Time to let college athletes major in their sports

                    

	Carnell Williams left Auburn without graduating but did receive invaluable preparation for his NFL career. Doug Benc/Getty Images
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Another school year is upon us, and a fresh round of academic hookie-dookie is surely  brewing at college sports powerhouses across the land, so perhaps it's time to contemplate removing the "student" from the "student-athlete" equation.

Voluntarily.

I began to ponder this notion after a recent incident at Auburn in which two department heads resigned in the wake of an investigation into 18 members of the 2004 football team receiving high grades in classes where little or no work, or even attendance, was required. These classes were available to all students as well, but  giving athletes an E-Z Pass in the interests of maintaining their eligibility is nothing new. The long, shabby tradition has cast clouds upon not only Auburn -- the most so-cited school in the SEC -- but other fine institutions of higher learning such as Minnesota, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio State and UNLV among others.

According to the latest NCAA report, graduation rates for Division I student-athletes have hit historic highs (62 percent), but numbers can be as hollow as an old tree stump (see: steroid-inflated stats and records or the expertly sauteed books of crooked corporations like Enron). Student-athletes may be graduating, but is a degree earned with the help of unscrupulous professors worth the parchment it's scribbled on? How much will it be worth to some hotshot running back after he fails to pan out in the pros? Does anyone much care at that point?

The NCAA can pull scholarships to hell and back to penalize this nonsense, but human beings will still expend more energy getting around inconvenient rules than working within their strictures, especially when glory and lucre are to be won. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to culture, but you can't make him think. So if a goodly number of top college athletes are going to go through the motions simply for the sake of maintaining their eligibility, why not put an end to the sleazy charade and give them the option of declaring their chosen sport as their major? Let them concentrate all of their time and energy on training, studying the playbook, practicing, traveling, playing and learning from their coaches with an eye toward a pro career.

How is seeking to make a lucrative living playing football, basketball or baseball -- multibillion-dollar industries -- any different than training for a career as an actor or singer? Why are sports still considered an adjunct to schoolin'  when they enjoy such oversized status in the world, not to mention the role of NCAA cash cow?

Much of lower education is a matter of enduring an array of subjects that are thrown at your intellectual wall to see what sticks and inspires. That process should be over by the time one is of college age. If it isn't, and one wants to be exposed to new subjects, fine. I just fail to see the value of forcing an academically disinterested athlete to take a full course load, especially when his school has more interest in his performance on the field.

If an athlete wants an education in another subject, let him or her declare a co-major. Those who truly wish to be scholars will be scholars -- we all engage much more fully in things we genuinely want to do -- but academic performance will not affect one's ability to play sports. This will remove the considerable pressure on professors to award inflated grades to superstars who sit at the back of the room picking their teeth, tossing paper planes or ogling babes, if they even bother to show up at all. It will also put a lot of term-paper ghostwriters and test-takers out of business, but so be it.

This is a matter of pure choice, in which one takes full responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. If we must insist on saving people from themselves, let's make the first step one of simple awareness. Before anyone declares himself a football major at Auburn or a hoops major at Arizona, he should be handed the cold, hard facts: You have a roughly one in 12,000 chance of becoming a pro. The average career lasts in the vicinity of five years.

Those who get injured, cut or fail to get drafted or signed by a pro team will go back to square one with everyone else and start figuring out how to earn enough scratch to pay for an education in another skill. There are no guarantees of success in any chosen field. Welcome to the real world. Still game?

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