The Pandemic and the Stu-dent ATH-O-LEETS!
It looks like one part of my plea for fall sports will be denied.
Yesterday, both the Pac-12 and Big 10 conferences voted to cancel their fall sports season. The biggest casualty for the spectator is football. They could play football in the spring, but nothing is certain. Meanwhile, the Big 12 vowed to have a fall season today.
Confused yet?
I sure am. When I wrote my little ditty last week, pleading the gods of the gridiron and spirits of the cross country course to hold their competitions, I didn’t think about the NCAA’s structural problems.
On Monday, ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith provided compelling reasons as to why college football should be cancelled.
Mr. Smith blasted the NCAA’s leadership for not, well, leading. NCAA chairman Mark Emmert has not taken a definitive stance, leaving individual conferences to make a haphazard set of decisions. Predictably, chaos has resulted.
The NCAA cancelled winter and spring sports for the 2019–2020 season on March 17th. They have had 4–5 months to make an unified plan for the fall. They didn’t.
You deserve to have your cash cow cut-off if you can’t get it together in that much time. The NBA did, why can’t you?
At least with the pros, they are getting paid! Collegiate athletes gotta
In addition to blasting the NCAA’s leadership, Mr. Smith said that “This is the greatest opportunity the student-athlete in collegiate sports has ever had to acquire representation.” (6:39–6:45).
Mr. Smith’s criticisms of how the NCAA treats its student-athletes are shared by many.
As Boston Globe correspondent Nick Romeo wrote in a 2016 book review of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion against the NCAA, “Through its system of rules, the NCAA forces athletes to accept the bulk of the risk for a meager share of the financial gain their efforts produce.”
No matter how much money student-athletes’ efforts on the field, court, diamond or whatever bring both schools and the NCAA, they receive almost none of it because they are “amateurs.”
But that’s not all!
The idea of the student-athlete, while sounding noble, was “a legal fiction concocted in the 1950s to avoid paying worker’s compensation to the widow of a football player who died on the field.” Furthermore, about 5% of collegiate athletes go on the pros, making their sport a long-term career, while a significant portion of the 95% who have to purse regular careers suffer from long-term chronic injuries.
Imagine that you helped make your university, conference and the NCAA money, but don’t get any of it. In addition to that, you have some painful injuries from your playing days-that you need to take care of.
What the f — k, man?
The examples go on and on, but if you want a quick, funny summary of the problems with the NCAA, check out South Park’s brilliant critique of the stu-dent ATH-O-LEETS idea.
The clip raises two possibilities. Either the NCAA authorities are delusional and think they are protecting stu-dent ATH-O-LEETS from exploitation, or they don’t care and are “damn near amoral”, as Mr. Smith put it.
When I wrote my plea last week, I desperately wanted some sense of normalcy, a distraction during a pandemic and an election. Let’s be honest, aren’t elections-especially presidential ones-pandemics anyway?
Stu-dent ATH-O-LEETs are in an awful position and should seize the day to change it. Although not having fall sports makes bearing the pandemic harder, the constructive changes of representation, compensation and medical care long after playing days overall makes the sacrifice worth it.