Miami to Get Whacked Again

Michael David Smith at ProFootballTalk.com points out some “highlights” for the coming storm at Miami. Perhaps if this had hit next year, the NCAA could brush it off again. But after the Ohio St. mess, well, perhaps not. There’s nothing so brazen as a bunch of guys protecting their money.

The thing that really has to be worrying the NCAA is the link at the end of the article. It’s to an article at Yahoo sports, which is in turn about the booster at Miami. Or, at least, he was. Now he’s in jail on securities fraud charges for running a $930 million dollar Ponzi scheme. The article has to be read to be believed.

I used to be a purist about college football, believing that the scholarship money they were given should be enough. The rest of us, after all, have to pay to go to college to figure out what we want. These guys get a free ride and get to do what they love.

But I now know it’s not that cut and dry. Especially when considering how the fat cats in the NCAA, the multi-million dollar coaches and everyone else skim plenty off of the sham that is “amateur” football. I’ve wondered in the past if there’s way to create a minor-league football system where high school recruits could go and train to join the NFL as well as earn money along the way without fear of reprisal.

Smith gets to the nub of the problem pretty well:

And that gets to the real problem in college football: As Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel writes, the allegedly amateur system of college athletics prevents players from earning money honestly and makes them more likely to turn to crooks like Shapiro when they need something. The entire college football system is corrupt. Miami is just the latest school to get caught up in that corruption.

I’m really starting to think the only way to come up with a “clean” amateur system is to destroy it and start anew.