Leave it on the Floor

Watching the amazing NCAA tournament final game, I was annoyed at how the announcers so often went out of their way to mention all the wonderful things the "student athletes were doing off the court."

This young man -- everyone is a "young man" and not a "player" -- is an Academic All American. This young man is active in the community. This young man has a charity fund in his name. It's as if the players need to be doing good things off the court to validate their pursuit of sports. I am sure that, like any group of people, some of them are probably good people, some not so good, some with good grades, some with not so good grades.

NCAA sports exist to foster competition in many of America's great team sports, and equally as sources of funding and prestige for schools that are able to field quality programs. The ostensible balance between these goals and the academic/off-the-court performance of the "student athletes" is one more instance of hypocrisy mislabeled as debate in the US.

When I sit down to watch an NCAA basketball game, I am almost 100% interested in seeing a good basketball game and quality play by talented players (perhaps I am 1-5% interested in the cheerleaders). If I were interested in the players academic performance, I would instead audit their American Lit. class and take notes on their thoughts on Thoreau's concept of solitude as expressed in Walden Pond.

But I am not. I want to see intense, highly organized play, upsets and buzzer beaters. And the NCAA, individual schools and everyone else profiting from the quality of the game knows this (including perhaps Puff Daddy given the pre-game performance...).

I also think this is a perfectly fine objective. The contribution competitive athletes including unpaid college players make to society should never be undervalued. They provide a very, very large group of people with happiness and relaxation through performance arts which I believe will be historically remembered as America's singular popular culture.

At the same time, becoming a professional athlete is one of the most statistically improbable pursuits you can pick, and you have to be a student to be on the team. In other words, most of the time it is in everyone's best interest that the athletes graduate. Is it crucial that they have a 4.0, feed 500 homeless children every weekend and have never drunk a beer to step on a court or field? I don't think so.

Can there be a double standard if the athletes at top-flight academic programs don't have the same grades as their peers? Of course there can be, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that, as it exists for the non-athletes also. The mechanical engineering student on academic scholarship isn't expected to create millions of dollars in revenue for the school, its sports and academic programs with no compensation, or to entertain the entire student body with hours a week of diligent practice and performance.

Again, there are certainly plenty of athletes who perform well in class also. I certainly know plenty of jocks who are nerds and nerds who are jocks. But the reason they are at the school is often because they are on the team, and this is great. They are doing something wonderful on the team that you and I appreciate. Why can't we just accept it for that?