# data[].attributes.body
C- The article was published in the year 2008
R- Yes, and it agrees with my claim
A- The author of the article is Paul D. Staudohar
A- I found no spelling errors.
R- The author is set out on a goal to persuade the reader into thinking college athletes should be paid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Are football and basketball players at Division I-A schools amateurs or professionals? The answer is complicated since categorical notions have changed over time, making for an ideological rather than historical assertion. We know that top college athletes have a full-time commitment to their sport; they function in an organization with emphasis on economic goals; they "work" for bosses (coaches, tutors); and they are contracted to play for a particular team. Athletes receive compensation for tuition and books, housing in collegiate facilities, and sometimes financial assistance from boosters. Their main goal is to participate in sports, not to receive an education. There is currently a movement to unionize college athletes, by the United Steelworkers of America, which if successful would be another indication of professionalism. On the other hand, there is no direct payment to athletes in the form of a wage, and an athlete's outside earnings are limited to $2,000 per year.

The purpose of big-time college sports has little if anything to do with the educational mission of the schools. The purpose is to provide entertainment for students, alumni, boosters, and the public-at-large through live game and televised viewing. Elite athletes in top-level programs are ostensibly students, but they are not recruited for academic reasons. Their "scholarships" are based on their playing skills and entertainment value, not on academic capability.

There is no doubt that sports are a valuable part of students' campus life, whether playing intramural games or attending sports events for entertainment. However, overemphasis on the big-time sports of football and basketball, especially at the 115 Division I-A schools, has created a monster that, not interested in academic study, would have an alternative route to professional careers....

The large amounts of money paid to the NCAA and universities for big-time basketball and football result mainly from the entertainment value of watching these sports on television. While the athletes participating in these shows receive various forms of compensation, they do not receive a wage. Limited as to how much outside income they can earn, it is not surprising that some of these athletes feel that they are being exploited because they bring in far greater revenues to their schools than the cost of the benefits they receive. The Collegiate Athletes Coalition (the organization supported by the Steelworkers Union) is trying to improve conditions for athletes in Division I men's football and basketball....

For most athletes, successful educational pursuit would have to wait until their playing days were over.

The organization of players may be a good idea if it provides a more equitable distribution of money to athletes. Although supported by the Steelworkers, the players' group is not a union as such. According to the National Labor Relations Act, rights to unionize exist only for "employees," and under their current status, college athletes would not be considered employees because they do not receive a wage.

But perhaps it is time to change the nature of big-time athletic programs in a radical restructuring. Athletes could have a real union and be paid a wage for their services. This would get rid of the hypocrisy of the "student athlete" at schools with corrupt programs and provide honest for-pay entertainment. If such a change were enacted, programs would become self-supporting and not subsidized by public funds. Big-time college sports programs would function as a minor league feeder system to the NFL, NBA, and other major leagues. They would continue to provide entertainment, but as professionals not operating under the guise of amateurism.

If athletes playing for universities under these revised programs want to pursue academic studies, they could do so. But they would have to compete in admissions fairly, pursue authentic curricula with real scholarly content, and be treated and judged just like other students. For most athletes, successful educational pursuit would have to wait until their playing days were over.

Books

Eric Anderson In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Charles Barkley I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. Ed. Michael Wilbon, New York: Random House, 2002.

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Todd Boyd Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Joseph N. Crowley In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century. Indianapolis, IN: National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2006.

D. Stanley Eitzen Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

John Feinstein Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. New York: Little Brown, 2006.

John Fizel and Rodney Fort, eds. Economics of College Sports. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jessica Gavora Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment With Elite Athletics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball. New York: New Press, 2005.

Carl E. James Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student-Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Chris Lincoln Playing the Game: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League. White River Junction, VT: Nomad Press, 2004.

Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton More Than a Game: One Woman's Fight For Gender Equity in Sport. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Christopher Russo with Allen St. John The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kenneth L. Shropshire and Timothy Davis The Business of Sports Agents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Welch Suggs A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Ying Wushanley Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle For Control of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960-2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Shelly Anderson "Anderson: NCAA Rules Too Thorny for Bloom," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 13, 2005.

Dwayne Ballen "An Incentive Clause for College Athletes?," American Public Media: Marketplace, January 8, 2007. http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

Jeff Barker "Congressman Thinks Colleges Should Pay Athletes," Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2007.

Scott Bordow "Look, College Athletes Already Get Paid," East Valley Tribune (Mesa, AZ), January 2, 2003.

Marcia Chambers "Colleges; Brand Endorses More Aid To Athletes," New York Times, September 18, 2003.

Dan Daly "At Waffle House, Menu Choices Not Final," Washington Times, June 7, 2007.

Frank Deford "Pay Dirt: College Athletes Deserve Same Rights As Other Students," SI.com, May 7, 2003. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

Michael J. Diacin, Janet B. Parks, and Pamela C. Allison "Voices of Male Athletes on Drug Use, Drug Testing, and the Existing Order in Intercollegiate Athletics," Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2003.

David Enders "Football Players Discussed Joining Players' Association," Michigan Daily, April 10, 2002.

Patrick Finley "UA Football Penalized for Academic Woes," Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2007.

Teddy Greenstein "ESPN Views Play-for-Pay Arguments," Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2005.

Steve Hanway "Pay for Play a Bad Idea," Big Red Network, January 19, 2007. http://bigrednetwork.com.

Ali Hasnain "Should College Athletes Be Paid Wages?" The Daily Utah Chronicle, September 12, 2003.

Debbie Lazorik "Why Integrate Athletics Back into Campus Life?" Women in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 12, December 2006.

Mike Lopresti "Commentary: Don't Pay College Football Athletes to Play," Gannett News Service, February 13, 2003.

John Maher "Longhorns Get No NCAA Penalties for Academics," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 2007.

Pete Pelegrin "Penalties Are No Surprise," Miami Herald, May 3, 2007.

Selena Roberts "The Wal-Mart Of College Sports," New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Doug Smock "Pay for Play? Get Real," Charleston Gazette, February 12, 2007.

Kevin Tatum "Do the Homework, Then You Can Play: Temple Has a New Way to Keep Student-Athletes Eligible, and, More Important, Educated," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006.

Eddie Timanus "Academic Sanctions to Hit 65 Schools," USA Today, March 2, 2006.

Kelly Whiteside "College Athletes Want Cut of Action," USA Today, August 31, 2004.

Lya Wodraska "Poor Academics Cost Weber Football Scholarships," Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 2007.

Brad Wolverton "Athletics Participation Prevents Many Players From Choosing Majors They Want," Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 20, January 19, 2007.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Athletes Should Be Allowed to Unionize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are football and basketball players at Division I-A schools amateurs or professionals? The answer is complicated since categorical notions have changed over time, making for an ideological rather than historical assertion.

# data[].attributes.body
C-This article was published in 2008.
R-Yes, but it disagrees with my claim.
A-The writer of the article is Thomas k. Hearn.
A-No, I found zero spelling errors in the article.
P- The main goal of the article is to persuade the reader into thinking the college athletes shouldn't be paid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

In response to the growing pattern of abuses in college sports during the 1980s, the Knight Foundation, under the leadership of its president, Creed Black, created the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in 1989. The Commission was chaired by two of America's most distinguished university presidents, William Friday of North Carolina and Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame.

After extensive hearings and deliberations, the Knight Commission's first report, Keeping Faith with the Student-Athlete, recommended reforms reflecting four fundamental principles. First was presidential control. Athletic departments, conferences, and the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] itself were variously governed and presidential authority was often mitigated. The NCAA, in particular, was an enormously complex and decentralized body and was not under the direct governing authority of presidents. Second, the principle of academic integrity aimed to prevent the widespread exploitation of student-athletes, who often were admitted without adequate preparation for college and kept eligible in a cafeteria assortment of courses that had scant educational purpose or outcome. Third was the principle of financial integrity. It was not uncommon in those not-so-distant days for athletic fund-raising by boosters to take place outside the university. These funds were collected and distributed occasionally without appropriate safeguards and without university control. Fourth, the Commission recommended a peer certification program for athletic departments, reflecting the accreditation procedures and processes that are established mechanisms of quality control in higher education.

Measures reflecting these principles were, in various degrees and guises, adopted by the NCAA. Most significantly, the NCAA came under the governance of a presidential board of directors. As a general outcome, the Knight Commission brought renewed attention to the areas of conflict between the athletic program and the academic mission of the universities of America. That conflict itself, however, was far from resolved.

The Knight Commission Reconvened

In the year 2000, the Knight Foundation decided to assess the status of intercollegiate athletics a decade after publication of its first report. Once again, with the leadership of Presidents Friday and Hesburgh, supported now by Hodding Carter as president of the foundation, a restructured Knight Commission was convened. Its report, A Call to Action, was released in June 2001.

In some respects the system of intercollegiate athletics has never been stronger. In most of our institutions, most sports programs function appropriately. In the effort to diversify our student populations-ethnically, socio-economically, and internationally-the contribution rendered by athletics is substantial. The doors to academic and athletic competition are opening to women with all the attendant positive results.

However, what our study found about the situation of football and men's-and to some extent women's-basketball, was disturbing. The circumstance of these major "revenue" sports in the major programs poses a growing threat to the entire system of intercollegiate athletics. The status of these major programs determines the welfare and outlook for the entire athletic enterprise.

This threat has to do with the position of these so-called "premier" sports as part of a continuing and dramatic revolution in the culture of sport in America. Historically, the culture of sport in the nation was defined by local community organizations-schools, summer and church leagues, and the YMCA and the YWCA. Across the nation, these sponsors uniformly regarded sport as an educational and developmental undertaking. The values of fitness, teamwork, and fair play were such that sport was universally regarded as a metaphor for moral endeavor. Athletics as an integral element of learning and personal development was axiomatic. Given this conception, athletics is appropriate to the university as a place of learning, the university being the culmination of this community-based athletic culture.

This change in the culture of sport is destructive of the aims of athletics as part of the mission of the university.

Recent decades, however, have brought a profound revolution in this view of athletics. It now seems quaint and naive. The culture of sport today is defined by professional teams, which are part of the media and entertainment industry. In this professional context, games are played, not for love or for learning, but for money, fame, and stardom. The games that professionals play are not, in the primary sense, games at all, but businesses that operate according to the inexorable laws of the marketplace. Sport as learning and as moral education has no foundation in this setting.

Television is the primary agent of this cultural transformation. What television covers, it transforms to its own requirements. For example, how simpleminded we were to believe-as once we did-that television would enhance democratic political culture. Quite the reverse: television transformed our political system to the requirements of the entertainment ethos. Political conventions are now television shows, and politicians are increasingly television and media personalities. Political discourse is packaged in thirty-second sound bites for the evening news.

This change in the culture of sport is destructive of the aims of athletics as part of the mission of the university. Our athletic programs are increasingly regarded by players, coaches, the media, and our fans as part of the entertainment culture. Our teams wear collegiate colors and insignia, but the ethos of major programs is increasingly that of professional franchises. Therein lies the peril for the present and future of collegiate sports.

The implications of this cultural change are everywhere evident in major athletic programs. Let us examine briefly what this cultural change has wrought.

Despite our earlier efforts, graduation rates in the revenue sports are languishing. The most recent NCAA graduation rate report reveals that 51% of Division I-A football players and 32% of men's basketball players earned degrees. These are full-time students who receive four to five academic years of full scholarship support, plus summer sessions if necessary. By any measure, these rates reflect our lack of academic resolve.

The ethical heart of the matter is: Are we providing student-athletes the educational opportunity for which the university exists? We might reconcile ourselves to the excesses of recruitment and commercialism if, as an outcome, students were being educated. If we fail in this regard, however, the enterprise loses its rationale as a university undertaking.

Graduation rates are not the best or only measure of our academic effort. The way these rates are calculated by federal regulation is flawed. A student-athlete who transfers in good standing and graduates on time still counts as a non-graduate for the school transferred from. Graduation numbers are not reported until six years after the date of the entering class, and thus do not provide adequate information about current academic standing.

But whatever indices we use, poor academic outcomes reflect this changed culture. Wake Forest's legendary basketball coach Bones McKinney remarked that he never told a student to go to class or get a degree. "Why else would they be here?" he asked. "They didn't need me to tell them to do what they came to do." That is the message of a bygone coach and a bygone era.

Some coaches rightly conclude that their career aspirations depend on winning, and winning alone, and feel no career motivation to support the academic aspirations of their players. It is wrong to blame the coaches. We hire and reward them. But so-called "power coaches" are media stars oftentimes beyond the reach of presidents and boards. A chancellor remarked to me about such a coach: "It is fortunate that he cares about education. If he didn't, there would be nothing I could do about it."

From the student perspective, a growing number of athletes have no interest in education. Their goal is to play as a professional, and they are in school only out of necessity. The disconnect between their personal interest and the aims of the university is manifest in academic failure and behavioral problems that make the papers with alarming regularity.

These adolescent dreams of professional fame and wealth, of course, are deceptive and cruel, akin to those of impoverished families who believe their future opportunity dictates buying lottery tickets. A tiny fraction of Division I football and basketball players will be drafted by the professionals, and fewer yet will ever make a team. A college education is, in fact, what these young people need as an avenue to productive and useful lives-especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The entertainment culture, though, mitigates against the appropriate alignment of youthful aspirations and needs.

Perhaps the most evident outcome of this new culture is an unsustainable rise in athletic spending-what Cedric Dempsey has called the "athletic arms race." In the pursuit of successful franchises, investments are being made in facilities, salaries, and programs at a rate that is unsustainable at best, suicidal at worst.

[I]n the "play for pay" culture of professional athletics, a free education is often not a valued commodity.

Popular opinion is, of course, that colleges make millions on athletics. The problem is that the millions we make, we spend, and we spend yet more. According to the most recent reports, just 48 of the 320 schools in Division I operate in the black. The average deficit for the rest is $3 million annually. If the full cost of athletic facilities-including construction and operation-were assessed fully to the athletic department, I suspect that no athletic program in the nation would be solvent.

Coaching salaries are another glaring indication of the spread of the professional outlook to our campuses. Football and basketball salaries routinely now surpass the million-dollar mark. Why? The professions of professional and major college coaching have merged. When coaches migrate seamlessly from the professionals to the collegiate ranks and back, they come and go bringing an outlook about the job along with escalating salaries.

The rising demand to pay college players reflects not only the growing influence of the professional ideal-athletes play for money-but also the lack of regard for the value of education. Given the lifelong earning differential between high school and college graduates, an education should be the most valuable "payment" a student-athlete could receive. But in the "play for pay" culture of professional athletics, a free education is often not a valued commodity.

A Union Would Bring Calamity

If the coalition/union that is attempting to organize student-athletes in California is successful-I am told we cannot discount that prospect-the outcome will be fiscal calamity. Indeed, the success of this coalition would possibly bring the end of intercollegiate athletics as we have known and loved it. The ironic result would be the closing of doors of opportunity for future student-athletes, defeating the purposes the organizers claim to serve.

There seems to be no comprehensive national solution to this looming financial problem. Efforts to limit expenses or salaries through NCAA or other mechanisms are likely to run afoul of anti-trust and other regulations. This crisis can only be averted through the responsible efforts of boards and presidents on your campus and mine.

Our instinct, however, in the face of rising expenses is to do whatever we can to enhance revenue. The resulting spiral of escalating costs chasing escalating revenues leads to abuses of every sort.

I, for one, am not optimistic that we have the resolve to tame this fiscal dragon. Financial excesses, however, have a way of self-correcting. When state legislators or trustees find themselves facing fiscal shortfalls-as we see across the nation-their willingness to subsidize sports enterprises at the expense of academic programs will be tested. That test may come soon.

The Decline of Sportsmanship

Another casualty of the professional ethic is the decline in sportsmanship and rising levels of confrontation between and among players, coaches and fans. Years ago, my son played small-town tennis tournaments when John McEnroe burst on the scene. The next thing we knew, little boys were having on-court tantrums and shouting obscenities for all the world to hear.

This same degrading process is still at work in athletic programs from the youth leagues on up. In the world of professional athletics, the ideal of conformity to standards of personal conduct-any belief in the moral purpose of sport-has no relevance. Fists and Elbows Fly More Frequently heralded a recent headline in The New York Times about the NBA season. Taunting and trash-talking has spread from the fields and courts to the stands, and the conduct of our fans forcefully reminds us that "fan" is short for "fanatic."

Sportsmanship could, of course, be supported by the rigorous enforcement of game officials, but the professional culture militates against it. Despite presidential efforts in the ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference] to have basketball officials call technical fouls on players and benches for obscene language, we have not been able to eliminate that conduct. Several episodes involving coaches and players this year required later action by our Commissioner when forceful action was not taken by the officials at the time.

The fragmented systems of governance and control over intercollegiate athletics make our programs vulnerable. Colleges and universities are good-to-outstanding managers of the teaching and learning process. We understand what goes on in the classroom, the laboratory, and the library. But in the business that athletics has become, we are often not adequate to the task. The allure of athletic fame and money tempts us, and we often lack the capacity or the resolve to confront powerful athletic interests.

Conferences exercise a wide range of control over our programs, but they often reflect the desire of member institutions to enhance visibility and revenue.

The NCAA receives more than its share of criticism for the regulatory morass we have created. However, it is the organized reflection of our own collective will. Competition generates a climate of distrust reflected in the arcane and complicated rules about recruitment and student-athlete benefits. These rules are much complained of, yet they grow directly from the ethos of competition. The NCAA is divided along every fault-by individual sport, by revenue and non-revenue sport, by big schools and small schools, by women's issues, minority issues, and every other imaginable interest group. In such a setting, it is virtually impossible to reach policy conclusions that are other than a collection of compromises.

The general outcome is that we do not have systems of governance over intercollegiate athletics that are comprehensive or uniform. In the absence of such mechanisms, various internal and external forces are exerted that do not support alignment with our academic mission....

Our Opportunity-And Our Responsibility

Student-athletes arrive on our campuses possessing remarkable gifts. They have developed early in life a passion that demands the fullest measure of life's supreme requirements-dedication, self-sacrifice and commitment to excellence. They have risen above the passivity and apathy that can accompany adolescence in America. Their youthful passion may be sport, but history reveals that games are avenues to lives of service and achievement in other fields of endeavor.

It is our opportunity-and our responsibility-to see that in intercollegiate athletics this passion for play becomes attached to the other callings of life-career, service, and citizenship. We must not fail these young people of such talent and promise.

The boardrooms and presidential and faculty offices of America are filled with men and women of supreme intelligence and good will. There is no issue affecting the future of intercollegiate athletics that we cannot, with common resolve, set right. I urge you to make this resolution our common purpose.

Books

Eric Anderson In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Charles Barkley I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. Ed. Michael Wilbon, New York: Random House, 2002.

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Todd Boyd Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Joseph N. Crowley In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century. Indianapolis, IN: National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2006.

D. Stanley Eitzen Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

John Feinstein Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. New York: Little Brown, 2006.

John Fizel and Rodney Fort, eds. Economics of College Sports. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jessica Gavora Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment With Elite Athletics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball. New York: New Press, 2005.

Carl E. James Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student-Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Chris Lincoln Playing the Game: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League. White River Junction, VT: Nomad Press, 2004.

Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton More Than a Game: One Woman's Fight For Gender Equity in Sport. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Christopher Russo with Allen St. John The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kenneth L. Shropshire and Timothy Davis The Business of Sports Agents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Welch Suggs A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Ying Wushanley Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle For Control of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960-2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Shelly Anderson "Anderson: NCAA Rules Too Thorny for Bloom," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 13, 2005.

Dwayne Ballen "An Incentive Clause for College Athletes?," American Public Media: Marketplace, January 8, 2007. http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

Jeff Barker "Congressman Thinks Colleges Should Pay Athletes," Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2007.

Scott Bordow "Look, College Athletes Already Get Paid," East Valley Tribune (Mesa, AZ), January 2, 2003.

Marcia Chambers "Colleges; Brand Endorses More Aid To Athletes," New York Times, September 18, 2003.

Dan Daly "At Waffle House, Menu Choices Not Final," Washington Times, June 7, 2007.

Frank Deford "Pay Dirt: College Athletes Deserve Same Rights As Other Students," SI.com, May 7, 2003. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

Michael J. Diacin, Janet B. Parks, and Pamela C. Allison "Voices of Male Athletes on Drug Use, Drug Testing, and the Existing Order in Intercollegiate Athletics," Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2003.

David Enders "Football Players Discussed Joining Players' Association," Michigan Daily, April 10, 2002.

Patrick Finley "UA Football Penalized for Academic Woes," Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2007.

Teddy Greenstein "ESPN Views Play-for-Pay Arguments," Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2005.

Steve Hanway "Pay for Play a Bad Idea," Big Red Network, January 19, 2007. http://bigrednetwork.com.

Ali Hasnain "Should College Athletes Be Paid Wages?" The Daily Utah Chronicle, September 12, 2003.

Debbie Lazorik "Why Integrate Athletics Back into Campus Life?" Women in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 12, December 2006.

Mike Lopresti "Commentary: Don't Pay College Football Athletes to Play," Gannett News Service, February 13, 2003.

John Maher "Longhorns Get No NCAA Penalties for Academics," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 2007.

Pete Pelegrin "Penalties Are No Surprise," Miami Herald, May 3, 2007.

Selena Roberts "The Wal-Mart Of College Sports," New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Doug Smock "Pay for Play? Get Real," Charleston Gazette, February 12, 2007.

Kevin Tatum "Do the Homework, Then You Can Play: Temple Has a New Way to Keep Student-Athletes Eligible, and, More Important, Educated," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006.

Eddie Timanus "Academic Sanctions to Hit 65 Schools," USA Today, March 2, 2006.

Kelly Whiteside "College Athletes Want Cut of Action," USA Today, August 31, 2004.

Lya Wodraska "Poor Academics Cost Weber Football Scholarships," Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 2007.

Brad Wolverton "Athletics Participation Prevents Many Players From Choosing Majors They Want," Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 20, January 19, 2007.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Athletes Should Not Be Allowed to Unionize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In response to the growing pattern of abuses in college sports during the 1980s, the Knight Foundation, under the leadership of its president, Creed Black, created the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in 1989. The Commission was chaired by two of America's most distinguished university presidents, William Friday of North Carolina and Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame.

# data[].attributes.body
C-  This article was published in 2008.
R- The article agrees and is related to my topic.
A- The writer of the article is John R. Gerdy
A- The article does not have a single spelling error.
P- The author of the article is trying to persuade the reader into thinking college athletes shouldn't be paid.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Higher education leaders have been trying to reform athletics for decades. Despite these efforts, Division I athletics continues to undermine the academic integrity and educational missions of our colleges and universities in very significant ways. At issue is not the value of elite athletics in our culture but whether our educational institutions should be saddled with the responsibility of developing elite athletes and sponsoring professional teams. Like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, the professional sports model simply does not fit within the educational community. Rather than continuing to pound that peg, it is time to admit that sponsorship of elite, professional athletics should be left to the professional leagues. In short, it is time for colleges and universities to eliminate their departments of professional athletics.

The following bears mentioning again. While one of American higher education's strengths is its tremendous diversity of services, programs, opportunities, and missions, in the case of athletics, higher education may not be able to have it all. Division I athletics, as currently structured and conducted is not meeting the purposes for which it became a part of higher education. That being the case, we have a responsibility to dramatically restructure Division I athletics to do so or, if that proves impossible, eliminate it. The history of American higher education offers many examples of programs or departments that were downsized or eliminated when it became apparent that they had become obsolete, had failed to meet their purpose, or had become a drain on institutional resources.

That said, the root cause of college athletics' ills is not commercialism nor academic fraud but rather the mode-the professional sports model-that higher education has chosen to meet its business, education, and commercial goals. Professional athletics is simply not an appropriate business for higher education.

In short, it is time to take a new road; a road that would require not simply strengthening eligibility standards but deconstructing the entire enterprise. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, higher education's responsibility in the cultural area of athletics should be twofold: first, to involve the maximum number of students in sports activities that can be enjoyed for a lifetime for purposes of promoting public health and, second, to provide entertaining but educationally based intercollegiate athletics.

Specifically, the professional model of intercollegiate athletics must be dismantled and rebuilt, not as a mirror of professional sports but in the image of an educational institution. To do so, the fundamental principle on which the professional sports model is built-pay for play-must be changed. Specifically, the athletic scholarship must be eliminated in favor of institutional, need-based aid.

[F]or many coaches, the scholarship has little to do with educational opportunity or financial need and everything to do with control.

Realizing change of this magnitude will be neither quick nor easy. It is, however, necessary. The higher education community must come together in a show of courage and confidence to halt the steady and destructive march of the win-at-any-cost professional model of intercollegiate athletics. It will require the courage and will of higher education leaders to act upon the fact that college athletics is higher education's property; not ESPN's or CBS's, not Nike's or Adidas's, not corporate America's, not the sports talk-show hosts', and not the crazed fan's in the stands. Because athletics is higher education's property, it is the higher education community alone that must establish the rules of the game, the values of the enterprise, and the principles upon which it will be presented to the public. The fact is, higher education leaders can make athletics look like and represent whatever they want. If these leaders are serious about reforming athletics, they must address the professional aspects of the enterprise....

Freedom to Pursue an Education

At first glance, it would appear that eliminating athletic scholarships in favor of a need-based formula would not be in the best interest of student-athletes. However, if this proposal is judged upon what is in their best interest for the next fifty years of their lives, rather than the four or five years they are on campus, it becomes clear that eliminating the athletic grant will contribute significantly to athletes' chances of obtaining a well-balanced academic, personal, and athletic experience while in college.

An athletic scholarship represents a contractual agreement between the athlete and the coach, which allows coaches to view athletes as employees, bought and paid for by the athletics department. Thus, for many coaches, the scholarship has little to do with educational opportunity or financial need and everything to do with control. Athletic scholarships are a powerful means of keeping athletes focused upon athletic performance. If the athlete does not do what the coach wants, he can be "fired" because the athletic scholarship is a one-year agreement, renewable at the discretion of the coach.

A need-based financial aid agreement, however, is a contractual agreement between the student and the institution. It guarantees that the student will continue to receive his or her financial aid regardless of what transpires on the athletic fields. There is no more effective way to empower the athlete because it fundamentally changes the relationship between the athlete, the coach, and the institution. Under such a contract, the student is less beholden to the athletics department's competitive and business motives and thus freer to explore the wide diversity of experiences college offers.

Critics will argue that athletes are already underpaid in relation to the amount of money they generate for the institution. In the current professional model, college athletes are underpaid. The NCAA differentiates its "employment" arrangement from the professional model by claiming that the "student-athlete's" compensation is in the form of an "educational opportunity." Regrettably, in far too many cases, this "educational opportunity" is a sham. Despite all the attempts at academic reform, the current, professional model of college athletics has evolved to a point where the barriers to earning that well-balanced educational experience have become too great. It is no wonder athletes feel they are underpaid. They are clearly not getting the deal that was sold to them when the coach sat in their living rooms and promised a quality, well-balanced, academic, social, and athletic experience. In the need-based financial aid model, a legitimate educational experience is, once again, a viable part of the compensation package. And the value of a well-rounded, academically rigorous, and hard-earned educational experience is priceless....

[F]or too long the American system of athletics has catered to the narrow needs of a few elite athletes while shortchanging the vast majority of participants.

Further, the financial hardship on athletes resulting from the shift to a need-based aid system will be less than one might think. While many football and basketball athletes will be required to pay a portion of their educational expenses, those who qualify for "full need" will receive it. Almost all other sports operate on what is known as an equivalency system, where most receive only partial athletic scholarships....

Elite Athletics Will Be O.K.

The inability to receive a full-ride athletic scholarship, ... will drive all but those who are serious about being genuine students from college programs. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Athletes who will go to school only if they receive a full ride and play immediately can pursue their athletic career through the club system or with a professional team. If at some point these changes shock the system into becoming more balanced and educationally focused, reinstituting freshman eligibility could be considered. But a shock is what the current system needs, and the combination of these two changes will provide it.

Many will be unable to get beyond the impact these changes will have on the elite athlete, with the question being where they will go to hone their athletic skills. In our sports-obsessed culture, there is little doubt their needs will be met. The fact is, for too long the American system of athletics has catered to the narrow needs of a few elite athletes while shortchanging the vast majority of participants. While catering to the elite athlete might be appropriate for a club or professional team or league, it is inappropriate for an educational institution. The elite athlete will continue to flourish, as an alternative system or structure with highly competitive outlets to develop their athletic potential will surface.

In many sports, this shift is occurring already. The most obvious example is baseball, with its well-established minor league system. Interestingly, in the shadow of the minor league system, college baseball thrives. In soccer, tennis, swimming, and basketball, club sports are emerging to cater to the athletic needs of the elite. In basketball, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has established a developmental league with a minimum age limit of eighteen. Thus, a high school athlete, rather than attending college to refine his skills for the NBA, could move directly to the developmental league and proceed on to the NBA at age nineteen.

In short, the purpose of an educational institution should be more focused on providing legitimate educational opportunities for students who are interested in using athletics to supplement the educational process rather than elite athletes who view their stay on campus simply as a means of getting to the pros.

Besides, how much can athletes who are in school primarily to play sports really learn if they view college as nothing more than a way station on their steady march to the pros? Should we be wasting tax dollars and school resources on those who have little desire to learn? And why do we believe that college is for everyone or that if you want a college degree you must earn it by age twenty-two?

In the final analysis, a need-based aid system will help ensure a genuine, well-balanced educational experience for the athlete that offers far more long-term value than an athletic scholarship system that serves as a barrier to achieving a genuine educational experience. The fact is, receiving need-based aid resulting in a legitimate educational experience that leads to a meaningful degree is a far better deal than getting an athletic scholarship to cover the cost of an educational experience that is a sham.

Equal Access to What?

Some argue that eliminating athletic scholarships ... will deny opportunity and limit access for many students, most notably, black athletes. The question is access to what? To the fields of competition or to a quality, well-balanced opportunity to earn a meaningful degree? With black basketball and football players generally graduating in the mid 30 to mid 40 percent range, respectively, earning an athletic scholarship under the current system is little more than an opportunity to play ball.

Given these results, the larger question is whether the athletic scholarship, and the tremendous influence coaches have over the athlete who receives one, serves to limit the ability of the athlete to have a well-balanced collegiate experience and earn a meaningful degree. After all, coaches are paid to win. As a result, their short-term interests (win next week's game) are often at odds with the athletes' long-term educational interests (earn a degree). This is simply the reality of the current system. How many more athletes would graduate if it were not for the excessive time, energy, physical, and emotional demands placed upon them from the athletics department; demands that, if not met, will result in the elimination of the scholarship? Rather than the athletic scholarship being the determining factor in earning a degree, it is more likely that athletes graduate in spite of the demands of being beholden to what amounts to a professional sports franchise. These young people are so motivated, smart, and determined, they will find a way to graduate with a need-based aid package as opposed to a full athletic scholarship.

[O]ur policies and daily actions must show very clearly that education is the primary purpose of our athletics departments....

Further, the athletic scholarship has made our educational institutions complicit in perpetuating a dangerous and counterproductive cultural myth. Specifically, far too many parents and youngsters believe sports, rather than education, is the ticket to future success. The professional model of college sports reinforces the myth that the road to economic and personal prosperity is best attained by chasing athletic fame, glory, and financial reward rather than by obtaining a quality education. This impact is particularly prevalent in the black community. One only has to consider the previously mentioned NCAA graduation rates to realize that, in most cases, this is a cruel hoax. While moving to a club system for elite athletics may not significantly change this myth, one thing is certain: our educational institutions should have absolutely no part in perpetuating it.

While the argument that the elimination of the athletic scholarship will inhibit some black athletes' ability to access higher education is powerful, a more likely result of this change will be that these black athletes will simply be replaced by other black athletes. While they may be a bit less talented and obsessed with athletics, they will likely be better students or at least more interested in academic achievement than in using the university as a springboard to the pros. In the end, more athletes, black, white, and Hispanic, will obtain a well-balanced college experience resulting in graduation....

In the Interest of Athletes

In the final analysis, if we have the long-term academic and personal interests of young people in mind, the athletic scholarship should be eliminated in favor of a system that assures them a legitimate opportunity to actualize the personal, academic, athletic, and economic opportunities afforded by a well-balanced college education. Specifically, our policies and daily actions must show very clearly that education is the primary purpose of our athletics departments and that the true measure of success hinges upon obtaining a degree.

Books

Eric Anderson In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Charles Barkley I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. Ed. Michael Wilbon, New York: Random House, 2002.

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Todd Boyd Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Joseph N. Crowley In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century. Indianapolis, IN: National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2006.

D. Stanley Eitzen Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

John Feinstein Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. New York: Little Brown, 2006.

John Fizel and Rodney Fort, eds. Economics of College Sports. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jessica Gavora Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment With Elite Athletics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball. New York: New Press, 2005.

Carl E. James Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student-Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Chris Lincoln Playing the Game: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League. White River Junction, VT: Nomad Press, 2004.

Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton More Than a Game: One Woman's Fight For Gender Equity in Sport. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Christopher Russo with Allen St. John The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kenneth L. Shropshire and Timothy Davis The Business of Sports Agents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Welch Suggs A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Ying Wushanley Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle For Control of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960-2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Shelly Anderson "Anderson: NCAA Rules Too Thorny for Bloom," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 13, 2005.

Dwayne Ballen "An Incentive Clause for College Athletes?," American Public Media: Marketplace, January 8, 2007. http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

Jeff Barker "Congressman Thinks Colleges Should Pay Athletes," Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2007.

Scott Bordow "Look, College Athletes Already Get Paid," East Valley Tribune (Mesa, AZ), January 2, 2003.

Marcia Chambers "Colleges; Brand Endorses More Aid To Athletes," New York Times, September 18, 2003.

Dan Daly "At Waffle House, Menu Choices Not Final," Washington Times, June 7, 2007.

Frank Deford "Pay Dirt: College Athletes Deserve Same Rights As Other Students," SI.com, May 7, 2003. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

Michael J. Diacin, Janet B. Parks, and Pamela C. Allison "Voices of Male Athletes on Drug Use, Drug Testing, and the Existing Order in Intercollegiate Athletics," Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2003.

David Enders "Football Players Discussed Joining Players' Association," Michigan Daily, April 10, 2002.

Patrick Finley "UA Football Penalized for Academic Woes," Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2007.

Teddy Greenstein "ESPN Views Play-for-Pay Arguments," Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2005.

Steve Hanway "Pay for Play a Bad Idea," Big Red Network, January 19, 2007. http://bigrednetwork.com.

Ali Hasnain "Should College Athletes Be Paid Wages?" The Daily Utah Chronicle, September 12, 2003.

Debbie Lazorik "Why Integrate Athletics Back into Campus Life?" Women in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 12, December 2006.

Mike Lopresti "Commentary: Don't Pay College Football Athletes to Play," Gannett News Service, February 13, 2003.

John Maher "Longhorns Get No NCAA Penalties for Academics," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 2007.

Pete Pelegrin "Penalties Are No Surprise," Miami Herald, May 3, 2007.

Selena Roberts "The Wal-Mart Of College Sports," New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Doug Smock "Pay for Play? Get Real," Charleston Gazette, February 12, 2007.

Kevin Tatum "Do the Homework, Then You Can Play: Temple Has a New Way to Keep Student-Athletes Eligible, and, More Important, Educated," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006.

Eddie Timanus "Academic Sanctions to Hit 65 Schools," USA Today, March 2, 2006.

Kelly Whiteside "College Athletes Want Cut of Action," USA Today, August 31, 2004.

Lya Wodraska "Poor Academics Cost Weber Football Scholarships," Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 2007.

Brad Wolverton "Athletics Participation Prevents Many Players From Choosing Majors They Want," Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 20, January 19, 2007.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Athletic Scholarships Should Be Eliminated

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Higher education leaders have been trying to reform athletics for decades. Despite these efforts, Division I athletics continues to undermine the academic integrity and educational missions of our colleges and universities in very significant ways.

# data[].attributes.body
C- This article was published in 2008.
R- Yes, the author an I have the same claim on the topic.
A- The author of the article is Shelly Anderson.
A- Ther where no spelling errors found in the article.
P- This article is informing for the most part.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

Blame it on the moguls.

Not the manicured bumps in the snow that Jeremy Bloom skis over so deftly on courses that would eat most people's knees for lunch.

The problem is with the big shots who make the rules.

Bloom is an accomplished two-sport athlete. While that's not rare, his combination of disciplines is unusual and, unfortunately for him, unworkable for now.

This 23-year-old Colorado native is the reigning World Cup champion in moguls freestyle skiing and is nearly a lock to make the United States Olympic team for the Turin Games in February [2006].

He finished ninth in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, beginning that year on the C team.

It's his other sport that was yanked away from Bloom.

He showed promise in two seasons with the University of Colorado football team. He was a Football Writers Association of America Freshman All-American in 2002, when he set a Buffaloes record with a 94-yard touchdown reception and scored on a 75-yard punt return.

Then, the NCAA rose its ugly head.

Once he realized his immense skiing potential, Bloom tried to sue the NCAA over its ban on endorsement money and eventually decided to defy the rule by taking on sponsors. It was either that or give up skiing.

Because Bloom accepted endorsements for skiing, the NCAA ruled him ineligible for college sports. Bloom and Colorado appealed, and he was careful to make sure his sponsors were not football-related and did not make any references to that sport, but the NCAA's final word came in August 2004.

Because Bloom was stuck between the NCAA's rules and those of the United States Olympic Committee [USOC], he missed the chance to play football as an upperclassman.

"That was the worst part," Bloom said....

"I did all these things to prepare and I worked hard and the one thing I really wanted was to start at receiver. To look back and think that it wasn't my ability that kept me from doing that, it was an organization ... I thought that was really unfair."

Bloom was a guest on the Buffaloes' sideline for homecoming Saturday when they beat Texas A&M, 41-20, to break into the national polls. Ideally, he would have redshirted this year to concentrate on skiing, then played his senior season in 2006.

There is no good reason he shouldn't have been able to do that.

When the Bloom situation came up, it would have been an ideal time for the NCAA to revisit its stance.

The USOC long ago had to give in and let athletes accept endorsement money because that's the only way it could afford to compete internationally. Now, even top pro athletes are eligible for the Games.

The NCAA's rules on endorsements are rooted in its athletes being amateurs. But let's be real.

Overlooking the fact that full-scholarship athletes get a big return on their performance in the form of tuition, room, board and sometimes celebrity and a shot at a pro career, the NCAA reeks of hypocrisy because it allows some dual-sport athletes to have pro careers, as with many college football players who have played pro baseball.

There is no justifiable difference between a college football player being allowed to accept pay for competing in one sport and his being allowed to accept endorsement money for competing in another.

When the Bloom situation came up, it would have been an ideal time for the NCAA to revisit its stance. Instead, it stubbornly stood behind an outmoded rule.

"The NCAA can't keep turning a cold shoulder on athletes," Bloom said.

To its credit, the USOC is attempting to get the NCAA to listen.

Bloom said Jim Scherr, CEO of USOC, is helping to write proposals to the NCAA that would assist future college-Olympic dual-sport athletes.

To be fair, Bloom's life hasn't been ruined by the NCAA. He has become something of a pinup man, winning the 2003 made-for-TV "SuperStars" competition (he donated his prize money to charity) and getting a spread in GQ magazine. He might have a future as a model or actor.

That's beside the point, though. His college football career didn't have to be cut short.

Bloom still pines for football. He has his eye on the NFL [National Football League] pre-draft combine workouts about a week after he hopes to earn an Olympic medal in Italy.

He has started interviewing with agents and hopes to choose one by next week. A front-runner is Leigh Steinberg, who represents Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

Bloom said he hopes to talk to Roethlisberger soon for advice and that, someday, he dreams of catching a pass from someone like Roethlisberger.

His chances of that would be better if he had completed a successful college career, but that's not Bloom's fault.

Editor's Note: Jeremy Bloom was never able to play football at the University of Colorado again. He went on to win the World Cup Championships in the moguls event in 2005 and placed sixth at the 2006 Turin Olympics. After the Olympics he decided to make football his top priority and was taken by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2006 NFL draft. However, he had to sit out the 2006 season with an injury.

Books

Eric Anderson In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Charles Barkley I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. Ed. Michael Wilbon, New York: Random House, 2002.

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Todd Boyd Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Joseph N. Crowley In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century. Indianapolis, IN: National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2006.

D. Stanley Eitzen Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

John Feinstein Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. New York: Little Brown, 2006.

John Fizel and Rodney Fort, eds. Economics of College Sports. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jessica Gavora Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment With Elite Athletics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball. New York: New Press, 2005.

Carl E. James Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student-Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Chris Lincoln Playing the Game: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League. White River Junction, VT: Nomad Press, 2004.

Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton More Than a Game: One Woman's Fight For Gender Equity in Sport. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Christopher Russo with Allen St. John The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kenneth L. Shropshire and Timothy Davis The Business of Sports Agents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Welch Suggs A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Ying Wushanley Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle For Control of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960-2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Shelly Anderson "Anderson: NCAA Rules Too Thorny for Bloom," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 13, 2005.

Dwayne Ballen "An Incentive Clause for College Athletes?," American Public Media: Marketplace, January 8, 2007. http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

Jeff Barker "Congressman Thinks Colleges Should Pay Athletes," Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2007.

Scott Bordow "Look, College Athletes Already Get Paid," East Valley Tribune (Mesa, AZ), January 2, 2003.

Marcia Chambers "Colleges; Brand Endorses More Aid To Athletes," New York Times, September 18, 2003.

Dan Daly "At Waffle House, Menu Choices Not Final," Washington Times, June 7, 2007.

Frank Deford "Pay Dirt: College Athletes Deserve Same Rights As Other Students," SI.com, May 7, 2003. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

Michael J. Diacin, Janet B. Parks, and Pamela C. Allison "Voices of Male Athletes on Drug Use, Drug Testing, and the Existing Order in Intercollegiate Athletics," Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2003.

David Enders "Football Players Discussed Joining Players' Association," Michigan Daily, April 10, 2002.

Patrick Finley "UA Football Penalized for Academic Woes," Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2007.

Teddy Greenstein "ESPN Views Play-for-Pay Arguments," Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2005.

Steve Hanway "Pay for Play a Bad Idea," Big Red Network, January 19, 2007. http://bigrednetwork.com.

Ali Hasnain "Should College Athletes Be Paid Wages?" The Daily Utah Chronicle, September 12, 2003.

Debbie Lazorik "Why Integrate Athletics Back into Campus Life?" Women in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 12, December 2006.

Mike Lopresti "Commentary: Don't Pay College Football Athletes to Play," Gannett News Service, February 13, 2003.

John Maher "Longhorns Get No NCAA Penalties for Academics," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 2007.

Pete Pelegrin "Penalties Are No Surprise," Miami Herald, May 3, 2007.

Selena Roberts "The Wal-Mart Of College Sports," New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Doug Smock "Pay for Play? Get Real," Charleston Gazette, February 12, 2007.

Kevin Tatum "Do the Homework, Then You Can Play: Temple Has a New Way to Keep Student-Athletes Eligible, and, More Important, Educated," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006.

Eddie Timanus "Academic Sanctions to Hit 65 Schools," USA Today, March 2, 2006.

Kelly Whiteside "College Athletes Want Cut of Action," USA Today, August 31, 2004.

Lya Wodraska "Poor Academics Cost Weber Football Scholarships," Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 2007.

Brad Wolverton "Athletics Participation Prevents Many Players From Choosing Majors They Want," Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 20, January 19, 2007.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Athletes Should Be Allowed To Have Their Own Endorsement Deals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Blame it on the moguls. Not the manicured bumps in the snow that Jeremy Bloom skis over so deftly on courses that would eat most people's knees for lunch. The problem is with the big shots who make the rules. Bloom is an accomplished two-sport athlete.

# data[].attributes.body
C-The article was published in 2005.
R-yes, and it agrees with my claim
A- The author of the article is Stanley eitzen.
A- No I could not find any spelling errors.
P- This article was meant to inform.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

The governing body of big-time college sports, the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association], is caught in a huge contradiction-trying to reconcile a multibillion-dollar industry while claiming it is really an amateur activity. That it is a huge moneymaking industry is beyond dispute.

The major conferences have an eight-year package (ending in 2006) worth $930,000,000 with ABC to televise the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) at the conclusion of the regular football season. Each team playing in a BCS game currently receives about $13,000,000 and, under the terms of the new contract, will receive around $17,000,000 in the final years of the agreement. Since the teams share these monies with their conference members, the 62 schools involved will divide approximately $116,000,000 in payouts annually.

The NCAA has signed a $6,200,000,000, 11-year deal giving CBS the rights to televise its men's basketball championship. (That's $545,000,000 a year, up from the $216,000,000 annually with the current arrangement that expires after the 2002 tournament.) The NCAA also makes money from advertising and gate receipts for this tournament. To enhance gate receipts, the finals are always scheduled in huge arenas with seating capacities of at least 30,000, rather than normal basketball-sized venues.

Universities sell sponsorships to various enterprises for advertising. The athletic department of the University of Colorado, for example, has 50 corporate sponsors. The major one is Coors Brewing Co., which has a $300,000 advertising package for scoreboard, radio, and TV advertising, plus a sign on the mascot's trailer. The school also named its basketball arena the Coors Event Center in return for a $5,000,000 donation.

Nine football coaches will be paid at least $1,000,000 in overall compensation in 2000....

Obviously, big-time athletic programs are commercial enterprises. The irony is that, while sports events generate millions for each school, the workers are not paid. Economist Andrew Zimbalist has written that "Big-time intercollegiate athletics is a unique industry. No other industry in the United States manages not to pay its principal producers a wage or a salary." The universities and the NCAA claim their athletes in big-time sports programs are amateurs and, despite the money generated, the NCAA and its member schools are amateur organizations promoting an educational mission. This amateur status is vitally important to the plantation owners in two regards. First, by not paying the athletes what they are worth, the schools' expenses are minimized, thus making the enterprises more profitable. Second, since athletic departments and the NCAA are considered part of the educational mission, they do not pay taxes on their millions from television, sponsorships, licensing, the sale of sky boxes and season tickets, and gate receipts. Moreover, contributions by individuals and corporations to athletic departments are tax-deductible.

The Injustice of Amateurism

To keep big-time college sports "amateur," the NCAA has devised a number of roles that eliminate all economic benefits to the athletes: They may receive only educational benefits (i.e., room, board, tuition, fees, and books); cannot sign with an agent and retain eligibility; cannot do commercials; cannot receive meals, clothing, transportation, or other gifts by individuals other than family members; and their relatives cannot receive gifts of travel to attend games or other forms of remuneration.

These rules reek with injustice. Athletes can make money for others, but not for themselves. Their coaches have agents, as may students engaged in other extracurricular activities, but the athletes cannot. Athletes are forbidden to engage in advertising, but their coaches are permitted to endorse products for generous compensation. Corporate advertisements are displayed in the arenas where they play, but with no payoff to the athletes. The shoes and equipment worn by the athletes bear very visible corporate logos, for which the schools are compensated handsomely. The athletes make public appearances for their schools and their photographs are used to publicize the athletic department and sell tickets, but they cannot benefit. The schools sell memorabilia and paraphernalia that incorporate the athletes' likenesses, yet only the schools pocket the royalties. The athletes cannot receive gifts, but coaches and other athletic department personnel receive the free use of automobiles, country club memberships, housing subsidies, etc.

Most significantly, coaches receive huge deals from shoe companies (e.g., Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski has a 15-year shoe endorsement deal with Adidas, including a $1,000,000 bonus plus $375,000 annually), while the players are limited to wearing that corporation's shoes and apparel. An open market operates when it comes to revenue for coaches, resulting in huge pay packages for the top names, but not so for star players. When a coach is fired or resigns, he often receives a "golden parachute," which sometimes is in the multimillion-dollar category, while players who leave a program early receive nothing but vilification for being disloyal. When a team is invited to a bowl game, it means an extra month of practice for the athletes, while head coaches, depending on the bowl venue, receive generous bonuses. A university entourage of administrators and their spouses accompany the team to the bowl game with all expenses paid, while the parents and spouses of the athletes have to pay their own way.

As an extreme example, an analysis of the economic impact of basketball star Patrick Ewing to Georgetown University during his four years there in the early 1980s shows that he brought more than $12,000,000 to the school (a tripling of attendance, increased television revenues, and qualifying for the NCAA tournament each year). Meanwhile, the cost to Georgetown for Ewing's services totaled $48,600-providing a tidy profit of $11,951,400 for the university. A study by an economist almost a decade ago found that top-level college football players at that time generated a net gain (subtracting room, board, tuition, and books) of more than $2,000,000 over a four-year period.

What exactly are the wages of average college athletes in the major sports? The answer is a bit complicated since those who do not graduate have not taken advantage of their tuition, so they have played only for their room and board. Moreover, there is a significant difference in tuition costs between state and private universities. Economist Richard G. Sheehan has calculated the hourly wage of big-time college players taking these considerations into account and assuming a workload of 1,000 hours per year. The best pay received, he found, occurred at private schools with high graduation rates for the athletes; the lowest, at state schools with low graduation rates. Duke, for instance, paid an equivalent of $20.37 an hour for its football players, compared to the University of Texas-El Paso's $3.51. The median wage at all big-time schools was $6.82 an hour for basketball players and $7.69 an hour for football players....

Since most college athletes never play at the professional level, the attainment of a college degree is a crucial determinant for their upward mobility, and thus a rationale for tolerating the unjust plantation system. Yet, graduation from college, while not the long shot of becoming a professional athlete, is also a bad bet.

A 1999 report compiled by the NCAA examined Division I athletes who enrolled in 1992-93 to determine how many had graduated after six years. (Athletes who left school in good academic standing were not counted in the results.) The data show that, while the overall graduation rate for all male students was 54%, for football players it was 50% (60% for whites and 42% for blacks) and 41% for male basketball players (53% for whites and 33% for blacks). While some programs are exemplary (Duke graduated 92% of its football players and Stanford University graduated 100% of its men's basketball players over the six-year period), others are not. According to Emerge magazine, 38 Division I basketball teams did not graduate a single black player in 1998. From 1995 to 1999, Ohio State graduated 100% of its female basketball players, but just 31% of its male basketball players. The 1999 men's basketball NCAA Division I champion, the University of Connecticut, managed to graduate a mere 29% of its team members between 1994 and 1997.

There are several reasons for the relatively low graduation rates for big-time college athletes. Compared to nonathletes, they are less prepared for college. On average, they enter in the bottom quarter of the freshman class (based on SAT scores). Football and men's basketball players in big-time sports programs are more than six times as likely as other students to receive special treatment in the admissions process-that is, they are admitted below the standard requirements for their universities. Second, athletes spend 30-40 hours a week on their sport, which is demanding, as well as physically and mentally fatiguing. Third, an anti-intellectual atmosphere is common within the jock subculture. Finally, some athletes attend college not for the education, but because they believe it will lead to a professional career. In this regard, former Iowa State University football coach Jim Walden has said, "Not more than 20% of the football players go to college for an education."

Not only do typical athletes in big-time sports enter at an academic disadvantage, they often encounter a diluted educational experience while attending their schools. Coaches, under the intense pressure to win, tend to diminish the student side of their athletes by counseling them to take easy courses, choose easy majors, and enroll in courses given by faculty members friendly to the athletic department. Some of the more unscrupulous have altered transcripts, given athletes answers to exams, staged phantom courses, and hired surrogate test takers. In one well-publicized case of academic fraud, a tutor for the University of Minnesota athletic department wrote more than 400 papers for basketball players over five years. Even with that help, just 23% of the players recruited since 1986 to play basketball at that university have graduated, the worst rate of any Big Ten basketball team during that period....

The obvious starting point for changing the system is to pay athletes in the revenue-producing sports fair compensation for the revenues they generate. Athletes should receive a monthly stipend for living expenses, insurance coverage, and paid trips home during holidays and for family emergencies. Media basketball commentator Dick Vitale suggests a modest plan to make the system somewhat fairer. He says that the NCAA should invest $1,000,000,000 of the $6,200,000,000 it will receive to broadcast the NCAA men's basketball tournament and pay the athletes $250 a month. Sports Illustrated writer E.M. Swift responded: "Is Vitale right on the money? You make the call. For now, as the NCAA continues to treat its athletes with supercilious contempt while reaping GNP-sized windfalls from their labor, you can at least say this for scholarship athletes: They're getting a free education in no-holds-barred capitalism."

The time has come to end the pretense that players in big-time college sports are amateurs. They are paid through a scholarship, far from a just or living wage in this world of big-time sports megabucks.

Books

David L. Andrews, ed. Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Jeff Benedict. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes Against Women. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997.

Richard O. Davies. America's Obsession: Sports and Society Since 1945. New York: Harcourt Brace College, 1994.

Richard O. Davies and Richard G. Abram. Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001.

Robert Elias, ed. Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender, and the National Pastime. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

Jon Entine. Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.

Jessica Gavora. Tilting the Playing Field: School, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy. Sports: The All-American Addiction. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002.

John Hoberman. Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997.

Richard E. Lapchick. Smashing Barriers: Race and Sport in the New Millennium. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001.

Andy Miah. Genetically Modified Athletes: The Ethical Implications of Genetic Technologies in Sport. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Shane Murphy. The Cheers and the Tears: A Healthy Alternative to the Dark Side of Youth Sports Today. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

Mariah Burton Nelson. The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Dennis Perrin. American Fan: Sports Mania and the Culture That Feeds It. New York: Avon, 2000.

Douglas T. Putnam. Controversies of the Sports World. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.

James Quirk and Rodney Fort. Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Lissa Smith, ed. Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women's Sports. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.

Murray Sperber. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Allen L. Stack and Ellen J. Staurowsky. College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA's Amateur Myth. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

Paul Weiler. Leveling the Playing Field: How the Law Can Make Sports Better for Fans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Black Issues in Higher Education. "New Game Plan," April 15, 1999.

Bill Brubaker. "Minimum Standard, Maximum Dispute: Freshman Eligibility Rule Has a Controversial Past and Faces Uncertain Future," Washington Post, July 25, 1999.

James C. Dobson. "Gambling with the Future of College Sports," USA Today Magazine, May 2001.

Patrick Hruby. "All Bets Off," Insight on the News, November 20, 2000.

David Lagesse. "Troubleshooting," U.S. News & World Report, March 18, 2002.

David Meggyesy. "Athletes in Big-Time College Sport," Society, March/April 2000.

Stephen Moore. "Pointless: College Basketball Players Throw the Game. So What?" National Review, December 21, 1998.

New Republic. "March Madness," March 29, 1999.

Ronal Roach. "Academics and Athletics," Black Issues in Higher Education, April 8, 2004.

Skip Rozen. "A Whole New Ball Game? The Push to Reform-and Scale Back-Collegiate Athletics Is Gaining Yardage," Business Week, October 20, 2003.

William S. Saum. "Sports Gambling in College: Cracking Down on Illegal Betting," USA Today Magazine, July 1999.

Welch Suggs. "Athletes' Graduation Rates Set a Record," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2003.

Time. "Throwing the Game," September 25, 2000.

U.S. News & World Report. "Graduation Blues," March 18, 2002.

Arnie Wexler and Mark Isenberg. "Blowing the Whistle on Campus Gambling," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 22, 2002.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The governing body of big-time college sports, the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association], is caught in a huge contradiction-trying to reconcile a multibillion-dollar industry while claiming it is really an amateur activity. That it is a huge moneymaking industry is beyond dispute.

# data[].attributes.body
C- Doesnt say when it was made.
R- Yes it agrees with my claim.
A- Does Not show who created the image.
A-No, spelling errors are not in the image.
P- persuade is what the creator is trying to do.

# data[].attributes.body
C-2017 was when the comic was created.
R- Yes it is pro image that agrees with my claim.
A- Doesn't say who created the comic.
A-No, I didn't find any spelling errors.
P-persuade was what the comic is mainly trying to do.

# data[].attributes.body
In this cartoon by Nick Anderson. The viewer can see the man that represent the NCAA. Talking to the college athlete. With a garbage truck full of cash driving by. with the man telling the athlete that he made them all the corrupt money.

# data[].attributes.body
This political cartoon made by John cole. Is trying to persuade the person looking at the image. When the viewer sees the coach counting his million dollars. With the 99.9 percent of college players standing there watching him count the money. This little political cartoon is related and agrees with my point on the topic.

# data[].attributes.body
In this picture the comic maker is comparing a slave to a college athlete. In the comparison you see the football player think to himself about the millions he pulls in for the NCAA, but gets none of it. Just like the slave who is picking the cotton for the white men. You can tell how the images are related because they are giving but no getting.

# data[].attributes.body
In this extremely short video, Colin Cowherd talks about the reasons why college football players should get paid. This broadcast was made in January 20 of 2016. The broadcast talks about colleges pulling in butt loads of money. After they get all of the money they don't know what to do with it so Colin argues that it is time to pay college players. I completely agree with Colin.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Here's why the NCAA should pay college football players | THE HERD

# data[].attributes.body
In this short 12 minute video group of people sit at a table a discuss the issue of college athletes get paid. In this video made in March, 20 of 2014 the show brings a famous retired NBA player Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who wants college athletes to be paid. The show was made and owned by CNN. This video was made to persuade the viewer to want college athletes to be paid or not to. This show has the counterclaim come in when the only female on the show speaks because the thinks they should not. For the most part the show is split between opinions 2 people want college athletes to be paid 2 do not.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Richard Sherman Student Athlete Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Paying College Athletes Persuasive Speech

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Crossfire: Should college athletes be paid?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Christine Brennan debate whether college athletes should be paid.

# data[].attributes.body
This article was published in 2008. With the author Eugene McCormack informing readers about why college athletes should not be paid. Eugene did a good job with the article, it has no spelling or grammar errors. The author still included somewhat of a counterclaim. This article disagrees with my point and argument.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Document controls

Main content

When C. J. Masters dropped out of Kansas State University in March 1993, he was just six classes shy of a degree in criminology. The starting safety on the 20th-ranked football team wanted to devote all of his energy to the forthcoming National Football League draft.

For months Mr. Masters flew from city to city, trying out for teams in three professional leagues. When no one offered him a contract, he moved to Kansas City, where, over the next few years, he held several low-paying jobs, including organizing schedules and appointments at a group home for troubled adolescents.

During the late 1990s, he tried his hand at sales, but never felt fulfilled. Then, in 2002, he learned about a job helping children with developmental disabilities, and was hired as a case manager.

He loved working with kids. But over the next few years, he was passed over for several higher-paying jobs because he didn't have a college degree. In late 2004, he called Kansas State's athletics officials to see what they could do to help him earn his diploma.

What Mr. Masters and hundreds of former college athletes have discovered in recent years is that many institutions-including Marshall University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln-are making it easier for college athletes to complete the degrees that eluded them during their playing days.

Although thousands of athletes who left college early have returned during the past two decades, the numbers have recently spiked. Athletics officials attribute some of the growth to a new incentive from the National Collegiate Athletic Association that rewards teams when former athletes come back.

Under the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate formula, which measures how well teams are performing in the classroom, teams with low scores can lose scholarships. But when former players return to complete their degrees, teams earn bonus points that can help them avoid such penalties.

The incentive has spurred some colleges to reach out to former athletes as never before, offering free tuition, housing, and other assistance-often in exchange for part-time work in the athletics department.

Academic Officials' Mixed View

Academic officials are happy to see former athletes return, as many show a newfound focus on their studies. But some critics say the change in attitude only proves that colleges put big-time athletes under too much physical and emotional strain to concentrate on their class work.

"Athletes returning to school is a positive step because the discipline that they learned in sports, they finally can apply to their course work," says Murray Sperber, professor emeritus of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington and author of several books on college sports. "But the fact that athletes usually perform better academically when their eligibility is over shows the huge flaw in the current system."

Under NCAA rules, students may receive athletics aid for no more than five years in a six-year period, and many players in the NCAA's top division do not finish in that time. But students who come back for their degrees may qualify for NCAA grants or tuition assistance.

Many colleges that provide financial help to returning athletes are members of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports. Started in 1985, the program has helped thousands of former players finish their degrees at no cost to themselves, though they must participate in community-service projects for 10 hours a week. Colleges pay a small fee to join the consortium and cover the cost of the returning students' tuition.

As athletes have returned, some have helped their alma maters avoid NCAA penalties.

Athletics officials credit the consortium with helping them bring back the majority of former athletes who have completed their degrees in recent years. But some colleges say the NCAA's new academic incentive has led them to redouble their efforts, or start new programs, to bring players back.

From 2003-4 to 2004-5-the first two years that the NCAA has kept track of returning athletes-there was a 23-percent increase in the number of students who came back, with a total of 849 former players in the top division re-enrolling in those two years to finish their degrees.

More than half-58 percent-of those students played baseball, football, or men's basketball in college. That is no surprise, several experts say, as graduation rates in those sports are usually among the lowest.

Football players have returned in droves. In fact, 38 percent of all NCAA Division I football programs have had at least one player come back to finish his degree in the two most recent academic years.

Several universities say they are motivated to bring former athletes back because the students made many sacrifices for their institutions.

As athletes have returned, some have helped their alma maters avoid NCAA penalties. This spring [2006] was the first time the association stripped scholarships from teams that underperformed academically. According to the NCAA, 265 teams were at risk of being penalized.

Fifty of those teams avoided punishment with a combination of retention adjustments and graduation bonus points they received from returning athletes' finishing their degrees. One-third to one-half of those 50 teams, the NCAA estimates, got around penalties solely through graduation bonuses.

Several universities say they are motivated to bring former athletes back because the students made many sacrifices for their institutions. Officials at the University of Texas at Austin, where 30 to 40 players have returned in the past five years, and at the University of Maryland at College Park, which has brought back about 25 former players in the same period, say that helping athletes is simply the right thing to do.

"These individuals have spent four to five years at our university and have given us a lot," says Anton E. Goff, an assistant athletics director for academic support at Maryland. "We know the importance of getting an education, and if we can help them get one, we will."

But some institutions, including Marshall University, say they developed a plan to bring back former athletes primarily to boost their teams' academic-progress rates.

Last year Marshall officials started searching their database for athletes who had left campus within the past 10 years but needed less than one year of credits to graduate. The university found that about a dozen former students, some of whom now play professional sports, were already eligible for diplomas-sometimes in different majors than they had signed up for. One former student who plays in the NFL got his degree simply by paying $100 in campus parking tickets.

To help students with 12 or fewer credit hours left to complete, the university has set up a program allowing students to work 20 hours a week in the athletics department to cover their tuition and living expenses. Two athletes have graduated under the plan, which began in August.

Marshall officials are not sure how much their returning students will help them avoid possible NCAA penalties once the returning graduates are factored into their scores.

Marshall's success in finding athletes close to earning their degrees has persuaded the university to start looking back 20 years to see if more players might need only a few classes to graduate.

Other universities have already helped students come back after an absence of more than 20 years. Clifford Moller, a former basketball player at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, left the Cornhuskers program after his junior year, in 1970, and returned to New York City, where for five years he drove a cab and installed telephone lines. Then, over the next 20 years, he worked in the real-estate business, eventually overseeing a 13-acre redevelopment project in Manhattan.

The project made him want to learn more about economic development, but he realized he needed a college degree to work in that field. He planned to go back to college in New York, but when he called Nebraska for his transcript, an academic adviser told him about a university program that helped former athletes. Mr. Moller learned that the university, a member of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, would waive the cost of his tuition, fees, and books if he worked 12 hours a week as a study-hall counselor for athletes.

Mr. Moller says the offer was too good to pass up, and he returned to Lincoln in 1997, at age 47. Over the next three years, he sat through athletes' study halls four nights a week, telling students that they should focus on their studies to avoid ending up like him. "I would point to all the gray hairs on my head and say they don't want to be doing this when they're my age," he says.

Without basketball to distract him, Mr. Moller says, he dedicated himself to academics like never before, raising his grade-point average from 1.3 to 2.9 and finishing his undergraduate degree in communications in three years.

He went on to complete a master's degree in community and regional planning in 2003 and is now executive director of an economic-development association in Alexandria, La.

But many colleges do not have the money to help former athletes finish their academic work. Southern Utah University, for example, is more focused on securing a fifth year of aid for scholarship players than on trying to bring back athletes who did not graduate, says Myndee Larsen, an assistant athletics director.

"We're not even close to having the ability to look beyond that right now," she says.

As Mr. Masters, the former Kansas State football player, discovered when he called the university in the spring of 2005, even some big-time athletics programs do not offer financial incentives for returning athletes. But university officials helped him secure a $2,000 NCAA grant. Athletics officials also told him about the department's Second Wind program for comeback players.

Athletic departments that help pay for returning athletes do so with revenue from ticket sales, donations, and other sources.

The program provides former athletes assistance in scheduling classes and finding housing. If students don't want to move back to Kansas, the program allows them to take classes online or at other colleges and have the credits count toward their degree at Kansas State.

Mr. Masters was living in Phoenix and didn't want to move. Last summer he returned to Kansas to take one class, and over the past year he completed three courses online and two at Scottsdale Community College, near his home. He finished his criminology degree in May.

This fall or next spring, Mr. Masters plans to enroll in a Kansas State master's program in youth and development administration. He still wants to work with children, but he would like to find a position in a public parks-and-recreation department, setting up and running an after-school program or creating better designs for parks.

Athletic departments that help pay for returning athletes do so with revenue from ticket sales, donations, and other sources. Athletics officials at Northeastern University say they receive about $100,000 a year from the university's student-financial-services budget to bring back about 10 former players. Other institutions have set up endowments to offset scholarships and other expenses.

The University Kentucky has established a fund in honor of Cawood Ledford, a former men's basketball announcer who died in 2001, to provide scholarship assistance to athletes who want to complete their degrees. To qualify for aid, players must work 20 hours a week in the athletics department and perform community-service work.

Since the fund was started, in 1992, it has helped more than 40 students, including the basketball star Allen Edwards, finish their educations. Mr. Edwards helped Kentucky win two national championships in the late 1990s, then left to play professionally for several years. He returned with financial assistance from the fund and finished his undergraduate work in sociology in 2002 with an eye toward becoming a college basketball coach. Now he is an assistant men's coach at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Books

Eric Anderson In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Charles Barkley I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It. Ed. Michael Wilbon, New York: Random House, 2002.

William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Todd Boyd Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Joseph N. Crowley In the Arena: The NCAA's First Century. Indianapolis, IN: National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2006.

D. Stanley Eitzen Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003.

John Feinstein Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. New York: Little Brown, 2006.

John Fizel and Rodney Fort, eds. Economics of College Sports. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Jessica Gavora Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002.

John R. Gerdy Air Ball: American Education's Failed Experiment With Elite Athletics. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006.

Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford Shattering The Glass: The Remarkable History of Women's Basketball. New York: New Press, 2005.

Carl E. James Race in Play: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Student-Athletes. Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Chris Lincoln Playing the Game: Inside Athletic Recruiting in the Ivy League. White River Junction, VT: Nomad Press, 2004.

Cynthia Lee A. Pemberton More Than a Game: One Woman's Fight For Gender Equity in Sport. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Christopher Russo with Allen St. John The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Kenneth L. Shropshire and Timothy Davis The Business of Sports Agents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Welch Suggs A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Ying Wushanley Playing Nice and Losing: The Struggle For Control of Women's Intercollegiate Athletics, 1960-2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.

Periodicals

Shelly Anderson "Anderson: NCAA Rules Too Thorny for Bloom," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 13, 2005.

Dwayne Ballen "An Incentive Clause for College Athletes?," American Public Media: Marketplace, January 8, 2007. http://marketplace.publicradio.org.

Jeff Barker "Congressman Thinks Colleges Should Pay Athletes," Baltimore Sun, May 2, 2007.

Scott Bordow "Look, College Athletes Already Get Paid," East Valley Tribune (Mesa, AZ), January 2, 2003.

Marcia Chambers "Colleges; Brand Endorses More Aid To Athletes," New York Times, September 18, 2003.

Dan Daly "At Waffle House, Menu Choices Not Final," Washington Times, June 7, 2007.

Frank Deford "Pay Dirt: College Athletes Deserve Same Rights As Other Students," SI.com, May 7, 2003. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

Michael J. Diacin, Janet B. Parks, and Pamela C. Allison "Voices of Male Athletes on Drug Use, Drug Testing, and the Existing Order in Intercollegiate Athletics," Journal of Sport Behavior, vol. 26, no. 1, March 2003.

David Enders "Football Players Discussed Joining Players' Association," Michigan Daily, April 10, 2002.

Patrick Finley "UA Football Penalized for Academic Woes," Arizona Daily Star, May 3, 2007.

Teddy Greenstein "ESPN Views Play-for-Pay Arguments," Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2005.

Steve Hanway "Pay for Play a Bad Idea," Big Red Network, January 19, 2007. http://bigrednetwork.com.

Ali Hasnain "Should College Athletes Be Paid Wages?" The Daily Utah Chronicle, September 12, 2003.

Debbie Lazorik "Why Integrate Athletics Back into Campus Life?" Women in Higher Education, vol. 15, no. 12, December 2006.

Mike Lopresti "Commentary: Don't Pay College Football Athletes to Play," Gannett News Service, February 13, 2003.

John Maher "Longhorns Get No NCAA Penalties for Academics," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 2007.

Pete Pelegrin "Penalties Are No Surprise," Miami Herald, May 3, 2007.

Selena Roberts "The Wal-Mart Of College Sports," New York Times, June 3, 2007.

Doug Smock "Pay for Play? Get Real," Charleston Gazette, February 12, 2007.

Kevin Tatum "Do the Homework, Then You Can Play: Temple Has a New Way to Keep Student-Athletes Eligible, and, More Important, Educated," Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2006.

Eddie Timanus "Academic Sanctions to Hit 65 Schools," USA Today, March 2, 2006.

Kelly Whiteside "College Athletes Want Cut of Action," USA Today, August 31, 2004.

Lya Wodraska "Poor Academics Cost Weber Football Scholarships," Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 2007.

Brad Wolverton "Athletics Participation Prevents Many Players From Choosing Majors They Want," Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 20, January 19, 2007.

Source Citation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Athletes Should Not Be Paid due to Post-Eligibility School Benefits

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When C. J. Masters dropped out of Kansas State University in March 1993, he was just six classes shy of a degree in criminology. The starting safety on the 20th-ranked football team wanted to devote all of his energy to the forthcoming National Football League draft.