Yes

by Robert Tippett

Created on: February 03, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I want to state clearly that my decision is based solely on the present situation, the way college athletics are run these modern days. Long gone are the days of jalopies, felt school pennants, saddle oxford shoes and funny hats on students rooting their team to victory on fall Saturdays. Today season tickets are sold-out before the season begins, at the major football colleges, with contributors of $5,000 or more (to the school's athletic fund) getting primo tickets in return. A "gift" from the institution to the giver. Funny thing is most of those contributors are fans and not alumni, who write off the $5,000 as a charitable donation on their income tax.

Recently, at the University of Arkansas, one of their stellar performers, who came from an impoverished background, was investigated for driving an expensive car he certainly could not afford to pay for. Such a marque player cannot hold down a part-time job, go to school and still memorize playbooks and practice. There was a possibility that the NCAA would not let this player play in the school's bowl game. In the end, the player played in the bowl game, then immediately filed for the NFL draft as a junior, foregoing his senior year of college eligibility. This means Arkansas lost a player because he was tired of all the hard work, for no pay (at least pay that we know of).

Meanwhile, the bowl games and television revenues paid to the NCAA are in the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, each year! With these funds we see great new additions to the stadiums at these major football colleges. Most no longer seat a measly 40,000 fans and students, they seat 80-100k. This is so they can get more contributors in the seats. Add to that the schools also use the TV money for special box seating, for the school's really big contributors. Sky boxes and the like afford the VIPs waitresses, who bring them drinks and snacks so they don't miss a minute of football. Ordinary folk have to stand in long lines for a hot-dog at halftime and we won't mention the bathroom luxuries sky boxes afford those people who really have to go bad.

I read on-line that in the 2006-7 season, when lite-weight NCAA Division 1 school Boise State finished undefeated (13-0) and won the 2007 Fiesta Bowl (against perennial powerhouse Oklahoma), the athletic department for Boise took home a check for nearly $3 million. That is after (bold print) all their expenses were paid. Their total prize for winning was $4.5 million!

A report said that most of that money went into new press box and a luxury suite complex near their stadium at the university (where they have blue turf). That same report had this to say, "The school used about $500,000 for academic scholarships." They then quoted the assistant athletic director for media relations (how much do they pay that title?) as saying, "We wanted to be able to give back to the university on the academic side." Wasn't that sweet to think of the academic side for a moment like that?

Do they ever say any of the booty was divided between the college players who actually won the game, netting the windfall? Why isn't there some report like we see in the sports news following the World Series (baseball), where the winner's team members (all, A-Z) get either full or partial shares of the loot? Even the bat-boy gets something for all his donated time and effort, at the successful conclusion of a long hard season. Why shouldn't college football athletes (and basketball too) get paid and paid well, when they win the big one?

The point of all this is that with the money involved in college athletics, college athletics no longer has anything to do, really, with college. It has become a professional sport, where slave labor is used, while using the pretense that the rules say a college athlete has to be an amateur. Again, those days are long gone.

Amateur athletics at colleges and universities are now called intramural sports. Intramural sports do not require coaches to be hired, at $1 - 4 million a year, bringing in a staff requiring another million between them all, just to set up intricate plays (how much do professors get paid?). Intramural sports do not require athletic dorms, or 100,000-seat stadiums, or elaborate practice facilities, or 64 color-combo uniforms (home and away). Intramural sports mean simply this: college kids letting off some mental stress by running around on grass for an afternoon. It is the source for such sayings as, "Its not whether you win or you lose ...."

That is the no-brainer part about college athletics, again referring only to those of the major university variety. When you actually start to realize the first word in "college athletics" is "college," its hard not to recognize this word primarily means academics. This is so much so that they have to add "athletics" to the word "college," just to lead our focus out of the classroom, to the stadiums and gyms, which is not the usual focus when one says "college." It becomes very important to start looking back at the classroom focus, to see just how much major college athletics disrupts that setting. After all, without the word "college" we are only talking "athletics" here.

For all the money big time college football (and basketball) earns, practically nothing becomes a benefit for a student seeking to go to college to make something out of his or her life. A regular old "geek" student has to go into debt or have his or her parents go into debt, so that an advanced education can be obtained. Meanwhile, there are 50 or so "scholarships" given yearly by the school's athletic department, to boys who may or may not be academic scholars, on a college-university level. It is a shame, especially with college tuitions doubling over the last decade, reaching phenomenal levels.

So, to conclude this line of thought, yes college athletics should be paid; but (a big but), they should not be attending a college to play professional sports. As riotous as the $5,000 a year contributor fans will probably become, all of these major "college" teams should become the semi-pro teams they really are. Model them after Major League Baseball's minor leagues. Schools can sell all of the infrastructure built by athletic directors to new owners for these teams (for a pretty penny) and turn that money into real scholarship programs for real students. What we now call students can then focus entirely on "playing pro ball" and be paid. They can play more than four years too; and, if the NFL has to fill for an injury need, call the teams you have a contracted allegiance with. They will send up a center or wide receiver instantly. Buying and selling human beings is still slavery, but when you actually pay the slaves well they smile more.

Most importantly, this new way we won't be hearing any more news reports about former NFL stars, supposedly graduates of major universities (at least attendance for four-five years), who since have fallen into troubling financial times. We won't hear that someone took them for all they had earned so badly that they have to publicly announce they were duped because they cannot read or write. Don't laugh, it has happened for real twice that I know of.

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