I can’t shake the image of that poor screaming Texas football fan who wore a Longhorns shirt into an Oklahoma City sports bar two years ago. A 53-year-old Sooners fan, who happened to be a church deacon and federal auditor, admits he approached, reached down, grabbed the Texas fan’s testicles, and twisted to the tune of 60 stitches. He claims he was provoked. Charges were dropped after prosecutors found it difficult to prosecute because they couldn’t find any witnesses in the Sooners bar who would testify on behalf of the Texas fan.
Remember when college used to be out education? About learning and getting a degree? Yeah, I know; I don’t, either…but would it be too much to ask that we at least make an attempt to maintain the charade that institutions of higher learning are at least minimally about…learning??
Like a lot of us, I’ve been watching the saga of musical college football teams with some fascination and more than a little disbelief. If any of y’all harbored ANY lingering doubt that it’s all about the Benjamins…well, here’s your sign. Colorado’s going here, Nebraska there…and who know where Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State will end up? Of course, the answer should be self-evident: whoever waves the most money at them. It’s become what Steve Duin of The Oregonian described as “the survival of the fattest”. Division I college sports has become an environment in which universities cynically employ 18- to 22-year-old athletes as profit centers. Certainly, school presidents and athletic directors will argue that student-athletes are getting an education out of the deal, and yes, there’s at least that to be thankful for. In reality, though, education is secondary to the business of college athletics, and the term “student-athlete” is backasswards.
Athletes come to Enormous State University to play their sport of choice, the most important and financially valuable of which is football. Outside of the “education” an “athlete-student” receives, athletes are for all intents and purposes indentured servants. If they’re under scholarship, athlete-students cannot hold jobs, and they’re burdened by a thick rulebook designed to maintain the facade of their “amateurism”. Enormous State University prospers off the labor of their athlete-students, and NCAA rules enforce the system of barely-concealed indentured servitude. It’s cynical, immoral…and widely accepted as the American Way. Everyone makes money…excepts the athletes themselves.
Don’t get me wrong; I love college football. I can rationalize myself into believing the myth about the purity of amateurism as easily as the next person. Given the obscene amounts money at stake in college football these days, though, even I have to believe that it’s time for athletes to share the spoils. Division I athletes are, for all intents and purposes, semi-professional athletes. It’s time to recognize that it’s their labors that allow vast wealth to accrue to their school. It’s time to end the hypocritical system that allows everyone to profit…except the ones actually responsible for putting butts in the 100,000 of glittering cathedrals dedicated to jock worship.
It’s time to show the athletes the money. They deserve better than to be treated as indentured servants stuck in a system that may, or may not, see them leave school with something resembling a college edumication.
