The Case to End College Football

Today’s guest columnists are professors and authors Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva.

College football is morally indefensible.

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That is the premise of our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, based on lengthy interviews we conducted with 25 former big-time college athletes (mostly in the Power Five, now turned Power Four without the Pac-12).

While we are sympathetic to the fact that much is beloved about the sport—from its pageantry and quirky traditions to its profound cultural significance across so many regions of the United States—the pleasure it affords fans and participants is vastly outweighed by the exploitation and harm that define its practice.

Let’s start with the basics: Big-time college football is one of the most egregious sites of economic exploitation in U.S. society today. Despite recent moral panics about how name, image and likeness (NIL) liberalization is ruining the sport, the fact remains that although 42 athletic departments produced more than $100 million in revenue in 2021-2022, universities continue not to directly compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for producing that value.

Instead, they funnel the revenue produced by players into the hands of formal athletic department employees such that 36 head football coaches pull in more than $5 million per year, 66 assistants extract more than $1 million, 51 athletic directors receive more than $700,000 and even 21 strength coaches receive more than $500,000. Indeed, at Ohio State, an astounding 2,158 people are on the payroll of the athletic department. None of them are football players—a fact that the athletes we interviewed were acutely conscious and deeply resentful of.

The dynamics of this system are compounded by racial inequalities. A…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/case-end-college-football-123000337.html

Author : Sportico

Publish date : 2024-05-22 12:30:00

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