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Tuesday, November 16, 2004
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HE SAID IT, I DIDN'T...
FOXSports Dave Kindred 11/16/04 "The big lies are told by the hypocrites at the top. They want you to believe it's amateur sports. It's not. ESPN reported Ohio State football brought in $53 million during its 2002 national championship season and spent only $15 million to do it. That's a 253 percent return. The Colombian drug cartel wishes it could do that well. Meanwhile, the average value of an in-state athletic scholarship was $13,379. You'd think somebody would care that big-time college football makes drug-cartel profits from the work of teenagers who have no say in where the money goes that they make. You'd think that university presidents would be ashamed that they're at the top of an organization that deals in an athletic version of child porn. You'd think that university presidents would be embarrassed to stand revealed as the bosses of outfits that systematically exploit immature, unsophisticated, powerless children for the entertainment of Old Grads With Money. But no. No one cares. No one is ashamed. No one is embarrassed. Or, if they are, they can't admit it, because to admit it would be to invite demands that they end it. And the only way to end it is to revolutionize big-time college athletics. End the charade that it is amateur athletics. Operate it as professional athletics. That would be the honest thing to do. But after a century and more of creating and maintaining the biggest lie in all of sports, universities can't afford to acknowledge the truth. It would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions. That's because they would have to compensate the workers, the Maurice Claretts. In addition, they would face an even more loathsome responsibility. Like the rest of us and like all professional sports, they would have to pay local, state and federal taxes on their revenues. Right now, they pay no taxes because college athletics programs are counted as part of the quote-educational-unquote system. Yeah, right. At Georgia, the school's assistant basketball coach prepared a final exam loaded with puzzlers such as: How many halves in a basketball game? At Ohio State, students took on the intellectual challenges inherent in Officiating Tennis. It will never change." |