… is the spectator sport.
Here’s a tax-exempt organization that does little other than make the world safe for big-time university athletics corruption (note its president’s hard-hitting response to the Education Secretary’s latest proposal about the droves of basketball players who don’t graduate).
Ralph Nader’s proposal to eliminate athletic scholarships and replace them with need-based money was a great opportunity for the NCAA to, say, reject the idea as overbroad, but express understanding of the motivation behind it, given the corrupt and destructive nature of much big-time university football and basketball.
Instead, the NCAA did another cynicism number. If the response to government officials wanting to reform a university-based system that fails to graduate huge numbers of high-profile athletes is to say jackshit about it and move on, the response to someone like Nader is to pull out all them nice girls on the swim team who graduate one hundred percent and you better believe it baby! Why is that mean man going after them nice girls?
The 145,000 student-athletes who receive athletics related financial aid each year are in fact students first — as evidenced by the fact that in almost every demographic they graduate at higher percentages than their counterparts in the general student body. …[T]hey are students, just like any other student on campus who receives a merit-based scholarship.
Don’t talk to me about football and basketball! Let’s just put all the athletes together into one big 145,000-person pile and note that most of them graduate! How unfair to pull out of that pile the few who play … What did you say? Which sports? … Oh yeah. Football and basketball. Why the obsessive focus on those sports? They’re just like any other…
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Why is the NCAA so cynical?
Because it works. No one, Mencken wrote, ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
March 25th, 2011 at 7:06AM
nor their desires for fast-food and circuses…
March 25th, 2011 at 2:28PM
The cynicism is in Big Time Sports highlighting the women’s teams that are otherwise maintained to remain in compliance with Title IX of the 1972 Civil Rights Act, even if that compliance requires the occasional elimination of men’s gymnastics, or of wrestling.
Otherwise, it’s the usual tactic of a rent-seeker. Pay no attention to the degenerate art. Look at the summer school program the National Endowments made possible. Pay no attention to the Communist sympathies (years ago) or third-world-ophilia (today) of All Things Considered. Look at those radio stations broadcasting opera in the hinterlands. Pay no attention to the bridge to nowhere. Look at that interchange-improvement project in Milwaukee. Per corollary, pay no attention to the football team’s rap sheet. Look at those swimmers doing internships with Social Services.