BILL RHODEN: AGREE OR DISAGREE

Here, here, you say! The NCAA is evil. Well, just like a studio audience member at a Bill Maher taping, it's easy to jeer the nameless and faceless authority, but my question to you is this: Have you, Mr. Rhoden, really considered the ramifications of what you are proposing?

A student signs a contract -- and that is what a scholarship is, is it not? -- with the university that is going to fully fund his education, not with the coach. True, the coach may be the primary reason that the student decides to attend that university, but you don't see that coach paying for the student's education out of his own bank account, do you?

Both sides have made a compact. The school promises the student that it will pay for his education -- and again, this is something that far too many people who cover college sports, be it on ESPN or in print, seem to take for granted. An education can cost between $100,000-200,000 over four years these days. That's a lot more than the average American makes in one year. The student, in turn, agrees to participate on that varsity team to the best of his abilities and to abide by the same rules that a normal student does. Unless he plays football for Tennessee (rimshot).

Consider the coach, who also has a contract with the school. Imagine, for example, if West Virginia had just stopped paying Rich Rodriguez. There would be an uproar. Rodriguez would sue, and win. WVU would have violated the terms of their deal. Likewise, Rodriguez simply departed WVU for greener -- and more Maize -- pastures. That's fine, WVU says, but according to the terms of our contract, you owe us $4 million. Schools insert clauses such as that in order to protect themselves against a coach violating the terms of their agreement.

Now, per the university-student relationship, the university promises to honor the scholarship. The student agrees to play on the team and maintain a decent grade-point average ... and hopefully, drive Dustin Colquitt home if they both happen to be out together. Anyway, why shouldn't the university be able to protect itself against a student just leaving the school? After all, the school has invested money in that individual. What if we were to propose a student-athlete buyout deal? Sure, you can leave and not sit out for a year, just as soon as you repay the school the cost of your education thus far? Well, now, how many student-athletes would agree to that -- assuming that the NCAA doggedly insisted that that player's "representative" or "uncle ... sort of" was not funding that transaction?

What if we let Mr. Rhoden's world exist? A student-athlete can transfer without any consequences. Well, you've already seen how cutthroat and overly zealous recruiting is currently. Can you imagine if coaches could recruit known quantities, in terms of their collegiate performance level? And consider how the coach-athlete relationship would be altered. Any time a player feels he is being mistreated, even if he is just behaving like the immature, coddled prima donna that he is, rival coaches would swoop in and say, "They're disrespecting you. We'll treat you better here."

Again, the sitting-out-a-year deal, whatever its intent, is an effective way of allowing a young man to determine just how seriously he wants out. And if no such codicile existed, far too many players would never learn the lesson that sometimes you just have to stick it out through the bad times. Doesn't our society already make it too easy for people to simply flee from their problems?

Mr. Rhoden then goes on to write that varsity athletes endure restrictions and rules that guarantee that they are not a typical or traditional student. For example, he writes (citing information provided in a blog entry by Mark Cuban) that there's a rule in place where no more than four D-I basketball players on the same team can be on the court simultaneously during the summer.

Granted, that seems like a ridiculous rule. But let's examine the genesis of such a rule. Mr. Rhoden, I fear, is either being disingenuous or just plain dumb. He has covered big-time sports for decades. He has to know why such a rule exists. The reason: coaches are megalomaniacal martinets. If a rule was not in place restricting practice in the summer (or at any time), then these kids would be practicing. As it is, coaches obviate the policies best they can by having "captain's workouts". The team captain calls an informal practice, which just happens to occur at a fairly routine interval, during the offseason. And you'd better believe that the coaching staff is aware of whom is failing to attend those practices ... or who is excelling and who is not.

Those rules exist to protect the student-athlete. To at least provide him some control over his life. Otherwise, coaches, we all know, would just monopolize even more of the student-athlete's time. You cannot have it both ways, Mr. Rhoden. You cannot flail away at the system arguing that it does not give student-athletes the time to be students one day, and then the next criticize the rules that are in place to give the student-athletes that time.

Last night I was typing and had the Texas-Kansas State game on in the other room as background noise. I heard Mike Patrick share a story in which the team (I believe it was K-State) lost at Missouri, and upon returning to campus the coach marched the team directly back to the basketball offices where they spent the next two hours reviewing that game tape. Patrick shared the story as if to say, Look how serious this coach is about winning. If I had been his broadcast partner -- and why aren't I? I can speak knowledgeably about Britney Spears -- I would have chastised said coach for being a blight on coaching and higher education in general. Obviously that coach has no regard for his players' academic lives. They were exhausted and probably already behind in classwork. Did they really need two more hours of basketball?

So, no, I don't trust coaches to do what's in their players' best interest from an academic standpoint. That's why such rules exist.

Mr. Rhoden cites Mark Cuban's blog entry, in which the Dallas Mavericks owner writes: "What's the difference between the talented athlete who wants a pro career and the talented student who goes through Indiana's highly regarded music school with the idea of becoming a professional?"

Ooh, ooh! Mr. Kotter, pick me! The difference, in most cases is that the talented athlete is on scholarship. Also, yes, the talented athlete is helping to create revenue for the school that the music student just cannot do.

Now, let's back up for a moment. I understand that the BCS and major-college basketball are just university-run minor leagues for the NFL and NBA. And I'd have no problem with schools officially creating majors in professional sports preparation, just as they do in pre-law and pre-med. I was a pre-med and knew entering the program that one out of three of us would be accepted to medical school. High risk, but high reward. If you attend a university with the idea of becoming a professional football player, and they offer a major in that, then simply you are taking on an even higher risk that in turn offers an even higher reward. The students I knew who became doctors probably had to wait a lot longer to purchase their first Lexus than my other classmate, Tim Brown, did. On the other hand, a greateer percentage of pre-meds in my class graduated from medical school than teammates of Brown's did find themselves on an NFL roster.

If schools are going to offer non-major such as "interdisciplinary studies" ("look, ma, I'm majoring in not majoring"), then why not offer them in "pro football"? Chances are that a lot of BCS-level athletes are going to pursue a career in football, anyway, be it as players or coaches. When a school such as Notre Dame was founded, a career in professional football did not exist. Today, though, it is inarguable that professional sports is a multi-billion dollar industry offering a variety of careers.

Hey, look, I would tell a prospective journalist that he or she is better off majoring in English or History in order to be more well-rounded, but many schools do offer journalism majors. Likewise, I'd advise a prospective NFL player to major in something other than football, but if that is what he wants to pursue, and if it's a legitimate career with thousands of jobs related to that interest, why not have a football major? Is it really any less marketable than, say, a marketing major?

But I digress. Whenever I read an article stating that the NCAA is not allowing athletes to be regular students, or that players should be paid a stipend, I always wonder, How many of these student-athletes would have attended college if they had to take out loans to do so? A lot of us had bad jobs in college (I remember all too well and not too fondly manning the "slop line" at South Dining Hall), but it's the price we were willing to pay in order to earn a degree.

College should be affordable to everyone, but the truth is that even a state school or community college is a financial hole that you'll spend most of your twenties digging out of. Is someone compelling these young men (and women) to accept these scholarships?

A college scholarship is a tremendous, tremendous privilege. When you think about it, the other students, the tuition-paying ones, are helping to finance the free educations of their "classmates". So, no, Mr. Rhoden, in that sense scholarship athletes are not regular students. They're attending class for free, while their classmates are not. And so if the university that is offering that scholarship wants to protect itself by saying, "If you bail on us, we want some form of insurance", I have no problem with that.

Should the NFL and NBA have minor leagues, the way MLB does? Sure. But they don't. In the meantime, I'd love to see the world Mr. Rhoden suggests we should create. One in which student-athletes can transfer without regard to consequence, where the most coddled young men any of us know could be coddled even more. Where a player who doesn't know the difference between the tough love of Geppetto and the immaturity of Lampwick will just flee to his personal Pleasure Island. We all know how that story turns out.