<p>So there are no rules. Why is anyone complaining then? These athletes are getting paid to play. Or not play. </p>
<p>No. They are not getting paid to play. Not yet.</p>
<p>So where was UNC’s Academic Dean during these 18 years? It doesn’t take a doctorate candidate in statistics to see something’s awry when these athletes who get Ds in everything else, get As in the AFAM courses.</p>
<p>And ditto for the SAC. Where were these accreditation reviewers? Do they audit anything at any school or do they just rubber-stamp? SAC should be investigated too.</p>
<p>There has been some discussion above about whether players who return to complete their education should count against the scholarship cap. The NCAA already provides one avenue for teams to allow players to continue to receive their scholarships while not playing: the medical redshirt.<br>
<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703384204575509901468451306”>http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703384204575509901468451306</a>
<a href=“Saban defends Tide's medical redshirting in wake of critical report - NBC Sports”>http://collegefootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2010/09/29/saban-defends-tides-medical-redshirting-in-wake-of-critical-report/</a></p>
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The schools are colluding to limit compensation. Apple and Google recently settled an antitrust lawsuit that accused them on conspiring to limit wages ( <a href=“urli.st”>urli.st; ) The $325M settlement was rejected by the judge as too small. </p>
<p>The NCAA is facilitating the same sort of collusion. It directly limits compensation to players and it also restricts player movement by enforcing the policy that players in certain sports must sit out a year if they transfer. This is a type of non-compete clause, but it seems broader than is typically permissible in industry. </p>
<p>Exactly, which is why when the NCAA says they will “take it to the Supreme Court,” they are bluffing. Already we see movement as they attempt to protect their cut of the industry, and it is an industry.</p>
<p>SACs probably did review the AFAM courses and approved them . The problem is that later these courses were changed and were not taught according to SACs guidelines. SACs requires schools to asses knowledge gained by students but in this case it would be a poor tool to detect this type of fraud. I would not be surprised if SACs changes some of its rules to allow easier fraud detection.</p>
<p>Maybe. It would be easier on everyone if the whole NCAA charade would just end. There is no place on the planet where putting 100% of the best athletes in the country in D1 schools is going to yield 100% great students. That’s the issue, really, and everything else is just trying to work around it.</p>
<p>I imagine there are quite a large percentage of athletes, probably a similar percent as there are in the non gifted athlete population, who are excellent students even under the conditions of travel and committment they have to make. The other 60-70%? I don’t know what we think the outcome is going to be, but staying in college under those conditions for three years is going to require some finagling. </p>
<p>There was a study done in 07 or 08 which showed that almost every D1 program studied had clustering in certain academic subjects, so that a huge percentage of the football team or bball team would be found in sociology or some such subject. On all the campuses the subject might be different, but there WAS a subject.</p>
<p>That’s why the NCAA doesn’t investigate clustering, which is what Wainstein talks about in the report. Clustering is the easiest way to find the problems, but the problem they are looking for, if they are looking, can’t be solved as long as we insist our best athletes also be excellent students.</p>
<p>It’s completely improbable.</p>
<p>2 and Done – There are still plenty of rules. The 65 schools and the 5 conferences in D1+ can decide what those are. Rather than previous when 300 D1 schools had to agree. Just like there are different rules for D1 FCS, D2 and D3.</p>
<p>Coase – obviously the NCAA is a cartel. That’s why there’s so many tough legal cases pending against the NCAA. That’s why the student-athlete deal is being renegotiated by the D1+ schools. End game, imho, is that the system does not get blown up by the Kessler case. Instead, the NCAA settles/negotiates. Which will require the creation of a player union. The NFL is a cartel too, but it is a legal one because all of the restrictions (draft, salary cap) are contained in a collectively bargained agreement with a union. Unions are another legal cartel fyi. </p>
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This is what I think, too. Maybe we’ll see some incremental improvements.</p>
<p>Just a note on athletic recruits and legacies at Ivies: my guess is that these groups are quite different in how the “finger on the scale” works. If there is a finger on the scale for legacies, I think it helps people who are, in general, competitive for Ivy admissions but are a bit weak in one of the areas needed for admissions. Maybe a GPA with some Bs mixed in, or an SAT of 2090, or weaker ECs–but not all of these. (Note: I’m not talking about development cases here). For athletes, there is a broader ranger of academic preparation and achievement–the Academic Index allows some pretty weak students to be admitted, but it limits their number. Most likely, the academically weakest athletes will also be the academically weakest admits overall. They will also be the most athletically talented–most likely football players.</p>
<p>How does this discussion about NCAA being a cartel having anything to do with student athletes taking fluff courses? Although I agree with much that has been discussed about how students are placed in a situation that does not foster getting an education because of NCAA rules and their commitment to their respective sports, but the bottom line is that most student athletes lack the “student” part of being a student-athlete.</p>
<p>In order for this to change, student-athletes must be students first and athletes second. Taking of the types of fluff courses uncovered by the UNC investigation, is a disservice to all those who take such courses. It may boost GPA, but everyone who takes such courses has cheated themselves out of an education and universities that foster such behavior by allowing such courses to exist are showing its true colors that athletics is more important than education. </p>
<p>VOR – all these things are related. College sports brings in a lot of dough and, because of the NCAA rules, doesn’t have to pay so much out to the players but can make huge demands on their time. That creates fat profit margins that leave a lot of dough to be paid to football coaches, hoops coaches and athletic directors. That incents schools to cut corners on academics to favor winning and revenue.</p>
<p>The biggest problem in academics is that players are required to spend 40-50 hours per week working at their football job. That obviously takes a big toll on academic performance. More so because many of the athletes are poorly prepared academically to start with. Even smart kids have to take gut courses to get by given those time demands. Even so, getting a degree typically takes 5 years (including a red shirt year) and summer school each summer.</p>
<p>If the kids don’t take the gut classes, then they won’t stay eligible and won’t keep their scholarships. Which until recently (per NCAA cartel rules) were only good for one year at a time.</p>
<p>You can go two ways on this. First, pay the players what the market will bear since they have a full time, revenue generating job. Or second, SEVERELY curtail the time requirements asked of student-athletes. If that were done, all these kids would be STUDENT-athletes rather than ATHLETE-students.</p>
<p>I’d do both.</p>
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<p>But then big-time Div.1 football won’t be the minor league for the pros that it are now.</p>
<p>Nowhere near all the best athletes get to play D-1. HBCUs, lower division colleges, CCs and HS 5th year programs are full of kids that did not meet the requirements for a D-1 scholarship. </p>
<p>“But then big-time Div.1 football won’t be the minor league for the pros that it are now.”</p>
<p>But something has to give. You can cut back the time commitment required of athletes. Or you can cut back the academic commitment required of athletes. Both actually makes the most sense. </p>
<p>The reason why you have these UNC-type situations is because these athletes (many of them weak academically to begin with) are required to be full time football players and full time college students at the same time. </p>
<p>I was a strong student and had a tough time keeping up working 20 hours a week with a full class load. No way I could have done that putting in 40-50 hours a week of back-breaking manual labor. Plus lots of out-of-town travel.</p>
<p>So many know so little about D-1 football. Half the time is spent in meetings, film study, learning new game plan for the week, etc. Football is half smarts and half labor. See this typical week breakdown.</p>
<p><a href=“Northwestern Wildcats football comes up just short against Ohio State Buckeyes - ESPN”>http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/9788562/northwestern-wildcats-football-comes-just-short-ohio-state-buckeyes</a></p>
<p>Field smarts is not student smarts.</p>
<p>It’s not rocket science. 30-40% of the US has a college degree. I think that’s about the percentage of athletes who can do the work, as well. Plus, on top of this, they have a tremendous outside work load, and their work in the top conferences translates into a very big business for the people around them.</p>
<p>I think we need to offer useful educations to these kids, and those educations might include a sports major with a how to manage your money minor. As in, a class that teaches why the “glamorous” investment is not the way to go when even those who go pro will have an average career of 3 years in the NFL.</p>
<p>For those who are probably not destined for the pros, but who still deserve an education for the work they have done to earn that television revenue, degrees like EMT, Paralegal, Real Estate Broker, useful things they can take with them to make a living. </p>
<p>Either that, or we need to change the model. Let it be like high school. Admit the best students and have people try out for the football team. It wouldn’t be big business, but it would still probably cause just as much fun school spirit. Maybe more, even, because who would win each year wouldn’t be so predetermined. We could go back to the leagues we used to have where they were just based on proximity and that would limit travel time, as well. </p>
<p>I’d be fine with either, frankly, but we have to get these kids something they can use when they leave school. Otherwise they are being taken advantage of in the worst possible way.</p>
<p>The Ivy League does not officially publish academic index information for recruited athletes. If one assumes that Espenshade used data from Princeton and 2 other Ivy league schools then his analysis which shows:</p>
<p>Admission SAT bonus of 200 for recruited athletes</p>
<p>Admission SAT bonus of 160 for legacies</p>
<p>Is probably the best data available to compare Legacies and athletes for the Ivy League. The data from Espenshade show an overall admit rate of 23% which is consistent for IVY league schools during the timeframe of the study (and would be difficult to achieve using 3 non Ivy League schools). The size of the admit class is consistent with the IVY League schools and the average SAT scores are also consistent with Ivy League schools.</p>
<p>The Ivy league thing is strange to me, because I know they are qualified students.</p>
<p>In fact, it is an open secret to forget about Yale because they really do NOT favor athletes. (This drives some of my Yale alumni friends nuts, btw, because they want to win, even at Yale.)</p>
<p>There are schools that do openly want athletes. Dartmouth, in particular, is an athletic destination.</p>
<p>But, for the most part, these student athletes at the Ivies do not have a future in athletics. At all. They mostly run the financial industry… </p>
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<p>And the problem is?</p>