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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  General Discussion  |  Sports / Fantasy Sports  |  Topic: Ralph Nader wants to ban athletic scholarships 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Ralph Nader wants to ban athletic scholarships  (Read 19039 times)
ghost
The Dentist
Posts: 10619


Reply #35 on: March 29, 2011, 11:07:43 AM

No worries, ghost makes a good point. They are just volunteering to help their own high school teams usually or cheerleaders or band. It's a vicious cycle of helping!  awesome, for real

Hey hey hey.   You just watch all that helping going on.  Somebody's going to put an eye out. 
Abagadro
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Reply #36 on: March 29, 2011, 11:29:30 AM

You can pry  big time college football from my cold dead hands!

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

-H.L. Mencken
Rasix
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I am the harbinger of your doom!


Reply #37 on: March 29, 2011, 11:37:06 AM

You can pry  big time college football from my cold dead hands!

Welcome to the Pac 12.  awesome, for real

-Rasix
Khaldun
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Reply #38 on: March 30, 2011, 06:33:18 PM

Personal enjoyment, community identity and all that jazz is perfectly obtainable with minor leagues that are associated with university sponsors.

Big time college athletics absolutely 100% sucks significant resources away from instructional budgets in every campus except for the few that have teams that make serious $$$, and many of the big stadiums built in the last decade at public universities have been built with taxpayer $$$, not donor money. When donors and board members are involved in athletic support, they often exert governance over academic programs as well. Look up the shit going down at Auburn if you want an especially gross example of that.  Moreover, it leads to pervasive corruption of universities: there is an endless legion of stories of adjunct faculty fired for accidentally fucking up and grading an athlete down, bogus courses created to get athletes through, before you even get to the fantastic corruption involved in recruiting or in trying to keep athletes from having to face criminal charges for a wide variety of crazy bullshit they pull.

It's much wiser to just say, "I enjoy it and I don't intend to look any further into it, because I don't want to know"  than to suggest that there's really nothing wrong going on and it doesn't hurt anybody and won't anyone please think of the concessions staff and the poor scholarship athletes.
Morat20
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Reply #39 on: March 30, 2011, 06:44:09 PM

They don't suck a whole lot of money away from instruction and administration, they mostly suck money away from donors and the football program, at least at my own school from everything I've been able to dig up about it. And most of those donors would just not give money if the programs they're supporting went away, rather than say 'well, I guess I'll give it to the anthropology department instead!'
I'll speak from a bit of experience -- a friend of mine, guy I've known for almost 20 years now -- his dad used to be BIG into government watchdog groups. You know, filing FOIA requests, demanding access to books, doing amateur forensic accounting, that sort of thing. (By "amateur" I mean "trained CPAs and occasional actual forensic accountants volunteering". It was all done as volunteer work).

Our local community college is a rather sizeable one. Big enough that Bill Clinton spoke there when pushing his big community college program. My friend's dad was one of the guys in his watchdog group looking through their books. The college had a sizeable sports program. REALLY big for it's size.

What he found was that, contrary to their charter and possibly (but I doubt it) state law, they were funding a large chunk of the sports program (primarily football) out of student and tuition fees. The 'athletics' fees and alumini donations didn't even scratch the surface. We're talking significant chunks of the college budget.

It all got published, there was a huge uproad, the Chancellor resigned and everyone swore it'd be different. Athletics would be funded JUST from the athletics fees (which they jacked up) Six months later, the next audit showed that, suddenly, groundskeeping costs were ten times what they'd been the previous year. Again, they were funnelling money to the sports program.

THAT uproar resulted in the entire removal of the sports program. Which means the amateur groups -- student groups and whatnot -- have good equipment to play games in, there's a large football stadium the pee-wee leagues use to practice in, same for baseball -- and the only athletics there are actual classes or pure 'fun' leagues.

I'm pretty sure if my podunk Texas Community College was shoveling a sizeable percentage of fees that should be going to academics to football, that they had PLENTY of company. I'm sure the alumni from most of the Ivy League are quite capable of funding their super-sports programs, but I've heard nasty things about what's going on at UCLA for instance.
Paelos
Contributor
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Reply #40 on: March 30, 2011, 06:51:35 PM

Tbh, that's Texas and doesn't really apply to the rest of the country, though. You're going to find those kind of over the top situations where they were STILL trying to funnel massive amounts to football because Texas as a state has a hard-on for the sport. They have a raging hardon for the sport at levels most people don't even understand. I mean we're talking about building multi-million dollar high school stadiums that seat more people than an average DI-A college.

I know this because I grew up there, went to all my schooling there through high school, and witnessed the kind of insanity people will pull through booster programs just to get around state laws regarding payment of football coaches and recruiting amongst middle schoolers. I mean we're talking about illegally recruiting 13 year olds here.

Then I moved to Georgia, which is probably tied with Florida for second place on that level of crazy for football. Cali's a close third. Consequently those 4 states always produce the top candidates for college programs in the US.

CPA, CFO, Sports Fan, Game when I have the time
Morat20
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Reply #41 on: March 30, 2011, 07:03:44 PM

UCLA isn't in Texas. Kleiman (the blogger in question) is a tenured professor there. (The post is from late 2009)
Quote
Athletics for everyone advances that mission because sports are fun and health is good. We should have everyone playing sports and exercising. This resolution is about something quite different, namely intercollegiate athletics, which is the faculty and 95% of the students watching the other 5% compete; except insofar as IA has impoverished and looted recreational sports, today’s discussion has nothing to do with “athletics at Berkeley.”
[...]
The campus has borrowed money against athletic profits that have never existed, to build a $125m football palace, booster party venue, and (a sixth of the building) conditioning center for five hundred athletes. The interest on that loan is $6m a year and operating the building will be another $6m, so DIA needs a $30m per year turnaround to protect the academic enterprise from this folly.

» Meanwhile, the $120m art museum, which is central to our core mission, is stalled for lack of funds and may be a full story smaller than planned if we build it at all.
» Meanwhile, the other 30,000 students’ and the faculty’s sports facilities are overcrowded, understaffed, and falling apart.
» Meanwhile, Cal Performances events really are world-class top quality, and for every dollar the campus gives to intercollegiate athletics, we give three cents to Cal Performances.
» Meanwhile, our classrooms are a disgrace in quality, condition, and number, the worst I’ve ever taught in in the USA.
Intercollegiate Athletics at Berkeley is an auxiliary that we have agreed again and again should be self-supporting, that has agreed to be so, and that has systematically reneged on the deal. A self-supporting DIA can comply with Title IX, and provide the appropriate level and intensity of intercollegiate competition for the best research university in the world.  Please vote for our resolution to put it on this footing.
Offhand, I'd say the very big football schools with the VERY rich alumni might fully fund their stuff. But if that's more than, oh, 15 schools -- tops -- I'd be shocked. The rest steal off academics fees, suck money from the actual goal of a university (which is not, in fact, to train football or basketball players), and are generally a net minus.

Kinda reminds me of the 'stadium deals' the pro teams make. You know, the ones the taxpayers fund on the promise of HUGE returns (and the threat of losing the team) that never seem to pay the taxpayers back?
Morat20
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Reply #42 on: March 30, 2011, 07:07:28 PM

Ah, sweet. Actual data. Key bit:
Quote
For the 2006 fiscal year, 19 institutions in Division I-A football reported a profit from athletics, with an average of $4.3 million, according to Dan Fulks, an accounting professor at Transylvania University who analyzes athletic finances for the NCAA. Those 19 included many SEC schools, he said. The 99 other schools lost an average of $8.9 million.
The article is mostly about how the SEC is basically a giant -- and poorly run business -- not an academic endeavour.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2011, 08:17:35 PM by Morat20 »
Paelos
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Reply #43 on: March 30, 2011, 07:17:44 PM

Yep, the South loves football and makes money off it. No shock there.

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HaemishM
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Reply #44 on: March 31, 2011, 10:07:45 AM

Oh, and don't forget the poorly run, yet profitable business part. The South is well-known for that also.

Chimpy
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Reply #45 on: March 31, 2011, 11:27:45 AM

Frontline episode from Tuesday: Money & March Madness

Apparently the episode is having problems loading for a lot of people (me included). Probably too much traffic :/
« Last Edit: March 31, 2011, 11:32:47 AM by Chimpy »

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Chimpy
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Reply #46 on: March 31, 2011, 07:21:41 PM

Saw this link while trying to get the Frontline episode to play (get spinning wheels :( )

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/2011/03/ncaa-president-says-hes-ready-to-explore-paying-athletes.html

Quote
Just 24 hours after the airing of a FRONTLINE documentary investigating the role and distribution of money in college basketball, NCAA President Mark Emmert is changing his position. In contrast to his insistence that it would "be utterly unacceptable ... to convert students into employees," Emmert now says the idea of compensating student-athletes should be considered.


'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
ghost
The Dentist
Posts: 10619


Reply #47 on: March 31, 2011, 07:59:02 PM

That's pretty smart on his part.  They'll never be able to pay the big stars what the agents can pay though, so they may be better off to go the route of  no scholarships and no payment at all just to get the hypocrisy out of it all. 
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