Did They Make the Grade?

The State Journal sports page carried a story the other day that caught my eye for what was missing.

The story was about how the Badger football program has been snapping up the best talent from Wisconsin high schools. My first reaction was, ‘good for them!’ The Badgers once prided themselves on building a recruiting wall around the state and keeping our best players at home. That made it easier for fans to feel close to the team.

But then — as is my way, and this is always a mistake, people — I thought about it some more. And rain started to fall on the parade.

Because what occurred to me was that there was an assumption — so obvious that the question probably didn’t even occur to the reporter — that all these guys who had committed to the UW would get in to the university. A selective institution, only about 44% of applicants are admitted and the average GPA is 3.9 with correspondingly high test scores.

And so, are we supposed to believe that every one of those athletes is going to meet admission standards? Similarly, the football Badgers recruited 34 new players from the portal this year. Again, every one of them would be allowed to transfer in based on their academic record? And by the way, not one of those 34 transfers mentioned academics as a reason for their move.

And yet, UW Athletic Director Chris McIntosh can’t order breakfast without saying “student-athlete” twice. In what sense are these athletes students?

The obvious answer to the new world created by the fact that college athletes are finally being paid for their work is the NFL model. A players union to negotiate the parameters. Contracts which bind the players to their teams in exchange for money. And — just a touch of sensible socialism here — a hard salary cap to keep things competitive. And by the way, that salary cap should apply to coaches and administrators as well.

But all of that would raise the next level of questions, which revolve around this one: should players have to be students at all? Because let’s be honest. A high percentage of players couldn’t have been admitted to the UW on their academic performance. There’s an end around happening with the UW admissions office.

I’ll admit right here that some of this is personal for me. I had a niece who badly wanted to be a Badger — this despite the fact that she’s spent her whole life in California and visited the campus amid an early April snow storm a couple of years ago. She had the grades and the test scores to get in, but somehow she didn’t make the cut in the UW’s black box admissions system. I can’t help but believe she would have gotten a different answer had she had a lower GPA but a higher percentage beyond the three-point arc.

So, rather than having academically unqualified athletes taking up space in classes that kids with better grades should occupy, let’s drop the pretense of the “student-athlete” altogether. Let’s get rid of any requirement to be a student in order to represent the red and white on the field or the court.

Here’s how it could work. Every athlete would get five years of eligibility without exceptions. (You got injured and missed a year? Sorry, those are the breaks. Now you’ve got four years left.) You sign your contract with the UW for one to five years and you play the game. And yes, players might even move between college teams and the pros. In fact, the basketball Badgers just signed a player who has played in the Australian pro league.

If you want to be a student and you’ve got the grades like everybody else, well then, so much the better. That’s great. But let’s stop pretending. Do you really think that a lot of these athletes who just want to play actually show up in class? Do you really think they all make the grade? What I’m proposing here is simply to recognize the reality that already exists and has existed for a very long time, even before the players could get paid and before the portal.

College sports is so much better now that players who produce the billions for everybody else can finally share in the wealth — though a players union is necessary to get their fair share because they’re still woefully underpaid. And it’s a lot better because of the transfer portal — though contracts are a necessary next step to bring some order to the Wild West. These two changes have resulted in better play and better games because more players get a chance to start when they’re not stuck in a stacked program. And the pay could keep some players playing for college teams longer as they don’t have to go to the NFL or the NBA to cash out.

Along with jettisoning the whole discredited idea of the “student-athlete,” we also should spin off athletic programs from universities. Yes, they’d carry the school logo and colors and they’d use university facilities. but they’d be separate entities. They’d pay schools (very high) leasing fees for use of the logo and facilities and then they’d be free to do whatever they needed to do to balance their budgets — crucially, WITHOUT any taxpayer or university subsidy. In fact, through the lease agreements the money would flow the other way. How could they make those numbers work? I don’t really care. With a share of billions of dollars to be had they’ll figure it out. I don’t know, maybe you don’t give coaches automatic $100,000 annual pay raises even if they lose most of their games.

One final word for my loyal readers. I’m struck at how much resistance I encounter to my frequent criticism of the “student-athlete” sham, which seems so obvious to me. And this comes from both liberals (who you’d think would be all for the workers getting paid and for unions) and from conservatives (who you’d think would be all for the free market and against taxpayer subsidies).

Nobody who pushes back on this has ever offered me a single good argument — all the more surprising because these are all YSDA readers and so they are, by definition, intelligent and discerning people. Rather, it’s more like religion. Somehow, somewhere they picked up this fanciful notion of the hard-working student who just happens to also throw a football in a tight spiral when he’s not working on the cure for cancer. And that fantasy dies hard.

But that hallucination is exactly what’s keeping us from the final revolutionary changes that will transform college sports into something that’s really good — which is to say honest, transparent and fair to the players.

For those of you who still stubbornly cling to the old “student-athlete” myth, let me ask you a question. Even before NIL and the portal, when a player stepped to the line did you think about his free throw percentage or his GPA? Right. I rest my case.