Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

Can we all stipulate that people are "free" to be morons?

Then can we get back to trying to stop people from acting like morons?

 

To be honest about the two revenue sports, football and basketball, the "student-athlete" thing has always been pure crap. Yes, there are players who value the scholarship. But many have little interest in academics, and are unqualified or unprepared to succeed academically at the undergrad level. They are there to play their sport, hoping they will be good enough to turn pro, and that requires keeping up the farce.

The only way to even consider them playing sports while the virus is still active, would be to keep the kids in a bubble. Putting aside that that can't really work for football, if they did that, it would expose the whole farce (even though people still wouldn't acknowledge it) for what it is, because sports would be taking a high priority over the academics.

If one good thing comes out of this, hopefully the "student-athlete" farce gets put to rest. Perhaps we could move to something where the sports teams are more loosely associated with the schools, and the athletes find a way to realize their actual worth.

 

As I said, there are some kids there who value the scholarship. And use it to their advantage.

There are also a lot of players -- many of them the star players who carry those power teams and are carried along in a farce soley because they are great athletes who the teams want -- who are not even nominally academically qualified to be taking space in a college classroom (if they even show up).

For that type of kid, the mularkey that they are getting a valuable college scholarship as compensation is ridiculous. The scholarship is all but meaningless, especially to a high percentage of them who won't even walk away with a degree. What would be valuable to those kids is finding a way to use the leverage their athletic prowess should be affording them to realize their worth. And by that, I mean, realizing it in a way that is actually meaningful to them, which for most of them would mean cold, hard negotiated cash.