Newspaper Sports Column

David Smith, The Southerner
Henry W. Grady HS (Atlanta, Ga.)

Time to take the ‘college’ out of college sports

They build facilities exclusively for their athletes, costing up to tens of millions of dollars. They spare no expense and have no scruples when trying to lure a potential player to their teams. They pay their coaches two to five times what the president of the United States makes. They care only about how their players perform on the field.

I’m talking about the leaders of college sports. It’s way past time to unveil the façade and realize that college football and basketball are nothing more than minor leagues for the NFL and NBA. They have all the characteristics of professional sports organizations. It’s time they start being structured with the same accountability that professional sports teams have.

College sports should become a separate profit-making entity with no connection to the university and its mission of academics. The only sports that should exist within colleges are intramurals. The big-business sports the universities are currently paying for should become in name what they practice—minor leagues for professional sports. Of course, athletes can attend the nearby university if they so choose. Or, like many college athletes do today, they can concentrate solely on their sports instead of being forced to take geology classes with nicknames like “Rocks for Jocks.”

No one but the most deluded deny that there are serious problems in college athletics. In 1997, Walter Byers, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association for more than 30 years, published a book titled Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes. Current NCAA president Miles Brand recently stated that athletic spending was out of control. If two presidents of the NCAA—presidents of the organization that repeats over and over how college sports represent the “ideals of amateurism”—have blasted the culture of college sports so openly, we know this problem isn’t something that will disappear overnight.

Look no further than the average six-year graduation rates of college football and basketball programs for more evidence: 55 and 44 percent respectively, and even lower for most of the top teams. In Division I football alone, there are approximately 13,500 players per class. The NFL takes around 250 players in the draft every year. That leaves 13,250 of former athletes looking for work. And if almost half of them don’t have a degree—and some of the rest have only an academic degree in name, having taken the easiest classes—how are college sports helping these athletes?

Not only do they not care about their athletes’ well-being after their playing time is over, universities’ athletic programs are taking money away from academics—which, lest we forget, was the reason universities were founded in the first place.

According to a 2001 study by the NCAA, the vast majority of school’s athletic programs lose money. A study by the Temple faculty in the late ‘90s found that their football program was losing about $4 million a year. Schools fund their athletic deficits by using money from the general university fund, which is usually used for things like paying professors’ salaries and giving need-based aid.

But the NCAA doesn’t lose money—far from it. The organization takes in more than $500 million a year. And athletic directors and coaches don’t lose either: they make up to $2.5 million a year. All the while, academics, the purpose of attending college, suffer.

There are two intelligent arguments for how to solve these problems: reform within college sports and making college sports separate from the university, as I have advocated. My reason for supporting the second proposal is simple—reform has been tried for decades, and college sports are worse now than ever.

For example, the NCAA once passed a bill limiting outrageous spending on coaches. They were promptly hit with a $54.5 million anti-trust lawsuit. The NCAA passed a bill in January that would reduce teams’ scholarships if they don’t graduate enough players. But they have no way to keep classes like Jim Harrick Jr.’s “Principles of Basketball” out of colleges’ course catalogs. Reform measures have the right goal in mind, but fail because, as a Knight Commission report advocating sports reform stated, the NCAA’s “dual mission of keeping sports clean while generating millions of dollars in broadcasting revenue for member institutions creates a near-irreconcilable conflict.”

The solution, therefore, is to take the “college” out of college sports. Once you get past the nostalgic “you can’t get rid of college sports” view, this proposal makes a lot of sense. We shouldn’t pretend intercollegiate sports are “educational” when so few athletes are being educated, and sports are taking money away from real education. Let sports be sports, business be business, and education become education.