Athletes Are Both the Most Pampered and Most Abused Students; Both Situations Are Getting Worse

The first part of the title above ought to be self-evident. Far too many universities operate as sports franchises with a few academic courses offered on the side. This, despite the fact that most athletic departments lose money despite TV revenue, ticket sales, etc. 

Even average (by intercollegiate standards) athletes are likely to get a full ride: tuition and fees, room and board.  And that’s not counting NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals which often run well over $100,000 a year for even average players in a major sport at a Division I school. High-end programs in football and basketball get bowl games or in-season (or pre-season) trips to tournaments in exotic locales. The best student physicist at the school might get travel money to a conference in Pittsburgh or something like that, but there’s not going to be a lot of hanging out on the beach on someone else’s dime, much less a tuition waiver and a six-figure income. 

NIL also means that at least some elite athletes in football and basketball are shopping their services to the highest bidder. Every time a star player enters the transfer portal and moves to a different university, the accusations pour forth from the new school’s competitors that they’re “buying players.” Some of those allegations are simply sour grapes; many (most?) aren’t. Of course, the practice has existed under the table for decades, but NIL has certainly exacerbated the problem. 

Then, there are the tutors, the luxurious housing, and other forms of special treatment. A goodly number of athletes, of course, wouldn’t be accepted at Duke or Stanford, or even at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople (extra credit if you get that reference, Gentle Reader), if they didn’t have a jump-shot or some equivalent skill in another sport. 

Bolenciecwcz, the dim-witted football star of James Thurber’s “University Days” (1933) who finally is able to name a mode of transportation after professor and fellow students alike prompt him to say “train,” is a satirical construction, of course, but satire works only if there is the ring of truth. And I suspect the scandal at the University of North Carolina a few years back is more likely the tip of the iceberg than an anomaly. 

Curmie has had a number of students in his classes who actually were the “scholar-athletes” the NCAA pretends anyone with an athletic “scholarship” is. There was the multi-year all-conference tennis player who was also a fine student (in her second language!) and an excellent actress (she got a graduate degree and now works for one of the country’s leading regional theatres), the middle-distance runner who missed the Olympic team by a fraction of a second and did quite well in Curmie’s non-major class, the starting safety on the football team who asked for permission to miss class because he would be interviewing with one of the nation’s top med schools (he got in). 

But there are plenty of examples in the other direction, as well. There was the basketball player who couldn’t write a coherent paragraph about literally anything. There was the football player who complained about his grade in an acting course because he had nothing in common with the character I’d given him in a scene; the character was complaining to his professor about his grade. (Sigh.) Another football player whispered disgusting sexual advances to one of the women in an acting class when I was working with other students. (He came to regret that.) 

My… erm… “favorite,” though, was the star football player who missed about a half dozen more classes than department policy allowed. There were three hour-exams in the course: he got a D on one and failed the other two. He didn’t write either of the required short papers, and he got something like a 31 on the final exam. He subsequently showed up at my office, position coach in tow, to protest his failing grade because one (yes, just one) of his absences should have been excused. His excuse: he was in court… being convicted of an E felony. (Sigh.) 

All that said, it would be easy to make a case that athletes, especially those in sports other than football and basketball, are the most exploited students on campus. Unless, like LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne, what you’re selling is that you look great in a bikini or a miniskirt, you’re not going to get as good an NIL deal as the backup quarterback does. Plus, most sports require that you’ll play more than a dozen or so games; baseball and softball, for example, generally have about 50 games in a regular season. That means, among other things, more road games, and that means more travel, more time out of class, etc. 

The situation is exacerbated enormously by conference re-alignments. Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was in college, conferences were aligned geographically: schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference were located (wait for it) along the Atlantic coast, the Southeastern Conference was in the southeast, and so on. The Big 10 was in the northern Midwest, and the Big 8 was a little further south and a little further west. 

Rivalries usually centered on proximity: Pittsburgh against West Virginia, Washington against Washington State, Oklahoma against Oklahoma State, and so on. Some rivalries were sport-specific, like Syracuse against Georgetown in basketball. As of about a year from now, none of those pairs of teams will be in the same conference. At the most personal level, this may be the greatest cost of the wholesale shuffling of conferences. Those intense rivalries are part of the fabric of intercollegiate sports. Their prospective demise saddens me. 

Schools moving from conference to conference is nothing new, of course; I can’t think of any conference other than the Ivy League that hasn’t changed at least somewhat in the time since I was an undergrad. But the last couple of years, especially the last few weeks, have been insane. Last year Oklahoma and Texas, two really big names in college athletics, announced they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC; fans feared for the future of the former conference, which was now down to eight schools. The league responded by adding four new teams to get back to being the Big 12. 

But a few weeks ago UCLA and USC, the two biggest names in the Pac 12, announced that they’ll be joining the Big 10 starting next fall. And then the floodgates opened. The Big 10 and Big 12 have cannibalized the Pac 12, which as of now will be down to four schools come next fall, and one would have to believe that those programs are currently considering their options. And the SEC has its eyes on the two highest profile programs in the ACC (at least in football), Clemson and Florida State. Note that the long-term excellence of Duke and North Carolina in basketball is borderline irrelevant. Nary a women’s team matters in the slightest in this calculus. 

All of this is about one sport, football, and one thing, money. This is aggravated by the fact that universities in general seem incapable of understanding that both income and expenses matter. If it’s a famous faculty member whose presence attracts a handful of tuition-paying new students a year: “look at all the money we’re spending on this guy!” If, on the other hand, it’s going to increase travel costs for sports teams by literally millions of dollars, it’s “look at this spiffy TV deal.” 

So now we turn to the University of Missouri’s head football coach, Eli Drinkwitz (that’s him in the photo), who notes that all of these decisions seem to ignore other sports than his own. He wonders aloud, “did we count the cost for the student-athletes involved in this decision?” The answer to his semi-rhetorical question is “OF COURSE NOT.” 

One of Curmie’s mantras is “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” And the NCAA sure does tell us a lot about how much they care about “scholar-athletes.” Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows it’s all what my mom would call “balloon juice” (I might opt instead for a term suggesting bovine fecal matter). The NCAA has never, ever, cared about anything but itself, its self-image, and its power. Students? Fans? Who? Alas, too many universities are following their lead. 

Drinkwitz cites three really significant facts. First, an inevitable result of conference realignment is lack of sleep for the athletes, the number one cause of mental health issues. He mentions baseball and softball: “They travel commercial. They get done playing at 4:00, they gotta get to the airport, they come back, it’s 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, they gotta go to class? I mean, did we ask any of them?” 

He also points to tweets (Curmie is still going to call them that) that the reason a number of students chose their school is so their parents didn’t have to travel to see them on the road. Asks Drinkwitz, “Did we ask them if they wanted to travel from the east coast to the west coast?” Again, OF COURSE NOT. He doesn’t mention other students at their university, but that’s part of the deal, too. You just might want to see your best friend or significant other play their sport. 

Back when there were, you know, ten teams in the Big 10, the greatest distance between two conference teams was 644 miles. Next year, it will be 2686 miles, over 2000 miles more. When there was a Big 8, the longest distance between schools was 747 miles. It will soon be 2320 miles; make that 3125 if, as rumored, Oregon State also joins the Big 12. Having driven a round-trip from Texas to New Hampshire last summer (a mere 1742 miles, one-way), Curmie can attest that 2000+ miles seems like a rather long commute. 

And it’s not just the big conferences. The university where I taught for a couple of decades joined a new conference recently. It’s now 2379 miles to one of our new conference foes… in an FCS (1-AA) league. This is insane. 

Someone on social media noted also that these huge distances will make it more difficult to recruit athletes in sports other than football and (maybe) basketball. Who wants to play softball for UCLA if you’re going to have to travel to New Jersey to play Rutgers? Maybe Long Beach or San Diego State start looking more attractive. Good. 

Finally, Drinkwitz points out that the athletes most directly responsible for giving the universities the ability to get those multi-million-dollar TV contracts don’t share in the profits.  They have restrictions placed on them; “the adults in the room” can do as they please.

There is one advantage to conference re-alignment, of course. Because the University of Missouri left the Big 12 for the SEC a few years ago, they are no longer the arch-rival of my beloved Kansas Jayhawks (I got my PhD at KU). I am therefore no longer duty-bound to despise all things Mizzou, and can, if I might borrow Jack Marshall’s term, declare Eli Drinkwitz an Ethics Hero.

This essay was first published in the Curmie’s Conjectures series of guest posts on Ethics Alarms.  Some minor stylistic changes have been made here, but the argument is unchanged.  As with earlier posts of this type, there are likely to be more comments there than here.  So head there... or don’t... as you will, Gentle Reader.