Dryden;1716309; said:
Problem with this is that if the Big Ten decided to withdraw from the NCAA to stay clean, then we'd likely wind up with an inferior product on the field after a short number of years. Why would a kid go to Ohio State or Michigan or Nebraska to be a student-athlete if he can go to the south and get paid to play in an NFL-feeder league carried on two national networks (CBS & ESPN)?
I'm as rah rah for the ideals of the Big Ten as anybody else, but watching filler about marching bands and undergraduate programs at Big Ten member institutions on the BTN isn't going to pay the bills. The Big Ten would wind up being as nationally prominent as the Ivy League and the modern-day Army/Navy game, which is to say, unless you went there, you probably don't care much about it anymore.
And research brings how many dollars to OSU compared to sports? 7 to 1? And that gets spent on whom? Students, teachers, researchers?
I dare say that despite the fact that their numbers are small, the research dollars, endowment funds and teacher pay scales of Ivy League schools and Chicago surpass those of the Big Ten schools. Their scholarship programs are heavily weighted to favor those who have achieved in the classroom.
Buckeye football is one of my guilty pleasures. I love being in the stadium, I find summer's length and autumn's brevity annoying, but in my heart I know it creates excesses.
We have one whole section of this site dedicated to "high school athletes" in which many of us follow their progress and pile on the praise -- not for what they've done in the classroom -- but on the field.
We know what a disgrace our inner city and rural schools are, but instead of encouraging their students by offering full rides, meals and housing for performance in the classroom, we make it on the ability to tote a football or hit the three. That perversion of the word "scholarship" should be enough to cause us to pull back in shame.
Everyday we tell any high school student who wanders on this site that the most important aspect of our lives as students was the football team, that if they want our attention and praise they need to be an athlete.
How can it, our love of the game, not influence what goes on in school. Yes, I know there are/were some fine teachers who also coached, but I also know too many who spent their classroom time talking about the upcoming game instead of civics. (At one point in the sixties there were so many bad history/social studies teachers that OSU did away with the history minor hoping to thus discourage PE majors.) How many classroom hours are lost to pep rallies? How many times are teachers asked to reconsider an athlete's grade? How many athletes develop a warped image as to their importance in society? And how many capable, but not athletic, students are discouraged by the cost of education while some incapable, but athletic, student goes off to a select enrollment school? How many coaches make more money than the principal, or the best teachers in many schools?
The NCAA is as weak or strong as the schools want it to be. As long as schools believe that they need athletics to keep endowment funds growing, they will need a governing body to keep some semblance to academic purpose.
