by Curmie

The first part of the title above ought to be self-evident.  Far too many universities operate as sports franchises with a few academic courses offered on the side.  This, despite the fact that most athletic departments lose money despite TV revenue, ticket sales, etc.  Even average (by intercollegiate standards) athletes are likely to get a full ride: tuition and fees, room and board. 

And that’s not counting NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals which often run well over $100,000 a year for even average players in a major sport at a Division I school.  High-end programs in football and basketball get bowl games or in-season (or pre-season) trips to tournaments in exotic locales.  The best student physicist at the school might get travel money to a conference or something like that, but there’s not going to be a lot of hanging out on the beach on someone else’s dime, much less a tuition waiver and a six-figure income.

NIL also means that at least some elite athletes in football and basketball are shopping their services to the highest bidder.  Every time a star player enters the transfer portal and moves to a different university, the accusations pour forth from the new school’s competitors that they’re “buying players.”  Some of those allegations are simply sour grapes; many (most?) aren’t.  Of course, the practice has existed under the table for decades, but NIL has certainly exacerbated the problem.

Then, there are the tutors, the luxurious housing, and other forms of special treatment.  A goodly number of athletes, of course, wouldn’t be accepted at Duke or Stanford, or even at the University of Northern South Dakota at Hoople (extra credit if you get that reference), if they didn’t have a jump-shot or some equivalent skill in another sport. 

Bolenciecwcz, the dim-witted football star of James Thurber’s “University Days” (1933) who finally is able to name a mode of transportation after professor and fellow students alike prompt him to say “train,” is a satirical construction, of course, but satire works only if there is the ring of truth.  And I suspect the scandal at the University of North Carolina a few years back is more likely the tip of the iceberg than an anomaly.

I’ve had a number of students in my classes who actually were the “scholar-athletes” the NCAA pretends anyone with an athletic “scholarship” is.  There was the multi-year all-conference tennis player who was also a fine student and an excellent actress (she got a graduate degree and now works for one of the country’s leading regional theatres), the middle-distance runner who missed the Olympic team by a fraction of a second and did quite well in my non-major class, the starting safety on the football team who asked for permission to miss class because he would be interviewing with one of the nation’s top med schools (he got in).

But there are plenty of examples in the other direction, as well.  There was the basketball player who couldn’t write a coherent paragraph about literally anything.  There was the football player who complained about his grade in an acting course because he had nothing in common with the character I’d given him in a scene; the character was complaining to his professor about his grade.  (Sigh.)  Another football player whispered disgusting sexual advances to one of the women in an acting class when I was working with other students.  (He came to regret that.)

My… erm… “favorite,” though, was the star football player who missed about a half dozen more classes than department policy allowed.  There were three hour-exams in the course: he got a D on one and failed the other two.  He didn’t write either of the required short papers, and he got something like a 31 on the final exam.  He subsequently showed up at my office, position coach in tow, to protest his failing grade because one (yes, just one) of his absences should have been excused.  His excuse: he was in court… being convicted of an E felony.  (Sigh.)

All that said, it would be easy to make a case that athletes, especially those in sports other than football and basketball, are the most exploited students on campus.  Unless, like LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne, what you’re selling is that you look great in a bikini or a miniskirt, you’re not going to get as good an NIL deal as the backup quarterback does.  Plus, most sports require that you’ll play more than a dozen or so games; baseball and softball, for example, generally have about 50 games in a regular season.  That means, among other things, more road games, and that means more travel, more time out of class, etc.

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