GP1

Who's blaming NIL? I don't blame NIL. I blame the people who want it to be 1970.

What if your boss had an expectation you didn't want to comply with and you could string them along until just before they fired you, you went to work somewhere else? That's what's going on in college athletics.

What if you boss told you you couldn't fart for 8 hours then required you to eat ten bowls of Raisin Bran?

I'm not that interested in talking to the problem.

Maybe some.

Many don't. Life is full of choices. They are adults.

Ok, why do they need a college degree to become a professional in something else? Why aren't we all professionals at whatever job we do. I expect the manager at an Arby's to be a professional even though that person may not have a college degree.

They are getting paid to play. That makes them professionals.

In the NIL era, many have already gone pro.

What if they aren't dummies at all? What if they simply don't care because if they start to flunk out they can just go to another school?

How easy would it be to pass classes and get an online college degree in the NIL era? My understanding is OSU has a WR making $4 million per year. It would only take about one to two percent of that money for a player to hire an "academic advisor". Does anyone want to write a job description for this academic advisor? My interests in college athletics in recent years don't really lie in what happens during games, but the entire perversion of the American university system. It's part of our general societal decay and has been fascinating to watch. It's so gross I can't look away.

In the NIL era, a winning team is all I care about. If there is embarrassment , it's the decades long failure on the field. I think anyone who feels bad about this story is internalizing it. Very few people give a crap about this nonsense. I don't feel one bit bad about this story. In fact, I think academic standards in minor league professional sports are stupid. The players aren't here to go to school. They are here to participate in football games and make some money so ESPN has weeknight programming in the late fall. The classroom stuff should be optional. Within ten years, high level college football will be teams that are merely sponsored by universities. They could use names like, The Buckeyes brought to you by The Ohio State University. If you don't think it's going this way, you are fooling yourself.

Do you really think that the catastrophe will all be on him?

It will be a Kent level disaster.

What if they could be 38-10 over the next four years?

I was hoping they would try to use the football program to benefit the athletes students alumni fans and general community around Akron. I don't think this is unrealistic.

No

I can only see Nihilism in our future.

"kids"? These are grown ass men who now are playing a type of minor league professional sports. Some of these "kids" are 25-26 years old. I'm not even certain why academic standards are a consideration. To me, if some of these men want to take classes towards a degree, that is good for them. If not, see you at practice, meetings and games.

Actually, it was the Supreme Court of The United States of America.

Might result in one less person in attendance next year.

Yes because I'm intellectually honest. I'd be more than happy to do it if the team won the MAC. I'd do it for a six win season next week. I can't pretend it's college athletics anymore. I don't think a person who got passed through the college of engineering without doing any work is going to last long, or even get hired in the engineering world.

In the NIL era, degrees are being handed out left and right. Players transfer from school to school and I doubt there is much cogency to the curriculum from school to school. On line masters programs are devaluing undergraduate degrees far faster than anything.

College athletics used to be a means to an end. Players went to schools, got an education/degree while playing sports then entered adult life prepared for success. Today, college football is the end and there is no preparation. I don't know how many more times I have to say this. College athletics are now minor league professional sports. I don't expect a college athlete to get a degree anymore than I expect an Akron Rubber Ducks player to attend classes and graduate from a university. Accepting this would allow coaches to do what they are brought to schools to do. That is preparing athletes for events that will be broadcast so TV networks can make money.

In an era when it's almost impossible to flunk online classes, this is pretty inexcusable. OSU probably has a 5 to 1 ratio of "academic assistants" to football players. The primary job of the assistants is to take tests for the players who coincidentally happen to be in the same classes. Sanders joked when he was at Colorado that he had not seen the inside of a classroom. Let's not pretend in the NIL era players are at the schools for the education and get these issues addressed with some academic assistants of our own. Some call this embarrassing. I don't know about that. If nobody is paying attention or even cares, how embarrassed do you need to feel?