Thoughts on the eve of that big college ?? game

Jan 9, 2022, 9:04 AM

Thoughts on the eve of that big college football game

BY GEORGE F. WILL

WASHINGTON POST

Monday night’s national championship game is the maraschino cherry atop the sundae of post-season college football. The nation’s highest-paid government employee – coach Nick Saban, $9.75 million – will lead the University of Alabama’s student-athletes against their counterparts from the University of Georgia. They are coached by Kirby Smart, whose salary ($7.13 million) ranks only fifth among Southeastern Conference coaches, but is 40 times larger than that of Georgia’s governor.

The game will be watched by perhaps 20 million potential purchasers of beer and trucks and other stuff that corporations pay broadcast entities to advertise. ESPN reportedly pays about $470 million annually under a 12-year, $5.64 billion agreement for the right to broadcast major postseason games.

There always are, however, solemn warnings that the appeal of high-revenue college sports – football and basketball – is jeopardized by any departures from the “revered tradition of amateurism in college sports.” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote those words in a 1984 case that came from the University of Oklahoma. (One of OU’s wittier presidents, when a state legislator asked why the school needed more money, answered, “I would like to build a university of which the football team would be proud.”) The 1984 court weakened the NCAA’s grip on schools’ football television arrangements, but the court’s rhetoric strengthened the lucrative myth that sustains the business model of the academia-entertainment complex: Amateurism is beautiful, so don’t pay the talent.

Andrew Perloff, writing in Education Next, says “student athlete” entered academia’s lexicon in 1957 when a widow lost a claim for workmen’s compensation death benefits from Fort Lewis A&M College for fatal injuries her husband suffered playing football. The school said the player was not an employee because the school was not in the “football business.” The NCAA adopted the “student athlete” mantra, but Perloff says: “Between long daily practices, ongoing physical conditioning, and cross-country travel, playing on a team can stand in for a full-time job.”

The supposedly precious aura of amateurism is supposedly imperiled by new rules that allow those who make $9 million coaches possible – the players – to earn a comparative pittance. Last summer, the NCAA (2019 athletics revenue: $18.9 billion), having uneasily watched more than two dozen states pass laws to give college athletes some rights to market themselves, faced this fact of federalism: Schools in states where athletes cannot be punished for monetizing their fame will have an advantage in recruiting blue-chip prospects.

So, welcome to the NIL era: Increasingly, an athlete can earn money from his or her name, image and likeness. A few football and basketball players will benefit a lot; volleyball and field hockey players not so much. Gender disparities will energize the “equity” police. And what boosters used to do by passing cash under the table can now be done on the top of the table, which might be progress, of sorts. But if you graft a multibillion industry onto higher education, some awkwardness is unavoidable.

In 2018, Georgia spent $2.6 million recruiting players. Given the likely return – in money, and in prestige, which has monetary value – from getting the Bulldogs into Monday night’s game, this was a good investment. As is Saban’s compensation, which is scheduled to soon pass $10 million per year.

Schools increasingly compete for customers, aka students, by emphasizing the college “experience.” This is enhanced by decreasing academic demands: There is less studying – Education Next reports that students spent 27 hours a week on studies in 2003, down from 40 hours in the 1960s – and more grade inflation. In “The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe,” the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Mitchell reports that one school’s experience includes “amenities like a state-of-the-art recreation center with a climbing wall and a ‘lazy river’ pool complex with a 30-foot water slide. ... A campus dining hall served steak cooked to order.” Which school? Roll Tide!

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George Will is a clever writer. He's smart and skilled enough to not put to print explicit falsehoods, which keeps many readers from criticizing him.

The excuse for his social statement in his January 7 opinion piece (the title is "Two Cheers for the first college football national championship of the name-image-likeness era") is meant to disparage the big colleges which have prominent athletic programs (especially the money-generating athletic programs).

What he fails to do is highlight that nearly all of the USA's colleges and universities have prostituted themselves for the purpose of enriching the compensation and enhancing the 'environment' of the college work experience for the college employees (Presidents, Deans, Professors, Asst. Professors, and 'student life' support staff). Pandering to students and making sure that no one flunks out is the currency by which the lavish life for college employees takes place.

Colleges throughout the USA are deathly fearful of flunking students out; they therefore weaken the curricula and grade on the curve in ways that were unthinkable in the early/mid 1970s.

But Mr. Will makes this sound as if UGA and Alabama (and throwing in Oklahoma to show that he's 'balanced') are the root of this academic fraud which is ruining the future of America.

He should point out that his liberal havens such as NY University and Emory University and the Ivy League schools are just as guilty.

George Will is a clever elitist phony.

That is all.

Thoughts on the eve of that big college ?? game

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CFB is in death spiral basketball had 20 years ago

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Many fans are dissatisfied

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