http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=6254572


Ralph nadar wants to remove scholarships from college sports. What are your thoughts on this?

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I'm 90% for it.

My theory for decades has been that scholarships should only be awarded based on academic merit. If you happen to play a sport too, that's great, it's an advantage you'll have to get a roster spot playing a sport you love. Colleges are for academics, so seeing kids go to "college" to major in "basketball" bothers me when they are getting a full-ride that should be going to someone with the academic criteria. The reality is that when Johnny Partial Qualifier or Bob Barely Able to Qualify gets a scholarship, it means that a kid who was supposed to get a full ride for strong academics...and needs it...ends up going to a lesser school. But the trickle down keeps going, and eventually for every sports scholarship, including track, volleyball, crew, etc, it means that at the bottom, a student who should get a academic scholarship ends up not going to college. It's just the reality.


But I do see the benefits of college sports as big business for schools.

It's why my idea was always pretty simple:

* Eliminate all sports scholarships for non-revenue sports and replace them with academic scholarships
* Use donations made to a specific sport to help fund those sports rather than "funding" via paying the scholarships

* For each sport, the would be full transparency on the revenue and projected revenue. Using a system much like the BCS uses to judge BCS criteria, a system would be put in place to determine the number of sports scholarships for a specific sport at a specific school. So if Ohio St. generates X number of dollars via a good business model for their program, the NCAA awards them with Y number of scholarships. If Georgetown basketball, a non-football school, generates X number of dollars, then they get Y number of basketball scholarships. If UConn Women's team generates X number of dollars, they would get Y number of scholarships. If CSU-Fullerton generated X number of revenue, they get Y number of baseball scholarships.

In the end, it will eliminate the whole "should we pay athletes" for football and basketball question. Because what the real question is there, is should players for sports that generate big money be compensated more than the players for sports that just USE money like tennis, golf, track, etc.

But it doesn't eliminate every other sports chances. If you have something strong like the rare Tennessee or UConn women's basketball program, or a school like BU or UNH that make revenue through hockey...or even the rare baseball program that makes money. Those schools that generate revenue could compensate their players with full scholarships.

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My guess here is that large amounts of those donations would go away if said donations were not in part to allow the program to recruit the 'student' athletes they want.




And here you create a gross competitive imbalance. We will not use Women's Hoops as an example because it has been dominated by UConn and Tennessee for years without this type of setup. I think Baseball is a good example where there are probably only a handful of 'profitable' schools. You could pretty much hand Texas or LSU the title every year in this setup, and the same would be true for lots of smaller traditionally non-revenue sports that receive some emphasis or have some history of excellence at certain schools.

i thought most of the major schools had endowment funds & thats where the athletic scholarships came from, not taking away an academic scholarship from a non student athlete?