Re: “In college, the NCAA’s state-protected profiteering off of unpaid players’ physical sacrifice is increasingly criticized as well.”
Unpaid players?
Gimme a break. The average college football scholarship pays close to $50,000 per year (including summer school) in room, board, tuition, books, fees, and tutors. A good red shirt player can get a fifth year, which means one year of free grad school.
Only 2% of college football players are good enough to play even one full year in the NFL (minimum salary $465,000).
Bottom Line - getting a cost free bachelors degree seems like a reasonable deal for the other 98%.
Gimme a break. The average college football scholarship pays close to $50,000 per year (including summer school) in room, board, tuition, books, fees, and tutors.
You are spot on. I went to a top ten college and because of my good grades, I got a job as a "tutor." I was under very heavy pressure to make sure that my football playing student passed his classes (i.e., write his papers for him).
It is quite the pampered lifestyle these guys live. Girls, grades...they have everything they want, as long as they can perform on the field.
A free college education has no monetary value to NCAA players who have no interest in it and/or are incapable of really putting it to any use.
Fine. But let's limit the number of scholarships awarded each year to the number of players a college graduated the prior year with real degrees in real academic fields, honestly earned.
Then we'd see how the football powerhouses would fare with about 10 scholarship athletes on the field. The rest of today's "student athletes" could go back to whatever manual labor they are capable of doing. Or the NFL could set up its own farm system.