Still doing it for the kids

So, Notre Dame’s president and AD pen an editorial in the New York Times entitled “College Sports Are a Treasure. Don’t Turn Them Into the Minor Leagues.” and it’s every bit the joke you’d expect.

The perception has grown in recent years that student-athletes, whose talent and hard work create so much revenue for schools and even coaches, get nothing in return.

Gee, I wonder how that happened.  Let’s trot out that old, familiar straw man in rebuttal.

The claim that student-athletes otherwise get nothing from a multibillion-dollar college sports industry is false — and the misperception behind it goes to the heart of what is at stake.

If a talented high school player heads straight to the minor leagues, he earns a paycheck. If he goes instead to college, he can earn something far more valuable: a degree. Economists estimate a college degree is typically worth about $1 million in enhanced earning power in a lifetime. At our institution, 99 percent of student-athletes who stay for at least four years get a diploma. Because less than 2 percent of all our student-athletes will play in their sport professionally, such a benefit is useful indeed.

The claim isn’t that college athletes are getting nothing.  It’s that they’re not receiving fair market value for their participation.  And if there’s anything that demonstrates the difference, it’s what the NIL era has ushered in and what these two gentlemen complain about in their piece.

Again, expressing concern about what the money flow was doing to change college athletics would have been relevant and even considered a couple of decades ago.  Now, with the horse out of the barn, it’s little more than insipid nostalgia.  But, good luck with it, dudes.

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Topping Toppers

So, I’m rummaging around the intertubes, trying to catch up on what I’ve missed, and come across this remarkable tweet:

In press conference, #uga coach Kirby Smart accepts no responsibility for series of transgressions that culminated in deaths of a player and recruiting staffer in January car crash.

— Alan Judd (@AlanJudd3000) March 14, 2023

The accompanying sniff is palpable.  And who is this guy to be passing judgment like that, anyway?  It’s one thing to be an investigative reporter pushing the boundaries (what’s been happening at Toppers lately?).  It’s another to be editorializing about where the moral responsibilities of a head coach lie.

For what it’s worth, this really isn’t that hard a question to address.  If you want to see where a coach takes actions that do bear responsibility, take a quick look at what recently went on with New Mexico State’s basketball program, where the head coach interfered with a criminal investigation.  There’s a big difference — or at least there should be a big difference — between enabling criminal behavior and not reacting to such behavior as forcefully as one may like.

Anyway, I digress a little.  I do wonder whether Kirby internalizes such criticism to motivate himself and his team this season.  Actually, this being Kirby Smart, I don’t wonder about that at all.  As Seth Emerson ($$), put it in his Mailbag today,

… I agree with a point Josh Pate of 247Sports made on his podcast this week (at about the 36-minute mark): Smart will use the criticism about the team having a culture problem because of the car crash and racing arrests. I’m already on record what I think about the issue; I don’t see a big culture problem. But some of my media colleagues (only a few, but that’s enough) have been pretty harsh, and Smart could use them as a foil. As Pate said, and I already knew from covering this program, Smart and his coaches likely already have been telling their players to answer all the culture questions with their play on the field. And yes, the culture questions have been about off the field, so the best thing the Bulldogs could do is keep their noses clean. But undoubtedly the criticism creates a rallying cry inside the program, fuel to make offseason workouts and lifting sessions fierier than they might have been otherwise.

There’s a certain amount of irony in letting the AJ-C provide fuel for the motivation fire, of course, although I doubt we’ll ever hear Smart publicly acknowledge that.  But if in fact Judd’s sanctimony helps drive the team towards another national championship run, something which we all know the paper will provide copious amounts of coverage to accompany the finger wagging, well, that’s why they have a scoreboard to point to.