Other Notes
It's rather quaint the way University administrators and NCAA officials declare just how wonderful and pure is the devotion of their students to athletics. They play for the love of the sport; they aspire to greatness. They want to improve themselves. They want to be true to their school. They want to learn about leadership and team-building and self-sacrafice and self-denial and goal-setting and how to give everything you've got, for a higher purpose.
That kind of sentiment is for saps, of course, and the Administrators and Coaches and NCAA officials know it. If they claim otherwise, let's make it simple for them: prove that you believe in the values you insist your students must believe in-- you now work for nothing. You are volunteers. You get no money, no limos, no first-class flights, no suites, no dinners at the top restaurants. You too can express your purity and join in this ethereal expression of academic holiness.
Don't be too quick to dismiss the idea. I mean, it is not likely at all that it's going to happen, but not because it makes sense to do it the way we do it now. It will not happen because of simple, unencumbered ruthless human greed. There is no body or institution or person who is in a position to prevent the NCAA would perpetuating their positions of privilege indefinitely. There is a symbiotic relationship between college administrators, sponsors, coaches, and politicians, and they will all circle the wagons and roll out the big guns if anyone threatens the status quo.
The players, as you know, are this pure and devoted and selfless. They play for nothing. In fact, if they do accept money or gifts, they can be fined and suspended and expelled. But their coaches are among the highest paid state employees in the nation. The head of the NCAA famously drives a Porche and lives in luxury.
What's my problem with NCAA sports in America? Nothing. Just drop the pretense and make it what it really is: a professional league. And pay your players and provide them with decent insurance and other benefits, and cut out all the bullshit. Strip all of the Universities and Colleges of all the professional sports-- let them go back to amateur athletics organized purely, solely, and exclusively by and for amateurs.
And athletic scholarships should be terminated, period. The entire idea is stupid. What is an institution of higher learning doing paying for people to come play football or basketball or to swim for them? Who says they should? Who says it wouldn't be a better world if Universities went back to the business of education?
Let's get rid of the vampires and pimps. And let's have a string of institutions that are actually dedicated to higher learning: to producing smart people. Let's value them on the basis of how good they are at doing that. And let's put cost controls on them so that the incredibly obscene rise in tuition costs (fueled by perverse application of federal student loan guarrantees) stops.