Please stop this trite nonsense about “student athletes” on the Ohio University men’s football and basketball teams. Call them what they actually are: athletes first, and students second. Don’t believe me?
Then ask yourself why the football team’s schedule is being dictated by the ESPN networks.
Why are they traveling to and playing away games on weeknights instead of the traditional Saturdays? The corporate masters at ESPN need live sports programming for their ratings, and mid-major conference schools like OU are happy to oblige.
What about the classes of these “students”? Aren’t Saturday games less disruptive for attending classes? Isn’t that what “students” should do first and then fit in the extracurricular activities as a second priority?
Instead, the football players get to be actors in the reality TV dramas that are sports events, but without fair compensation.
Someday soon, athletes at big-time sports factories — which is apparently athletic director Jim Schaus’ goal for OU — will wake up and stop their exploitation.
I know, I know. They get a “free” education by way of a scholarship. But is that enough? If former basketball coach John Groce got $55,000 in bonuses for the team’s performance this year, what did his players get? Did they get a piece of that pie? Why not?
That’s akin to a sales manager getting a bonus for his sales team’s performance and then the ones doing the heavy lifting getting a pat on the back.
Groce has become a millionaire on the backs of his OU players, getting $7 million over five years. The OU players like Walter Offutt who are bummed by Coach Groce’s departure should have seen this coming and planned accordingly.
They ought to have told Groce beforehand that they wanted a cut of the bounty that would come his way if the team made a NCAA tournament run. By bailing on OU and taking a better offer at a bigger conference, Groce was just looking out for his own interests. OU athletes need to do the same.
It would be wonderful if NCAA basketball players organized a strike and surprised their university and ESPN “bosses” with it at the beginning of next year’s tournament.
They are underpaid performers who need to finally talk back to the ones who are feeding them just table scraps from the corpulent buffet that is televised university athletics.
Paul Clarke is a graduate student studying linguistics.
