Is College Football Pure Again?
The commanding generals of college football come down from the safety of lofty positions during Penn State’s battles to shoot the wounded and pick their pockets.
Taking away $60 million in fines and dozens of future athletic scholarships as well as past victories, the (paid) president of the NCAA harrumphs, “Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people.”
Purists can all rest easy now. College sports have been cleansed to continue under NCAA rules that turn institutions of higher learning into profit centers where student athletes, with no compensation or insurance, labor for the glory and financial gain of celebrity coaches and TV networks.
Joe Paterno’s statue is down, and all is well in the land of Saturday afternoon slavery except for those Penn State players who signed on for the possibility of future fame and wealth, only to be undermined by nasty news of a child predator in their midst.
Someone is paying a price for all this unpleasantness, but as usual, it’s not those who profit from it most.
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it is tough with college football. You cant have kids jumping into the NFL without a couple years in the NCAA, they simply are not physically able to withstand the punishment.
of course that does not mean that those player should not at least receive full health care coverage and some sort of long term injury insurance. that being said, only the D1A schools really have the money for that. Your typical NAIA school uses its football program to bring in kids on half scholarships to help support the uni.
Collegate sports was intended to be between the colleges, not be Roman Coliseum gladiator events broadcast all over the country to the benefit of advertisers and cable/satellite television networks.
Making college sports our version of the Roman gladiator event is what is at the core of corruption and money-mongering in college sports to the exclusion of what college is first and foremost supposed to be about – getting an academic education!
The same football dominant cultures are even stronger at the likes of Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, LSU, Oregon, and the list goes on. Hopefully, the Penn State penalties shake this corrupting culture to its roots. Hopefully….
“Someone is paying a price for all this unpleasantness, but as usual, it’s not those who profit from it most”
How true. It is not the school since it will continue to raise millions from the alumni, it will continue to charge outlandish prices for someone to attend a game, with the stands almost full and after the 7-8 years to recover, it will be back where it is today.
The ones that are really paying the price are the current student athletes and the student body that had nothing to do with this crime.
I can accept both arguements that the school needed to pay a price for the actions of its leadership, but I can also find it in my heart to accept the fact that even though the players can transfer, where will they go at this late date, what impact will it have on their actual graduation if they are a student first and athlete second and they decide to transfer and how will it impact their lives as it pertains to sports on Sunday? And then how are those that attend Penn St going to be affected when they apply for jobs. Will they be known as attending a great academic school or will the first reaction be “they attended the school that got the most harsh penalties ever”.
Many more lives have been impacted by these actions than just those that led Penn State during this period.
The NCAA uses scholarships and bowl bans to punish the schools. But is the school really punished or is it the current students and athletes being punished?
Joe Paterno will never go to jail, he is dead. His bosses most likely will find time in jail since they covered up a crime. They will be punished. And Sandusky will never see the light of day again in freedom, he will die in jail.
But who is really looking out for the current individuals most impacted by this action, the student athlete?
I must once again vote that college and schools in general are not the way to train future professional athletes. A much better system is that used in the rest of the world for world football, soccer, where the professional clubs run youth academies where promising young players are trained in the sport as well as educated.
“professional clubs run youth academies where promising young players are trained in the sport as well as educated”
well kinda. I played club ball overseas and coached high school kids that resided and were educated at sport specific schools. Education was something the school did because it was the only way they could get the best kids in one place so they could constantly practice.
also, since college education is not free in the US, scholarships do give kids a chance to get an education…if they want it. Clubs do not do college education because by then the players are old enough to quit school and focus on sports alone. This is why most kids either make the jump to full time pro or quit sports and go to a normal uni.
Merkin..How old are the kids when they attend these academies? Are they like tennis academies in this country where the kids are high school age and then turn pro?
How about eliminating colleges as the minor league for football and basketball and create a minor league system for them like baseball?
Now if that is possible, now tell us how all the money that has created the monster in college sports can ever be removed and allow student athletes to be just that.