philly1121 said:
Sebasta - then who is the villain in all this? The coaches? The players? NCAA? The fans?
IMHO, there's a lot of blame to go around. It starts with the NCAA, the media companies, the coaches, and the administrators who got rich on the backs of the student athletes for generations. They exploited the student athletes and offered little in return. Sure some managed to graduate with a degree that helped elevate them from the financially disadvantaged world they knew before college, but countless others wound up falling back into the same world they sought to escape.
How many schools pushed their football and mens's basketball players into Mickey Mouse classes and useless majors just so the players could retain academic eligibility? The players were unsophisticated and didn't know those useless majors in underwater basketweaving wouldn't translate into paying jobs after college. With no career prospects, the former student athletes inevitably wound up where they started: financially disadvantaged.
Meanwhile, the coaches who promised to love those student athletes and treat them like family moved on to another set of student athletes to replace those out of eligibility. They made millions from the blood, sweat, and tears of the student athletes who did whatever the coaches told them. But as soon as the student athletes are out of eligibility, the coaches turn their backs on them.
The NCAA and the media companies made (and continue to make) billions of dollars from the student athletes' work. The NCAA ridiculously enforced amateurism rules against the players while allowing everyone else to profit from the players' labors. Lest we forget, the NCAA amateurism rules were originally implemented specifically to maintain athletics as the realm of the wealthy and prevent the economically disadvantaged from being able to participate. Of course, once college sports started being profitable, the once excluded poor kids were highly recruited to play, but not to share in any of the financial revenue their play generated.
The college administrators went along with this system and gave it a veneer of respectability. They took the profits that came from their football and men's basketball programs and used it to fund whatever else they and their schools wanted, including their own salaries. While some schools implemented programs designed to help the student athletes (e.g., tutoring), how many of these schools actually steered the student athletes toward marketable majors? How many of them, instead, helped the coaches pushed the student athletes into impractical majors in order to keep the spirts revenue machine going?
In short, the players are the injured parties, here. Just about everyone else has dirty hands.