GEORGE WILL, MAKING SENSE. Say what you want about George Will, he's always taken a rational approach to analyzing the business side of sports, and his column today on college football is no exception. Will beats the usual dead horses about what's wrong with Division I-A men's college football and basketball: they're run for business rather than educational purposes, with their high television revenues and coaches salaries, and their low graduation rates. But he comes at it from a fresher angle, asking if universities should lose their tax-exempt status for these commercial rather than educational activities(George Will favors more taxes? This has to be a first.) The only problem with the piece is that Will seems to buy into the standard approach to this issue, which is to suggest ways of scaling back the business side of college sports and improving the academic experience for college athletes. Clearly, the business is too lucrative, and the fans are too crazed, for this to ever happen. Rather, as I've argued before, college athletics should be spun off from the schools that sponsor them. College athletes who are clearly not academically qualified should be paid an actual salary, commensurate with their monetary value, rather than being given tuition to a school they will never get a degree from. Will is right about the problem, but his hope that "embarassing" the college athletic directors into better behavior will solve the problem is naive. People who see the fundamental problems with college sports must accept that the whole "student-athlete" paradigm is outdated and only a radical solution will make a real change.
--Ben Adler
