A Fantasy

With any luck, no college athletes will be unnecessarily exposed to the virus because (at least) fall sports will be cancelled everywhere.  

A fantasy immediately sprang to mind when thinking about this.  It's not a "wouldn't it be great," it's a fantasy:

Here it is:  The 2020-21 academic year involves no college sports at all, because, for some reason, we all made non-greed-based, grown-up decisions about exposing young adults to a deadly disease so we could sit on the couch and eat Doritos.  The world did not end.

The result - the new world of college sports?  Understanding that we can survive without college football, and, at the same time, understanding the horrific consequences of repeated concussions on one's ability to think straight going forward, we just get rid of college football altogether.  Done.  Gone.  What is an expensive and dangerous activity for the vast majority of colleges who don't make any TV money from football, is no longer in the budget.  The rather small number of Division I schools who make money from their football programs - they'll figure it out.  They're all very big schools, with enormous budgets.  They can look around at other very big schools without millions in TV money, and see how they do it (Hint:  For a start, pay your coaches the same salary you pay the rest of the faculty).

In fact, let's take TV money out of college sports entirely.  This will probably have the biggest impact on the Division I basketball programs, but again - big schools, lots of models for reform.  TV networks can broadcast games, but they don't pay the schools to do it.

One of the really important benefits of this new world innovation is that athletes in big colleges no longer serve as the unpaid farm system for the NFL and the NBA.  These professional organizations can set up their own farm systems and leave the colleges alone.  Using colleges as a farm system is about as bad an idea as providing health insurance through employment.

So in the new world (my fantasy new world), you go to college if you want an academic degree, and you go to farm team tryouts if you want to be a professional athlete.  Students participate in a wide variety of extracurricular activities, some of which are sports (but not football).  

As a bonus, we get to fix the map:

Win-win.

The fact that this is probably the most controversial post in the entire blog kind of proves the point.