College football is a notoriously hypocritical business. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry but the people who are the main attraction and who take all the physical risk, the players, don’t have salaries. College football players are meant to be amateurs — college kids who also play football. That the NCAA and member Universities are able to maintain this fiction, despite all evidence to the contrary, is absurd. College football is big business. Being a college football player requires well over a 40 hour work week. And, although it varies from school to school and player to player, football is the primary focus for most college football players.
If we’re honest about it, playing football so intensely doesn’t leave that much time for academics. Now, you might be thinking that you didn’t spend that much time on academics when you were in college either. Maybe you spent most of your time following your favorite rock bands, crushing on your classmates, or exploring drugs and alcohol for the first time. Well, you weren’t as focused as most college football players, now were you? These athletes are basically holding full-time jobs down AND going to college while you were just messing around. It’s a lot to ask and frankly, there are lots of ways around it. Many big football schools find a way to make the academic side of college life easier for their football players. They get them private tutoring or help them figure out which classes are easiest to pass. There are also countless more shady means that universities use to help their football players concentrate on football while playing into the charade of academics that the NCAA requires of them.
This is all pretty stupid. The most obvious suggestion would be to divorce football from academia. Create a minor-league for the NFL so that young football players can concentrate 100% on developing their skills while also making a fair salary for the entertainment value they help create. For years, however, I’ve been fascinated by another option. What if, instead of divorcing football, universities embraced it even more fully? Create a football major and allow football players to major in their sport. You can already graduate college with a major in ballet or bassoon. What’s the difference? Like football, ballet is primarily a physical activity. Like football, the market for high-paying bassoon jobs is harsh and limited. That doesn’t stop either of those pursuits from being thought of as legitimate studies. If anything, I would argue that you could create an extremely interesting major around football.
For the first time, this idea seems to be gaining a little bit of mainstream attention, if not steam. Ben Strauss wrote an article in the New York Times about the idea recently. In the article, he quotes two key supporters of the idea, “David Pargman, a professor emeritus in educational psychology at Florida State University, and William D. Coplin, director of the public affairs program at Syracuse University.” I recommend reading the whole thing but here are some highlights:
Dr. Pargman, who started a doctoral program in sports psychology at Florida State and has written several books on athletes, proposes a sample curriculum for a sports performance major that follows two years of basic studies, including anatomy and physiology, educational psychology and a particular sport’s offensive and defensive strategies. By graduation, players would have taken courses in public speaking, nutrition, kinesiology and business law. Practices become labs, supervised and graded by their coaches, though grades wouldn’t depend on game performance — no A for scoring a touchdown.
Dr. Coplin, who has spent his career designing programs to serve students in the job market, believes the skills learned through sports — from highly specialized training to learning a complex playbook to simply being a good teammate— are more valuable to employers than classroom knowledge… He envisions a three-credit seminar in conjunction with an “internship” — a semester on the team. The course could require players to keep logs of what they do each day and write a self-evaluation on career-building skills. “Athletes sometimes don’t realize the value of the skills they’re learning,” Dr. Coplin said. “But employers do.” He argues that their skill set — competitiveness, drive, the ability to work toward a common goal and take responsibility — is particularly valuable in sales and business management. Another idea for the class: an Excel lesson in which a player tracks his performance using trend lines and percentage change.
In the uneasy marriage between higher education and football, divorce is more likely than a renewal of vows, but I am fascinated by the idea of the two sides embracing more fully. I’m a lover not a hater, I guess.