Please do not presume to think for me. It's one of my pet peeves. I played at Harvard.. I know LOTS of college footballers personally who got a quality education. I also had high school teammates who went to Florida, Miami, Tennessee, Florida State, FAMU, Bethune Cookman, Albany State, Morris Brown, Wofford, Memphis State, USC, North Carolina State, North Carolina A&T, East Carolina... well you get the picture. I can tell you first hand not all of them got any education worth a damn. Yes some of them did.. but not all of them. And that is my point.. Not one of them had the option of turning pro at that time. Mind you not all of them were NFL caliber.. But several of them were.. One was a running back who got hurt his junior year at FSU and never recovered. Had the option been there to turn pro before that he would have at least had a shot and that injury would have occurred while he was getting paid. And maybe having access to NFL doctors instead of college guys enables him to make it back completely. Another was a 6'2" 195 shutdown corner at FSU who also led the nation in punt returns and was a projected all American and first round pick but got into some trouble before his senior year and his career never recovered. Had he been able to turn pro he would have been a first round pick. After being suspended for a year by the time he got back on the team some guy named Deion Sanders had taken over his role as the badass cornerback.
To answer your ultimate question though.. "So young kids should do what?" - To me it's simple.. they should be allowed to do what is best for themselves and their families .. Basketball and Football are the only sports that have these "seniority" requirements before a kid can turn pro. Tennis players can turn pro whenever they feel like, as can golfers, gymnasts, swimmers, tracksters, hockey plays, baseball players... all can go make money at any point they feel ready.. But the two sports that pay the bills for the athletic departments at nearly every school in the NCAA.. can't. And let me not gloss over that "pays the bills" phrase. There are no less 40 colleges whose athletic programs that gross over 100 million dollars a year..
https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances. Almost all of that comes from football and basketball. It was not a huge surprise to me that the NCAA got taken to the woodshed over "name image and likeness" this year in the courts. They have been profiting off these kids for a hundred years under the guise of "free education" while neglecting the hell out of these kids in that regard.
I am never one to paint every school or coach with the same brush. I know there are some that do a great job with these young folk. But some of the school have horrid graduation rates in their football and basketball programs.. According to this ESPN article
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ad-rates-slide-gap-widens-black-white-players roughly 73% of footballers at the 56 bowl bound schools graduated in 2019-2020. So would you consider that 27% who didn't graduate "a lot?" I certainly would. It certainly isn't "a few." Doing a little quick math in my head if there are 85 kids on scholarship that's 4030 kids 27% of that is like 850 kids a year falling through the proverbial cracks. Now we know about 10% of those will just be guys turning pro early. But that still leaves almost 800 kids annually simply washing out .. If the numbers are similar for the other 100 or so schools in the NCAA D1 then those numbers really start to become staggering. Maybe 2000 kids a year brought in to make money for the schools.. sent on their merry way with nothing to show for it. And the schools raking in 100 million+ a year off their backs. Many are left with mangled bodies that will never be the same..
Thing is.. I am not advocating dismantling the NCAA as some have suggested. But they need to make some changes.. They have no one to blame but themselves for their current predicament. They have had decades to make adjustments to do better by these kids. And they have chosen not only to not do better but to double down on screwing them. Remember that kid from UConn hoops who told the story of how he was bumming food off classmates for months because the meal plan for his scholarship could not kick in before the basketball season began? He told that story to highlight the ridiculous constraints the NCAA places on athletes. I don't know if they quietly rescinded that rule but a lot of athletes chimed in with similar stories. For decades there were athletic dorms where they were well take care of but some idiotic rule change dismantled them for a time. I assume they have since been brought back because that story went away pretty quickly.
