Sports Scholarships

Sport scholarships is a big can of worms as they say.  Every time the subject comes up, depending on the nexus of the conversation, people have deeply entrenched viewpoints.  They often create controversy because both sides have valid points of view that cannot be easily resolved.   This is often because neither side sees a middle ground.

Academics

Now this is one subject that is not usually discussed.  Most people ignore this bad boy, but not me.

Scholarships are being given to students who are not qualified to attend the institution, period.  Ofttimes, they are so academically unqualified that they have get special classes prior to admittance in order to meet the basic entrance requirements set by the NCAA, let alone the actual institution.

Now, I am an advocate that higher education should be available for everyone who wants it.  With 25% of high school graduates going to college now days, the bar already is not that high.  That is not the issue here though.  If an institution has a minimum entrance requirement, they should adhere to them.  If they make an exception for their scholar athletes they are admitting one of two things:

• Admitting that their entrance requirements are ridiculous (highly unlikely) – or –
• Admitting that they are “hiring” the scholar athletes with no real attempt to trade an education for their play.  And any degree will be relatively meaningless.  This is especially true in the case of the “one and done” basketball players.

As long as the institutions of higher learning do not hold their athletes to the same levels of educational requirements that they do the rest of their students, they continue to risk the constant scrutiny and claims brought on by the fact that these athletes are not true students.

The solution is simple.  The NCAA should require that all scholar athletes should be real students meeting the standard minimum requirements for student enrollment.

College as minor leagues

In the case of football and men’s basketball, and to a lesser degree women’s basketball, college acts as the minor league for the pro sport.  As such, it is extremely visible and extremely lucrative.  The sport has the cache of being affiliated with an institution, the athlete gets essentially room and board, and the professional sport gets their athletes “educated”, trained, and winnowed for free.

Everyone wins – except for the athletes.  Not only do they get nothing, except in the rare case and education, but they have to go to school on top of it.

Obviously this is not true of all sports.  Minor sports, where the money is not huge there is no real incentive to use the institution as the free training ground.  Other major sports such as baseball, soccer, and hockey have well-established minor league programs that keeps the college system from being used as the minor league system.  But then again these sports, by and large, do not generate the revenue of the sports described above.

This creates an environment where neither the colleges nor the professional sports want to see any change.  The colleges are making money and the pro sports are getting the athletes trained for free.

But the reality is that were we to make our college athletes really students, would we not then have a lot of athletes no longer willing or capable of going to college?  I believe so.  The only real solution would be to establish a federal guideline that would mandate a minor league system for any professional sport getting special anti-trust or tax breaks.

paying college athletes

Now this is one subject that is not usually discussed.  Most people ignore this bad boy, but not me.

there are people who automatically bring up issues in support of the current situation for various reasons, usually because of their love of their favorite sport or institution.  Equally, there are people who bring up counter-issues objevcting to the current situation because of a feeling of inequality or disenfranchisement.  That is because they are trying to deal with the scholarship issue based

Sadly, both have their points.  When you try to look at sports scholarships from their points of view, there is usually problems finding a middle ground.  That is because they are trying to solve a pro