College football in the education of Black athletes

College football in the education of Black athletes

By: Marvin King
Mon, 01/04/2010 - 01:00

I am huge sports fan, especially of football. This week my beloved Texas Longhorns travel to Pasadena to play Alabama for the national title. Notwithstanding my love for the game, I keep a wary eye on the physical and mental sacrifice made by the players. They sacrifice plenty too.

Certainly, they receive compensation through scholarship money. However, I have met plenty of players and trust me, most barely get by. The NCAA has strict limits and despite whatever story you hear about paying players with a car or a non-existent job (see stories on Joe McKnight or Rhett Bomar), most players barely have enough money to get home on the holidays.

Most of the players will not live their dream. They will not make it to the NFL. Each year, there are roughly 2,550 seniors in the 120 major college FBS programs, but the NFL drafts just 224 each year. Knowing this, most play to get a chance at an education they otherwise would not be able to afford. Now, I am a realist here. I have seen plenty a student-athlete fritter away perfectly good opportunities because they get caught up in the, "Look at me, I'm a star athlete," lifestyle, and then they fall back to Earth - hard, when they go undrafted and no one cares about them anymore. Their name is not in the paper anymore - last year's news. Those are sad stories, but not the entire story.

Most, actually, have realistic expectations and know that football is an opportunity to improve their lives for the better. This is why it is so disappointing because these athletes, half of whom are Black, help their universities earn big bucks. These big bucks for universities, however, often do not translate into degrees for the players.

This is because large gaps remain in Black-White player graduation rates. Colleges, almost all of them, do a woeful job of taking athletes and turning them into student-athletes. The NCAA allows coaches inordinate amount of discretion over the daily schedule of a player's life. Unfortunately, not enough coaches and schools spend that time on schoolwork.

My solution is a mandatory redshirt year for freshmen athletes where the NCAA limits practice time and requires that all students pass a minimum number of college credits before they can play one down of football. If you can't handle Introductory English, then you need to concentrate more on the ABC's, than the X's and O's. Further, there should be punishments (scholarship limitations) if each team does not match the graduation rate for its' student body.

If we want to increase the embarrassingly low number of head Black major college football coaches (now up to 11), then schools have to do a better job of graduating these young men. If we want to increase the number of Blacks coaching in the NFL or serving in administrative capacities for college and pro sports teams, universities have to do more for their athletes than just count the cash.

Marvin King is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Mississippi and writes the blog King Politics.