This is from a Washington Post article ... My entire point is this: College athletics is a big time business now more than ever. And schools will do what they need to do to compete and in order to compete they need the best athletes ... and many times those athletes may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer but the schools ensure they are kept eligible to play ...
Do you see Saturday’s Final Four game between Syracuse and the University of North Carolina as an embodiment of some of the larger problems in college sports?
What it embodies is the extent to which the bargain between the university and the student is a corrupt bargain for the student. Because in both cases, but especially the UNC case, at the heart of it was what they call academic fraud.
Basically, the athletes at UNC were not getting a legitimate education. They were taking these fake classes to stay eligible — they were majoring in eligibility. At Syracuse, for all the time they spent investigating, ultimately the main bad thing that happened was that an academic counselor took a test for Fab Melo, which is also a form of academic fraud. They embody the way the system deprives athletes — especially football and men’s basketball players — of the education that they’re promised.
Has the NCAA’s handling of the punishments relating to these cases exposed its underlying profit motive?
Well, of course. Take the example down in
Louisville, where they self-imposed a penalty to try and lighten the load. Or at
Ohio State, where they basically said players got impermissible benefits, but they weren’t going to get penalized until the following season because they had to play in the Sugar Bowl where there was a lot of money at stake. UNC is sort of the same thing. It’s hard to believe that the NCAA doesn’t already know what it’s going to do, what the problem is, but here we are in the Final Four, and everybody’s going to try to ignore it until they get through it and all they money is made. The ACC is getting somewhere around $40 million because of their success in this tournament.
A classic defense that you hear from supporters of the NCAA is that the scholarship athletes are getting a free education and thus don’t deserve additional compensation. How do you respond to that line of thinking?
I think it’s off-base for two reasons. The first is that athletes should have rights. Part of those rights are economic rights. They should get what their value is. Most of them won’t go pro. They have this tiny window to make some money on their athletic ability and they’re deprived of that.
So you could say, “OK, they’re getting a scholarship that’s going to be worth a couple hundred thousand dollars, and more importantly, they’re going to get an education.” But the truth is that when you’re a college athlete — especially
if you’re a football or men’s basketball player — you are on the campus to generate revenue for the university. That’s your job, and that comes before academics every time. You don’t get to pick the majors that you want, you don’t get to pick the classes that you want, you miss tons of classes because you’re traveling. That’s what you’re there for. So the idea that they’re supposed to be satisfied with an education, which is basically substandard at best, is kind of a fraudulent argument.
