Ole Miss Football: It’s Time to Revolutionize the NCAA
By John Gillon
Ole Miss football fans, and fans of collegiate athletics in general, have an ever-developing love-hate relationship with the NCAA. We love the product the NCAA delivers to us. However, we hate some of their procedures, practices, and rules.
College athletics have become embedded in the American culture, especially in the South. Just consider Ole Miss football and our SEC opponents. Accordingly, the NCAA is a billion dollar non-profit organization.
College sports provide an atmosphere that you can’t find in professional sports. For example, athletes, in perception at least, are playing for a program they love. They picked one over all the others, and it shows on the field. The passion displayed in collegiate sports is unmatched.
Collegiate sports are predicated on the basis of amateurism. The idea is that athletes attending college, sometimes on scholarship, should not be compensated.
This idea is completely bogus. You can’t just make billions off of someone putting their body on the line game in and game out without reimbursing them.
Yes, some are getting a free education. Outside of football and basketball, though, most athletes are actually not on a full scholarship. Softball gets 12 scholarships, while baseball gets a lousy 11.7.
It is worth noting that softball gets more to balance out the amount of scholarships between male and female athletes. Most women sports have more scholarships than their male counterparts due to football getting a whopping 85 scholarships.
This means that a lot of these students either collect massive student loan debt, or their parents must try to pay for their college. It is not reasonable to ask families that quite possibly struggled affording high school athletics to pay for college and give the student-athlete everything they need.
If a school, or its boosters, gives an athlete money, it is breaking NCAA rules. The NCAA will investigate, a process flawed in numerous ways. First the investigators are just quidnunc’s with a title. They routinely leak information to the media, while schools must stay silent. Also, the investigations take forever just to reach the allegation of violations stage.
Ultimately, the committee on infractions will hand out the sanctions. These penalties routinely inflict gobs of collateral damage.
Without further ado, I’ll dive into how I would go about fixing the billion dollar industry that is the NCAA.