Y'know, I never considered this. I like the idea. Of course, I didn't play any sports in school (though I did outside) and watched as my first school's failing football team squandered money that could've been spent on other academic pursuits — such as replacing textbooks that we decades out of date.
Yep. Sports are not bad. Sports as part of the schools are bad.
Holy shit.
Does it? Or is just something we say because we've said it for generations?
Athletics are beneficial, but there's no reason to attach them to the school system any longer. Let parents of children who are interested in athletics send their kids to athletic academies. Let's stop putting two unrelated things together because we used to do it 80 years ago.
It's the marriage of sports culture to schools that bug me. There's no reason to have our amateur athletics tied to schools, except that's sort of how it evolved. Schools should teach, athletics should be a whole separate system.
It's not an impossible fantasy. In many other countries kids play sports at local clubs or gyms and go to school separately. I haven't noticed that e.g. Europeans are any less passionate about their national teams for it, and the kids play a huge variety of different sports.
Mostly because, for most of these guys, it's not a lot of money. Sure, even the lowliest guy makes more than you or I do on a yearly basis, but football ends for most of these guys by the time the rest of us stop drinking until 3am and getting our first "serious" job.
Good luck with that.
You do have a point. It would certainly be as sleazy, though I guess the hope is that at least they'd drop the hypocritical "student-athlete" bullshit that the NCAA uses to mask its scummyness.
Key point there. There is absolutely no reason to believe it would be any better.
Jim Harbaugh????
Should've put Liverpool away :p
As awful as the NCAA is, do you think having the cartel that is the former BCS will be any less a bucket of scum?
Things like undefeated seasons and dominance by a handful of teams in many leagues is all the more reason UEFA and FIFA should allow the national leagues to combine their top teams into a permanent standing best-of-the-best league.
So we should all just accept that in 20 years, she'll be our supreme ruler? I'm cool with it.
After the last two jez stories, meteorologists are predicting a 70% chance of rain from my eyes.
+1 for the username
he's even learning rudimentary sign language