Should college athletes be compensated? Should Florida follow Cali’s lead? Part 2
Bottom Line: The biggest shame in collegiate athletics today arguably isn’t the greed and intellectual dishonesty of the NCAA or athletic departments at many colleges. It also isn’t the lack of appreciation for the value of the scholarships and educational opportunities afforded to many athletes. It’s what this corrupted system prevents from happening. Would-be student athletes being denied scholarship opportunities and the ability to play collegiate sports that are occupied by the players recruited to play sports who wouldn’t meet the academic standards required of the school.
When it comes to abuse within athletics the biggest losers are never the names you know. They’re the people you’ve never heard of who never received opportunities despite doing it the right way. This is a different version of a similar thing to what happened to a generation of baseball players in the 90’s and early 2000’s during baseball’s PED heyday. The real tragedy wasn’t Barry Bonds stealing Hank Aaron’s home run title or Big Mac and Sosa making a mockery out of Maris’s single season mark. It was the toll it took on hundreds of thousands of kids who felt they had to do PED’s as early as middle school to be able to get noticed and the hundreds of thousands of kids who choose not to cheat who were denied opportunities they may have otherwise received. That takes me back around to the question about Florida. Should we join California in allowing collegiate athletes to become compensated? I say yes.
Florida is one of seven additional states currently considering the prospect of traveling down the same path as California. I’d like to see it happen in the hopes of ending the charade that is college athletics for most of the D1 men’s football and basketball programs. My hope is that eventually we’ll have “minor league” equivalents for all major sports, a la baseball and hockey, that would put an end to the NFL and NBA’s manipulated use of college programs as their defacto minor leagues. Doing so would also force colleges to actually care about student athletes rather than pretending.