Sally Jenkins on WaPo:
The coronavirus crisis is an incredible diagnostic tool. The excesses have never been so sharply delineated: The $50 million stadium upgrades, the indoor waterfalls, the ballooning salaries, the locker rooms designed like first-class luxury airliner cabins now look like protruding, tumorous distortions, worthy of recoil and disgust. Institutions have laid themselves bare, with their desperate insistence on trying to make unpaid kids play football in a viral outbreak simply to meet their overextended bills.
“Schools have spent money recklessly for years,” says attorney Tim Nevius, a former NCAA investigator who is now an advocate for athletes. “Now they’re in a position where if the season doesn’t go forward, they’re on the hook for millions. … There has just been an extraordinary amount of spending on things that have very little resemblance to a university’s mission to educate and develop people.”
Thank GOD (says your friendly agnostic), someone else GETS it. Sort of. Sadly, they won’t quite dabble with Abolish Big Time College Sports, which I’ve been saying this since I ATTENDED university mumblety-mumblety years ago. I’ve mentioned it on UMB a few times: here and here and here.
But recognizing the ill-fit and the wandering from school mission and the damage this is causing during a time of stress is an important step to take, not to mention it’s an amusing rant.
Now tell the professional sports complex that if they want a place to train up and comers then BLOODY WELL HAVE MINOR LEAGUES. Baseball does it, sort of. Basketball, kind of. Football does NOT. Does hockey count? Depends on if you live in Minnesota or not. Now I’ve forgotten if hockey has minor leagues. I think so.
ANYWAYS. All these “student-athletes” putting their health on the line just for a shot at the big leagues and fabulous wealth – it’s bloody well immoral, you bet it is. It’d be better to have minor leagues so they can start earning a salary, as relatively measly as it will be.
And let the college sports teams return to intra-mural.
