Hey, Old Sport!
Years ago when I worked at a small college in Pennsylvania I was involved in recruiting students for our athletic programs. We were an NCAA Division III school which meant that there were no scholarships involved for those kids other than the ones they might get strictly for their academic prowess.
It was a busy time in our lives but we did manage to get in quite a few football games and it was a lot of fun. There was always some big rivalry between our school and whichever one we might be playing on a given day. And the quality of play was always first-rate. Those students took their talent and their conditioning and their desire to win hugely seriously – and that was reflected in the quality of play.
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about how annoyed I was that college athletes would be allowed to accept various kinds of "outside" honoraria – their names and various images of them could be used in advertising and corporate promotions. The honoraria, of course, was payment and it could be huge.
Now, however, the NCAA has taken a huge step forward (?) in allowing its Division I athletes to be simply paid. The institutions can compete in recruitment by offering huge sums to athletes they deem desirable. I'm not sure where scholarships might fit into this picture, or if these paid athletes would have to pay tuition and fees. That latter point, however, might soon be moot, since I suspect that, before long, these athletes won't even have to be students. In other words these sports would no longer be a healthy outlet for students with some degree of talent; rather, they would simply be promotional vehicles for the institutions.
Of course most of the "big-time" athletic programs have long since abandoned some noble idea of the student-athlete. Very often students are enrolled in the most undemanding of majors and then coddled through those with massive tutoring. What's also pathetic is to hear one of those athletes being interviewed after some special play or special game and to find only a minimal articulation of coherent sentences.
What's going to happen when these programs have only a name connection to the institutions that house them? How will this affect the maintenance of a fan base? Most fans connect with a team because they went to Old Siwash, or there is or was a child or relative there, or they simply live in the same town as Old Siwash. When the athletes, however, are simply paid staff where's the fan hook? Why are fifty-thousand fans going to want to fill a university stadium to see the play of athletes with no connection to the university?
Without that connection, too, you're just watching some athletes who, while talented, are not at the level of professional teams. Why not simply direct your sports mojo to a professional team?
A lot of sportswriters have expended a great deal of keystrokes on all of this. But I'm no sportswriter – only a fan who is beginning to wonder why we even have these programs at our major colleges and universities. Yes, they bring in big dollars but those dollars go right back into funding the facilities and equipment and travel – and, now, "student" salaries. I have yet to hear of any sports program picking up the tab for an additional professor of philosophy or biology.
G.K. Wuori ©2025
Photoillustration by the author