On the NCAA recap, have some of the photos been photo shopped, e.g. on Morant’s dunk, where are his teammates?
I was a division one athlete on scholarship. I got “paid” through a solid education. Student athletes generally know what they are signing up for.
Wofford was great fun to see play. Quick, accurate, energetic, accurate shooters and all those threes. Wow. I'll watch the NCAA tourney this year as long as they are in it. Otherwise? Nah. Ok, maybe just the recaps.
1
MIchigan handily beat #1 seed North Carolina during the regular season and also defending National Champion Villanova. Let's see how this plays out.
1
NCAA tournament time is all about how much money the NCAA takes in(Billion plus dollars profit) and how much the institutions take in. During the regular basketball season it's all about how much the coaches take in(up to 10 million in salary at as much from their contract with the shoe and clothing mfg) and secondarily what the institutions net from game revenue TV and media rights plus their "brand" from the shoe and clothing mfg sales. The players get nothing other than a dorm room and 2meals per day they are the meat in the sammige.
3
@MstrTwister
OK, let's pay the players. Describe exactly how you propose to do that, in detail. Let's take football.
Does Kyler Murray get more than the third-string long snapper?
Does every school (public or private, 3K enrollment or 40K enrollment) have to pay each player the same? Or can Michigan pay five times more than Wake Forest?
Or is each school required to spend $X on football income? Or is it based on TV revenue? Concessions? Ticket sales? Can rich booster clubs kick in a few million a year?
If you pay players, do you pull scholarships and make them pay their own way? Is that legislated by the NCAA or set by policy on a school-by-school basis? Do they have to pay room-and-board up front like any other student, or are they given a "credit against future earnings"?
It's a lot more complicated than "pay the players".
3
If you want to be snarky about a simple answer, here's one:
Remove sports from college. If this industry is worth so much it can sustain itself. The teams might keep their locations and names but should be completely unaffiliated with academics. The conflation of school and professional sport is what got us into this mess. These kids are doing what professional athletes do without pay.
Just because the answer isn't technically simple doesn't mean the answer isn't obvious. Those are two different questions you're running together, using one to discredit the other.
5
@Charles A less than simple answer is that we are not talking football here but NCAA basketball. B-Ball Sports scholarship athletes should continue to receive their "scholarship" plus a monthly stipend to be determined by the conference for all schools in that conference; All players(and their families) will be allowed to receive individually contracted sums from shoe and clothing mfg's and royalties on sales of their shoes and logo clothes. All athletes should be able to sell their own likeness plus get paid for doing autograph sessions and promotional appearances. Big money now is not from "boosters" but from commercial rights I'd rather the players get these monies instead of the coaches. Further the NBA should draft players out of high school and expand their G league teams plus those salaries.
1
The games are really exciting, but I don't understand the apparent link between what colleges and universities do and these athletes. The whole enterprise is corrupt. It's a stain on colleges, an exploitation of young men, who are often students in name only, and a great demonstration of lost values. Coaches of one (or two) and done "undergrads" can only be "worth" more to a university than say faculty when the institutions have redefined worth purely in $$$. Yes, colleges and universities are great institutions to teach our next generation about values!
In the interests of full disclosure, yes, I'm an academic, but also a father and grandfather.
12
@Jack Chicago
Some schools do it right and the players stay in school and graduate. Then there are the one and done schools that bring in kids who have no intention of ever graduating.
The cure for those kinds of teams would be a ban on any athletic "scholarship" and a ban on postseason play for teams with low graduation rates.
4
@David Gregory
The fault for one and done is the NBA players Union. They agreed to prevent players from joining their union right after high school. There was no one and done when players like Kobe and LeBron left high school. The NCAA is preventing no one from earning money as a NBA player. Colleges don’t want the current NBA rule.
I think it is wonderful that the NYT is glorifying these student-athletes as they strive to achieve greatness on the court while balancing serious college academics.
I am quite certain that admissions never lessened their standards to admit a single one of these athletes, that they take the same rigorous courses as their classmates, and that they are studying hard for exams between games.
I guess it is time to celebrate collegiate athletics and how it enables students, who otherwise could not balance their time between sports and classes to equally participate in their sport while being serious students.
10
@BMD
Stanford gives preferential admission to many, many athletes in many, many sports that generate no revenue. Additionally, no conference has a higher percentage of students participating as scholarship varsity athletes than the Ivy League. Whether it’s labled an athletic scholarship or an academic scholarship, it’s the same to the player. There are more preferential admissions in non revenue sports than revenue sports because there are only two revenue sports.
@BMD Gee, the whole enterprise isn't worth your time to reply. So why did you?
1