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 Student-athletes? Spare me
Posted: Wednesday June 23, 1999 04:50 PM
Having attained a certain age, here are the four things in life that I positively know will never work: 1.
Communism
Understand, they can play sports in college, but it is simply beyond the capacity of avaricious men to create a fair system wherein genuine amateur students play so that they might accumulate great sums of money and prestige for their repositories of higher learning. The hapless officials can adapt, adjust, mix-and-match, shake it up, correct, and even start over from scratch, but big-time college athletics in America cannot work. The term student-athlete is simply an oxymoron, and you can't build any system that is grounded on a basic contradiction. The NCAA, which was founded by Teddy Roosevelt essentially to keep Ivy Leaguers from maiming each other on the gridiron, ends this century as it began, seeking vainly to keep educators from cheating one another. Currently, the NCAA is striving to change its academic eligibility requirements for athletes, and also it is considering the possibility of barring freshmen in basketball from playing on the varsity. The need to amend its current entrance requirements was forced on the NCAA by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the minimum of 820 on the SATs was discriminatory to African-American athletes. Obviously, the only other entrance standard you can apply is one involving high-school grades, and that can only result in even greater widespread corruption. After all, we know that now, even in college, athletes' grades are routinely fictionalized. The current scandal at the University of Minnesota, where it was disclosed that hundreds of learned term papers were churned out for basketball players by a scholarly ghostwriter, is surely not only Minnesota's bad luck. It is common knowledge that all over the country athletes are greased through mock courses by a fifth column of professors who are jock sycophants. Even in the finest colleges, the athletes have grades far below the rest of the student body. Take the SATs out of the equation, and the fraudulent system would only expand in its crookedness, for it is wishful thinking verging on Pollyanna not to believe that high schools would cheat on grade-reporting in order to assure a star athlete a college scholarship. The only way we will ever get an honest collegiate athletic system is to let each college set its own academic standards for athletes. If State U. wants to let in eighth-grade dropouts to stock the football team, fine, let it. Then, if your school doesn't want to play State U., OK, cross them off your schedule. I'm sorry, but after a century of seeing that the NCAA way simply doesn't work, I have concluded that honest prostitution is vastly preferable to pious hypocrisy . As for denying freshman basketball players the opportunity to play on the varsity so that they might acclimate themselves better to the college life, this is noble do-gooding based on the premise that a young basketball player who goes to college is ... there to go to college. The point of American big-time college sports is eligibility, not education, and until eligibility is removed as the issue, all the earnest talk is ... well, it's just academic. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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