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Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Go Team, and Take the Other Sports With You.

I am not a fan of college sports. I could care less about March Madness, the BCS Championship Bowls or any of the other collegiate sport activities. Now I know that some sports fans claim that it’s the purest form of the sport since the players aren’t playing for money, others claim that the colleges are just as bad as the pros except in college you have to hide the payouts.

My reason why I don’t like college sports is completely different. I don’t think there should be any college sports. There are a limited number of spaces in a college for students, shouldn’t we put the kids there that want an education, not the ones looking for a pass to the NBA? The number of student athletes that actually care about their degrees is amazingly small. The average defensive lineman in college is a communications major but can’t get through an interview without saying ‘you know’ at least fifty times.

Now there are the occasionally abnormalities, like Robert Smith formerly of the Minnesota Vikings, but overall the educating of these students is a waste of time. They are pulled away from their classes regularly to travel for games, they have so many practices that they can’t have time for their schoolwork and many of them leave school early for one of the pro drafts.

And let’s look at some of the results: O. J. Simpson accused of murder, Ray Carruth guilty of murder, Ray Lewis accused of murder, Jason Williams accused of man slaughter, Andre Rison accused of fraud, Leon Lett accused of drug trafficking, Michael Irving accused of drug trafficking and that’s not counting all the cases of domestic abuse and drunk driving. The key thing to remember here is: all these people went to college. They took up the space of someone else legitimately trying to get an education.

Baseball has a farm system; it works for them. Hockey has the IHL; it works for them. Football and Basketball should create a farm system or use NFL Europe, the CFL and the CBA to groom their future stars and let the future doctors and scientist have the colleges.