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College sports are all about who can kiss eighteen year old butts the best. It isn't about who can draw the best X's and O's. The Boise State coach just proved that. He won with two plays that kids have run on the schoolyards at recess for years. Nothing complicated or new about the two most exciting plays of the 2006 bowl games thus far. The schools with the big budgets, the nicer facilities, the high paid staffs, and the big arenas can awe an eighteen year old high school senior better than the smaller schools.

We know this beyond any doubt. College sports is not about student-athletics and education regardless of how they try to camouflage it. The NCAA can run all the commercials about "turning pro in something other than sports" all the want to. It is a charade for most of the athletes.

How many times have we watched a college senior fail to make one grammatically correct complete sentence during an interview. If you can't speak the language, you certainly can't write the language. But then how much writing does one have to do on a multiple choice test. None! Just color in the selected square.

We see the results of the successful players that make it to the pros, but we never see any followup studies about the multitudes of NCAA athletes that fail to make the next level. Wonder why? Perhaps if we did, the taxpayers that funded their four or five year stay at the college might realize that it was a bad investment except for the entertainment value the young man or woman afforded the rabid fans. Meanwhile a real student-athlete that could have performed adequately on the field and in the classroom never got the chance.

Our military academies are the only institutions of higher learning that truly have student-athletes today. They do not compromise their standards for the sake of winning athletic contests.

College sports is not about student-athletics and education regardless of how they try to camouflage it. The NCAA can run all the commercials about "turning pro in something other than sports" all the want to. It is a charade for most of the athletes.

What are you basing this on? The facts don't back up this broad assertion. The graduation rate for Division I student-athletes is 77%, compared to 63% for non student-athletes. Even in Division I-A football, the graduation rate is slightly better than for non-athletes, at 66%. Men's basketball is below average, with a graduation rate of 59%.