I can’t help but juxtapose the NCAA’s stated defense of its transfer rules…
… with this Lebron James quote.
“I do know what five-star athletes bring to a campus, both in basketball and football,” he said. “I know how much these college coaches get paid. I know how much these colleges are gaining off these kids.”
“I’ve always heard the narrative that they get a free education,” he added, “but you guys are not bringing me on campus to get an education. You guys are bringing me on it to help you get to a Final Four or to a national championship.”
You could say that’s a matter of perspective. You could also say there’s a vast difference in the levels of bullshit on display there. In the end, it’s what you get when an organization is forced to defend a system that really isn’t defensible.
Get The Picture 
The best argument for athletes’ true academic progress is to not be an athlete in the first place, so… yeah.
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The reality is that athletes in non-revenue sports well out perform the student body in gpa. Athletes across all sports graduate at a higher rate than the student body as a whole.
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You’ve not considered the reality of the limitations of courses and majors they have available to them no matter what sport they’re in. As in, if you’re D1 in any sport there are some majors you’re not even sniffing.
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Tell it to Terry hoage and Alec Kessler.
In the non-revenue sports, they’re in every conceivable major.
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Non revenue sports brought to you in full by football and men’s basketball
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I for one am gravely concerned about academic failure in rigorous study areas like Housing, Child/Family Development, Communications, and exercise science. These majors aren’t easily transferable.
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I definitely tune in on TV and go to Sanford stadium to watch these kids because they’re great students. I know GPA and extra curriculars make a huge component of the rating process for Scout, Rivals, and the NFL combine, it’s why the transcript is included in every highlight video. It’s why I wanted Joe Tereshinski to start over Matthew Stafford. I mean sure the guy wasn’t a very good quarterback but he was magna cum laude as a risk management major at Terry!!!!!!! That’s what counts!!!!
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I know I’m preaching to the choir but anyway:
1. Amazing that kids go to school for 12 years and still leave high school unable to take good notes let alone write with proper grammar, yet when they don’t graduate from college it’s because they transferred.
2. College athletes could never focus “only” on athletic performance because they have to carry a full class load, but if you are really concerned about their academic performance then legislate academic performance.
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Lebron is a bad choice of spokesman. Left high school for the NBA.
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Yeah, what would he know? He was only recruited by every major CBB program in America.
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I’m sure the major programs recruited him 1) because he was a great student and 2) a degree from whomever was going to set him up for a far more lucrative career than a silly game putting a ball through a hoop ever could.
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Lebron is as rich as “four feet up a bull’s ass” , as GrandGot would say. His Wiki page is worth reading. I’d say he has a better perspective this than most.
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On this.
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Maybe he should focus some of that perspective on getting the NBA to do away with the 19 year old requirement for players. His outrage should be more focused on the NBA and its rigged system than forces the great high school players to pretend to be a college student for a year while they audition for a spot in the NBA.
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Its very true that the NBA and NFL are the ones who set the rules about why these athletes must stay in college or even go there in the first place. However, that doesn’t change the fact that they have no control over how the kids are treated while they are in college. That’s 100% the NCAA’s issue. We’d be having this same discussion even if the players were free to join a pro league whenever they felt like it. (although fewer people would participate in the discussion, as viewership would likely drop significantly)
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I wish I could have been treated like a scholarship football player during my time in Athens. Also, I don’t think viewership would drop at all if players could go straight into pro ball. I’m a fan of the University of Georgia and that’s why I watch their games. If the quality of play was 5% lower, which is about what the difference would be in my opinion, I’d still love watching. As long as all programs lived under the same system the games would still be competitive and entertaining.
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And most athletes wish they were treated more like you were… by the school. But you seem to be referencing how they’re treated around town, which is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. What, because its easy to get laid if you’re a stud athlete, you should just be quiet and take what you get?
You’d keep watching. I’d keep watching. But the casual fan is less forgiving of a watered down product, and the casual fan is the reason for those gigantic ESPN contracts. Basketball viewership has suffered, and the same would happen to football.
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I don’t know. No one was making sure I had a tutor or making sure I studied. I’m not sure money flowing out of college football and basketball would be a totally bad thing. Let ESPN start helping fund the NFL and NBA developmental leagues and let college athletics go back to having actual students playing.
I know it won’t happen. The genie is out of the bottle and it isn’t going back.
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Personally, I would be fine with that.
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Like I said, the Wiki page is an interesting read.
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which benefits veterans like LeBron and his old friends by not handing roster spots and first round contract money to raw high schoolers.
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Exactly. But don’t worry because congress is involved and I think it’s the guy that had all those individual tax returns in his committee’s possession.
I still think they should slap a 10% surtax on all individual income over $1,000,000 to help ease the student loan crisis. After all… it’s all about the students. I’m sure Lebron wouldn’t mind.
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Call me crazy, but he doesn’t sound that outraged.
Just realistic.
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To the academic argument: First of all, if you have a statistic, list it. How much “higher risk”, and what exactly is “academic failure?” How exactly are “transfers and non-transfers” defined here? That stat could include JuCo transfers and players who were kicked off teams for disciplinary reasons (hell that’s probably 90% or more of all transfers at this point.), and exclude graduate transfers, which would obviously skew the stat in favor of their argument. In fact, I’ll eat my computer if they didn’t calculate it exactly that way. The whole thing just reeks of “here’s a stat; we need you to first, trust it, and second, don’t consider why it is that way.”
To the free agency argument: it would be no different than it is now, just more kids would consider it. Just like now, you penalize coaches and teams who pursue kids before they announce intent to transfer. Add this: once a kid announces his intent to transfer, the team immediately gets his scholarship back and can sign another kid the next year.
Taken together, their argument claims they’re all about academics, and totally ignores the possibility of a student transferring for academic reasons. Which is an admission that they’re not, in fact, looked at in the eyes of the NCAA as “student” athletes.
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Was there more below just the 2 bullet points?
If not, this is a small sample. “A free agency system would develop….” a statement without any reference to a study having been done? So, kids can try to “transfer” to the NBA draft after only having to pass only 1 semester of courses. A guy who never was a student athlete (Lebron) havING to call them out should be enough writing on the wall…jees
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You’re high off your *** if you think the NCAA really cares about academics.
You’re also high off your *** if you think open transfers wouldn’t cause chaos.
I’m sort of losing focus on what the goal is in these daily discussions. Other than trying to win internet arguments, which is admittedly fun but dorky, I can’t think of what we as spectators / fans / alums are so offended and put off by. If you’ve been watching college football for decades, you can’t possibly be that repulsed by all the “current” injustices (thanks twitter). If you were, you wouldn’t be watching. I don’t watch certain things that I fundamentally disagree with. If the goal of our little daily talks is to do everything we can to tinker with and quite possibly ***k up the greatest American pastime ever conceived, well then we’re doing a great job of it.
But we’re also high off our ***.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll be surprised if I’m still following CFB closely five years from now.
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Does that mean you’re dropping your season tickets ?
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Greatest pastime? Have you ever heard the watermelon joke? Come on GTP’ers, don’t make me do this alone…….
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Tony, let me introduce you to my friend, she’s going to take you into the back room and show you a couple of things ………
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The NCAA could protect nearly all their money if they would give each student a couple of free passes to transfer without restriction and let them trade on their likeness.
Most kids dont transfer and wouldnt transfer. Likeness rights let someone else do the paying.
Instead they are willing to risk it all to protect nothing.
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Would it be OK for a kid to transfer from Clemson to South Carolina (using one of his free passes) because Columbia Ford was offering him more $$ than Upstate Chevy ?
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of course. Why would I object to that?
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of course you know why, great systemic risk to program stability.
As more and more of these ridiculously unrealistic proposals are suggested, the more reason for Universities to circle right back to the very early argument of giving you the Finger and tell you to go start a minor league. People want them to concede to every one of these demands. Good luck with that. They won’t and they shouldn’t. And for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone who likes college football enough to follow a blog in the off-season would want that…. other than being a bored liberal looking for a victims and a nemesis.
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You just said, “Also, I don’t think viewership would drop at all if players could go straight into pro ball. I’m a fan of the University of Georgia and that’s why I watch their games.” So why would players being freer to transfer make a difference to you? You’re still rooting for UGA, right?
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re a bored conservative looking for a nemesis.
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when did i say anything about viewership ?
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Why not? Doesn’t cost the schools a dime. Just make the system so that once the kid is putting his services out to bid, the school can give his scholarship to someone else.
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I think the tv network that airs the game each week should be required to pay every player for both teams an appearance fee, or royalty, or some kind of compensation- doesn’t matter what they call it. It’s the only direct path to pay the kids and have the money pass directly between the people with the money and the people who earn the money.
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