Professional Sports Career

The argument to be made in this paper is that the possibilities of achieving a professional sports career and the benefits once that professional career is achieved on the part of college athletes are not worth the odds of giving up on a college education. At the present time, it seems that the major university sports programs, especially in football and basketball, are geared to producing professional athletes without much emphasis being placed on the academic side of the college equation.

The paper will further argue that both the college sports programs and the athlete-students who participate in them cannot have it both ways. They cannot continue to be revenue producers for the schools while at the same time pretend to be pushing the ideals of scholarship and amateur athletics. At some point, a decision needs to be made. As pointed out by Barbash (1990):

[T]here should be a federal law that requires schools either to return to the Ivy League ideal in which players are legitimate members of the student body, judged by the same standards as everybody else, or let players on their teams be non-student professionals. (p. 39)

This paper argues that the second option should be the one chosen (creating college teams made up of non-student professionals) in order to remove both the hypocrisy and the unfairness of college athletic programs today. In essence, at the pre

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el rooms of NCAA officials. These mementos cost Indianapolis an estimated $25,000 [in March 1997] … At a minimum, gifts for each official included a Samsonite suit bag, a Final Four ticket embedded in Lucite, a Limoges porcelain basketball and Steuben glass (McGraw et al, 1997, p. 2). The question to be asked: what exactly is the difference between the NCAA Division I spectator-sport teams and out-and-out professional sports franchises? Well, the NCAA gets to have it both ways: they rake in the money but at the same time they do not even have to pay those "employees" whose labor allows them to acquire that wealth minimum wage. As well, because they are still listed as amateur organizations with education as their primary focus, they get all types of tax breaks for everything from huge TV deals to licensing: "By giving the impression that big-time college sport is merely a variant of the amateur contests staged by nonscholarship-granting institutions, college sport has generally avoided, income taxes, antitrust scrutiny, and other laws that apply to businesses" (Sack & Staurowsky, 1998, p. 130). Other conclusions of a similar sort were reached by a number of those who examined the NCAA. Among them: Widespread corruption from t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Athletes Introduction, Association Proceedings, Similarly Edwards, NCAA Division, Sack Staurowsky, II Argument, Division NCAA, NCAA Widespread, Simons Butow, Final Fours, professional sports, college athletes, professional athletes, women's sports foundation, women's sports, zimbalist 1999, college football, college sports, student athletes, intercollegiate athletics, sports foundation, producing professional athletes, kansas city star, athletic association proceedings, collegiate athletic association,
Approximate Word count = 1852
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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