Professional in All But Name, and Paycheck

Myles Brand, president of the NCAA, argues against proposals to give college athletes the option of taking a salary in lieu of free college courses they don't want in pursuit of a degree they'll never obtain, because:

Paying even a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.

Yes, what a sad day it would be if our great institutions of higher learning were to compromise their academic ideals in pursuit of the fame and money that come with being in the sports entertainment business. Before you know it, they'd be paying the heads of their sports divisions multi-million dollar salaries while simultaneously raising student tuition and freezing faculty salaries, or--even worse--banding together to form some sort of national college sports entertainment monopoly, led by a former university president to give it respectability, which would negotiate multi-billion dollar licensing fees with giant publicly-traded entertainment corporations. Brand concludes by saying:

No one has to go to college to play professional sports. But if you do go to college, you have to be a student.

This would be true if there were no such thing as the "National Football League," which prohibits its teams from drafting players who aren't at least three years removed from high school. In theory, a star prospect could sit at home for three years playing Xbox in between workouts, or play in the Arena Football league, but everyone understands that for all intents and purposes the NFL requires players to play three years of unpaid college ball, or two years after redshirting. A few years ago a talented young halfback from Ohio State named Maurice Clarett thrilled the nation by leading the Buckeyes to the 2003 national championship as a freshman. Operating under the mistaken impression that this is a free country, Clarett decided to abandon his faux studies and enter the NFL draft, as opposed to playing for free for two more years, abandoning his faux studies, and entering the NFL draft. The NFL went to court and blocked the move. After years in legal limbo, Clarett went into a downward spiral that culminated in a high-speed police chase in a vehicle that was later found to contain an open bottle of vodka, an AK-47, two loaded handguns, and a samurai sword. He's currently in the middle of a seven-year contract with the Toledo, Ohio Correctional Institution; you can read his blog here. But it was all worth it, because the NFL and NCAA were able to maintain their agreement to collectively exploit free labor standards.