Look in the Mirror

The constant trouble that ahthletes get into with law enforcement leads me to believe that going to college does very little to prepare them for the real world.  These kids have been pampered all of their lives because they have been given athletic "gifts."  They are given a free rides through college, even though many of them could not make it in on their academic merit.  They continue to live the thug, hip-hop life style and it is accepted by all because they play for our team.

Every time I see a recruit having trouble qualifying I cringe, knowing that this is potential trouble, should he finally eke out a test score or pass that last course.  Yeah, sure, this doesn't apply to every marginal student, and many have made the most of their opportunity by taking college seriously and coming out with marketable skills other than catching a football to dribbling a basketball.  For every one of these kids there are 10-20 or more who are just there taking up space, just doing the minimum to stay eligible to play their sport.  They don't see the value in an education and if they are lucky enough to acquire a fat, juicy pro contract, they thug it up or squander the riches that the regular Joe can only dream of.

So who's to blame here?  The players?  The schools?  Big money?  The fans?  Probably all of the above, but is mostly us, the public, because we accept it.  In fact we want this stuff.  Our culture cultivates and accepts the thug life by sensationalizing it in the media, by giving these people fame and fortune.  We continue to want to see players on our university's team who are spectacular athletes, regardless of their character or their intellect.  We dismiss Stanford and Duke as anomalies, when we should be demading that all schools require their athletes to be students first.  We want our university to make scads of money so that they can attract more of these dim bulbs to bring us a national championship.

The reality is that a whole lot of these players should never set foot on a college campus, that is until they can prove to everyone that they are serious students and citizens.  It is a shame seeing grown men begging thugs to come play for them and doing everything that they can to get them into school.  Yet we all accept it because that is what everyone does.

So the next time that one of these guys gets in trouble with the law, and you wonder how someone who "has it all" could have done that, look in the mirror.  We are all partly at fault by continuing to support a very flawed system.