With academic controversies rocking institutions from Florida State to UNC-Chapel Hill, the term “student athlete” seems to have moved away from the former word and towards the latter.
Questions of compensation and the legitimacy of NCAA rules against certain player activity have arisen, forcing all participants in the system, from athletes to fans to administrators, to confront that college athletics has morphed from a character-building pastime to a highly lucrative business.
When University of Kentucky men’s basketball coach, John Calipari, announced that all of his players, from top-five material to walk-ons, would declare for the NBA draft in an effort to exploit a procedural loophole; it said less about the shrewd Wildcats helmsman than it did about a system in which the college experience is little more than a development league for the truly gifted.