Posted on 12/08/2015 11:32:42 AM PST by EveningStar
College football players are gladiators of sorts. On the one hand, they are vastly underpaid for the risks they take as well as the profits they generate for the university and the scores of jobs they subsidize. On the other, in terms of college protocols, they are pampered and exempt from rules that other students follow. Being exploited and privileged is a bad combination.
For half a century, liberals have pointed out that football players should drop the amateur pretense, join a semi-pro club, and make the money they deserve -- given that their admissions, grades, and class attendance are exempt from university rules, and warp the college experience. Why do we treat as a privileged class those who so often do not meet university requirements that are non-negotiable for mostly indebted students without recourse to such lavish scholarships and subsidies? Entire majors, curricula, counseling, and protocols were invented simply to free football players from having to be students.
Athletes are also exempt from the new liberal policing. The university campus has grown into a scary place, given the Maoist tendencies to go after race/class/gender enemies of the people. But no institution is more guilty of such politically correct crimes than is the football team.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Is VDH trying to be funny here -- or is he making a (rare) dumb statement?
The only thing wrong with college sports is that students don’t get credits for participation. They get scholarships, but no credits. Music, dance, acting, etc. students get scholarships and credits. Those fields also deal with the physical and the cognitive.
Yeah I think he’s veering into PC territory himself here.
Be more like the baseball model and insert a minor league. Then the reality of only 1% of high school players make it to the big show will set in instead of every kid thinking he is going pro.
“Why do we treat as a privileged class those who so often do not meet university requirements that are non-negotiable for mostly indebted students without recourse to such lavish scholarships and subsidies?”
To quote Ned Beatty in the movie Back To School “It was a really large check”.
It’s all about the dollars folks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_4ocoJDVD8
I refuse to watch any college sports. They encapsulate the sanctimonious, unprincipled and money-grubbing nature of higher-ed. All supported by your tax dollars.
Although I am not a fan, I oppose the thought of ending college football
Football at all levels is ritual war that sucks up the nationalistic/villageistic/stateistic natural agression in young males. If football were to end, there would be skirmishes between town, actual battles between states and wars between regions
to maintain the harmony in America, the war preventing foot ball games must remain
then there are the fans. if there were no Georgia Tech ball cap or Tennessee car decal, these fans would have no identity. Texas would be in an uproar and Oklahoma would just disappear. The Red River would be truly red as the Indians were reconquered
Even though football makes verbose couch potatoes of many, better heart attacks than general war
Okay I guess I should have read the whole article before posting. Of course that’s not SOP around here. Anyway I think VDH might be using a little sarcasm here.
To my mind - admittedly not very mainstream - it is not clear how “institutions of higher learning” can peaceably coexist with a game that involves potentially getting repeated concussions and brain damage. Isn’t the point of education, to improve one’s brain and certainly not the opposite?
And having seen how the football team can blackmail a university, all the more reason not to have one.
VDH has written an analysis that is simply from a different perspective. This article requires the reader to make some simple leaps to see how affirmative action programs and the universities’ present institutions as counter-productive and illogical.
VDH’s regular readers will have no problem understanding his points.
Oldplayer
College football is the NFL’s minor league structure (to a lesser extent, ditto college hoops for the NBA), and much of the corruption in college revenue sports is due to this fact.
The NFL should institute a minor league structure for kids unsuited or uninterested in college, and it should proved a financial reward to the draftee’s college for each kid drafted, varying in amount depending on the position in the draft and whether or not the player makes the squad.
BTW, I have my own reasons for ending college football at my own alma mater . . . I am a Longhorn, and as we all know, we haven’t played college football at UT for nearly a decade.
Oldplayer
ping
What nobody wants to acknowledge is the fact that the vast majority of college athletic departments operate at a deficit, mainly due to the costs of the lesser sports (most of which are now federally mandated due to Title IX).
Football is the only sport which offers a university the opportunity of taking in more money than it spends; and that’s only to a relative small number of schools in Division 1.
If it wasn’t for football, most college sports would consist of intramural competition.
I*ve been saying it for half a century and I*m a conservative.
Neither.
Privileged: College football players can get away with almost anything ... even serious violent felonies.
Exploited: The universities don’t pay them, but make enormous sums of money from them. Only a very few become NFL players. Most of the rest get a useless degree, no meaningful education, and the back of the hand after four years.
Is it possible to “exploit” someone who just wants to play?
Not everyone plays football at a D-1 powerhouse. There are a lot of small schools in Division II, Division III and NAIA that play for the love of the sport.
>>If it wasn’t for football, most college sports would consist of intramural competition.
You say that like it would be a bad thing.
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