Leveling field for student athletes
The double standard in intercollegiate athletics with regard to coaches’ and athletes’ relative rights of mobility is outrageous enough as it is. College sports is a multibillion-dollar industry in which the institutions get truckloads of money, broadcasters get truckloads of money, and coaches — especially the successful ones at major colleges and universities — get truckloads of money.
The players — the ones fans shell out those truckloads of money to watch — get squat.
Yes, scholarship athletes can, if they avail themselves of the opportunity, get a fully or mostly paid-for college education. As every student and/or parent who has ever written college checks knows, that’s hardly a pocket-change consideration. But in the context of the sums involved in big-time college sports, especially football and basketball, scholarships are a drop in a big-sports school’s budgetary ocean.
Yet that’s how the system has worked, and been accepted, for decades. What makes it flagrantly unfair is that an already well-paid coach might pick up and leave as soon as a better offer comes along, while archaic rules bind the athlete, who wants only the opportunity to play instead of warming the bench, to be mothballed for a term before transferring.
A policy change proposed at this year’s Southeastern Conference spring meetings would permit an eligible athlete who has finished his or her college education to transfer without penalty.
Some of the coaches reportedly don’t like the idea, for obvious reasons. Georgia head basketball coach Mark Fox (who does not oppose it) said the concern among some of his peers is a virtual “free agency” in college sports. Ironically, it is UGA that originally proposed the policy. As reported earlier this week, head football coach Kirby Smart has said a player who completes an undergraduate degree should be able to transfer without restriction.
The best argument is that a genuine student-athlete (a term often spoken with a justifiably cynical smirk), one whose college experience has involved not just sports but actual education, has earned that freedom.
“We just felt like for student-athlete wellness and fairness,” said UGA athletics director Greg McGarity, “that was the right thing to do.”
It probably won’t happen. But it should.
Eyes front
The usual complaint about an operation such as Thursday morning’s distracted-driving police lookout goes something like this: “Why aren’t they out catching real criminals instead of harassing drivers?”
Nobody asking that question is a friend or loved one of anyone among the alarmingly large and fast-growing number of Americans killed or seriously injured in accidents involving distracted drivers.
As reported by senior writer Chuck Williams, Columbus Police issued almost 100 citations Thursday morning in the Bradley Park area alone. Among the distracted driving violations reported were texting, reading, applying makeup, checking Facebook — and, according to Maj. J.D. Hawk, one driver using a laptop.
People can complain if they like. Public safety is what police are sworn to protect. If they’re citing hazards like those, they’re doing their jobs.
This story was originally published June 1, 2017 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Leveling field for student athletes."