I have been advocating for years for college athletes to not only get paid, but “go pro” at the earliest opportunity.
I did so in “The Categorical Imperative to Pay Student Athletes Just Got Stronger,” March 28, 2014, “Student Athletes Make Billions (for Colleges) but Most Graduate Poor … and Dumb,” January 16, 2014, and “Reggie Bush Forfeits Heisman Trophy,” September 16, 2010.
The following is an excerpt from the last. It highlights the imperatives that compel my advocacy.
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There’s nothing amateur about college Football. It’s a multibillion-dollar business for Christ’s sake!
More to the point, the people generating its revenues are not the university presidents, athletics directors, or coaches who, incidentally, make millions of dollars in salary and endorsement deals. Instead, they are the poor, mostly black athletes whose raw talent colleges exploit to pack 100,000 fans into their stadiums on game day.
I have always felt that it’s tantamount to modern-day slavery for colleges to recruit poor and, all too often, uneducated athletes just to play Football and not compensate them for their services, especially considering they rarely get an education.
But this indentured servitude is made much worse by branding these poor players as cheaters for accepting a little cash on the side. Mind you, those offering the cash are often boosters just trying to make life easier for the players to enable them to perform better – on the field. …
The hypocrisy inherent in this exploitation is beyond shameful.
Colleges should compensate student-athletes in direct proportion to the way NFL teams compensate their players. They could then reallocate the scholarship money they spend recruiting jocks to fund financial aid for poor (black) students who aspire to be more than professional athletes.
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Then, of course, there’s the open secret that colleges enable top athletes to take fake “paper classes” to maintain their eligibility to play sports. Former federal prosecutor Kenneth Weinstein threw this into stark relief with an independent report dated October 22, 2014, which found that the University of North Carolina (UNC) perpetrated this academic fraud on its so-called student-athletes for 18 years.
[Learning Specialist] Mary Willingham’s job was to help athletes who weren’t quite ready academically for the work required at UNC at Chapel Hill, one of the country’s top public universities.
But she was shocked that one couldn’t read. And then she found he was not an anomaly.
(CNN, January 8, 2014)
Arguably, tens of thousands of students have graduated from big-sports colleges like UNC with degrees that are utterly worthless, much like the degrees thousands of suckers graduated with from Trump University.
Incidentally, former governor Mitt Romney held a press conference earlier today to warn Republicans against nominating Donald Trump for president. In doing so, he cited Trump University as one of many schemes this huckster used to scam gullible Americans.
As it happens, some of us have been warning for years that getting a degree from this university is like buying swampland in the Florida Everglades. My commentary, “Trump for President?! Don’t Be a Sucker,” April 8, 2011, affirms this.
Meanwhile, President Obama makes quite a show of honoring Division 1 NCAA championship teams. In fact, he did so on Wednesday with the University of Alabama Crimson Tide Football team.
Mind you, many of the student-athletes he honors at the White House are incapable of reading or writing at grade-school level, much less at college level. The shame is that Obama has never bothered to decry this fact.
But I had this untenable fact in mind when I advised Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones as follows:
It’s unconscionable to continue exploiting these athletes as nothing more than indentured servants – most of whom end up even more indebted, if not indentured, after their service.
After all, they not only graduate with degrees not worth the paper they’re written on; they actually enter college aiming to do nothing but make themselves more marketable to professional teams…
Classes could indeed prove pointless for Jones now that he’s a national champion quarterback. The only lesson left for him to learn is that he must strike while the iron is hot and go pro.
(“Ohio Buckeyes Trample Ducks to Win NCAA Football National Championship,” January 13, 2015)
Therefore, imagine my consternation when Cardale ignored my advice and announced his intent to return to Ohio State. I duly commented in “WTF! Ohio’s Cardale Jones Opts to Stay in School…?” January 17, 2015, which includes the following instructive points for other student-athletes.
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- Playing in the NFL is no more anathema to getting an education than playing in the NCAA, especially considering the amount of time student-athletes dedicate to sports at Division 1 colleges, like Ohio State.
The best way to prepare for a career in the NFL is to play in the NFL — as any first-round draft pick, who completed his four-years of indentured servitude in college, will attest.- It smacks of a perverse form of paternalism to question a 21-year-old Football player’s mental and emotional ability to handle all that comes with suddenly making millions (especially if he grew up dirt poor — as Cardale did). After all, teenage entertainers handle the same every day. At least nobody can question the 6’-5”/250-pound Cardale’s physical ability to handle playing in the NFL.
- Cardale claims he sought advice from family members and close friends about whether to go pro or stay in school. But this is unfair, almost to the point of being cruel. After all, even if they wanted to say, “take the money and run, fool,” they probably feared coming across like parasites who just can’t wait to live off Cardale, his education be damned.
- Cardale claims he also sought advice from his coach. But, for obvious reasons, his coach has more vested interest in having him stay in school than his teachers.
- Cardale would have been far better served if he had sought advice from men who have been in his shoes, like superstars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant – neither of whom ever spent a day in college.
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I ended by wishing him well. But, sure enough:
Nothing has been the same since.
Despite beating out J.T. Barrett for the starting job in camp, Jones was benched after starting the season 7-0, and his draft stock has steadily slid. He’s not expected to go in the first round and may not be taken until the third and final day of the April draft.
(Associated Press, February 25, 2016)
This meant that, after foregoing a rookie NFL contract last year for 4 years, $22-25 million, Cardale ended up struggling to get one this year for 4 years, $3-5 million.
Then, adding injury to insult, came this:
The 2016 NFL scouting combine is pretty much over for Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones, who suffered a hamstring injury…
‘I think the combine’s going to be a good time to show what I can do’ [Jones said]. Now that chance is gone.
(Yahoo! Sports, February 27, 2016)
Frankly, all I can say now is, I pity this fool.
Related commentaries:
Reggie Bush…
Student-athletes gradate poor … and dumb
Trump U suckers…