Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? Instead of leeching off universities, particularly public universities, they could be operating minor leagues independent of any educational system.
(Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics, but that is only true in a very small number of schools, so I don't think that's a valid argument. It may well be the case in Alabama, but I still don't think it relevant since I take issue with the scheme as a whole, not merely on a case by case basis.)
Furthermore, if the desires of the students were really the root motivation, then Alabama wouldn't need to manipulate the desires of students by providing weird point-system incentives.
I'm firmly in the camp that sports have nothing to do with education, and there should be no association of organized sports and public educational institutions whatsoever. Gym class is one thing, but after-school sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education.
Schools can't do this too?
They don't require stadiums with amenities that would make royalty blush, nor seven-figure salaries paid to coaches.
There is some argument that colleges shouldn’t be a feeder for the NBA or NFL. Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete?
Professional sports is a significant part of the US economy. [1] We could argue that programs such as gender studies, anthropology, or Classics are both heavily subsidized and pretty useless from an economic standpoint. Yet, we pay five-figure salaries to professors and six figure salaries to administrators affiliated with those fields.
I am not arguing against the value of those fields per se, only pointing out that sports are a very significant part of society and the economy, like it or not. From the benefit of the university standpoint, sports have a tremendous impact. Not many people are proud of and donate to the University of Texas because of a world-renowned ancient literature program — but because of football.
I don’t particularly like college football — I prefer baseball, however it is an exciting part of the year, especially if you are a student or alum. We waste billions of government money on ridiculous projects all the time. I think the price tag on California’s high speed train to Bakersfield is in the multi-billions? There is government funding to study the sex habits of tsetse flies? $38 million in federal money was wasted on a Ted Kennedy institute? We subsidize NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. To be clear, I am not arguing against the National Endowment generally, only suggesting that most people don’t care about the next Mapplethorpe as they care about the next Tom Brady. Giving $5 of government money to subsidize an exhibition of Andres Serrano whose art featured a crucifix submerged in his own urine or $5 to a high school or college athletic program? Or $5 to a gender studies program? What choice would most people make? Personally, I would vote to just keep my $5 and let the people that wanted those programs to pay for it out of their own pocket.
So why are we complaining about college sports again — something tens of millions of people care about. NPR has about 30 million listeners. College football has an audience of over 160 million people. [2] The LSU-Texas game last weekend had over 5 million viewers. That’s about 6 times as many viewers as CNN gets during prime time.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_n... [2] https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attend...
I've been saying precisely this. The public is footing the bill for training employees for corporations.
To that I say:
1) Plenty of poor kids do find ways to participate in school sports. Let's not throw that baby out with the bathwater.
2) Where this is not possible, it would be better to find ways to make it possible than to get rid of something good for everyone.
If you want to have public sports programs, that's fine. It has nothing to do with school, should be an entirely separate pool of money, and IMO, should be entirely self-funded.
In the real world, though, athletics keep at-risk kids in school and trying to get grades because they want to play and need to make satisfactory progress in order to do so. Athletics have helped a ton of kids grow into prosperous adults because it kept them invested in their educations until they realized that it's what they needed to do anyway.
I'm not suggesting that universities ban sports clubs. I object to university systems become the primary feeder for corporate professional leagues. American Football and Basketball do it. Baseball and normal Football do not.
It would be so much easier if they just called American Football "handegg".
I object to tuition going up 8% a year for the last 3 decades That's a much bigger problem even though it's sort of topic to the original article.
In college sports (D3, which is a different ballgame and likely closer to what most people would imagine as "clubs") I learned a bunch as well, about leadership, organization, time management etc. We actually did much better in class during season because we had -5 hours a week of free time due to sports.
My university's sports are all funded through a calculation they did on alumni donations. Those who played sports are most likely to give money, so they keep the sports going as it has a marked impact on donations.
Who do you mean by we?
I'm not familiar with the american university system but how much public (say tax) money does a private university like Stanford get (which also has a good football team).
I am a very strong opponent of the overwhelming sports culture at American universities, and of the absurd sums of money spent to sustain it. (Example: Dabo Swinney was just given a $93 million contract to remain the football coach of Clemson.)
This
>Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics
is part of the reason. But the real argument is: successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school; they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission; they encourage alumni to open their pocketbooks and donate.
Personally, as a professor at an American university, I don't buy it. But evidently my bosses do.
By encouraging more students to apply, they have the opportunity to turn down more applicants and appear more selective, boosting their position in college rankings.
The whole thing is ridiculous. We are supposed to be educating students, not giving them brain damage.
Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso...
While 93 million over 10 years works out to being a pretty sizable chunk of that for one employee,
yeah, its still a profitable enterprise
If you lose, it's your fault, but if you win, then we win. It's symptomatic, whether with burned out programmers, upto and over 50% of university drop-outs (in certain programs like maths or physics at least), blue collar workers who break their backs, etc. etc.
No.
The NFL minimum salary is under $500k and by your own admission these players aren't that good.
Even a generous $200k/yr and a generous 100 player roster only adds up to $20 million, and there are teams with over $50 million in profits.
Second, you're assuming that even the top players would only make the minimum, which you have arbitrarily set at $200k, assuming that they would be paid less than the minimum NFL salary. The more accurate measure would be to pay them some percentage of the average NFL salary, which was $1.9 million in 2018. [1] So assuming the average college player salary would be 40% (to use your arbitrary number), that would be just under $800k per player. Even with a 53-player roster, that puts player salaries at over $40 million annually, which wipes out profits for all but the top 15 or 20 teams.
Third, I didn't say these players "aren't that good." The fact that only 2% of them make it to the NFL doesn't mean the other 98% aren't that good, it just means that the market won't bear paying for more players when they're fairly compensated.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2018/09/11/college-f...
[1] https://gazettereview.com/2017/03/average-nfl-player-salary/
The core issue here is claiming that profits are derived from not paying players. There are plenty of teams not paying players and losing money. The top teams could pay players well and still make profit. There's a small Goldilocks zone where what players should be paid lines up with the team's level of profit. The old "profits come from not paying workers" canard is a story with little to no explanatory power here.
The top college football programs pull in over a hundred million in revenue each year. Clemson is on it's way there. And that's only in media, ticket sales and such. I'm sure schools with excellent football programs are more likely to attract students and alumni donations.
Check out this WSJ table with revenues from the 2018 season. https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NCAA_2019?mod=article_inline
EDIT: Thinking more about it—there are secondary effects as well. If a team does well, it attracts fans from out of town. Those fans will spend money on food, drinks, entertainment and hotels. That provides local businesses money and the city tax revenues.
I take issue with a couple things: First is that unpaid 'workers' are responsible for driving an industry now worth billions of dollars. Second is that some scholarship athletes are admitted to schools they have no business attending on academic merit, and end up in essentially remedial education. This is true even at prestigious schools with high-level academics.
It's such an american thing to say that something just over a hundred years old has immense history. I own furniture and other stuff, which my grandparents inherited, that is probably older than that.
Sure the stuff has some history, but it's barely a few generations.
That is absolutely not true. At least $300 a semester of my tuition went to our sports programs. And I went to a public university in the US. We don't even have that prestigious a football team. I can't imagine how much students pay at schools like Alabama.
For the 2012-2013 season University of Texas brought in over $100 million with under $30 million in expenses. Same year Alabama brought in $88 million on $47 mil in expenses.
edit: The magnitude of these numbers is why I think these teams and perhaps a 4-year league should be spun off and the players should be paid.
I guess we can debate whether "positive" equals "positive sentiment" or "positive success in generating brand awareness." However, the fact that this article exists underscores the positive publicity value of the Alabama football program regardless of whether this specific article is good or bad publicity.
In other words, the NYT never writes this article for Sheboygan State University's football program because not enough people care about it (note: it doesn't exist... nor does Sheboygan State... it's just a generic example so I wouldn't offend anyone with the name of a real university).
In contrast, people care about the University of Alabama's football program, which results in people caring about the University of Alabama.
There is a strong history of associating the identity of the school with its football program (though I expect this to wane as we learn more about the long-term impact of concussions). Let’s take Ohio State as an example: it is more compelling of a mid tier graduate program because of its success on the football field.
I don’t say that as a knock on OSU: they have fine academics. But being a Buckeye is very connected to the football team.
Same with Alabama. I currently live in Birmingham and when I relocated I was asked all the time, “whose your team?” That question only has two acceptable answers: Auburn or Alabama. There is no option for “none of the above.”
But I still expect this to wane given a long enough horizon. From a sample of one, I used to be very involved in college football and NFL fantasy football leagues. But over the last five years I’ve become less comfortable with the sport (it feels like watching a Roman gladiator match). I’m [edit: bearish] on the 15 year horizon for the sport: I think we’ve reached peak football.
Maybe for lower tier colleges, but I sincerely doubt that anyone gives a rodents behind how the football teams of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CalTech and others top-tier Universities are, before applying to them.
They are in the Ivy League, which means they don't give out athletic scholarships. They would be crushed by any D1 team. And, yet, the alumni (many of whom are deep-pocketed) care.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.si.com/college-basketball/2...
Briefly, it is not uncommon at Caltech for students who have two or three possible electives that would fit into one open slot in the schedule to not register for any of them at the start of the term, and sit in on all of them and do the homework for all of them for two or three weeks, and then decide which to take. They then register for that one.
This practice is approved by the faculty and administration.
Caltech had just gotten a new head of athletics, and while reviewing student records he realized that (1) several students on Caltech teams had done this "try before registering" thing, (2) for those two or three weeks, before they picked and registered for one of those courses, they were technically, by NCAA rules, part time students, not full time students, and (3) they had attended team practice sessions during that time.
It's against NCAA rules to allow part time students on a team, including team practices. The new head of athletics reported Caltech's inadvertent violation of this rule to the NCAA, and also reported that all student athletes were properly full time before participating in any games, and that they would make sure in the future to not allow students to join the team until they had registered for a full load.
The NCAA response was to put more severe sanctions on Caltech than they had put on major athletic schools that had committed massive rules violations, such as fake classes and grades to keep players from becoming ineligible for low grades, bribes, and the like.
The sports press take on this was generally it was more evidence that the NCAA is incompetent and/or corrupt. The NCAA had been criticized for slaps on the wrists against those big schools with big money sports programs, so many thought that they came down hard on Caltech to try to look like they could be tough without the downside of damaging one of the big money making athletic programs.
Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.
I hope so. Athletics are only the tip of the iceberg.
Tuition at universities like Harvard, Princeton, etc. runs around $45,000 a year. Even at public universities, it tends to be over $10,000 a year. This is tuition, mind you, not counting room and board. These figures are vastly higher than a generation ago, and are continuing to skyrocket. Needless to say, this is inflicting crippling debt on huge numbers of college students.
Meanwhile, universities are hiring fewer and fewer tenure-track professors; increasingly, the teaching is being done by people working under terrible job conditions. See, for example, this as an example:
https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-...
I am an insider -- a college professor at an American university. The current system is thoroughly screwed. We need a big reset.
Other expensive private-nonprofit schools may be another matter entirely. But those two are bad examples to use.
While this is true on paper, it's not always the case in practice. I was able to get multiple acceptance offers to Ivy League schools, and poor enough to have the sliding scale of tuition slide all the way to $0. But all of them had an estimated cost of attendance[1] so optimistic about ancillary expenses during the school year that it was infeasible to actually go to any of them. There were other implicit barriers to acceptance as a poor kid as well, but the way the sliding scale was implemented was the biggest.
I chose a state school instead. Despite a higher paper cost higher than the Ivy League schools offering free tuition, the total out of pocket cost for attendance of the state school worked out significantly lower.
[1] Federal loans and many scholarships won't pay out over the university's estimated cost of attendance. By zero'ing out tuition and room and board, that just leaves the "books and personal expenses" line item,
There were additional issues like the logistics and upfront costs of a cross-country move, as well as the timing of aid disbursements and expense needs. Which I neither had the savings nor the cashflow to confidently support, nor anyone to lean on temporarily for it. While there were plenty of unknowns for the state school, they were manageable enough for me to be competent in my ability to handle them and close enough to my personal support network if things went south.
Many schools do in fact have the ability to address such needs. I just didn't learn was a possibility until after the fact. For anyone else that happens to be in that situation, I'd strongly encourage doing what you did and taking the Ivy offer. There will be sufficient support to accomodate your circumstances. It'd just be nice if the schools themselves improved their offer letters or follow-up collateral to address the concerns/needs that are likely for those which qualify for a zero'd out tuition or whose application/FAFSA documents indicate are a first generation college student.
Personally, I would recommend anyone in that situation to opt for the Ivy as it really does open doors later in life.
With so many students exiting college with crippling debt, I'm not sure this is still a sustainable way of paying your way. Work study can certainly help, but the pay of even a fairly skilled job will fall far, far short of the cost of tuition, room and board, textbooks, etc.
For anyone that comes across this post: I fully agree. I was fortunate in the particular intersection of my skills being comparatively rare, and having a professor that took a personal liking to me and acted as a mentor (while opening a few doors on my behalf through his connections). While I've been successful myself, it's been through connections I've made post-school (other than the bootstrapping from that one professor). I can't imagine the possibilities that would have come with seeding that entire process throughout school.
> If you were accepted into multiple Ivies with full financial aid you were definitely eligible for work study and student loans.
You're not wrong, but that was non-obvious at the time. The student loans were a particularly sticking point, as the cost of attendance letter provided by the schools had optimistic line items for personal expenses (which include books and supplies), creating an artificially low limit on the ability to take out loans. And I wasn't familiar enough with the college experience, nor had access to anyone that was, to understand the potential for work study. Better onboarding collateral geared towards first generation college students would have easily clarified things and provided confidence around this, rather than leaving a gaping unknown on how I was going to make ends meet.
By zero'ing out tuition, fees, and room and board, that leaves $4,193 as the cap on demonstrable need, which federal loans and many scholarships will use as a max limit on cumulative aid. This is unrealistically optimistic, and serves to needlessly cap the potential ability to raise funds via merit scholarships or loans, shifting part of the cost burden to ongoing cashflow.
Which, I'll concede, isn't necessarily too hard due to the plethora of work-study and student jobs available. But I only knew that after the fact, and the prospect of getting stuck far away from home without the money to make ends meet and the knowledge that your family is too far away to help you get home and too poor to help financially is terrifying to a kid right out of high school.
I also learned, through the work that I did for the university I went to, that the cost of attendance isn't as black and white as it's made out to be either. Although universities may differ in policies, they can make accommodations in your individual cost of attendance letter if you can justify the deviations. But I only learned of that flexibility after experiencing the system, and it wasn't clear at the outset. So I didn't even realize that was a possibility when evaluating acceptance offers and aid packages.
It has nearly always been the way it is now, big business.
72,000 capacity stadiums built in 1927 aren't built for school clubs to play in. Stadiums like this were built for schools like Michigan because the sport was big money.
The multi-billions of dollars spent on it begs to differ. Just because they aren't old (are 22 year olds really too young for athletics?) doesn't mean it is a bad product. Many consider it to be a much more exciting game opposed to the 7-3 games the NFL puts out.
I'd rather watch a 49-21 game than a 14-6 snoozefest.
This is really your personal opinion.
Their priority is not education, it is profit.
That's really it.
Believing otherwise is like believing the priority of health insurance companies is public health or the priority of for-profit prisons is rehabilitation.
Instead, you do things like giving the University President an absurdly enormous salary, plus put him up in a lavish mansion, or go on a construction spree, building more and more very expensive buildings and stadiums, or give a 7-figure salary to the football coach.
The Church of Scientology is a considered a non-profit institution in the U.S. as well. Do you believe that The Church of Scientology is a benevolent actor? I don't. I believe their primary purpose is profit and they are taking advantage of their followers and the U.S. taxpayer in the same way these universities are.
The university in this article is "non-profit" as well, but they just granted a $70+ million contract to their football coach. I don't see how you can argue that this is appropriate for a non-profit institution whose priority is education when they are charging their 30,000+ undergraduates six figures to complete a four-year degree at the same time.
What you are describing is more like "growth." And maybe the kinds of growth universities are investing in isn't great right now. That's a fine conversation to have.
This isn't just a semantic distinction. The profit motive and the kind of empire building growth motive are two pretty different things. You can see this because there ARE for-profit universities in the US and they act in dramatically different ways than the non-profits.
Why would we allow someone to gain power without giving back to the society which provides safety nets for that power?
I am pretty certain Scientologists enjoy every bit of that money (be it expensive cars, free travel, more followers for your ego) they don’t pay in tax.
The same goes for universities: growth without purpose are only there to satisfy the egos of those who manage the money they never earned.
America just needs to add a new section to the Constitution, and call it the "Rules of Acquisition".
There was a suit and the college kids won!
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-la...
In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. I played in D3 where the priority is Academics, Sports. We calculated we spent at least 800 hours per season on the sport. About 3000 hours over 4 years. D1 sports is more like 2000+ hours per season (aka a full job). Imagine how well you'd do at a full time uni if you were working 8 hours a day in construction at the same time. And that's if the school prioritizes you playing sports.
Personally I think they should be allowed to get a education benefit that grants them one free year of classes for every year of sports played for use at any time in their lives post sports. That way when they end the sports dream they can get the education they paid for by working.
That is an uncharitable overgeneralization. There are 345 D1 schools. Many, if not most, do not have that prioritization.
I talked to the coaches for a few D1 schools, even ones who weren't known to be good at sports and heavy on academics like Northwestern (at the time) had a little talk with prospective players about the balance between the two. They recommended you do not attempt any difficult majors while playing football as the conflict between the two would be too difficult to manage.
That is directly putting sports above academics. And that was for practice squad kids.
Yes there may be schools that are better at it, but scholarships change the equation.
I've talked to many many people who played college sports at all levels, this may not be statistical but this was well over 100 people.
If football were brought into line with other college club sports, the pressure to pick football in particular would be diminished. People looking for academic scholarships could instead choose to play something less hazardous, without worrying that they were limiting their opportunities.
College football is just one sport among many popular college sports in the U.S.
It began as a club-type extra curricular activity but as it became more popular universities likely saw it as a way to market their school and attract customers (students).
The top 30-40 programs produce $100 million in revenue which is usually enough to be self-sustaining and help pay for all the other sports teams on campus.
College basketball, baseball, football, track and field, and even hockey in some places are de facto minor leagues. The power and influence of the NFL is probably more to blame for the lack of a proper minor league in football.
It is spectacularly profitable at some schools, and often provides funding for the entire athletics departments (every scholarship for every fringe sport, etc).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-f...
Of course it isn't profitable for all schools, but it certainly is for Alabama, and for most of the other schools that generally come up in the "football is expensive" discussion.
It isn't academic, but at the same time neither is music, or the arts, or many other essential elements of many post-secondary experiences. It has always been about more than the pure sciences or maths.
Money, lots and lots of money.
The most realistic potential improvement I can see is requiring public universities to reinvest some percentage of sports program profits (mostly coming from football/basketball in the US) back into academic programs and tuition assistance for non-athletes. Currently many unversities have academics and sports existing in separate financial universes.
Edit: The same universities do reinvest football/basketball profits back into other sports programs, which is great. Athleticism in general is IMO an essential part of education. But universities need to remember their core mission is education, and everything that a university does needs to feed that mission somehow.
That's not clear to me. Google tells me there are nearly 800 university football teams in America. Alabama is obviously top-tier and is doubtlessly profitable. But how many of the other hundreds are profitable?
Furthermore, don't many players, coaches, etc, transfer up from lower divisions when they demonstrate themselves to have exceptional merit? It's not clear to me that Division 1 wouldn't be impacted if the lower divisions were eliminated. If that's true, then lower divisions are effectively subsidizing higher divisions, so it's a mistake to consider the matter on a case by case basis rather than holistically.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidching/2018/04/17/big-tens-...
https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/espn-reaches...
On that latter deal with ESPN, note that the $470m/yr ESPN pays for the CFP games is relatively in the same ballpark as the NFL rights for Monday Night Football games ($600m/yr).
1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports that lose money, but thats not what is being discussed.
2. Football/Collegiate sports in general are major drivers of diversity in colleges that are lacking in them. I've heard that at UC Berkeley that over half of black male students are athletes. Those are students that are very valuable for administrators trying to bring diversity to campuses.
3. Good football (and men's basketball) teams increase the rankings for the schools in general[1]. This has a demonstrable effect on student applications[2].
4. The culture around football games is that of partying. You go out, drink for a couple of hours before the game, and then stand in the sun for a couple of hours cheering for your team. They're fun when they're competitive, but Alabama was playing competition that was sub-par, so the games were out of hand by the end. Watching something exciting is fun. Watching something boring is not.
In my opinion, Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-foo...
[1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
What about the athletes themselves who are taking years off their lives, while getting absolutely no compensation?
1. They are compensated with a degree, and not to mention the "luxury" benefits that come with being an athlete: better food, housing, tutors, golf carts for class, etc.
2. No one is forcing them to go to college.
If you get injured, poof scholarship
There is a market for minor league football, and that market is being met by college sports.
[0] Really hard to quantify, but comparing the revenue effects and higher order revenue generation of programs with elite head coaches to mediocre head coaches leads to this value.
So he's making about 1/10th what he should, or 10% of his value.
Best student athlete is worth 8 million. They make $0. They're making 0% of their total value back.
The cost of the education is meaningless. It's all arbitrary and basically monopoly money costs. Oh, you're getting a full ride to a school that would normally charge you $50K? That's great, but it's not of real value in the same way that actual cash is.
This is why I'm a big fan of California's move to allow students to take endorsements.
A coach that makes 5 million working with athletes that aren’t paid for risking their health is underpaid?
Is he personally bringing in the millions and the athletes nothing?
I agree with the first half of your sentence and not the second. But I would argue that Saban is easily 10x more important to Alabama's success than any single athlete on the team. I think Bama's QB carousel backs up that claim.
> Then he should go to the NFL and hang with the big guys.
Financially that might be the best move for him, however I don't agree that everyone's main goal in life should be to maximize income. That said, if someone gave me $3 million to do a job I don't like as much as my current one, I'd jump on the opportunity. But if he's already making $5 million, there's diminishing returns.
Maybe they should pay him 10x more than they pay the students then. What's that work out to? If the students are being compensated with free tuition, 10x that is probably a few hundred thousand dollars, right?
2. Since the pseudo-pro athletes are playing sports instead of studying, That's fake diversity of two separate programs in one building, like counting the cafe and janitorial staff in FAANG diversity. Better diversity would be letting diverse students in, not diverse football players. Letting students in explicitly because they provide muscle doesn't move society forward.
3. That's negative-sum, like the skyrocketing tuition due to making campuses into luxury country clubs just to compete with other schools. Rankings don't improve anything for the students and society at Aleve across the country.
4. Is negative sum. Football parties aren't a special benefit. Alcoholism and associated vices (like sexual assault) aren't a boon to a university's mission.
Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. That is why the Ivy League schools have some of the largest athletic departments in the country even though they don't generate revenue anywhere close to schools like Alabama or Ohio State. It is really no different than a school having a music or a theater program. Alabama just so happens to be the Juilliard of football. There are certainly some schools that shouldn't be spending what they do on their athletic department, but the idea that they need to generate a profit is just as flawed as expecting a public school's theater department to turn a profit. That said, there is no question that Alabama makes a solid profit on their football team.
Also the baseball industry is run differently because minor league baseball exists. There is not much of a minor league system in either basketball or football that provides a well defined development path for high school athletes. Both the NBA, NFL, and various independent organizations have tried developing them over the years, but college athletics is still the primary route for all American born professional basketball and football players. Universities and the NCAA are just taking advantage of that market need for minor league sports.
A traditional, old-school liberal arts education consists of exactly the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium ([Latin] grammar, logic, and rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, and astronomy.)
The slightly less old-school version takes the old trivium deemphasizes formal logic, and adds Greek, history, moral philosophy, and poetry.
Well, we usually don't call it “football” specifically, but “exercise science” or something similar is commonly available. And Baylor has “general studies”, which despite the generic name is intended to support “general career areas of health, fitness, recreation, and sport”, and that's what most of their football players major in.
Varsity sports provides letter-graded credits in “classes” available only to student athletes at many colleges and universities, and those credits are generally applicable to general ed requirements for any major to whatever limits generally apply to PE credits, and to major requirements in some related majors, yes.
I still think I got more (intellectually) out of college level football than I did out of intro level sociology.
I'm not familiar, but I imagine it's a bit of a cliff for the other 98%? There don't seem to be too many transferable skills from college football if you don't make a living from football.
I think football players tend very often to take academic programs relating to communication/journalism, education, or PE/exercise science/etc., and there are certainly some transferable skills from college football itself, along with such programs, to sports journalism, coaching/athletic training, and teaching in secondary school PE programs.
Yeah, you might have a better quality of life (money wise) temporarily, but I would argue the horribleness one with CTE experiences at the end of their life outweighs that temporary benefit.
sport in school is not an USA anomaly, in Italy the school curriculum basically includes for all obligatory cycles as much hours of physical activity as there are arts and culture hours every week.
the USA anomaly is making a business out of it, but that's just them.
https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1479-5868-...
Perhaps I assumed a different meaning from the one you intended, but when I hear people going on about sport building character, they're usually talking about their idea of "moral character".
This study does not test, let alone support, the premise that sport builds moral character. Did you mean some other kind of character?
Add to that travel time to distant cities for road games plus practice and you're closer to averaging 60 hours/week.
Many players practice together unofficially as well both in and out of season.
Regardless, I wouldn't exactly call that a virtue. The team members are dumping intense amounts of time into something (while risking literal brain damage) for a tiny chance at a place on an NFL team. Most of those players will leave the university and spend the rest of their lives not making a cent from their sport.
Not saying it's unreasonable to devote time to your passion, without expectation of monetary reward, and if football happens to be it, that's cool. But a university is a place to educate oneself, and it seems a bit sad to me to spend the majority of one's time there not actually doing that, especially when the actual use of time is unlikely to help much for their future outside of school.
I disagree with this. I was a college athlete. I firmly believe that being an athlete teaches you more about being a leader, a teammate and having discipline than almost anything else. Those are extremely desirable skills to have in any work place. I do think any team based activity can build the same skills if there's a common goal to be achieved. College athletes just have the guarantee that they've been doing it for multiple years.
Football players get picked on all the time because of a lot incorrect stereotypes about the people that do it. Not all football players are idiots. Look up John Urschel.
There are probably some who wouldn't be accepted to their school on academic merit alone.
Aside from that, I'm very opposed to college football (and soccer) as it's played now because of what we know know about brain injuries. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class action lawsuit in the future from current players that shuts down the programs at a lot of smaller schools.
Any coach working today knows that the way they are asking the kids to play will injure them.
People are arguing in the comments about the money, history and prestige US football brings to colleges in the US. I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university?
Soccer (football to the rest of the world) is probably 100 times as big with arguably ~6.5 billion vs ~300 million fans. It probably generates 100 times the profit of US football. It would be odd that the US college and football relationship is so strong when soccer is immensely bigger in every way.
Here in Germany I am not aware of any substantial sports teams by universities. Universities here also generally don't offer any scholarships for athletes. AFAIK, the situation in the rest of Europe is similar. The sports programs that are offered at universities here are very casual and comparable to a cheaper gym membership in purpose.
This is completely misunderstanding what's happening. They're leaving early because the game is already decided. When the score is 62-10 in the 4th quarter, you're no longer watching a competition.
It really seems to me that the school has somehow made these student/spectators a product in some way. Perhaps it looks better to network television if the stadium stays packed the entire game?
But the other reason (for schools with prominent teams) is that the number of seats available is often less than the number of students who might want to attend, so to be fair to students who actually want to attend, it becomes necessary to disincentive people from requesting tickets if they’re not serious about attending.
It’s pretty common for schools to give out tickets in a lottery system, and then penalize your future ability to successfully get a ticket if you show a pattern of not actually using the tickets. Back when I was in school, this was tracked by scanning the tickets when you entered.
College baseball exists, and some of the best teams in the country are from public universities. It's also generally considered a revenue sport (although admittedly not on the level of football).
Really in some cases football isn't big fron being a cash cow or "lotto ticket" for a society that views it as an acceptable way to make it big but frankly a cult. It doesn't matter to them if it is a poor investment or if there are horrifying human costs. It is an end to itself and all who question it are the enemy. Penn State and their Sandusky handling is a particularly infamous example of the mentality.
The local fervor is what leads to its undue emphasis where voters balk at funding for textbooks or class sizes but approve oversized stadiums without a thought. Undue emphasis is a symptom of anti-intellectualism in that they don't value education or view it as actively "betraying" their culture in a tall poppy way. Football is a way to get rich without "betrayal" of their self-perpetuated station.
That aside I suspect the institutions adapt to this by knowing that a football team raises their public profile more than academics. Which could be considered a "tradition" - a legacy of population and education. Since during industrial eras the vast body to market to were farm and factory families who never went to college - regardless of intelligence they would have little reason outside of personal interest to follow the academic details. This isn't a sleight on them - most don't follow areas of expertise outside their profession except for personal interest. Even if outdated for the purpose the institutions are still in place.
I suspect that's a pretty prevalent opinion, wrong as it may be.
When I first read the headline my mind naturally jumped to the most extreme interpretation: Alabama was using some sort of involuntary tracking technology to lower students' GPAs if they don't attend football games. Obviously very far-fetched, but knowing how much Alabama loves their football, not completely implausible.
Orwellabama? Crimson Tide Track Locations to Keep Students at Games
But for that gross invasion of privacy, I'd say this was a pretty clever solution.
But the implementation details are concerning. Will we end up in a state where you "have to" be tracked 24/7 not to miss out on various deals?
From an AP article on this...
"if they stay in the stands at a home game at Bryant-Denny Stadium through the fourth quarter, students who have the app could be rewarded with highly coveted postseason tickets to events like the SEC Championship Game or the College Football Playoffs"
"Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app — or delete it — once they leave the stadium."
Jesus, I just realized it was the New York Times ...
When I was there they did an analysis of alumni donations. One thing they found out was that if you did 2 or more activities in high school you were likely to do 1 or more activities in college. (these numbers are ballpark) If did ANY activities in college you were around 60% more likely to donate to the school. If you did NO activities and just took class you were only 20% likely to donate. If you did MORE activities you were even more likely to donate. The amount of your donation was related heavily to your income and found to be an independent function from your activities.
Thus the school decided that recruiting multi-sport atheletes to play Division 3 sports (which we were) was revenue positive for running an athletic department. Their goal was to provide a positive feeling at all the sports so that everyone felt good about their experience. So the school got very into (even to the chancellor level) attempting to be on par with stanford's numbers in the Sears Trophy (now the ncaa directors cup) for most National Championships in a year. Which means you have to be good at pretty much everything, golf (m&w), tennis (m&w), swimming (m&w), volleyball (w), football, basketball (m&w), etc. And that's what they did.
I'm not saying this is the only reason they did what they did, they were very genuine about providing great experiences for the student athletes as they should if they're doing their jobs.
Anyway the overall point is that some schools also focus on alumni donations which ARE driven by school loalty, which are driven by sports. One could consider people buying school athletic merch as a form of alumni donation.
I'm not explaining or excusing why college sports it the big business it is in D1 as it is. I've got problems with that as well, but mainly I think the schools should be required to provide a real education for the players at ANY time in their life post graduation and some kind of revenue sharing.
I went to a big basketball school (several NCAAM titles), and I was in the band/drum line which did a ton of entertaining for wealthy alumni during games.
Basically the way it works is that you make a “donation” to the school in order to access blocks of tickets to games. The more you “donate”, the better your tickets are. If you “donate” enough, you even get access to exclusive pregame events that usually entail comped drinks and live entertainment (band and cheerleader performances). Some of the biggest donors even get to travel with the team on road games. There was a small group that would travel with university personnel and get some interaction with players during tournament trips.
The low end donations were also a lot higher for anyone in a club. The school allows targeted donations. So if you wanted you could donate to sports.
They also have smart alumni things. For instance for $2000, I can buy a plaque over the locker for the player with my number (essentially buying the number). It would have been $500 but 2 of them got in a bidding war, and $2k is the price to knock them both out.
Looking back, so many electives I was required to take were pure fluff and had no connection to reality or life or income skills. As for classes that mattered, a good portion were taught by TAs.
So yeah thanks but no thanks - I’m certainly not going to offer them a penny. If anything, the college model is egregiously expensive and exploitative. We need innovation and a better alternative to what these institutions provide.
Couldn't they just have the students who want to opt in swipe or tap their student IDs as they enter and again as they leave?
It would be easier to game (you could leave for part of the game and return), but is less invasive than the app approach.
It seems easy and less intrusive for the majority(?) who wont get anything in return for installing a sketchy app to just give tickets out randomly toward the end of a game and anyone who is there at the end more often has a better chance of getting one.
Apple/Google could end this tomorrow by implementing permission systems that allowed users to change the data received by apps. A workable user friendly interface might be "location pinning", where you could check a box to store your current location and keep reporting that location until you said otherwise. And if app developers insisted on fighting back and inferring whether data wasn't noisy enough, the OS could easily step up its game by adding in synthesized drift, even across multiple users.
The problem is that smartphone OS developers are trying to serve two masters - their users, but also the surveillance-minded app developers. They're pretending it's possible to remain neutral in the face of a huge power disparity, but what they're actually doing is forcing the user to remain open to inspection by hostile code. Even LineageOS stonewalled the patches to support microG instead of simply accepting them into the state of the art and moving on!
If we as users want to be in control of our own devices (and for our society to not turn into a totalitarian shithole, we really do!), then we need to accept the worthiness of lying. No matter who it was written by, the code on a user's device should be working for the interests of the user. App developers already have a place to run the code that represents them - on their own servers.
Not to mention the damage to the brains of student athletes colliding into each other.
For you, but obviously many people disagree.
I'm defensive because, though I rarely watch the games, I enjoy listening to postgame interviews with the Alabama coach, Nick Saban. He's found unprecedented success in a brutally competitive field by following a textbook stoic philosophy people in the south call "The Process", by encouraging relentless pursuit of perfection in each individual's role, and showing little concern if that results in a win or a loss.
In every speech to players and fans he recites a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr: "If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."
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> "If students are leaving early, they must not be enjoying it"
Alabama typically wins games by 30-60 point margins (a touchdown is 7 points). Like any sport, close games are more exciting than blowouts. The students are getting bored in the last quarter, and leaving to return to tailgate parties and get drunk or avoid the traffic. Saban felt it was disrespectful and demotivating to the players who worked hard to win such staggering victories. In the genesis postgame interview, he yelled, "I've never been to a tailgate in my life!"
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> "American obsession with college football is absurd"
Generally, we hear this from self-hating Americans who wish to be European and American-hating Europeans who feel America is the source of all of their problems.
And generally, they share an obsession with soccer, or superhero movies, or something equally ridiculous as football.
American public universities are spread relatively evenly throughout the country, but major cities that support a professional team are not. So in the southeast and midwest, people rally support around local universities in the way that people in cities do for professional sports in America and in Europe.
Most of the fans of these university football teams never attended the university, but they are proud to still be apart of these traditions and it contributes tremendously to community cohesiveness. If you go to any southern tailgate, you'll see people from all ethnic groups and economic classes enjoying their time together.
Yes, this is tribalism. But maybe a little tribalism is good when half of the posts on hacker news are about the profound loneliness emerging in American society.
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> "It costs too much money"
Small private school football programs are struggling, yes. But many of them will not survive education changes in the coming decades regardless.
But football is very profitable for large public universities and funds other Title Nine sports programs like, most importantly to me, women's soccer. Title Nine is the best explanation for why we are so dominant in the Women's World Cup.
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> "Sports are a waste of time"
Yes, as are many of the things we choose to do with our time. Hopefully, no one is judging you for your unproductive time. But it sounds like many here are apart of a subgroup, like me, that didn't have much of a connection to the popular or well-adjusted kids in school. And so we find solace in looking down upon the things they enjoy. But being unjustly judgmental does not make us better than them, it makes us pathetic.
> The first organized college sports club was formed in 1843 when Yale University created a boat club.[4] Harvard University then followed in their footsteps, creating a similar boat club a year later. These boat clubs participated in rowing races called Regattas.[5] The creation of these organizations set the stage for the first intercollegiate sporting event in the U.S. This event took place in 1852, when the rowing team from Yale competed against the rowing team from Harvard at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire.[4] This marked the beginning of intercollegiate competition and triggered the creation of numerous college athletic organizations.[citation needed] This historic race sparked the venerable rivalry between the two schools, the Yale-Harvard Regatta is considered the cornerstone of intercollegiate athletic competition in the United States.[6]
...
> The first intercollegiate football game between teams from Rutgers College (now Rutgers University) and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) took place on November 6, 1869 at College Field (now the site of the College Avenue Gymnasium at Rutgers University) in New Brunswick, New Jersey.[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_athletics_in_the_Unite...
If you delve into it, you'll find that even Football was pretty much an upper crust ivy league thing until well into the 20th century.
It is not disrespectful to not attend sport event you are not interested in, no matter how hard players trained.
This Alabama coach is famous for erupting in anger during the last play of the game if his player makes a mistake, even when they are winning 60-0.
To him, every moment matters equally, whether in practice or in the championship. And he considers support of the students and fans to be key in the performance of the players.
The students there LOVE being apart of a winning program. They enjoy the first half when Alabama walks over almost every team in the country.
Saban, i think, feels that the students are threatening the part they enjoy by not staying to the end.
I agree with you that he's probably wrong about that, but I also kind of respect the attitude. And so do most of the fans as you'll see them now happily sitting in the rain until the last second to show their solidarity.
The tracking methods range from the low-fi to the high-tech: from a paper attendance checklist, to a Scantron sheet, to iClicker "student response system", to clicking buttons in an online portal.
But I do feel uncomfortable with the escalation of technology being used to perform this task. Scantron sheets being fed into auto-dialers that can call the wrong parent if the teacher bubbles the wrong line. And now, some schools are now running pilots using facial recognition attendance systems.
Is it only "Orwellian" when GPS is involved?
> The app it created for Alabama is the only one that tracks the locations of its students.
Oh my.
No problems reading the article. What issues did you see?
And, that aside, prestige is going to still matter to college governing bodies, and therefore to the leadership subject to and incentivized by them.