The Wall Street Journal offers an excerpt from a book about the football program at the University of Michigan. A day for superstar quarterback Denard Robinson is described as hectic and exhausting. Herewith an summary:
0630 - to the sport facility
1000 - attend a class (80 minutes long)
Lunch at a restaurant
One-hour meeting with a professor to discuss a paper
1400 - return to athletic facility
1930 - dinner
Watch films of game
2230 - leave athletic facility
2300 - to bed
Why don't they just pay these guys as performers and stop the charade of pretending they are students.
p.s. - I note the athletics refer to nonathlete students as "normies."
As a current university student, two hours of class in a day is not unheard of. If he had three hours a day for the other days in the week, that would put him at 14 hours of class a week, which is fairly typical for a general arts degree.
ReplyDeleteWow. I don't know if times have changed, or if I'm just clueless. After reading your comment, I looked up my college schedule for my freshman year. Classes and labs totalled 19 hours, including 2 hours on Saturday, plus 2 mandatory one-hour discussion periods.
ReplyDeletePlus we studied in the evenings; I'll bet I averaged a couple hours a night on weeknights.
I imaging the charade goes on so that schools don't have to pay their performers in return for the outrageous amounts of money they bring in to the *business* of college sports.
ReplyDeleteJust found my old sophomore schedule - classes and labs 23 hours (1 on Saturday) plus a one-hour section and a one-hour tutorial.
ReplyDeleteWe they need something to prepare them for the absolutely idiotic salaries they'll get paid once they turn pro - for playing a child's game. Sheesh!
ReplyDeleteI go to a university in England [Leeds] and for my third year of my history of art degree I have 4/5 hours of contact time a week and a 3 hour slot to watch a film with the class. Although I really am supposed to spend a lot of my spare time doing work, as opposed to playing sports or doing other things.
ReplyDeleteI fail to see how this is any different from the schedules those of us who work(ed) through college kept/keep. When I was an undergrad I worked, went to school full time and did extensive volunteer work; others did the same and cared for sick grandparents or had clinical programs. Nothing remarkable about the athletes except they don't have to go into debt for an education like the rest of us and they get special treatment, free tutors, etc.
ReplyDeleteAssuming they are on scholarship, they are getting paid in kind for their performance. If they do not value the payment, do not take advantage of the fact that they are in and institution of higher learning, we can't force that. You can lead a horse to water, bwana...
ReplyDeleteThey want money for a job because they loooove the game and don't care about an edumacation, they can go play arena league. Or get a job with a youth league.
Yes, a typical 'load' for college students these days is about 15 credits, which is about 15 contact hours per week. Many students where I work also work full time. So this athlete's schedule is not particularly special, except he works his way through school as an athlete, as Anonymous above said.
ReplyDeleteThe only surprise here is that people think college is a full time job. Ha! It's not and has never been!
We they need something to prepare them for the absolutely idiotic salaries they'll get paid once they turn pro - for playing a child's game. Sheesh!
ReplyDeleteTheir salaries aren't "idiotic" at all considering the amounts of money they bring in to owners and leagues. The massive amounts of corporate profits made aren't 'childish' either. This is one of the most obnoxious, and incorrect cliches there is.
"Why don't they just pay these guys as performers and stop the charade of pretending they are students."
ReplyDeletei have never agreed with something more.
Minnesotastan, what did you study in college?
ReplyDeleteI was a chemistry major and I spent much more time in class and studying in the library than "average" students.
Many of my fellow science majors and I all had our own designated 'spot' that we frequented. We spent so much time there, we felt it truly was ours. We always got a good laugh towards the end of the semester, when the library would become crowded with people on Macbooks typing papers for their art history/poly sci/English lit classes.
I majored in English, with a heavy dose of science classes (thus all the afternoon labs). This was the late 1960s (Beatles, Vietnam, assassinations, etc. An interesting era.)
ReplyDeleteI just checked with my wife, who was in college in the 70s; she had 18 hours/week for four courses (as a science major).
Along the lines of what Leoele said...
ReplyDeleteI think it greatly depends on the major. As a science (pre-med) major, I averaged closer to 19 hours per week throughout college, although I'm pretty sure the number of hour credits didn't always correspond to the number of actual hours spent in class each week. I was usually in class from 8 or 9 until noon each day (M-F) with labs of varying length in the afternoons. I knew plenty of non-science majors with classes M-Th (or sometimes just 2 or 3 days per week) from 8-noon only. I graduated in 2001.
@Steve
ReplyDeleteHit a nerve did I, sports fan? I said that it was a childs' game, not that the profits are childish. How is that incorrect and obnoxious? The profits are merely absurd, considering that it is after all a childrens' game. But then again, I forget that football is next to Godliness, at least in some peoples' minds.
Hit a nerve did I, sports fan?
ReplyDeleteHardly,
I'm not a football fan, and I pretty much think it's insane that college sports are popular at all. You were making a cliche anti-labor fallacy. It speaks volumes that you weren't complaining about the outrageous salaries (much higher than the actual sports 'stars') of franchise owners and league bosses. Notice that you, nor anybody else who trots out those tired cliches, complains about how much those owners or league bosses get paid for owning sports teams that play a "child's game".
@steve
ReplyDeleteYou know, it sounds as if we really have a good deal more in common than we may suspect (which doesn't really surprise me, seeing as we stumbled across each other here!).
I freely and heartily concede your point about the outrageous, head-exploding kind of money involved with pretty well all "major" sports (ie. the ones that have the big TV $$).
What I truly don't understand is your reference to an "anti- labour fallacy". I'm not being snarky, either - I really don't understand what you're getting at, and I would like to!
As you might be able to spell from my spelling of 'labour', I am Canadian. As such, I can - and do - vote for a union-built, SOCIALIST (gasp!) political party called the NDP. I vote in every election I possibly can, and I always vote
labour. That's why I don't get the anti-labour comment.
Sorry,
ReplyDeleteIt's a common thoughtless cliche to blame players for trying to bargain with owners for more pay or labor rights. It usually paints them as being babies playing a child's sport, while not considering that regardless of any of that, they are the talent that brings in the riches, and deserve a fair share of that from the owners. If sports have become an overpriced spectacle it's not because of players, same goes for actors or whoever.
@steve
ReplyDeleteAs I suspected, I actually couldn't agree more with you. It's only natural for the athletes involved - whatever their motivation or commitment - to expect their slice of the pie, at whatever their level of "exposure". As you point out, they are the only reason the sport exists in the first place. No-one would be making a nickel without them!