This Wall Street Journal piece by Buzz Bissinger is guaranteed to stir up controversy:
In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
That’s because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today’s times.
[. . .]
Who truly benefits from college football? Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma who make obscene millions. The players themselves don’t benefit, exploited by a system in which they don’t receive a dime of compensation. The average student doesn’t benefit, particularly when football programs remain sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing budgets to the bone.
If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don’t—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs.
The other big beneficiaries of the college football system is, of course, the NFL. Unlike baseball or NHL teams, it doesn’t have to maintain a “farm team” league or leagues to provide training and play opportunities for would-be professional football players. This burden, instead, is carried by the taxpayer as part of their share of higher education.
Of course most of the player benefit. I would be surprised if any one of the football players actually pay for their education. Not every player makes the NFL, therefore many players get a free education by playing football. I am sure there are other sports that offer free education, I think one of my acquaintances’ daughters is going to university in Nova Scotia on a hockey scholarship.
And I don’t know if the taxpayers in the USA are paying as much as Canada, that would be worth a good look.
Comment by Dwayne — May 9, 2012 @ 00:22
It’s a mixed blessing, however. Some players definitely benefit by getting a full or partial scholarship for their athletic talents, and get a useful degree out of it. That seems to be more true in sports other than basketball and football. Some schools manage to graduate less than half their football and basketball players (not counting the tiny minority who enter the pro draft in their junior year), and many of those degrees are in fields that do not offer much in the way of employment opportunities after university.
Worse, in some schools, the player loses all support immediately if they are dropped from the team, which gives the coach a huge lever to enforce attention to sports activities over academic work (it’s a cliché that the star players barely have to attend their “normal” classes, but the cliché came about for a reason).
It’s a rotten system, especially for students from poor families: in exchange for the chance at a possibly meaningless degree, they become indentured servants to their head coach for four years. The carrot of a lucrative pro career which less than 1% of all college athletes will ever get close to (and most of them will not be signed to contracts).
We don’t have gladiator schools — gladiators were technically slaves — we’ve found a subtler method of recruiting our gladiators.
Comment by Nicholas — May 9, 2012 @ 08:12