the NCAA claims it supports #1, the reality is #2.
Pro team tickets are at a minimum twice that of a college ticket and they play more games.
No offense intended, but who the hell are you to decide what level of skill each of these sports/professions take? Besides, what’s the difference? It’s not about the skill level, it’s about the amount of money football players bring in to the University.
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No offense taken. Like most kids growing up I played a variety of sports and, as I stated, it was my opinion.
And you’re right, it’s not about skill. The money generated is about the entertainment draw. The value of the draw is generally related to an exhibition of skill and success.