America’s Most Exceptional Folly

Only in America!

News outlets recently mourned the passing of Sister Jean Schmidt, who lived to the remarkable age of 106. What made her so noteworthy? She wasn’t a humanitarian on the path to sainthood, nor a theological visionary. She was, rather, celebrated as America’s most devoted sports fan. She was a nun famous for her unshakable loyalty to a team of college boys skilled at dribbling, passing, and shooting one thing: basketballs. She never missed a Loyola of Chicago home game.

America, to my knowledge, is the only nation in the world where universities are intimately linked to sports in a major fashion. You don’t see Oxford battle Cambridge on the soccer field, or, much closer to home, the University of Toronto battle McGill or Western Ontario. College in those places is about the discovery and dissemination of knowledge, and sports are left to professional profit-seeking businesses similar to America’s National Football League (NFL) or National Basketball Association (NBA). Adeptness with balls is fundamentally different than learning differential equations or discovering new drugs, things that universities do around the world.

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The absurdity associated with pretending top-flight athletes of college age are really students engaging in sports as an extracurricular activity has been fully exposed. Recently, I watched six Ohio State football players do a commercial for McDonald’s, providing them, no doubt, a sizable income. Some of the best athletes earn income from their ball-handling capabilities that exceed those of their most senior professors. Many of them attend two or three universities over their collegiate athletic career. At liberal arts colleges, perhaps more than a third of the students play on some team, and athletic prowess is used as a means of luring needed students in this era of weakened enrollments.

Adept athletes around 20 years of age are good at sports, but also often want a college degree to live comfortably later in adulthood. It seems like a win-win for everyone. Like others, I will be both watching and attending multiple collegiate contests just this weekend. Universities are in the teaching business, the research business, the housing business (student dorms), the food business (cafeterias), and sometimes even in the medical clinic and hospital business. So, the university thinks, why not be involved in sports too?

Yet, I doubt we have reached a stable model that will endure. The previous moral issue of adults exploiting youth—coaches making millions, their players at most tens of thousands—has been alleviated a bit. But what about the lifetime medical problems that emerge in midlife that will debilitate meaningful numbers of ex-athletes? What about the scandals surrounding ways to cheat the system (e.g., giving passing grades to student athletes who have done virtually nothing off the field or court)? (Read “Here’s My Advice to College Professors Being Pressured to Change Student-Athletes’ Grades” by Galanty Miller.)

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There is a financial issue, too. I work at a wannabe athletic power, in a conference of schools most in the shadow of the mighty Big Ten. Using honest accounting methods that would pass muster with, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission, I suspect my university loses probably $25 million annually on sports, roughly a thousand dollars for every full-time residential student (Ohio University has a total enrollment of 30,682 students). The typical student might attend two or three sporting events a year, but directly or indirectly pays upwards of $1000 to subsidize an activity most liked by a modest number of influential alumni, not the students. To a neighboring school to the North, Ohio State, now ranked number one in college football, athletics is not a financial burden, and genuinely promotes the university in other ways. But that is a rarity, the exception, not the rule. I doubt more than a dozen schools nationally can legitimately claim to come close to breaking even on college athletic programs.

What is the solution? For athletic powerhouses, one potential solution could be leasing or selling sporting facilities and the university name to private entities, subject to stipulations on student team participation. Ban “transfer portals.” Deep six the NCAA on anti-trust grounds. Remove tax breaks for donations to collegiate sports that have little or nothing to do with the true purpose of higher education. Ban from college sports egregious rule violators, especially coaches and other supervisory adults.  This is just a sample from a laundry list of reforms needed.

College sports have undergone significant changes in the past decade, and I expect this trend to continue for the next few years. Only in America could universities become both temples of knowledge and cathedrals of sport, but I am cautiously optimistic that we are moving away from complete insanity toward a system that is reasonably rational. In the meantime, play ball!


Image: “Ohio State Buckeyes kickoff 2007” by Kyle Kesselring on Wikimedia Commons

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One thought on “America’s Most Exceptional Folly”

  1. Well, university sports and academia began becoming a joke fifty years ago. I remember when one major SEC university had 9% of its football players graduate. New university presidents know that creating a winning football team increases alumni donations. What a sad reflection. The sad part are those real scholar-athletes whose dual accomplishments get downplayed. Academic All Americans should be front page news. Caitlin Clark’s academic achievements should be recognized.

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