A recent news report says that football players in Division 1A colleges average about 44.8 hours on that sport and less than 40 on academics.

This is crazy. A full time student is expected to spend a minimum of about 50 hours per week on academics (attending classes and doing out of class work). Assuming they sleep 8 hours per day, that means that they have 17 hours per week, or 2.5 hours per day, for everything else in life. It is ridiculous to think that these athletes are sacrificing all the other things and living the ascetic life of a hermit in order to completely meet their athletic and academic demands.

The NCAA, the governing body, is pretending that this shows the commitment of these students to living up to the ‘student-athlete’ ideal. An NCAA spokesperson Myles brand says, “These young people are very competitive. It’s in their fiber… and they will do everything they can to succeed… Frankly, I’d rather have that student go to sleep early, wake up in the morning and do an extra run than I would (him or her) staying up late and going to the bars… The fact that they choose to balance athletics and academics as a primary activity, I think that’s fine.”

Yeah, right. What is obviously happening is that these student athletes are cutting back on their studies at these big sports schools, which are notorious for finding ways to circumvent academic requirements.

What these students really are are professional athletes masquerading as students, providing income for the schools in return for the small chance of making it in professional sports after they graduate with a worthless degree. Some undoubtedly feel that they are being exploited, hence the periodic scandals involving ‘secret’ benefits and payments to players, with coaches and school administrators pretending not to notice. Ohio State University is the latest school to be found guilty of such infractions and its football coach resigned but he will merely move on to another position and the cycle goes on.