Wasting Money On UH Sports
Hey, Steve Murray, MidWeek Oahu sports guy! You’re one of the smartest in the biz and should be writing for The New York Times. So how about proposing, instead of a semi-pro arrangement for college sports, that we have just college sports for fun?
You’ve endorsed limits on coaching salaries and sharing some revenue with college players. I’m endorsing college sports as something incidental to a college education.
Here’s my plan: We can still offer a certain number of scholarships to athletes as an incentive to do college, but that money has to come out of the college general fund (no special athletic or “foundation” source) and all the revenue from games goes into the college general fund for general use. Athletics must compete with social sciences for funds.
We should encourage either volunteer coaches or, if we’re in an NCAA program, limit the salary of any coach in any sport to $60,000-$75,000 a year. No special incentives. No outside remuneration. No freebies.
No, absolutely no money for the athletes other than their scholarships. They are in college for an education, and their athletic participation is for fun and maybe future employment as professionals. They might even learn that studying is more important than traveling and playing.
Why not end this which-college-is-best-in-football nonsense? Why should I care if UH wins a championship? I’d rather cheer for the UH developing a cure for cancer or a new way of explaining the universe.
People say that citizens give money and time to their college because of its sports prowess. That may be true. But what a travesty of values!
UH graduate schools don’t get grants based on the football team’s wins.
I want sports re-relegated to what it was when sports in college started: a component of the body-brain training. A kind of upscale physical education. Did you ever notice that word “education” in the term?
Life in college won’t come to a standstill without almost professional-level sports. I don’t see any diminishment of applications to Harvard, Yale, Columbia or even Brown because they cannot win a national championship. My daughter’s education didn’t suffer because Wesleyan lost to Williams on the lawn gridiron without a $500 million stadium and a franchise quarterback.
