A Quick Rant about College Sports (originally posted on facebook 4/23/2014)

As if I needed another reason to not like professional sports, but the more I learn about college football and basketball the more irate I get. Forgive the hyperbole but when black people were doing all the work and white men were making all the money we called it slavery. Now we call it education, but no one is getting educated, a few men are getting astonishingly rich and college kids generating the revenue are going to bed hungry. The people making out like bandits are telling the kids and the public that for college athletes the focus should be education

But college kids whose only chance of getting an education is to accept athletic scholarships end up in sporting programs where they are given no time to study, nor are there any expectations that they will learn anything. The whole educational system is complicit and private individuals end up becoming fabulously wealthy. This isn't a relationship completely free of coercion, but maybe slavery is hyperbolic, perhaps something closer to sharecropping. You're free, but you're not going anywhere.