College Sports and Academics

College Sports and Academics

Division I college Football has never had a negative connotation. It is a stepping stone and training ground for athletes wanting to challenge their limits, improve themselves, and ultimately become professionals. This is true for almost all college sports. Becoming a pro athlete may not always be the goal, “As in life, [sport] is really about competition, teamwork, and succeeding-or failing-after a worthy struggle,” as sportswriter John Feinstein says. After reading “The Contradictions of Big-Time College Sports” by D. Stanley Eitzen, one has to rethink the benefits of college sports to a University, where academics are always supposed to come first. Eitzen believes, “NCAA Division I athletic programs threaten to compromise the educational missions of the universities that maintain them.” College sports are too valuable to be cut, downgraded, or underfunded as he is implying. I think the NCAA needs major reform in its organization and to find a middle ground in which college sports lose this negative connotation of compromising education and allows them to retain their positive qualities.

To find the positive qualities in D. Eitzen’s article, one has to search relatively hard because the article is very much one-sided. Eitzen made evident that the term “student athlete” at colleges and universities with big time athletic programs does not apply at all, and that they are really athletes first and students second. The coaches encourage their students to take courses that are easy and do not present much of a challenge, or recommend professors who have no problem on taking it easy with them because of their high profile sport, such as football and basketball. This leaves more time for the coaches demands towards excellence to be met. In addition to “practices, meetings, travel, studying videotapes and playbooks athletes are required to lift weights and engage in other forms of conditioning as well as �informal’ practices during the off season” (Eitzen 644). These take a huge toll on the students and according to Eitzen the NCAA is aware of this and has tried to manage the extreme needs of the coaches unsuccessfully. Due to the overwhelming demands, athletes are forced to mostly interact with each other and isolate themselves from the student body. The physical fatigue combined with academic challenges and the desire to excel in sports more than academics leads them to “cheat” or “hire surrogate test takers”. Therefore this leads them farther from the “student athlete” ideal and more towards the logic that “it is better not to try then to try and not succeed. Thus the structure of big – time programs works to maximize the athlete’s role and minimize the academic role, clearly opposite goals of higher education” (Eitzen 645).

The biggest reason driving coaches to push their players is winning, and the money that comes from it. This in turn is very ironic because “only about one-third of Division 1-A football programs make a profit; one-third of them run an annual deficit that averages more than $1 million” (653). The burden of making the budget work falls on the students due to universities using tuition money, and money siphoned from other programs, be it academic or othletic, to make up for any deficit. This is a major problem caused by mismanagement and frivolous spending of athletic funds. Football teams are allowed to give out 85 scholarships and have as many as 130 athletes on their roster (653). The amount of scholarships given is excessive; NFL teams only have 50 players on their rosters, so there is no reason why college teams should be so large. By having this many scholarships focused on one team it drains the athletic budget for other teams. The same should apply for the number of coaches hired. “Does a football team really need an interior offensive coach or an outside linebacker coach?” asks Eitzen (654). The biggest problem in management that I noticed was putting “entire squads in off-campus hotels the night before home games.”(645),which is a complete waste of athletic funds.

If we take Temple University and its football program as an example where would it fit in all of this? Are we behaving like all the statistics say? Unfortunately, yes. In the article “Temple, 1A Football, and The Big East Football Conference” the main point is to get Temple to spend more money on its football program or cut it out altogether. The article argues that “Despite its excellent academic and related parts, the University's message is fragmented and its overall image ("Temple University") is dragged down by deafening public perceptions.” Their idea to improve the University self-image is to increase