Big-time money is sapping the joy from college sports, even from the start of football season

By Rick Cleveland | Originally published by Mississippi Today

College sports has gone so far off the rails I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I prefer to laugh – and I do, each time a coach, athletic director or president at a power conference school talks about their “student-athletes” as if they are anything other than sports mercenaries.

Even when a school or a conference tries to draw a line in the sand – as the Southeastern Conference has tried to do with LSU signing football players right out of NFL camps – some judge in some court says, “You can’t do that.”

It’s a free-for-all in big-time college athletics. No rules, no scruples, no nothing. And, yes, LSU coach Lane Kiffin is the poster child for all the madness. I would call Kiffin the Snidely Whiplash of college athletics, except for the fact that even Snidely, for all his evil ways in the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, occasionally displayed rare moments of self-awareness and shame. Not Kiffin.

Where will higher education finally draw the line? How crazy is it? Let us count the ways:

• At Ole Miss, the quarterback makes more than five times the salary of the university’s chancellor. 
• Many weekend starting pitchers in SEC baseball – traditionally, a non-revenue sport – reportedly make $250,000 or more per year. The salary for Mississippi’s governor is $160,000 a year. 
• Josh Hubbard, the face of Mississippi State’s basketball program, which won five of 18 SEC games last season, makes more money in a year than Mississippi’s governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and state auditor combined. And, yes, Hubbard scored 22 points per game last season, second in the SEC, so you could argue he had a better year than all those others.
• The craziness of college sports doesn’t stop at player compensation. In the Big 10 Conference, which, by the way, now includes 18 universities, teams now travel nearly 2,500 miles to play conference games. The flight from Los Angeles (UCLA and USC) to Piscataway, New Jersey, (Rutgers) takes more than five hours. If they still bused to games, it would be 40 hours nonstop. That’s a long way to go for such an unnatural rivalry.
• It’s not just men’s sports either. At LSU, the women’s basketball roster continues to evolve. In strange ways. Center Kate Koval, from Ukraine, is leaving the program, following the signing of 17-year-old Russian professional Anna Minaeva. LSU coach Kim Mulkey said she believed the two could be teammates and even help end the war between Ukraine and Russia, which has led to the deaths of approximately 150,000 Ukraine soldiers and 17,000 civilians. Koval, whose father serves in the Ukraine military, didn’t see it that way.

We could go on and on and on. And on.…

But here we are. The college football season has already begun with the first full schedule of games coming up this this weekend. There are some good ones, too. Clemson plays at LSU Saturday night in matchup of ranked teams. Louisville plays Ole Miss in Nashville on Sunday night in another high-profile match of ranked teams. We are little more than two weeks away from the long-awaited Sept. 19 match of LSU and Ole Miss at Oxford. Who the heck knows who will be eligible for that one.

Meanwhile, published reports from reputable sources say 15 of the 16 SEC CEOs are considering suspending or even possibly expelling LSU from the league over the signing of professional football players. Never mind that nearly every SEC football player is, by definition, a professional. They are all being paid to play, and a few are making millions.

Normally, I would be uber-excited about the upcoming weekend and all that’s to come later in the fall. But the current state of big-time college athletics, no longer amateur sports in any way, shape or form, has dimmed my enthusiasm considerably. And I’ve got to wonder how many others, passionate about college sports for decades, feel the same way.

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article