I think that you misunderstood what I was saying. Fans are totally fine with paying under the table. That’s no problem. What they want, though is “student athletes”? They don’t want to see a bunch of old pros.
I think if Alabama signed Tom Brady, that wouldn’t go over well. Or if Duke signed LeBron.
They want to see kids out there who go to the school they went to. I guess you could largely solve the problem if you age restricted it to under 25 or something like that. But even then if the players are no longer students and just paid employees that don’t take classes, I think it does detract from the experience for some. But I guess as long as you kept them student-aged, that’s probably palatable. Once you start trotting out some older guys I don’t think fans (at least alums) feel the same way about it.
I don’t think so. The grading for my courses (quant subjects) was always pretty objective so it’s not like I could put my thumb on the scale too much. The absences were all handled by their liaisons who kept me updated with scheduling conflicts, written excuses, and such. It wasn’t like athletes were just skipping class on the reg for no reason. The have people from athletics dept watching them who pop into the classes to make sure they’re not skipping, so it’s not like I had to make decisions on whether to grant deadline extensions or move exams to different dates for them.
*Also, I never had anyone pressure me to boost grades or question a grade I assigned, but I had some colleagues who claimed that it happened to them.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone really cares if the kids are actually going to class or not. The fans just want a junior league that is notionally affiliated with their local college.
My understanding is that European basketball teams would crush NCAA teams, yet nobody in the USA is watching European basketball unless it is to watch the next big NBA star (Luka) - which suggests to me that NCAA basketball revenues are being driven by star players + branding.
I don’t recall ever specifically failing an athlete in a course but it may have happened. As for that guy, I think he withdrew from the course although I can’t remember exactly since it was 15 years ago. I never took any heat for athlete grades but I had some colleagues who said they did from the athlete handlers, not administration people. Administration bean counters seem to pressure people who have high fail/withdraw rates in aggregate as opposed to individual cases since they’re banking on that tuition money they’ve pre-baked into the next several budgets.
If this were the case these colleges could literally just put randos out there and succeed. Instead they go through all sorts of shenanigans and break all sorts of rules to do the opposite.
The institution has no value without the players. The institution has less value with lesser players.
The players still retain their value regardless. The problem is in this case people are stealing their value from them.
Also the ENTIRE infrastructure of all these programs was built on the blood and sweat of the athletes. Stadiums don’t win championships.
I don’t have anything smart to contribute on the net effect on revenue by paying players/allowing players to get paid but there are absolutely a ton of college football fans who would be disgusted by players getting paid.
Take a look at the players on the field and then take a look at the fans in the stadium, often in deep red states. It quite succinctly answers the question of why a Final Solution was never seriously on the table for how to solve the Negro Question.
I’d say for most college football fans, that the players are providing them entertainment while having any payment be against the rules and at the whims of good ole boys is a feature, not a bug.
Oh it’s all of them. There’s tons of major shit that goes down you’ll never hear about it. The major athletic departments must have shadow crisis teams that are on call 24/7 because it’s nearly constant.