MAJOR DEGREE RETHINKING BY NCAA, SCHOOLS LONG OVERDUE
“Football and school don’t go together,” UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen declared last week. Ya don’t say. Centuries from now, heathen sports media hacks will molder in their graves shaking their crumbly fists and mumbling, “Pay the damned college players.”
You might not know this, but in December 1773, a few days after the Boston Tea Party, Patrick Henry wrote, “Fie on England!” just before adding, “Big- time college athletics is the business of jamming square pegs into round holes.”
In his first draft of the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln decided that “Government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. And let college athletes major in their sports.”
Josh Rosen is the quarterback at UCLA who is also a junior economics major earnestly seeking dual excellence. What he said was highly correct — and wholly terrifying to the people who decide the rules of the quasi- amateur game.
At UCLA or Alabama or Ohio State, a 20- year- old college athlete- student is rarely a great player and a great learner simultaneously. Something has to give, and that something isn’t watching video of the next opponent. And that’s OK. Or would be, if the rules were changed in the name of reason.
It’s nice to suggest that getting a degree is what matters most, but it’s not practical for some. People go to college to play music and study art, too. Is that so different from what Josh Rosen does?
There has been at least one Cincinnati Bengal I’ve covered who attended four years of college and emerged functionally illiterate. He was also a damned good football player. You can condemn his university for not even attempting to educate him. Or ( in an admittedly twisted view) you could praise the school for addressing his real needs in a very successful way.
No solution satisfies everyone. One faction will talk about full- time students stocking Kroger shelves at 3 in the morning to pay tuition. They have a point. Another group will suggest college athletes get a free, priceless education and do job interviews in front of 100,000 people and millions more watching on national TV. So, buck up, boys. They have a point.
Others will argue that everyone but the players benefits financially from the games. As Lincoln said, pay the men. They have a point. They all have points. Here’s another point, one I made 25 years ago:
Allow athletes to major in their sports.
We all took courses in college we considered worthless, to satisfy a “distribution requirement” while meeting some anachronistic definition of a “liberal arts education.” Archaeology 101 — known at my alma mater as Rocks For Jocks — served no practical purpose for me. But I sure felt better about being a “wellrounded” graduate after passing it.
The difference is, I took just a few of those courses. Whether in the name of staying eligible or to serve some phony “degree track,” big athletes take lots of those courses.
Why not offer them courses relevant to their aspirations?
If I want to be a doctor, I don’t study Mandarin Chinese. If I’m an aspiring professional football player, why would I read Nietzsche if I had no interest?
To their prime duties as money- makers and self- promoters on the field, add practical learning: rudimentary finance. How to pick an agent. Courses in coaching, training and basic life skills. You’d be surprised how many world- class athletes leave college not knowing how to write a check or fill out a 1040 EZ.
That’s not on them, any more than it’d be on a typical undergrad who flunks PE 101. It’s on the rules that demand we put “student” before the hyphen, not after, where it belongs. Athlete- student. Even the young pros wealthy enough to hire people to pay their bills don’t always finish their careers with more money than when they started. They rely too much on the honesty of others. They’re easily taken in. They would benefit from exposure in college to the ABCs of managing money.
Pros not set for life after retirement often find an outlet in coaching. Just because you played doesn’t mean you’ll be effective telling others how to play. There’s a bit of psychology involved, with some sociology on the side. Colleges could provide that. And so on.
This isn’t difficult, conceptually. It would require the NCAA battleship make a 180- degree turn in the bathtub, though. Isn’t it time?
Josh Rosen is right. Football excellence leaves little room for classroom achievement for all but the brightest and most motivated. We’re not giving up on the “athlete- student” ideal. We’re just ditching some of the hypocrisy and wasted time that goes with it.