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Dec '24last reply
Dec '24- 5
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College sports are becoming a joke. Football players transfer from one team to another every year, ever hear one of them mention their major? Changing for better education. Yea, me neither.
Baseball players sign up with a college and then wait for the draft. The college scholarship I assume goes unused 80-99% of the time. I don’t even know why schools recruit top prospects out of High School, they know they will not show up on campus.
College Baskrtball has been a joke for years. What is the graduation rate at top Basketball Schools? 5%?
It is time to just force all sports to create minor leagues like Baseball. Having these “Students” make college look like fraud.
Let me add one more line to the article following this one:
"College Year 7 (age 25): Returns/transfers to SEC school as a senior."
Year 8 -- player goes undrafted and gives up baseball since he's too old to really be a prospect.
I don't know if that path would fit a real prospect's imagined future.
Yeah, that's a little extreme. But... for a large number of players, spending six years in college, actually getting your degree (and even a graduate degree, nearly all the football players who are doing six years actually do do that, you can't follow this path without graduating) and banking more money than you ever would have from your bonus and minor league salary is not necessarily a bad way to spend your early 20s (and certainly better than indy ball).
The main relevance for MLB is taking even more college players off the table. While I am more for player freedom, they might want to consider NHL or NFL type rules.
In reply to bkeich:
I agree. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that the NCAA "money" sports are becoming so seamy that I wonder how much damage they're going to do to the academic reputations of institutions that allow themselves to be sullied by these behaviors, in pursuit of "filthy lucre."
I'm a Penn State graduate... who discovered how well-regarded my undergraduate degree was, and how well I had been prepared at Penn State, when I spent two years in a very competitive graduate/professional program. If forced to see PSU choose between participating in this sordid business, and just abandoning its "money sports" programs... I would advocate for abandonment.
Of course, this won't happen. In our society, money talks, money dictates, and money corrupts. Far too few Americans are sufficiently principled to resist that siren call.
What's basically happening now is our educational institutions are licensing their brands to professional sports subsidiaries. While arguing that doing so only elevates their educational mission (and financial health) which is debatable, but not entirely untrue. And meanwhile, governments no longer believe in public education, though the legislators usually still love the football team. A lot of black coaches and educators especially still see athletics as a net positive, even when a kid doesn't get his degree. Some education is still better than none. And the platonic ideal of having athletics as part of a whole education is still valid, if hard to see clearly in between the Dr Pepper commercials.
This era is at least doing away with some of the hypocrisy. Collective bargaining is likely coming next. What's interesting is it doesn't seem to be putting off fans even a little bit (in terms of audience size), despite what you and BK are saying, and despite a big group of fans still thinking players shouldn't be paid. And nobody who is actually college age (or even under 30) really minds the changes.
I don't know how you solve the transfer portal and NIL stuff perfectly, in that, players should be as free to move as their coaches have always been and they they should also share in the spoils of this massive industry. But changing schools 2-3 times and shopping around can get out of hand. Then again, would we say that if MLB lost its anti-trust exemption (I mean, we would, just like people did when free agency first happenes, but that doesn't mean it would be bad).