Are american college athletes exploited?

[downtown]

For those of you who are unfamiliar, here is the tl;dr version of how major US college athletics works.

NCAA football and men's basketball make ungodly amounts of money...hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This money is spread out among TV stations, and member universities, which use it to fund the rest of their athletic departments, and also give back money to the general scholarship funds. Coaches and administrators in this system make a lot of money as well (usually more than most professors at the same school).

Many sportswriters have recently claimed that the students in this process are exploited, since they do not directly get financial gain. Athletes are forbidden to accept wages for their athletic abilities, although they are given full academic scholarships, and stipends for food, housing and transportation. Several students (and organizations) try to cheat by finding ways around this (paying players), and if caught, are given stiff punishments.

Some say that the fact that schools can sell jerseys, and that video games can use player likeness in video games without paying players, is wrong. Others say that because athletes are WAY less likely to be able to into college without sports, and because the college system greatly increases earning potential whether they are playing sports professionally or not, it isn\t really a bad deal...but akin to an internship program (like student teaching). They also argue that paying players would price many schools out of being able to field football teams, and could lead to increased corruption in the sport.

This is shameless link hogging, but here is an article I recently wrote arguing that athletes are not exploited. Do you think they are?
http://www.landgrantholyland.com/20...or-college-football-player-that-bad-of-a-deal

(PS dont argue that sports are terrible and should be banned. If you went to a public US college, you have nice things in large part because of football)

 

[cardgame]

I don't think they're exploited, but if they do end up getting paid they should be paid equally by the NCAA as opposed to the MLB option where (If I understand correctly) rich teams can get the best players.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I think it is incredibly reprehensible with no viable solution in sight. The least they should do is pay the professional athletes a reasonable stipend while eliminating what is largely a pretense of them getting a college education, but I would just as soon see the complete demise of big-time sports in all colleges.

 

[_random_]

I agree with the points raised in downtown's awesome article.

 

[Save_Ferris]

What can we do?

Sports are ruining college education, but how can we stop college sports? I guess we need to have restrictions on budgets and salaries, but that's still hard.

 

[innonimatu]

Why do americans attribute so much importance to college athletes anyway? And pour so much money into it? It seems like one more of those uniquely american things... almost everywhere else in the world college athletes are amateurs who mostly run their clubs as cheap hobbies.

 

[downtown]

What can we do?

Sports are ruining college education,

How do you figure that?

 

[Formaldehyde]

It does provide a great excuse to engage in binge drinking nearly every single Fall Saturday afternoon. But other than provide a revenue stream that largely now just pays thousands of females who are good at sports to attend college for free and act as a minor league for the NFL and the NBA, what else does it do?

 

[GhostWriter16]

I'd rather see "Yes and players are paid based on how well they play during the year; by the NCAA."

 

[downtown]

It does provide a great excuse to engage in binge drinking nearly every single Fall Saturday afternoon. But other than provide a revenue stream that largely now just pays thousands of females who are good at sports to attend college for free and act as a minor league for the NFL and the NBA, what else does it do?

Lots of things!

One, (ill look for the study), a relationship has been shown between athletic success and academic quality of student recruiters for smaller schools. your athletic department is the largest branding and marketing program any US college has, and getting the name of the school out helps all students (not just meatheads) learn about what the school has to offer.

Ball State's average ACT score jumped by nearly 2 points after they made their first bowl game. My original college, American University, had their score jump by over 2 after they made the NCAA tourney for the first time, so now hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of American got to take a look.

It's also perhaps the single biggest engine for alumni donations, which drive the general scholarship fund, and academic programming. Football helped power Penn State, Florida State, Ohio State and Nebraska out of backwater type schools into strong, research orientated institutions. I'm sure it had a role in building your alma mater, back with Ga Tech was actually good.

I went to a college with nearly state of the art everythings, and football and basketball money had a LOT to do with that.

 

[downtown]

Why do americans attribute so much importance to college athletes anyway? And pour so much money into it? It seems like one more of those uniquely american things... almost everywhere else in the world college athletes are amateurs who mostly run their clubs as cheap hobbies.

Part of it is because we just love football. High School football brings in crowds of the thousands all over the US as well.

We dont really have a club system for most sports, so college sports are the only game in town for several US states. In the south you may live over 250, 300 miles from the nearest pro anything...so college fandom is even more passionate.

College sports interest tends to be highest in the midwest and the south, and lowest in the northeast.

 

[Arwon]

Yeah the lack of amateur and semi-professional level club sport in the United States seems to be a big difference with most other countries.

 

[History_Buff]

Why do americans attribute so much importance to college athletes anyway?

This. A thousand times this.

I've watched college football. I've watched college basketball. Neither of them strike me as significantly different from the professional leagues, or professionally interesting. The only people who care about college sports should be the students, parents, and staff of said college.

 

[JollyRoger]

The NCAA rules have always been out of wack in various ways. I had to go through a ton of paperwork just to run cross country my freshman year. I was good enough to be on the team, but not good enough to count towards the scholarship limit (there were very limited scholarships for the sport per NCAA rules). I had an academic scholarship that the NCAA wanted to count towards the athletic scholarship limit. We had to convince the NCAA that the academic scholarship was not in any way used to induce me to join the team. It is a pretty sad state of affairs that a STUDENT/athlete gets treated as if he is a student/ATHLETE, even when said STUDENT is a mediocre athlete on a very bad team (my high school team was better from spots 2 to 7) in a very minor sport.

As for the thread topic, I would support a little extra cash going to the athletes and for the big money sports, big payouts coming for those that play all 4 years of eligibility and graduate - such payouts being based on team and individual performance during the years of eligibility and maybe GPA.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I went to a college with nearly state of the art everythings, and football and basketball money had a LOT to do with that.

The Ivy League schools and many others manage to do a reasonably decent job of educating real students who actually qualify to attend without being the shills of professional sports.

I would much rather see collegiate sports return to being completely amateur extramural student activities with no athletic scholarships whatsoever, despite what it would mean to Ohio State and other universities which stress their semi-professional athletic departments far too much.

But as long as they do so, they should at least pay the semi-professional athletes at least something. The existing system is nothing but modern-day indentured servitude with the false promise they will actually get a diploma in many cases. That is what hurt Georgia Tech and similar colleges more than anything else. They don't have phys ed or communications majors where just about anybody can graduate.

 

[schlaufuchs]

This. A thousand times this.

I've watched college football. I've watched college basketball. Neither of them strike me as significantly different from the professional leagues, or professionally interesting. The only people who care about college sports should be the students, parents, and staff of said college.

If you think this then you mustn't follow the two sports very closely, especially since there is such an outrageously large discrepancy between the professional and collegiate levels in basketball, baseball, and football. Players are bigger, players are stronger, players are faster. The professional leagues are like college if only the top 100 players from college are allowed to play, and if instead of going to classes they spend all day working out, and they have 5-15 years of experience in the collegiate leagues to build off of. The huge discrepancy is why most rookies have such a hard time their first year or two in the first place.

To provide an example, next time you watch college football, look closely at top prospect running backs. I think these guys are where you can most easily see the discrepancies appear. I find the top prospect college runningbacks comically entertaining to watch because they often just run roughshod over opposing colleges' defenses because the average defensive lineman simply is not fast enough, big enough, or strong enough to stop them. This is why you see players like Mark Ingram, Toby Gerhart, or Reggie Bush just straight up pushing guys over and making defensemen look like fools. They don't get to do this as often when they get up into the NFL because defensive linemen especially, but also linebackers and safeties are much fast, much stronger, and, most importantly much smarter/better experienced than the everyday college defensemen. They know how to stop guys like this, and are big enough to not just get pushed over.

Anyway, I don't know where this rant is going.

As to my opinions. I think a lot of the lengths NCAA (and High School institutions too) goes to ensure the players in question aren't earning a salary while getting an education are absolutely ludicrous. Some excellent examples were posted in an earlier basketball thread by Kraznaya regarding how the NBA (and many of the scholar athlete instutions) are essentially designed to ensure that NBA players don't actually know how to take care of themselves once they make it into the NBA. However I do like the idea that the student athletes get most or all of their university education paid for them. I think this, fundamentally, is the purpose, in this day and age anyway, for college athletics; to provide many with the opportunity to receive an education that they would not have even been able to fathom otherwise. So, I guess my thoughts are that I don't think students should be paid as athletes, but I think a lot of the stupid biproducts of this concept should be abolished or fixed in some way.

 

[_random_]

The Ivy League schools and many others manage to do a reasonably decent job of educating real students who actually qualify to attend without being the shills of professional sports.

They have the benefit of booster legacies predating the invention of football. Even if it were possible for OSU or Stanford to adopt another business model, why would they want to? The current one is working pretty well.

 

[JollyRoger]

I'm sure the outcome of the Harvard-Yale game could influence donations on the margins.

 

[Formaldehyde]

They have the benefit of booster legacies predating the invention of football. Even if it were possible for OSU or Stanford to adopt another business model, why would they want to? The current one is working pretty well.

There are still thousands of colleges which will likely never have anybody make a pro football or basketball team. More power to them for not sacrificing their academic ethics just to have larger budgets and a terrible reason for alumni to contribute.

I only had one class with football players in it when I was going to Georgia Tech. They never came to class and turned in papers written by their tutors. The teacher read some of them in class while explaining why she was picked as their professor. Since she didn't have tenure, she had to pass them or get fired.

Even so, hardly any of them ever graduated. The easiest major was industrial management which was the only one that didn't require calculus, chemistry, and physics, so nearly all of them were enrolled in that department. But they still couldn't even manage to pass all their classes to graduate.

 

[emzie]

DT, do universities pay into insurance programs for athletes? Say for instance Bob is a future first-round NFL pick, but Bob has his knee totally destroyed while playing college football. Is Bob compensated in any way?