Conferences needed to die when nearly all schools became financially able to charter planes and buses, and the sport became the priority and not academics, and not for the reasons listed here.
> The sport has reached its end-stage-capitalism period
Now that Stanford and Cal are in the ACC, there will be vastly more air travel, having environmental impact and lost time for academic study, which these two universities actually care about, and consequent fatigue for the players. Zoom classes on the long flights, or sleep?
Same for other left (over) coast teams, but less impact.
I’m guessing that you grossly underestimate the academic support for athletes.
1. Most athletes take fewer and easier classes during their season, or the main part of their season. Missing credit hours can be made up for during the summer, which sometimes have easier classes.
2. Many athletes take easier majors in general.
3. Athletes have access to free tutors. Sometimes these tutors help, sometimes they help a lot, sometimes they just do the work for the athlete. I imagine that the ethics line is adhered to a bit more frequently at places like Cal and Stanford, but sometimes it’s a blurry line.
4. Athletic departments and athletes know which majors and which professors are easy to deal with for things like travel and workload. Word gets around.
Of all the things to worry about, the academic side for the athlete would be the least of my worries.
It's more organized than that. The Stanford Daily once uncovered the football team's official list of easy courses.[1] Stanford also has the Academic Athletic Resource Center, to help varsity athletes make it through Stanford.[2] "Student-athletes may avail themselves of 2 hours of tutoring per class per week for any reason."
Maybe OP, despite the article being about college football, was considering how the realignment might affect athletes in other sports?
For college football, it’s only ~12 games a season and they typically are played at or near the weekend. But for many other sports, the schedule is heavier and played throughout the week.
I believe, as maybe OP did, the college football realignment (along with its many other faults) will potentially more detrimental to the athletes in other sports.
My nephew plays football at a university in a Power Five (now Power Four?) conference. So far, he's experienced much of what you called out. But, they have held him to a far higher academic standard than I expected.
He went to junior college first. After his first year, his current university brought him to campus a few times for recruiting purposes, but they didn't end up making him an offer because of his grades. A year later, his grades were up, and he got an offer from that university.
At this university, bad grades will cause you to be dropped from the team and lose your scholarship, no matter how big a star you are. They drill this into the players and make it clear that they owe it to their teammates to keep their grades up. I didn't expect that, and I assume it's far from universal at this level, but I'm glad to see it.
It's also a great opportunity for my nephew. He and his parents don't have the resources for an education of this caliber (his parents are both teachers), but he is getting it because of football. And he's getting much more active support in that education (through things like the tutoring mentioned above). He'd love to play professionally. Now that he's the wise old age of 20, he understands how low the odds are, and he's making sure he gets an education that will lead to opportunities for a good non-athletic career. Not all of his teammates have that clarity, but he says a lot of them do. One of his teammates graduated before his football eligibility was used up, so he's now getting a master’s degree.
You can argue that it's not fair that football players get so many more resources thrown at them. But at this level, they are a huge source of funding for the university. Through things I've heard from his coaches (I've been lucky enough to meet the head coach, the offensive coordinator, and a few others), my guess is that the university brings in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100M/year from football and spends something like 30% of that on football and support for the players. That 30% is seen as protecting the rest of the $100M (if the team doesn't do well, that money is at risk). These numbers are for a university that is not a perennial top 20 team, so I'm sure the numbers can be significantly higher for the top football programs.
> He'd love to play professionally. Now that he's the wise old age of 20, he understands how low the odds are
Odds are low, but not zero, especially if he is at a power 5 school.
I have a relative who was in the nfl until recently. Some (summarized) comments from him:
- Focus on technique. There can be substantial differences in size, strength, and skill in college such that sloppy technique can often get the job done. Not so in the NFL. Good technique and good ability to be coached will an asset.
- Focus on good technique in the weight room. This will both develop the right kind of strength and lower risk of injury. Good flexibility via stretching and yoga are also an important part of strength training.
- Get nutrition right asap. This includes moderation of drinking and junk food. There will be people who can help with this.
- Don’t settle for good enough. Most of the future NFL guys are so good that the opponent has to plan around them specifically. Be that thorn in the opposition’s side.
> my guess is that the university brings in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100M/year from football and spends something like 30% of that on football and support for the players. That 30% is seen as protecting the rest of the $100M
Yep.
What many people don’t realize is that revenue from football and basketball fund or cover funding gaps for all of the other sports at the bigger schools.
Not to mention that alumni donations and quality of applicants increase when the high profile teams do well. Simple example, the University of Alabama has seen a substantial increase in out-of-state applicants since Saban arrived.
Best of luck to your nephew, and I hope he makes it to the NFL.
While it's true that athletes get a lot of support (at least for money-making sports like football), that doesn't make it okay! Most college athletes aren't going to go pro, and so getting a rushed and watered-down education is not serving their best interests in their career beyond. Of course they're adults and how much they learn is up to them, but increasing the time and travel commitment of athletics greatly increases the pressure and need to rely on this "academic support", even more so than they do is today.
Also...while the football players will probably be fine, the same cannot be said about all students. For example, marching band also requires heavy time commitments and lots of travel, but these students receive little funding and no academic support. Last year when my school's football team went to a bowl game, the team was of course flown out and had a great time while my friends on the marching band came back with horror stories. The school was supposed to handle all the travel arrangements, but they consistently cheaped out and forgot about important things like food -- the whole band was loaded up into a stuffy tour bus for 16 hours without a single meal.
Or, consider less-funded athletic departments like the University of Oregon's beach volleyball team. UO is a top athletic school with a Nike sponsorship deal and a huge budget; the football team (in)famously wears brand new uniforms each week, whereas less-profitable sports are so badly underfunded that the school is under Title IX investigation for mistreatment of women athletes: https://www.oregonlive.com/ducks/2023/07/oregon-ducks-beach-...
> The team practices and plays home games in a city park. The players, who do not receive athletic scholarships, have had to use a public restroom with no doors on the stalls. At times, they’ve driven hundreds of miles for games and stayed three or four to a room and had to share beds.
These students' situations are going to get a LOT worse now that they're competing entirely against teams from the opposite side of the country.
As far as I knew, the plan for Cal/Stanford was to have all their non money making sports games (outside of their rivalry) at Southern Methodist in Texas. So the football and basketball games were to be played 'normally', but lacrosse and soccer, for example, were to be at SMU. I'd also heard that a lot of the 'lesser' sports were just going to be keeping on with the PAC12 league anyways, things like water polo which the ACC pretty much doesn't play.
That said, with FSU really trying to get out of the ACC, who knows.
But you do bring up a good point on the travel times. Most of the 'lesser' sports' players are at the universities for the academics. Especially Stanford due to their admissions model. Take a player in a sport that is an Olympic sport, who now has access to some funds from the NIL. Say swimming or something. They get a lot of cash from Speedo for the NIL as they are likely to win some medals. Now they can hire a real law firm to argue for them against the army of lawyers from the school and they now have a real shot at winning. The title-9 violations from these long distance travel arrangements may not be de jure but a good lawyer can argue that they are de facto violations. And now those schools are paying big money out. And now they can't just cancel all sports other than the money makers because these athletes now have access to real money and real lawyers.
This conference realignment is obviously a bad outcome. The leaders of the universities and American academia are delivering very poor results: education is too expensive, academic freedom is limited by outsiders, and now this. What good do the conference realignments do for anyone? Who is happy or better off?
The Big 10, in particular, used to be both an athletic association and an academic one, sharing resources between their members, (almost) all AAU members (leading research universities). This year they had the chance to add Stanford and Cal to the academic association, and share their resources. And they turned them down, because the Bay Area college football market isn't big enough. The story I read said Fox Sports, the Big 10's main broadcast partner, made the decision. They had the chance to add Stanford and Cal to their academic association, and said no - if you restrict yourself to universities which compete in major college sports, you will never get a better opportunity.
For generations, college football avoided this absurdity. Long ago, maybe eight years ago, there was a crazy notion of people working together, cooperating for a greater good. Why do that? Because it was good, and because they could accomplish more by working together than by acting in anarchy. People now embrace law-of-the-jungle anarchy like it's a rebellious trend, instead of just well-established idiocy. The NCAA members could work together to make it better; they could arrange conferences so that they work for everyone, without students flying across the country; but what was the norm for generations is now so obviously absurd that people roll their eyes at me.
What was the norm for generations was and has always been laughable. College football has been a cancer for academia, at first fed by the deep pockets of alumni who were the real audience. The business side grew up and realized that tv rights were an even bigger prize, but along the way somehow failed to recognize that they were greasing the wheels of their money machine with the distant hopes of a pro career held by academically underqualified students with athletic gifts, most of whom either fail to get a diploma, succeed in getting long term injuries, or both. The university priorities get turned upside down and season-winning coaches win the compensation lottery too.
It’s disgusting and always has been. Gooooo fighting whatevers!
I agree about the long-term problems (and I'm very happy the students are finally getting paid, and they should get normal market salaries), but it's still much worse now. It's too easy to say, 'everything in the world in imperfect, and therefore all the same'.
Fair enough. I don't care about college football, and I see it from a distance. That might give me a less accurate perspective, or a more accurate one, depending.
But large-scale situations result from norms, incentives and behaviors. Looks like the incentives are about the same, while the behaviors are now worse and are causing norms to drift. We can shame people into better behavior in the short term, but the incentives are still there.
As a thought, faith has been lost in institutions, and society in general, and rightly so in many respects. But I think instead of feeling agency to fix the issues, people feel they have to either capitulate, break the system or work outside it entirely.
I feel we forget, or don't teach, the fact that we built all of this, and for the purpose of our own benefit. Society and institutions have become antagonists in people's minds, rather than the enabler and provider that it is supposed to be.
> faith has been lost in institutions, and society in general, and rightly so in many respects. But I think instead of feeling agency to fix the issues, people feel they have to either capitulate, break the system or work outside it entirely.
Yes, but it's bizarre to feel so hopeless. In this example, it worked (and we worked) far better for decades until a few years ago.
Broadly speaking, it is illegal to fix things. If there is a problem that could be fixed with industrial processes, it is a common requirement that any attempt cause no pollution and be perfectly safe. If there is a problem in the medical system any attempt at a solution must be proven to be safe and effective. If there is a social problem, any scandal will have the government move in to license and regulate it. Something like 2 or 3 accidents ended the entire nuclear industry through safety regulation even though we then sailed into an energy crisis that has so far been much worse than a dozen nuclear disasters.
It is obvious why the system is tending in this direction, but the problem is that society is trying to achieve impossible goals. So it isn't succeeding and it has disarmed people of the agency to make improvements. My catchphrase is "everything China does to get ahead is illegal in the west". And that isn't a knock against Chinese methods. They have noticeably bettered their society in a way that the Anglosphere has not.
Yet we have been doing it successfully for generations. And then people started making up theories to explain what clearly isn't true - that we somehow can't do anything. You're just not doing anything (if you actually believe this stuff). We know exactly what to do; let's get going.
> They have noticeably bettered their society in a way that the Anglosphere has not.
In what way is it better to live in China? The economy there grew faster for awhile, which is the norm for successfully developing economies, but wealth and standard of living aren't at the level of the West. Why are so many in China moving to the Anglosphere these days?
(I'm not wishing anything but the best for people in China, who should have freedom, self-determination, and continue to grow in prosperity.)
I'm not sure you're engaging with the word "illegal". If someone did what they've been successfully doing for generations they will be fined, arrested, have their business dissolved or otherwise made to change their ways.
> In what way is it better to live in China?
I usually refer to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use - their per-capita energy use is ahead of the UK and the trends on the chart favour China. I'd expect life in China to be better than in the UK in the next few decades if those trends don't do something radical (and when it comes to democracies vs. authoritarians, anything is possible).
But more importantly, the trends massively favour China. What they are doing is building a place that would be nice to live. The Anglosphere is letting a nice place to live slowly decay because we aren't willling to maintain it. For all the bleating about how we have to do more for poor people, we've made no attempt to double per capita energy use in the way China has; there have been explicit policies trying to reduce it. Largely, I point out, because the obvious way to get more energy from where we are is continuous development of Nuclear power and it has been banned in practice.
> Why are so many in China moving to the Anglosphere these days?
I dunno, are they? I'm sure they'd like to, the US is still a long way ahead of where China is.
Though it probably didn't factor into the Big Ten's decision to not invite Cal and Stanford, at some point their academic research cartel would end up attracting the attention of someone in government or politics that doesn't believe such a cartel serves the purpose of their research funders, primarily the US government. If Vanderbilt loses out on a grant that goes to a less appropriate research group at Nebraska simply because Vanderbilt is in the SEC while Nebraska is in the Big Ten, does that best serve the taxpayers funding the research? With Cal and Stanford in the cartel, the weight of those connections would be very heavy and hard to ignore.
Ad dollars ruin everything. It ruined the internet, and now it is ruining amateur athletics and academics. I'm not sure how to fix it, but I suspect we'll need some regulatory answers. Just like some places have laws to prevent a billboard being built in a place that harms others, we shouldn't enable advertisers to harm others in other realms.
It would be easy and straightforward to ban third-party advertising across all business domains. But you will see when this is proposed that some people really really really like ads, curiously enough.
TFA mentioned Kansas (where I sit typing this comment) as potentially losing its importance (such as it is) in college football.
If it turns out that way, it won't just be disappointing for the KU football program; recent action by the program will make it disastrous.
What action? Huge scale reconstruction, of the football portion of the KU campus. As I type, the current football stadium is being demolished, to make way for a bigger and better (and more expensive) stadium, within a fabulous and exciting "Gateway District".
This was already IMO a bad bet, on continuing KU football's recent relative success; if things go the way TFA projects, catastrophic failure could occur regardless of win-loss success.
These “students” should be allowed to delay their academic studies until they’re done playing. Most of them won’t make the NFL, so they’re stuck with whatever education they can get while they’re not busy getting CTE.
While not quite the same thing, most schools will allow football players to finish their degrees after their football eligibility has expired. Given the amount of money live sports generates due to being one of the few places advertisers can be guaranteed an audience, schools that used to be stingy with limiting scholarship money to what was required by the NCAA, can now be very generous. But yes, this isn't quite the same as letting players focus on football first and then work through their degrees once their playing career is over.
Oh cnn you garbage site: “ We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.”
As an outsider with close to zero knowledge of American football, the spectacle of college athletics seems bizarre. I mean, I understand the old principle of _mens sana in corpore sano_ but it’s a stretch to imagine college athletics serving that goal for all but a very few students. I don’t doubt that the system has produced some academic success stories but it must be the exceptional case. Instead, the whole system bears the taint of over involvement of parties with financial incentives that have nothing to do with the mission of the academy.
College athletics is a pretty good system for promoting lesser-followed sports that would have difficulty maintaining an organized league -- team volleyball, swimming, field hockey, rowing, etc -- because it provides infrastructure and funding that would unlikely be available if reliant on revenue.
On the other hand, "amateur" leagues for popular sports (football, basketball) being associated with colleges is extremely effective at amplifying the interest of these leagues. Consider how little interest there would be in the "Ann Arbor Wolverines" vs "Columbus Buckeyes" in the USFL without any association with schools and their alumni, or whether anyone outside a 20-mile radius would watch Durham vs Chapel Hill if they played in the NBA's G-league.
Are those sports accessible to anyone in the university who want to join? My knowledge is only founded by US movies/series and this is what what I get out of it is:
- male good enough at sport: can participate in sport
- good looking female: can participate in cheers/pompom girls
- male not good enough /female not in beauty standard: can’t participate, go to the free urban basketball field.
In the EU countries I know, sport is as mandatory as math until ~17year old, then universities sports clubs are open to anyone whatever how good you will perform. The budgets are low but you don’t need a ton of money to train/maintain your body in good condition.
Physical well being is as important as math (if not more) and I hope my knowledge of the US does not depict the reality.
Also not from US, but campi usually have a great physical structure for sport practice. So, even if not part of the team, you have easy access to play the sport with friends.
That was intentional, the only movie including girls team I remember is “Whipe It”. The main character is in college and she fight to make sport instead of beauty contests.
Physical education (p.e. or gym) is mandatory in most us state education systems. But that's a far cry from competitive sports - they more just try to teach the kids to be active and blow off steam, with a bit of education about different sports, stretching etc. my high school pe classes were graded on whether we changed into gym clothes and participated.
Most universities in the US have recreation centers for students to exercise, play pick up basketball, and other forms of casual sports. College Athletics however is a whole different level - d3 and up are serious teams, though d1 teams is where the real athletic talent concentrates. Many d1 athletes seem to be at school for the sport, not the academics.
It's way more complicated in the USA. You forgot U21 teams at European pro clubs. American Division 1 college sports is roughly equivalent to those but affiliated with colleges rather than professional sports club.
Division 3, intramural leagues, and physical education classes at colleges are a totally different thing. These are more in line with college/university sports in Europe.
I've gathered that the situation in every country revolves around the available facilities/venues for sport, which is downstream of budgets and financing: in the US the majority of the divergence starts around high school level, with better-funded districts and private schools sometimes boasting rather spectacular facilities; since every US state sets their own education policies, there can be huge variance in what's available even going between different parts of California, let alone going to another state.
At university level the "new gym" or "new stadium" is a common method of patronage, creating a snowball effect of a campus having really nice facilities and a large student population, so not only can they host athletics for the regular student body, they can also field an elite team by putting a little more into the scholarships and coaching budget.
But the way in which this differs from other places is that access is often impacted by US urban sprawl conditions. In Japan, for example, middle school and high school athletes will use all the major urban venues, just as is depicted in manga and anime, because it's reasonable to get there by transit. So sports are supported by better utilization of the facilities across the entire local population. In contrast the US tends to have talent clustering in specialized cities: for example, all the serious tennis players go to Florida at some point. And that means there's a very substantial jump in pressure and selectivity when you go into the biggest competitive sports, and just about everyone at NCAA Division I level is intending to - or their parents groomed them to - go pro, and had it in mind from long before they got the scholarship. They allocate their day around the sport, and can't have an ordinary life. But there are always options to participate in lower divisions, intramural or other leagues with lower stakes as well, and those usually have to scrape around for budget, but can sometimes draft in the wind of an elite program.
I much much prefer the European football model of professional sports clubs that run programs reaching all the way down to 5-year-olds. These clubs use profits from their pro teams to build their programs and are in no way associated with schools.
Mixing sports with education beyond basic PE is a recipe for disaster, as you can pretty clearly see by the underperformance of American high school education.
I grew up in deep football land in Texas, and my experience as a non-athlete was that football consumed nearly the entire budget for non-academics in the district. Everything else was subsisting on peanuts while the football program hired dozens of coaches and built a new $30m stadium. Probably 50% of my high school teachers were coaches who were just doing double duty as teachers for some extra cash.
I wouldn't take too much from the way film and television depicts school dynamics in the US. I'm not going to claim to speak for everyone, but my experience was not much like what you see.
First, while cliques are definitely a thing and kids can be mean to each other, there is nothing like a strict jock/geek breakdown where athletes are never smart and they hate and pick on each other. I'm here now, competed in academic olympics and spelling bees as a kid, got the top SAT scores at my high school, and also lettered in four sports. The honors classes were filled with preppies and jocks. I was tall and athletic and girls liked me, but most of my friends and my now wife were all goth kids and I never bullied anyone.
It's not even remotely true that you needed to be attractive to be in sports or a cheerleader, either. Neither men nor women need to be any good to play in high school. The teams are totally open to anyone, but competitions can only dress so many in a given game and you might never play. Something track or cross-country can usually find room for everyone willing to try. There are plenty of sports for girls and all the athletic or attractive girls are not necessarily cheerleaders.
Universities are an entirely different story. They usually have intramural sports, which means they are not part of any formal athletic association, don't have paid coaches, and anyone can join and play. The intercollegiate teams that represent the school, however, are mostly scholarship athletes. They have limited slots. People can try out and join the team if they qualify without being recruited or getting a scholarship, but you need to be good. "Good enough" is a pretty high standard at the university level except for obscure sports no one plays. I won two state championships at the high school level, not individual but I was on the varsity team, and I never even tried to compete in college outside of intramurals. My niece was a national champion in cheer in high school and didn't play any sport in college.
At no point is sports participation mandatory, but all school systems I'm aware require some kind of "physical education." There is a general class offered where a coach just teaches arbitrary sports and exercise and most students take that. I grew up thinking that competing in a real sport exempted you from this class, because it did at my school, but I guess that isn't universally the case because I found out my wife competed in sports but still had to take the PE class as well. So I guess that depends on the school system. It's different in every state, maybe even every district.
As for "free urban basketball field," we call that pickup ball. It's open to whoever gets there first and often teams are picked on the spot, but usually the same people who up pretty regularly and know each other well. I played a ton of pickup ball as a kid. My summers were often spent going to the park and playing basketball for 14 hours before I came home. There were some people you see there you don't see in school, but at least half the regulars also played for the school and they played pickup ball in addition, not instead of.
I'm still working on my first kid (actually have an IVF appt in two hours), but as far as I understood youth sport these days, the more competitive level has unfortunately become a lot less accessible than it used to be. There are national travel leagues now that get sponsored by rich parents and participation can often be quite expensive between the travel and the equipment, so rich kids can have quite an advantage. Obviously, you need access to ice to play hockey, access to water to swim, things like that. Basketball courts, soccer fields (football, but Americans call it soccer), and baseball fields tend to be available everywhere, but playing as part of a real team will probably cost money except in basketball, where the lower-level amateur leagues will still scout and sponsor kids from pickup courts because the ...
Your knowledge of the US does not depict the reality. Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that requires equal opportunities in, among other things, athletic opportunities in educational programs.
> "With regard to Title IX’s participation requirements, a school can meet the standard via three independent tests. The first test is a mathematical safe harbor. If the school offers athletic participation opportunities (number of individual athlete participation slots, not numbers of teams) proportional to the numbers of males and females in the general student body, the school meets the participation standard. If the school does not meet this mathematical test, it may be deemed in compliance if it can (1) demonstrate consistent expansion of opportunities for the underrepresented gender over time or (2) show that the athletic program fully met the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender. The courts have ruled that “boys are more interested in sports than girls” is not an acceptable defense to lack of equitable participation opportunities."
> "Under Title IX there are no sport exclusions or exceptions, so football is included under the law. Individual participation opportunities (numbers of athletes participating rather than number of sports) in all men’s sports and all women’s sports are counted in determining whether a school meets the Title IX participation standard. The basic philosophical underpinning of Title IX is that there cannot be an economic justification for discrimination. The school cannot maintain that there are revenue production or other considerations that mandate that male athletes receive better treatment or participation opportunities than female athletes. A good analogy would be that a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide wheelchair access for students with physical disabilities as required under the Americans With Disabilities Act because the football team needs the money in order to maintain its current level of revenue production. Similarly, a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide participation opportunities for an underrepresented gender."
> College athletics is a pretty good system for promoting lesser-followed sports that would have difficulty maintaining an organized league -- team volleyball, swimming, field hockey, rowing, etc -- because it provides infrastructure and funding that would unlikely be available if reliant on revenue.
And yet, outside of the USA, these sports do manage to exist, leagues and all, outside universities.
College football and basketball seem mainly to function as publicity for the schools and, when the teams are winning, help them to get the alumni to donate more. And serve as entertainment for the non athlete students. It's profoundly weird and completely unrelated to the academic functions of the university. Lots of people confuse schools with good sports teams for schools with strong academics.
A cousin mentioned that the basketball coach was the highest paid employee at her (private) university. I said that he was also likely to be among the easiest to fire. Even an adjunct is likely to have more chances than a coach who doesn't meet expectations.
Football and basketball fund all the other sports. That's important because there are still many kids getting their tuition covered with a sports scholarship, which, in turn, is being paid for by the football and basketball programs.
All that to say there is some academic good that comes out of all this.
> the spectacle of college athletics seems bizarre
Unlike European football, in the US town-based football seems not to have taken off quite so much. The college scene, possibly because of affinity to elites, became the one that got the self-reinforcing money spiral that led to it becoming really big. This leads to weird distortions where the most highly paid public employee in many states is a sports coach.
Most college sports are just students who happen to also compete in a sport that is most likely earning negative revenue and they get scholarships in return. The NCAA and other associations, along with the school's athletic department itself, all get non-profit status and are eligible for tax-free donations and government funding because promoting amateurism in sport is a specifically designated carveout in the tax code.
Men's football and basketball are entirely different stories. Of the North American big four, hockey and baseball have always had robust minor leagues and kids are drafted into them straight out of high school. Football and basketball, on the other hand, have pro leagues that have historically relied upon university competition to develop athletes ready for the big leagues. The NBA (American pro basketball) started up a developmental league something like maybe a decade back or so it now calls the G League, but historical inertia being what it is, there is a much larger following for universities and the best players will still tend to do at least a year there, which I think is still the minimum required. The NFL (American pro football) won't draft you until you're at least three years past high school graduation, so the players there have no choice and need to go to college.
There's a lot driving it. Alumni pride, even regional and civic pride in places without pro teams in the same sport. Often the best school in each state is the flagship land grant public school and maybe a large private school, and these are usually not located in major metro areas that also have pro teams. There are a few exceptions like University of Washington, which played in the national championship game two days ago, is in Seattle. USC has one of the historically dominant teams and is in Los Angeles. But looking at the other top schools from this year, you're looking at Athens, GA, Ann Arbor, MI, Tuscaloosa, AL, Austin, TX, all places that do not have pro teams.
Something people miss is the university athletic department is often, even usually, its own separate non-profit corporation from the school. So, contrary to a lot of takes, it actually has its own revenue stream and its own expenses separate from the larger university. Having a very good football and/or basketball team can draw in enough revenue that the athletic department at the very best schools is typically self-funding. They may as well just be pro franchises, except they don't pay taxes and the athletes nominally have to attend enough classes to not flunk out, though they also don't need to graduate.
It's a farce of a system at the very top, but most athletes at most schools are actually amateurs just looking to do something healthy and competitive while they learn and get some of their school paid for, and the US law requires an equal number of scholarships awarded to men and women, so thanks to there often being men's sports that generate a lot of revenue, and there not being such a thing right now as women's football, the presence of a very successful football program can fund a ton of scholarship for obscure women's sports that give girls a chance to get a free education if they're willing to learn and practice them. Everything from fencing to bowling.
> I don’t doubt that the system has produced some academic success stories but it must be the exceptional case.
I'd guess the opposite. IMO, too much attention gets put on the top tier of athletes in the most popular sports.
I'd guess that well over 50% see education as the primary benefit. Most of these students realize that they don't have a professional playing career ahead of them.
"All that drives decision-making in college football now is television ratings, to the point that conferences are hiring former television executives as their commissioners."
I was just wondering the other day, are any of the top college athletes majoring in something demanding (in a way that it requires one to spend countless of hours learning new mental models) like CS or physics? As a European, my exposure to college sports is pretty limited, but I've never seen a major like that listed.
If you're interested you could look to the lists of Rhodes Scholar's worldwide- the entry qualification (before selection for award) is to be triple top tier - reputable sporting positon and good academic marks and reputable public facing involvement.
Typically, in Australia say, an annual Rhodes Scholar might be a captain in a state cricket team and a viola player in the state orchestra and studying one of the STEM lines.
I could point to a Physics Prof who occassionally lectures at the Royal Institute with good sports and band camp cred from their youth .. or another teaching music in the US at a prestiguous school - but that starts to pinpoint my origins :)
That's interesting. I think it's usually pretty siloed so that people in sports, music or academia/tech are so focused mastering their own field and hang out with likeminded people. Maybe you get combination of two, but three sounds pretty uncommon.
It's mostly in former British Empire territories, but rather famously US POTUS Bill Clinto got a Rhodes (IIRC).
Cecil Rhodes kicked it off on the back of mega mineral wealth extracted from South Africa (and surrounds, back in the day), and he wanted to support well rounded students into the Oxbridge education streams to mix with future UK diplomats, business leaders, politicans to expand the global web of interconnect ...
( fill in your own dots )
It's less about being the best athlete | best musician | best mathematician .. but very much about being up there with them.
There have been men who earned PhDs in mathematics during or after NFL careers--quite recently HN had links to an obituary of Frank Ryan, who led the Cleveland Browns to their last NFL championship, and who taught at Case. More recently, John Urschel, a lineman for the Baltimore Ravens earned a Ph.D. and according to Wikipedia teaches at MIT.
I have the impression that college football was much less of a full time job in Ryan's day, but Urschel graduated from Penn State in 2012.
"But in the long term, when you pattern yourself after the NFL in order to get some of their television juice, when you jettison the traditions and orthodoxies that made people fall in love with the sport in the first place, you stop being college football: You simply become Minor League NFL. And no one cares about minor league anything."
This pretty much sums-up college football today: it has no future. When you throw out all of the traditions you're left with a bunch of kids playing football. I can watch that on Friday night for a lot less money - and support my local community.
I see that there are a lot of 'factors' that are not used to giving ground that are being set up against each other, and I don't think it's going to end well or be very predictable.
1) Money: The sports of football and basketball are wildly popular in the US. Our appetite for football is effectively bottomless. Putting that much of it on the air is going to test how bottomless it is. Additionally, the 'lesser' sports that aren't in the TV money making arena are still going to have access to NIL money. This is especially true with Olympic sports, where every four years or so, these elite athletes are going to get a bust of cash from sponsors. For the 'lesser' sports, they will finally have longer term spokespersons that can keep the hype going through the off Olympic years, and the athletes will want this as well. Turning these athletes into money making machines is not going to be something that sponsors want to get rid of.
2) Laws: There are massive Title-9 violations all over the place. Lets look at Stanford students in particular. Their admissions policy is a bit unique in that sports are 'not considered' in admits (who know how true that is for football). The 'lesser' sports' athletes really are there for the education, mostly. Now, with the very long travel distances to the east coast or to SMU, that is putting a de facto undue burden on the women's teams, especially if they aren't flying the same airlines as the men's football team. Combine this with the NIL money that these 'lesser' sports are gong to get, and they can finally hire a real law firm that can go toe-to-toe with the army of lawyers from the university.
3) Banks: There are many schools that have decided to recently re-vamp their fields and facilities. Those are on long term mortgages and other contracts with the various banks of the nation. If these teams start sucking, or are in bad conferences, then there is a huge incentive to change that by the school. Still, there are going to be a lot of teams that just aren't going to do well. And their mortgages are going to start looking like really really bad ideas from the bank's perspective.
4) Governing boards: Some schools are governed by a board of regents. Some are governed by just a president. Some are governed by the state legislature. Some are governed by the Catholic church. All of these petite tyrannies and oligarchies are used to getting their way. Now, they are all going to be competing with each other for giant piles of money. Governing entities that have more legal powers than others are going to be incentivized to use those legal powers to try to grab more of that money. And once one does something galling, all the others are going to be forced to follow suit and try to outbid that gall.
5) Mothers: Mommas don't want their boys playing football anymore. The game is largely seen as too violent and damaging. Yeah, not all the mothers see that, by any means. But the statistics point to a marked and continuing decrease in the number of boys playing. This is a big threat to the pipeline going into football. Other sports aren't really seeing this issue however, outside of women's soccer. But as most of the issues with the conferences are centered around football, mothers end up being a factor.
6) Attention: This is the main issue, I think. The dynamics are pushing schools to have billion dollar programs to survive. These things kinda end up as power law distributions. And as programs get more money, they tend to win more. The system will settle on programs that are very successful and very expensive. To say yet another way, winners will keep winning. Without some sort of balancing factors (player draft, players' unions, salary caps, etc) the winning teams will largely be known before the season starts, just based on expenditures. That's where the attention issue comes in. Who is going to want to watch a game, let alone a season, where you already kno...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread> The sport has reached its end-stage-capitalism period
All credibility left was just lost
Same for other left (over) coast teams, but less impact.
1. Most athletes take fewer and easier classes during their season, or the main part of their season. Missing credit hours can be made up for during the summer, which sometimes have easier classes.
2. Many athletes take easier majors in general.
3. Athletes have access to free tutors. Sometimes these tutors help, sometimes they help a lot, sometimes they just do the work for the athlete. I imagine that the ethics line is adhered to a bit more frequently at places like Cal and Stanford, but sometimes it’s a blurry line.
4. Athletic departments and athletes know which majors and which professors are easy to deal with for things like travel and workload. Word gets around.
Of all the things to worry about, the academic side for the athlete would be the least of my worries.
It's more organized than that. The Stanford Daily once uncovered the football team's official list of easy courses.[1] Stanford also has the Academic Athletic Resource Center, to help varsity athletes make it through Stanford.[2] "Student-athletes may avail themselves of 2 hours of tutoring per class per week for any reason."
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/
[2] https://advising.stanford.edu/current-students/student-athle...
For college football, it’s only ~12 games a season and they typically are played at or near the weekend. But for many other sports, the schedule is heavier and played throughout the week.
I believe, as maybe OP did, the college football realignment (along with its many other faults) will potentially more detrimental to the athletes in other sports.
He went to junior college first. After his first year, his current university brought him to campus a few times for recruiting purposes, but they didn't end up making him an offer because of his grades. A year later, his grades were up, and he got an offer from that university.
At this university, bad grades will cause you to be dropped from the team and lose your scholarship, no matter how big a star you are. They drill this into the players and make it clear that they owe it to their teammates to keep their grades up. I didn't expect that, and I assume it's far from universal at this level, but I'm glad to see it.
It's also a great opportunity for my nephew. He and his parents don't have the resources for an education of this caliber (his parents are both teachers), but he is getting it because of football. And he's getting much more active support in that education (through things like the tutoring mentioned above). He'd love to play professionally. Now that he's the wise old age of 20, he understands how low the odds are, and he's making sure he gets an education that will lead to opportunities for a good non-athletic career. Not all of his teammates have that clarity, but he says a lot of them do. One of his teammates graduated before his football eligibility was used up, so he's now getting a master’s degree.
You can argue that it's not fair that football players get so many more resources thrown at them. But at this level, they are a huge source of funding for the university. Through things I've heard from his coaches (I've been lucky enough to meet the head coach, the offensive coordinator, and a few others), my guess is that the university brings in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100M/year from football and spends something like 30% of that on football and support for the players. That 30% is seen as protecting the rest of the $100M (if the team doesn't do well, that money is at risk). These numbers are for a university that is not a perennial top 20 team, so I'm sure the numbers can be significantly higher for the top football programs.
Odds are low, but not zero, especially if he is at a power 5 school.
I have a relative who was in the nfl until recently. Some (summarized) comments from him:
- Focus on technique. There can be substantial differences in size, strength, and skill in college such that sloppy technique can often get the job done. Not so in the NFL. Good technique and good ability to be coached will an asset.
- Focus on good technique in the weight room. This will both develop the right kind of strength and lower risk of injury. Good flexibility via stretching and yoga are also an important part of strength training.
- Get nutrition right asap. This includes moderation of drinking and junk food. There will be people who can help with this.
- Don’t settle for good enough. Most of the future NFL guys are so good that the opponent has to plan around them specifically. Be that thorn in the opposition’s side.
> my guess is that the university brings in somewhere in the neighborhood of $100M/year from football and spends something like 30% of that on football and support for the players. That 30% is seen as protecting the rest of the $100M
Yep.
What many people don’t realize is that revenue from football and basketball fund or cover funding gaps for all of the other sports at the bigger schools.
Not to mention that alumni donations and quality of applicants increase when the high profile teams do well. Simple example, the University of Alabama has seen a substantial increase in out-of-state applicants since Saban arrived.
Best of luck to your nephew, and I hope he makes it to the NFL.
> 1. Most athletes take fewer and easier classes during their season
This only makes sense if the goal of academia is to get students to pass tests, rather than to get them to learn.
Also...while the football players will probably be fine, the same cannot be said about all students. For example, marching band also requires heavy time commitments and lots of travel, but these students receive little funding and no academic support. Last year when my school's football team went to a bowl game, the team was of course flown out and had a great time while my friends on the marching band came back with horror stories. The school was supposed to handle all the travel arrangements, but they consistently cheaped out and forgot about important things like food -- the whole band was loaded up into a stuffy tour bus for 16 hours without a single meal.
Or, consider less-funded athletic departments like the University of Oregon's beach volleyball team. UO is a top athletic school with a Nike sponsorship deal and a huge budget; the football team (in)famously wears brand new uniforms each week, whereas less-profitable sports are so badly underfunded that the school is under Title IX investigation for mistreatment of women athletes: https://www.oregonlive.com/ducks/2023/07/oregon-ducks-beach-...
> The team practices and plays home games in a city park. The players, who do not receive athletic scholarships, have had to use a public restroom with no doors on the stalls. At times, they’ve driven hundreds of miles for games and stayed three or four to a room and had to share beds.
These students' situations are going to get a LOT worse now that they're competing entirely against teams from the opposite side of the country.
That said, with FSU really trying to get out of the ACC, who knows.
But you do bring up a good point on the travel times. Most of the 'lesser' sports' players are at the universities for the academics. Especially Stanford due to their admissions model. Take a player in a sport that is an Olympic sport, who now has access to some funds from the NIL. Say swimming or something. They get a lot of cash from Speedo for the NIL as they are likely to win some medals. Now they can hire a real law firm to argue for them against the army of lawyers from the school and they now have a real shot at winning. The title-9 violations from these long distance travel arrangements may not be de jure but a good lawyer can argue that they are de facto violations. And now those schools are paying big money out. And now they can't just cancel all sports other than the money makers because these athletes now have access to real money and real lawyers.
What a mess!
The Big 10, in particular, used to be both an athletic association and an academic one, sharing resources between their members, (almost) all AAU members (leading research universities). This year they had the chance to add Stanford and Cal to the academic association, and share their resources. And they turned them down, because the Bay Area college football market isn't big enough. The story I read said Fox Sports, the Big 10's main broadcast partner, made the decision. They had the chance to add Stanford and Cal to their academic association, and said no - if you restrict yourself to universities which compete in major college sports, you will never get a better opportunity.
For generations, college football avoided this absurdity. Long ago, maybe eight years ago, there was a crazy notion of people working together, cooperating for a greater good. Why do that? Because it was good, and because they could accomplish more by working together than by acting in anarchy. People now embrace law-of-the-jungle anarchy like it's a rebellious trend, instead of just well-established idiocy. The NCAA members could work together to make it better; they could arrange conferences so that they work for everyone, without students flying across the country; but what was the norm for generations is now so obviously absurd that people roll their eyes at me.
It’s disgusting and always has been. Gooooo fighting whatevers!
But large-scale situations result from norms, incentives and behaviors. Looks like the incentives are about the same, while the behaviors are now worse and are causing norms to drift. We can shame people into better behavior in the short term, but the incentives are still there.
I feel we forget, or don't teach, the fact that we built all of this, and for the purpose of our own benefit. Society and institutions have become antagonists in people's minds, rather than the enabler and provider that it is supposed to be.
Yes, but it's bizarre to feel so hopeless. In this example, it worked (and we worked) far better for decades until a few years ago.
It is obvious why the system is tending in this direction, but the problem is that society is trying to achieve impossible goals. So it isn't succeeding and it has disarmed people of the agency to make improvements. My catchphrase is "everything China does to get ahead is illegal in the west". And that isn't a knock against Chinese methods. They have noticeably bettered their society in a way that the Anglosphere has not.
> They have noticeably bettered their society in a way that the Anglosphere has not.
In what way is it better to live in China? The economy there grew faster for awhile, which is the norm for successfully developing economies, but wealth and standard of living aren't at the level of the West. Why are so many in China moving to the Anglosphere these days?
(I'm not wishing anything but the best for people in China, who should have freedom, self-determination, and continue to grow in prosperity.)
I'm not sure you're engaging with the word "illegal". If someone did what they've been successfully doing for generations they will be fined, arrested, have their business dissolved or otherwise made to change their ways.
> In what way is it better to live in China?
I usually refer to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use - their per-capita energy use is ahead of the UK and the trends on the chart favour China. I'd expect life in China to be better than in the UK in the next few decades if those trends don't do something radical (and when it comes to democracies vs. authoritarians, anything is possible).
But more importantly, the trends massively favour China. What they are doing is building a place that would be nice to live. The Anglosphere is letting a nice place to live slowly decay because we aren't willling to maintain it. For all the bleating about how we have to do more for poor people, we've made no attempt to double per capita energy use in the way China has; there have been explicit policies trying to reduce it. Largely, I point out, because the obvious way to get more energy from where we are is continuous development of Nuclear power and it has been banned in practice.
> Why are so many in China moving to the Anglosphere these days?
I dunno, are they? I'm sure they'd like to, the US is still a long way ahead of where China is.
If it turns out that way, it won't just be disappointing for the KU football program; recent action by the program will make it disastrous.
What action? Huge scale reconstruction, of the football portion of the KU campus. As I type, the current football stadium is being demolished, to make way for a bigger and better (and more expensive) stadium, within a fabulous and exciting "Gateway District".
This was already IMO a bad bet, on continuing KU football's recent relative success; if things go the way TFA projects, catastrophic failure could occur regardless of win-loss success.
On the other hand, "amateur" leagues for popular sports (football, basketball) being associated with colleges is extremely effective at amplifying the interest of these leagues. Consider how little interest there would be in the "Ann Arbor Wolverines" vs "Columbus Buckeyes" in the USFL without any association with schools and their alumni, or whether anyone outside a 20-mile radius would watch Durham vs Chapel Hill if they played in the NBA's G-league.
- male good enough at sport: can participate in sport
- good looking female: can participate in cheers/pompom girls
- male not good enough /female not in beauty standard: can’t participate, go to the free urban basketball field.
In the EU countries I know, sport is as mandatory as math until ~17year old, then universities sports clubs are open to anyone whatever how good you will perform. The budgets are low but you don’t need a ton of money to train/maintain your body in good condition.
Physical well being is as important as math (if not more) and I hope my knowledge of the US does not depict the reality.
Also not from US, but campi usually have a great physical structure for sport practice. So, even if not part of the team, you have easy access to play the sport with friends.
That was intentional, the only movie including girls team I remember is “Whipe It”. The main character is in college and she fight to make sport instead of beauty contests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnastics_all-around_champion...
Most universities in the US have recreation centers for students to exercise, play pick up basketball, and other forms of casual sports. College Athletics however is a whole different level - d3 and up are serious teams, though d1 teams is where the real athletic talent concentrates. Many d1 athletes seem to be at school for the sport, not the academics.
Division 3, intramural leagues, and physical education classes at colleges are a totally different thing. These are more in line with college/university sports in Europe.
At university level the "new gym" or "new stadium" is a common method of patronage, creating a snowball effect of a campus having really nice facilities and a large student population, so not only can they host athletics for the regular student body, they can also field an elite team by putting a little more into the scholarships and coaching budget.
But the way in which this differs from other places is that access is often impacted by US urban sprawl conditions. In Japan, for example, middle school and high school athletes will use all the major urban venues, just as is depicted in manga and anime, because it's reasonable to get there by transit. So sports are supported by better utilization of the facilities across the entire local population. In contrast the US tends to have talent clustering in specialized cities: for example, all the serious tennis players go to Florida at some point. And that means there's a very substantial jump in pressure and selectivity when you go into the biggest competitive sports, and just about everyone at NCAA Division I level is intending to - or their parents groomed them to - go pro, and had it in mind from long before they got the scholarship. They allocate their day around the sport, and can't have an ordinary life. But there are always options to participate in lower divisions, intramural or other leagues with lower stakes as well, and those usually have to scrape around for budget, but can sometimes draft in the wind of an elite program.
Mixing sports with education beyond basic PE is a recipe for disaster, as you can pretty clearly see by the underperformance of American high school education.
I grew up in deep football land in Texas, and my experience as a non-athlete was that football consumed nearly the entire budget for non-academics in the district. Everything else was subsisting on peanuts while the football program hired dozens of coaches and built a new $30m stadium. Probably 50% of my high school teachers were coaches who were just doing double duty as teachers for some extra cash.
First, while cliques are definitely a thing and kids can be mean to each other, there is nothing like a strict jock/geek breakdown where athletes are never smart and they hate and pick on each other. I'm here now, competed in academic olympics and spelling bees as a kid, got the top SAT scores at my high school, and also lettered in four sports. The honors classes were filled with preppies and jocks. I was tall and athletic and girls liked me, but most of my friends and my now wife were all goth kids and I never bullied anyone.
It's not even remotely true that you needed to be attractive to be in sports or a cheerleader, either. Neither men nor women need to be any good to play in high school. The teams are totally open to anyone, but competitions can only dress so many in a given game and you might never play. Something track or cross-country can usually find room for everyone willing to try. There are plenty of sports for girls and all the athletic or attractive girls are not necessarily cheerleaders.
Universities are an entirely different story. They usually have intramural sports, which means they are not part of any formal athletic association, don't have paid coaches, and anyone can join and play. The intercollegiate teams that represent the school, however, are mostly scholarship athletes. They have limited slots. People can try out and join the team if they qualify without being recruited or getting a scholarship, but you need to be good. "Good enough" is a pretty high standard at the university level except for obscure sports no one plays. I won two state championships at the high school level, not individual but I was on the varsity team, and I never even tried to compete in college outside of intramurals. My niece was a national champion in cheer in high school and didn't play any sport in college.
At no point is sports participation mandatory, but all school systems I'm aware require some kind of "physical education." There is a general class offered where a coach just teaches arbitrary sports and exercise and most students take that. I grew up thinking that competing in a real sport exempted you from this class, because it did at my school, but I guess that isn't universally the case because I found out my wife competed in sports but still had to take the PE class as well. So I guess that depends on the school system. It's different in every state, maybe even every district.
As for "free urban basketball field," we call that pickup ball. It's open to whoever gets there first and often teams are picked on the spot, but usually the same people who up pretty regularly and know each other well. I played a ton of pickup ball as a kid. My summers were often spent going to the park and playing basketball for 14 hours before I came home. There were some people you see there you don't see in school, but at least half the regulars also played for the school and they played pickup ball in addition, not instead of.
I'm still working on my first kid (actually have an IVF appt in two hours), but as far as I understood youth sport these days, the more competitive level has unfortunately become a lot less accessible than it used to be. There are national travel leagues now that get sponsored by rich parents and participation can often be quite expensive between the travel and the equipment, so rich kids can have quite an advantage. Obviously, you need access to ice to play hockey, access to water to swim, things like that. Basketball courts, soccer fields (football, but Americans call it soccer), and baseball fields tend to be available everywhere, but playing as part of a real team will probably cost money except in basketball, where the lower-level amateur leagues will still scout and sponsor kids from pickup courts because the ...
> "With regard to Title IX’s participation requirements, a school can meet the standard via three independent tests. The first test is a mathematical safe harbor. If the school offers athletic participation opportunities (number of individual athlete participation slots, not numbers of teams) proportional to the numbers of males and females in the general student body, the school meets the participation standard. If the school does not meet this mathematical test, it may be deemed in compliance if it can (1) demonstrate consistent expansion of opportunities for the underrepresented gender over time or (2) show that the athletic program fully met the interests and abilities of the underrepresented gender. The courts have ruled that “boys are more interested in sports than girls” is not an acceptable defense to lack of equitable participation opportunities."
> "Under Title IX there are no sport exclusions or exceptions, so football is included under the law. Individual participation opportunities (numbers of athletes participating rather than number of sports) in all men’s sports and all women’s sports are counted in determining whether a school meets the Title IX participation standard. The basic philosophical underpinning of Title IX is that there cannot be an economic justification for discrimination. The school cannot maintain that there are revenue production or other considerations that mandate that male athletes receive better treatment or participation opportunities than female athletes. A good analogy would be that a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide wheelchair access for students with physical disabilities as required under the Americans With Disabilities Act because the football team needs the money in order to maintain its current level of revenue production. Similarly, a school cannot say that it cannot afford to provide participation opportunities for an underrepresented gender."
https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/advocacy/what-is-titl...
And yet, outside of the USA, these sports do manage to exist, leagues and all, outside universities.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/lnir2v/oc_the_high...
Football coach but the same principles apply: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/12/jimbo-fisher-buyout/
All that to say there is some academic good that comes out of all this.
Trust me, this qualifier is completely unnecessary. See: Cal football's inexplicable perennial popularity.
People just like having a team to cheer for, regardless of that team's success.
Unlike European football, in the US town-based football seems not to have taken off quite so much. The college scene, possibly because of affinity to elites, became the one that got the self-reinforcing money spiral that led to it becoming really big. This leads to weird distortions where the most highly paid public employee in many states is a sports coach.
Men's football and basketball are entirely different stories. Of the North American big four, hockey and baseball have always had robust minor leagues and kids are drafted into them straight out of high school. Football and basketball, on the other hand, have pro leagues that have historically relied upon university competition to develop athletes ready for the big leagues. The NBA (American pro basketball) started up a developmental league something like maybe a decade back or so it now calls the G League, but historical inertia being what it is, there is a much larger following for universities and the best players will still tend to do at least a year there, which I think is still the minimum required. The NFL (American pro football) won't draft you until you're at least three years past high school graduation, so the players there have no choice and need to go to college.
There's a lot driving it. Alumni pride, even regional and civic pride in places without pro teams in the same sport. Often the best school in each state is the flagship land grant public school and maybe a large private school, and these are usually not located in major metro areas that also have pro teams. There are a few exceptions like University of Washington, which played in the national championship game two days ago, is in Seattle. USC has one of the historically dominant teams and is in Los Angeles. But looking at the other top schools from this year, you're looking at Athens, GA, Ann Arbor, MI, Tuscaloosa, AL, Austin, TX, all places that do not have pro teams.
Something people miss is the university athletic department is often, even usually, its own separate non-profit corporation from the school. So, contrary to a lot of takes, it actually has its own revenue stream and its own expenses separate from the larger university. Having a very good football and/or basketball team can draw in enough revenue that the athletic department at the very best schools is typically self-funding. They may as well just be pro franchises, except they don't pay taxes and the athletes nominally have to attend enough classes to not flunk out, though they also don't need to graduate.
It's a farce of a system at the very top, but most athletes at most schools are actually amateurs just looking to do something healthy and competitive while they learn and get some of their school paid for, and the US law requires an equal number of scholarships awarded to men and women, so thanks to there often being men's sports that generate a lot of revenue, and there not being such a thing right now as women's football, the presence of a very successful football program can fund a ton of scholarship for obscure women's sports that give girls a chance to get a free education if they're willing to learn and practice them. Everything from fencing to bowling.
I'd guess the opposite. IMO, too much attention gets put on the top tier of athletes in the most popular sports.
I'd guess that well over 50% see education as the primary benefit. Most of these students realize that they don't have a professional playing career ahead of them.
The sooner it dies, the better.
Typically, in Australia say, an annual Rhodes Scholar might be a captain in a state cricket team and a viola player in the state orchestra and studying one of the STEM lines.
I could point to a Physics Prof who occassionally lectures at the Royal Institute with good sports and band camp cred from their youth .. or another teaching music in the US at a prestiguous school - but that starts to pinpoint my origins :)
https://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/scholarships/the-rhodes-sch...
Cecil Rhodes kicked it off on the back of mega mineral wealth extracted from South Africa (and surrounds, back in the day), and he wanted to support well rounded students into the Oxbridge education streams to mix with future UK diplomats, business leaders, politicans to expand the global web of interconnect ...
( fill in your own dots )
It's less about being the best athlete | best musician | best mathematician .. but very much about being up there with them.
There's more than you might think.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myron_Rolle
Picked up in the US 2010 NFL Draft, a football playing Bahamian-American neurosurgeon.
Short list of a few notables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rhodes_Scholars
Full database: https://www.rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk/scholars-alumni/rhodes-scho...
I have the impression that college football was much less of a full time job in Ryan's day, but Urschel graduated from Penn State in 2012.
This pretty much sums-up college football today: it has no future. When you throw out all of the traditions you're left with a bunch of kids playing football. I can watch that on Friday night for a lot less money - and support my local community.
1) Money: The sports of football and basketball are wildly popular in the US. Our appetite for football is effectively bottomless. Putting that much of it on the air is going to test how bottomless it is. Additionally, the 'lesser' sports that aren't in the TV money making arena are still going to have access to NIL money. This is especially true with Olympic sports, where every four years or so, these elite athletes are going to get a bust of cash from sponsors. For the 'lesser' sports, they will finally have longer term spokespersons that can keep the hype going through the off Olympic years, and the athletes will want this as well. Turning these athletes into money making machines is not going to be something that sponsors want to get rid of.
2) Laws: There are massive Title-9 violations all over the place. Lets look at Stanford students in particular. Their admissions policy is a bit unique in that sports are 'not considered' in admits (who know how true that is for football). The 'lesser' sports' athletes really are there for the education, mostly. Now, with the very long travel distances to the east coast or to SMU, that is putting a de facto undue burden on the women's teams, especially if they aren't flying the same airlines as the men's football team. Combine this with the NIL money that these 'lesser' sports are gong to get, and they can finally hire a real law firm that can go toe-to-toe with the army of lawyers from the university.
3) Banks: There are many schools that have decided to recently re-vamp their fields and facilities. Those are on long term mortgages and other contracts with the various banks of the nation. If these teams start sucking, or are in bad conferences, then there is a huge incentive to change that by the school. Still, there are going to be a lot of teams that just aren't going to do well. And their mortgages are going to start looking like really really bad ideas from the bank's perspective.
4) Governing boards: Some schools are governed by a board of regents. Some are governed by just a president. Some are governed by the state legislature. Some are governed by the Catholic church. All of these petite tyrannies and oligarchies are used to getting their way. Now, they are all going to be competing with each other for giant piles of money. Governing entities that have more legal powers than others are going to be incentivized to use those legal powers to try to grab more of that money. And once one does something galling, all the others are going to be forced to follow suit and try to outbid that gall.
5) Mothers: Mommas don't want their boys playing football anymore. The game is largely seen as too violent and damaging. Yeah, not all the mothers see that, by any means. But the statistics point to a marked and continuing decrease in the number of boys playing. This is a big threat to the pipeline going into football. Other sports aren't really seeing this issue however, outside of women's soccer. But as most of the issues with the conferences are centered around football, mothers end up being a factor.
6) Attention: This is the main issue, I think. The dynamics are pushing schools to have billion dollar programs to survive. These things kinda end up as power law distributions. And as programs get more money, they tend to win more. The system will settle on programs that are very successful and very expensive. To say yet another way, winners will keep winning. Without some sort of balancing factors (player draft, players' unions, salary caps, etc) the winning teams will largely be known before the season starts, just based on expenditures. That's where the attention issue comes in. Who is going to want to watch a game, let alone a season, where you already kno...