It's time to emphasize student-athletes

The outrage has begun to ebb slightly, as it always does. Georgia has been tossed from postseason play, St. Bonaventure has accepted the resignation of its president. Conference tournaments are in full swing (many are already finished) and soon we will park ourselves in front of the flat screen for Selection Sunday. Having already displayed a brief spasm of anger at academic fraud, we can go back to watching basketball games.

And I'm all for that. I love the NCAA Tournament. Looks like I'll be shipping off to a regional for Sports Illustrated next week and I can't wait to find out on Sunday which teams will be playing in it. One of the great joys of my profession is looking at the regional brackets and carving out storylines for each team that I might be reporting on. Is Texas good enough? Is the Indiana team I wrote about in January really this unpredictable and is Mike Davis not as solid a coach as I thought he was? Can Carmelo Anthony carry Syracuse all the way to the Final Four before he leaves for the NBA? Ah, man, I can hardly wait.

I feel the same way on certain Saturdays in the fall, when college football upsets are bouncing all over the screen. I have sat in press boxes across the country, awaiting a kickoff while watching the Top 25 dismantle before my eyes.

However, it would seem that college sports are approaching another of those periodic crossroads at which we all sit back and analyze how to best make a wildly hypocritical system work properly. Beloved, yes. But also hypocritical. On the surface, colleges exist to educate people. Football and basketball programs exist to entertain audiences, earn money and raise the profile of the school. Eminem and Pavarotti have more in common than universities and the big-time sports they indulge.

What happens is obvious. Schools can only compete by building their programs with athletes who don't belong there. Often the "student-athletes'' have difficulty staying eligible, creating the need for cheating. Often they have little money, creating the need for cheating. Often their paths cross with those of the local constables, creating the need for... lawyers.

The cure most often put forth to make big-time college sports healthy is to pay the players. The operative word is "stipend,'' as if $200 a month is going to make a kid headed for the NFL study on Thursday night. Would a monthly stipend have discouraged Villanova players from running a phone card scam? Maybe, but I believe that situation had more to do with the players' sense of entitlement than with empty pockets.

Another suggested cure: Just use all the BCS and NCAA Tournament TV money to turn the big schools and conferences into minor leagues for the NBA and NFL, respectively. In fact, I believe this is the most likely scenario for football. I believe we are not far from the day when the 30-50 wealthiest and most powerful schools in Division I-A break off from the NCAA and form their own super league. This way they can keep all the Bowl money for themselves and not worry about NCAA rules. The impact on basketball and other "non-revenue'' sports is yet to be determined, but trust me, smart people are working on it every day.

Here's my idea: Colleges and universities need to be forced -- and force themselves -- to field teams with athletes who would stand a reasonable chance of being admitted to the school if they were not athletes. This is a massively grey area. Universities admit many "special'' students every year. Musicians, artists, etc. Well, fewer of those "special" students should be athletes, and those athletes who are admitted should be closer to the norm than they are today. NCAA minimums are laughable. If this change results in a poorer quality of play, fine. I think the good people of Nebraska will still fill Memorial Stadium to see student-athletes play. (Actually, based on Frank Solich's record, it would appear that Nebraska is employing fewer marginal students these days than in Tom Osborne's tenure). Fans will adjust.

Sure, schools with lower admissions standards would have an advantage because their recruiting pool would be larger. But that's always been the case. However, schools with modest standards are now sinking to new lows and using back-door programs. Also, the schools and the NCAA need a much more reliable system of tracking graduation rates to determine which programs are really trying to form adults.

This will anger the NBA and NFL, which would lose their free minor leagues. Without colleges, who will go into the inner cities, recruit 17-year-olds and train them? Without colleges, who will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars finding high school quarterbacks, feed and house them for four years (or three) and then deliver them to the scouting combine? Nobody will. Tough. Let the major leagues form their own minor leagues and groom their own stars. Let college sports try to be college sports, instead of something else altogether.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden is a regular contributor to SI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.

 

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