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> Let's stop pretending that college sports is anything but a glamorized professional sporting franchise For 95+% of colleges athletes, their experience with c

> Let's stop pretending that college sports is anything but a glamorized professional sporting franchise For 95+% of colleges athletes, their experience with college sports has absolutely nothing in common with professional sports. The pro-football edge case should probably be addressed somehow, but not in a way that ruins amateur sports for everyone else.

jessaustin 7y ago
Amateurs don't need NCAA to play sports. I was on my college kendo team, and NCAA doesn't care about kendo. There are lots of other competitive collegiate club sports that have escaped NCAA's plundering. The obvious solution to most schools' Title IX woes would be to declare that all sports are club sports. A compromise would be to say that basketball, football, and softball are official, and everything else is club.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  I agree that the NCAA is terrible. But imho a much better solution would be to ban schools from making money on sports, rather than letting students profit.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Most institutions don't "make money on sports", in the sense that their athletic departments operate at a loss, which if it can't be covered by alumni donations or by taxes for public institutions must be extracted from students. (College administrators might not see a difference between the latter situations and "profit"...) Like many other aspects of the modern university, a huge portion of athletic expenses are incurred by employing many times the number of administrators required in decades past. The NCAA functions on the athletic side in much the same way that the bankruptcy-impervious student loan functions on the academic side: ratcheting up revenue to support the inexorable growth of administrative staff. Colleges and universities aren't doing a better job than they did years ago, so by charging more they defraud both students and society. Whether students are allowed to profit or not, I certainly support your proposal to ban colleges and universities from taking commercial interest in student sports.

jessaustin 7y ago

Amateurs don't need NCAA to play sports. I was on my college kendo team, and NCAA doesn't care about kendo. There are lots of other competitive collegiate club sports that have escaped NCAA's plundering. The obvious solution to most schools' Title IX woes would be to declare that all sports are club sports. A compromise would be to say that basketball, football, and softball are official, and everything else is club.

Alex3917 7y ago
I agree that the NCAA is terrible. But imho a much better solution would be to ban schools from making money on sports, rather than letting students profit.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Most institutions don't "make money on sports", in the sense that their athletic departments operate at a loss, which if it can't be covered by alumni donations or by taxes for public institutions must be extracted from students. (College administrators might not see a difference between the latter situations and "profit"...) Like many other aspects of the modern university, a huge portion of athletic expenses are incurred by employing many times the number of administrators required in decades past. The NCAA functions on the athletic side in much the same way that the bankruptcy-impervious student loan functions on the academic side: ratcheting up revenue to support the inexorable growth of administrative staff. Colleges and universities aren't doing a better job than they did years ago, so by charging more they defraud both students and society. Whether students are allowed to profit or not, I certainly support your proposal to ban colleges and universities from taking commercial interest in student sports.