Category Archives: NCAA

By Christopher B. Daly 

Recently, the Times invited readers to send in letters for a “Sunday Dialogue” concerning the NCAA. The prompt for the letters involved a rather arcane point, internal to the NCAA, about whether the top 1% of teams by revenue should break off from the NCAA. 

I didn’t think that was a great question, but I wrote anyway. The Times did not print my letter (probably because it was a bit off-subject). But I have a blog, so here it is:

To the Editor:

As an associate professor at Boston University (a school with 23 NCAA Division 1 teams, including a top-10 men’s hockey team), I have had many student athletes in my classes over the years. The question I have is this: what educational purpose does the NCAA advance? What is the educational benefit of intercollegiate sports?

At the start of nearly every semester, I have one or more students approach me after the first lecture. They hand me letters from the Athletics Dept. telling me in advance which classes these students will be missing and requesting my “cooperation” with their athletic schedules. I often wonder why my students need to travel as far as the West Coast, during the regular season, to run around in shorts and chase balls. They miss classroom experiences that, I  believe, they can never truly make up.

I also wonder why NCAA athletes train year-round. A few years ago, I had a student in a class who was on BU’s swimming and diving team. She missed a number of classes for swim meets, then missed a few more because the team had earned its way into a tournament. Finally, her season was over. When she returned to class, I welcomed her back and observed that now she would have a lot more free time. Not so fast. She explained that although the season was over, the team would go right on holding practices, which she was obliged to attend. In fact, she said, they could step up their training now, because they would not be traveling to meets.

I believe young people should get exercise, but I think that’s true for all college students. They should all have sound bodies. But I don’t see the educational value in having a small fraction of the student population training intensively, year round, in ways that undermine the real reason they should be on campus.

–Chris Daly, Boston

 

By Christopher B. Daly

The NYTimes adds to the pile of reasons to abolish the NCAA. The athletes who play for big-time college teams sign a letter when they are in high school declaring the name of the school where they intend to play. This was originally meant to signal to recruiters from other schools to cease and desist. But, under the iron law of unintended consequences, today’s story indicates that these letters have morphed into what amounts to a “reserve clause,” like the one that used to tie professional baseball players to their team owners. Increasingly, college players are thwarted in their attempts to transfer.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for the “student athletes” who want to switch schools, but then I realize: they are not transferring to find a better English department or more-advanced physics labs. They are acting like professional athletes in any sport who want to do what’s best for their athletic careers (not their educations).

Proponents of transfer limits say that they are put in place to prevent coaches from continually attempting to lure athletes from other universities, which could create a never-ending recruiting cycle. Critics counter that the rules make it much too easy for coaches to act punitively, penalizing athletes for changing their minds about decisions made when they were teenagers.

Coaches cannot fully prevent athletes like Lunt from transferring to any university they want. But if a coach does not grant an athlete a release, the player must forfeit any scholarship opportunity, pay his own way to the new university and sit out the next season. Meanwhile, Gundy, whose contract pays him $30.3 million over eight years, and other coaches can routinely move from one college to another with minimal consequence, often for bigger contracts after arranging a buyout with the first college.

Not only that, but the article includes the startling figure that nearly 500 mens basketball players transferred from one college to another last year.

500 basketball players switching schools!

(That’s one sport, one gender, from a sport with a fairly small roster. How many total athletic transfers take place in a year?)

Now, let’s acknowledge that, on average, these are not the strongest students on our campuses, and let’s acknowledge that transferring is disruptive and probably sets most students back somewhat.

How much sense does this make?

Again, I ask: what educational purpose does the NCAA serve?