What gives colleges the right to use their athletes for their own profit? This has been a question that has been brought up for nearly a century. Taylor Branch in “The Shame of College Sports” and Derek Van Rheenen in “Exploitation in College Sports […]” both do a great job on describing the hardships that every college athlete goes though on a daily basis with the dictatorship of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The NCAA dehumanizes and only seeks to make profit off of the men and women competing in intercollegiate sports.
Walter Camp invented the great game of football in 1869 causing a revolution in collegiate sports. No one has ever seen a sport so brutal and memorizing since rugby. Therefore, making the game of football very …show more content…
This word is used to show “amateurism” of the athlete. This is a very difficult subject for many people to talk about and is very hard to pick a side unless you experience the legality of this word first hand. Many people say that “student-athlete” means that the word student precedes the word athlete so henceforth meaning that the athlete’s school work is more important than the athletics. When in fact that has nothing to do with the subject at hand, it was first used to sever any legal ties with workman’s compensation and the NCAA as seen in the court case for Ray Dennison. “Amateurism” on the other hand is another word mention in the essays from Branch and Van Rheenen. “Amateurism” as seen in “Exploitation in College Sports […]” is used by the NCAA to “maximize profit”, eliminate taxation on their income, eradicate any legal ties with worker’s compensation, and discharges themselves from being titled as an “illegal cartel” (555). In Branch’s essay “The Shame of College Sports” he calls both of these words “cynical hoaxes” which I cannot agree with him more. The National Collegiate Athletic Association uses these words exclusively to clear themselves from any legal encounters with the athletes and to profit from them even more than before. Henceforth, providing them with even more traits of an illegal cartel than many people …show more content…
Therefore, this definition directly correlates with the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s mentality. We can justify these allegations of the NCAA being a “cartel” by reading and understanding the scandals of Reggie Bush, Cam Newton and A.J. Green. Reggie bush was convicted of receive unnecessary payments from the University of Southern California for airfare, cars and houses. Consequently, this lead to USC being stripped of its National Championship Title in 2004 and Reggie Bush losing his Heisman Trophy he would win a year later. Henceforth, I believe these are generous acts of kindness from the University of Southern California. They are giving the lower class family of Reggie a home to live in closer to their star football player, a car to drive to see him play on home games and free airfare to see their son compete across the nation. I see no problem with the colleges giving accommodations to the family of the football players. On the other hand, I do have a problem with colleges giving the athlete or his family a considerate amount of money as a bribe to play for them as seen in the scandal of Cam Newton. Cam, junior college quarterback at the time was rumored to have received $180,000 from Mississippi State to play for them. Ultimately, he would deny