It’s hard for an average high school student who lives in the state of Ohio to get into Ohio State University. Heck, it’s tough for an above-average kid to get in. But if you’re from California, or Texas, or Delaware, or any other state, and you can throw/catch/run with a pigskin, not only will they roll out the red scarlet carpet for you and offer you a full ride, but you’ll also get paid six, maybe even seven figures, every year, to be there. What a country!
It’s not just Ohio State. Every “power conference” school across the nation is shelling out big bucks for big ballers, in hoops as well as football, thanks to the NIL (name, image, and likeness) ruling and the transfer portal that’s busier than the Atlanta airport on Thanksgiving Eve.
If you can’t make ends meet as a teenage millionaire at one school, or you don’t like the new coach, or the cafeteria food, you can leave at the end of the school year season for greener pastures. Four (or five) schools in as many years is becoming commonplace. A degree? Who needs that? It’s all about grabbing that cash.
It’s not just the players… er, excuse me “student athletes” either. Lane Kiffin just left Ole Miss to become the head football coach at LSU. He owes Ole Miss $4 million for breaking his contract. That’s chump change – his new LSU deal pays him $13 million a year for seven years. (LSU fired their former coach, Brian Kelly, midway through his fourth season, sending him on his merry way with a parting gift of $53 million.) Kiffin’s $13 mill a year makes him only the second highest paid coach in that conference.
At Indiana, where our youngest goes to school, three sports coaches and one former coach make more than the Dean of the med school and the school president.
The full list is here. IU head football coach Curt Cignetti makes $6.5 million and typically looks like he’s having about as much fun as a guy who has been stuck in a dentist’s lobby for two hours while awaiting his root canal. Having to coddle 18-year-olds who can jilt you at the end of the year will do that to you.
Indiana and Ohio State play each other this Saturday in the Big 10 conference championship. The game means nothing. Both teams are a lock to make the 12-team tourney in the College Football Playoff. There’s a chance the national champ will wind up playing 16 games. For Ohio State and Indiana, these playoff games come at the end of a 12-game regular season that involved at least one road trip to a West Coast campus.
(The Big 10 has 18 schools… maybe they need to spend more on their math departments.)
How much studying do you think these student-athletes manage to squeeze into their busy spring practice/regular season/postseason schedule? They’re not getting paid for their grades – their YAC (yards after catch) matters a lot more than their GPA.
Yes, it’s capitalism. Get while the getting is good. But maybe it’s time to unmoor the sports teams from the universities. Because the players are pros, pure and simple. And perennial free agent pros at that. They have about as much in common with the regular students as Jeff Bezos has with the average Amazon shopper.
I hope they DO get while the getting is good – and save their NIL windfall. Because when their eligibility is up (or when they blow out their knee), so is the gravy train for 99% of them. If they can’t go pro (and statistically, they’re more likely to get hit by lightning), where can they get paid $1 million to be an offensive lineman? I don’t see too many of those roles listed on LinkedIn.
What Nevada head basketball coach Steve Alford said nearly a year ago still holds true. “The NCAA and college athletics should be about teaching life lessons. Period.”
You done said…