I’ve been meaning to write a post on this issue for a long time. I’m
not feeling especially articulate at this exact moment, and I haven’t
learned anything new recently that’s changed my understanding of it, but
reading the linked article above coupled with watching the growing
enthusiasm of many of my Facebook friends as WSU’s football team climbs
up in the rankings made me feel like maybe it was time to finally get
some of my thoughts down.
As someone who has enjoyed watching
college sports (especially football) for thirty-four years and someone
who has taught college students for over a decade, it’s become
increasingly clear to me over time that college sports (especially
football) function mostly as a business designed to benefit a select few
financially while hurting universities, university students, university
faculty, the cities universities are located in, and most of all,
“student-athletes” in many different ways. College sports (especially
football) do this by providing a product that’s really goddamn fun to
watch, a product that’s created on the backs of extremely cheap labor.
Actually, “extremely cheap” doesn’t really capture it, since
student-athletes are forbidden by the very people who could, in theory,
pay them to receive any sort of recompense for their performance. There
are a lot of dimensions to this problem, and it exists in a lot of
sports, but in the interest of not turning this into a mandatory TL;DR,
I’m going to focus on one sport - football - and three big problems I
see with the system that student-athletes play that sport within.
For
one thing, the effect that college football has on universities financially is ten different ways of messed up.
Perhaps the most insidious dimension of this is the one the early part
of the article focuses on: funding athletics and new athletic facilities
using student fees, and particularly student fees that non-athlete
students are charged (at least somewhat) surreptitiously when tuition
across the country is already skyrocketing, and students are already
undertaking decades’ worth of loans just to attend average-quality
schools who are better known for their football teams than their
academic programs. Now, it seems, the universities themselves are in on
this debt-juggling tightrope act, gambling their future financial
stability (i.e., the value of their students’ tuition) on the hope that
upgrades to their sports programs will successfully fund future,
hopefully endless growth in enrollment and alumni donations. My thoughts
on pretty much every university’s willingness to set “Infinite Growth,
Forever” as its only “strategy” is a post for another day, but let’s
just say that it’s pretty much impossible for any university to achieve
this and that universities that bank on their “plan” for infinite growth
working based on money they might pull in some day from a football team
that doesn’t exist yet (or an 70,000 person stadium that doesn’t exist
yet, etc.) is just digging themselves a deeper hole to fall into when
they do inevitably fall.
The toll football in particular has on student-athletes physically has been well-documented.
Why we wring our hands (if we still do) over concussions and the
resulting mental illness and suicides in the NFL but don’t do the same
for college players, who tend to be much more impressionable, less
informed, and less capable of building a multi-million-dollar nest egg
before injury drives them off the field for good is beyond me. But there
it is.
But the facet of this issue that’s closest to my heart
is the fiction that we’re talking about “student-athletes” rather than
“athlete-students,” or even just “athletes” when we talk about college
football players. These kids are brought to these schools, often on
full-ride scholarships, not to learn, not to get an education so that
they can make their way in the world after they almost inevitably fail
to graduate up to the NFL, but to play football for the school more or
less for free so the school can make more money and gain more prestige
in eyes of possible donors. Granted, I only have experience at a few
universities, but from what I’ve seen, the notion that student-athletes
are supposed to, or are even able to take their education seriously while juggling it with football is a joke.
The
linked articles in the previous paragraph affirm what I saw again and
again in my years as an instructor at WSU: students unable to pursue the
education that supposedly comes part-and-parcel with their coming to
the school to play football because football ends up overshadowing
everything else. It’s especially heartbreaking because many of these
students are being recruited from foreign countries and/or low-SES
situations to play, and in many of these cases, getting a free education
is ultimately more important to them than playing football.
Unfortunately, it seems, you get what you pay for.
This was
brought home to me in particular one summer when I taught a class almost
entirely full of incoming students who were also undergoing their first
summer of training and practice with the WSU football team. Many of
these kids had never dreamed of getting to go to college except maybe on
the back of a football scholarship, and, as you might imagine, they
were just as excited about attending college as they were unprepared for
it. Their writing skills were atrocious, and by and large they needed a
lot of remedial help with “simple” college-level skills like time
management and note-taking. Many were absolutely ESL students (or
whatever the acronym is these days) that would never receive the level
of ESL assistance that their non-sport-playing peers would. Generally
speaking, WSU actually had a pretty fantastic infrastructure for getting
disadvantaged students the help they needed, but this just wasn’t a
possibility for the football players. They were too busy with football.
Time
and time again, I had last-minute cancellations from students scheduled
to meet with me to get extra help, students who couldn’t make it to
appointments with tutors because the tutors were only available during
the hours that football was happening, students who missed class because
they’d been to six hours of class and eight hours of practice the day
before and just couldn’t stay awake long enough to make it to an 8am
class, a few hulking, male students near to tears in my office because
they felt that they just didn’t have time to devote any attention to
their education, and suspected that if they complained, they might have
their scholarships taken away (how likely this really was, I don’t
know). It was explained to me by team staff in no uncertain terms a few
times during this course that struggling student-athletes’ grades should
just “get better” or else, as if I was an undercover detective caught
in illegal intrigue instead of an educator. I didn’t give in to these
“requests,” and at least a few of the students ultimately failed the
class partially as a result. I heard from colleagues later, though I
can’t verify the veracity of these reports, that those students more or
less magically ended up with passing grades in the course after some
discussions between the football team’s staff and the registrar, which
is not only an undermining of the university’s supposed values but also a
disservice to the students who would have benefited hugely from gaining
the knowledge needed to legitimately pass those classes before moving
on to football-less careers, whether it be right after college or (for a
lucky few) after a stint in the NFL.*
Where I work now, we
have no football team, which, while it’s a constant point of complaint
for locals who “have to” root for either UO or OSU instead, makes
education a lot more central to the mission of the school. We have
strong teams (both men and women) in many other sports, but I find that
their coaches and related staff are nearly always interested in the
success of their players as students first and as athletes second. Might
this have something to do with the fact that Oregon Tech isn’t part of
the NCAA? I don’t know, but my guess would be a big fat “yes.”
So,
yes, while there’s a part of me (an old, entrenched, Canton, Ohio part
of me) that’s excited to see WSU in the national rankings this week,
every time I see another former student or former faculty member, or current faculty
member give a shout out to the Cougs’ football team on social media,
it’s hard not to wince. I was born five miles from the Pro Football Hall
of Fame. Within a few minutes of being born, I had a blue plastic
football placed in my hand and had my picture taken with it. I “get”
football about as much as one can without ever having played it in an
official capacity. But damn if college football isn’t messing up these
kids’ lives, and by extension the workings of many otherwise great
universities across the country that could be even greater if they could
be bothered to value education over the supposed money-making machine
that is college sports.
I’m sure I’ll watch a few games over
this Christmas holiday, but it’s hard to be as excited about Bowl Week
as I used to be when I was younger. I always feel a bit dirty watching a
college football game now. And that’s how it should be. For all of us.
*
I’m sorry to be so spectacularly vague in this paragraph, but 1) this
was nearly four years ago at this point and 2) I’m hesitant to be too specific because…well, for obvious reasons.
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