[M]ost of these guys don’t get very good educations, because playing on a D-1 football team is basically a full-time job – at least as time-consuming (and certainly more dangerous) than most full-time jobs. Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.
The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.
The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
August 29th, 2011 at 10:54AM
This echoes what Murray Sperber said eleven years ago about college athletes — a number of them earn poor grades because they’re not very bright. But many of them earn poor grades and enroll in undemanding majors because their time allotments are not that different from adults heading back to school while working full-time, only adults don’t risk losing both job *and* their wherewithal to get a degree if they displease their employers.