Before UNC fans settle into their couches or bleacher seats to root on the football team against Miami this Thursday, the Athletic Reform Group asks that Tar Heels everywhere contemplate the full costs of the Thursday-night spectacle to be played out at Kenan Stadium.
According to NCAA averages, UNC football players work roughly 45 hours per week to get in shape, learn the playbook, watch game film, lift weights, travel to distant stadiums and don the Carolina blue before screaming fans, all at the risk of suffering brain and bodily injuries.
In return for their efforts, they are told that they are given the opportunity to receive a University education. Leaving aside the fairness of that exchange — offering in-kind compensation to a work force that has no bargaining rights is at best a morally ambiguous practice — the UNC community should consider some of what football players give up to play their sport:
Study time. Football players work a full-time job. Yet statistics indicate that a disproportionate percentage of football recruits were brought to this campus less than fully prepared for the rigors of university classrooms. They need more time than most, not less time, to manage the demands of HIST 128 and MATH 110. Midweek games obviously apply additional pressure to already packed schedules. Have universities really done all they should to enable athletes to seize the “opportunity” of an education?
Choices. Every minute of a football player’s 16-hour day is scripted. As a consequence, players have fewer choices than other students. Fewer classes, fewer majors, fewer “experiential” opportunities such as study abroad, fewer chances to interact with their professors. Their menu of choices is deliberately limited, their educational experiences necessarily impoverished.
Autonomy. Football players are recruited to universities by coaches who determine their schedules and have the power to rescind their scholarships. The NCAA forces players to sign away their privacy rights and their economic rights when they accept their scholarship agreements. In these conditions, the likelihood that a football player would ever publicly disagree with his coach or exercise leadership on controversial issues is next to nil.
Due process. Football players are at the mercy of a capricious system of “justice.” When accused of wrongdoing, players are preemptively suspended from the team pending investigation of the allegations against them. Even if found to be innocent — as was fullback Devon Ramsay during the scandal of 2010 — players are forced to sacrifice reputations, playing time and potential future earnings at the tarnished altar of NCAA purity.
The injustices of college sport are many. Fans of college football have recently focused, with good reason, on the pay-for-play debate and the mounting evidence that football causes brain damage.
But even apart from these major issues of health and compensation, football players routinely make other sacrifices that hamper their lives as students and citizens of the UNC campus.
Before Tar Heel fans wave their pom-poms this Thursday, let’s give some thought to how the college sport enterprise can be made more just and more in keeping with the principles of a center of learning.
