| Subject: How We Will Ruin Amateur Sports |
Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 11:47:22 04/24/26 Fri
In reply to:
Greenhorn
's message, "Five-for-Five Impact?" on 10:53:57 04/24/26 Fri
Five-for-five will become six-for-five. You mark my words.
We've already conditioned coaches and athletic trainers that they have six years to work with. The first time that some athlete suffers a horrific legitimate injury and then works like a dog to come back from it, becoming the feel-good story of the year, five-for-five will get a "one-time" exemption for six-for-five.
Then that will become the standard -- for the rest of college athletics, that is.
I agree with Greenhorn that our guys -- our eight guys who are actually mostly gals, in Massachusetts Hall and Nassau Hall -- are not going to accept this for us. Nor should they.
College athletics is now three things:
(1) Two sports, football and men's basketball, which are true revenue generators and, in about two dozen cases, actual profit centers. With NIL and the transfer portal, football and men's basketball will hurtle toward their logical conclusion. They will look and feel like businesses with every sad fringe "benefit": unions, collective bargaining, labor arbitration boards, et cetera. It will be an entertainment business with absolutely nothing to do with college, except the rental use of college sports facilities.
(2) Some sports that will stay relatively unaffected, those with very little revenue potential and, more importantly, little ability to improve a college's media profile among the general public: crew, fencing, and the like.
(3) A small number of hybrid sports that fall somewhere in between: women's basketball, men's lacrosse, baseball and softball.
Five-for-six will become standard for Group (1) sports. Once it does, I don't see how you can keep it from being the law of the land for Group (2) and (3) as well.
Then we will have made American higher education an extraordinarily expensive four-year process for 99% of students and a free or salary-generating six-year process for the 1% who happen to play a sport well.
Yesterday afternoon, I sat in the stands watching my daughter's high school soccer game. My wife explained that one of the girls on the team no longer attends any classes in school. She takes all of her schoolwork online so that she'll have more time to practice soccer.
My first reaction was, "That's awful. She's no longer a child, she's a product." My second reaction was, "That makes sense. That family is smart."
We have ruined amateur sports.
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