Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
Full disclosure: I watch and enjoy college football and am a season ticket holder for a college football team
Reading that work is sad and an indictment of the schools and the system perpetuated by sham amateurism, not the students. The students should be getting paid but since they aren't getting that, they are at least due best efforts to educate them. Not shuffled to advisers and through a system who help them meet minimum requirements and get them to do the bare minimum/cheat to keep themselves on the field, and then are left to their devices with garbagey degrees and little formal, decent education.
Remember the whole promise of the people who organize and control college athletics (mostly rich white administrators and their partners in the media) is that football players don't get paid with money but with education and degrees. In exchange football players get brain damage / cracked skulls, damaged limbs and joints, and the chance to be the ~1-2% who make it to the NFL where only even a subset of that group will have an extremely lucrative career. Second best outcomes involve getting funneled back into the feedback loop of coaching at various levels of the system where you can migrate from getting taken advantage of to also getting paid to profit from someone else's work. All other outcomes are what the students can make of it themselves while admin/coaches/etc. steer and cajole them into joke programs and advisers and assistants who keep the education light so they can focus on sportsball.
Since the schools themselves by and large treat the education part of big time college athletics as a huge joke, they're the ones not upholding the bargain. The students are double victims: told they can't get paid, they are offered instead an education, but the people who insist they can't get paid
don't even bother with the education either. That's the heinous thing and what these episodes make very clear.