College Athletes Overworked and Exploited? What a Shock

As is the case now during school opening season for many members of other university faculty, I received my notice over a week ago. It came from an academic support director in an athletic department building. It informed me that one of my students was also an athlete who would miss the first day of classes due to a game out of state.

A campus advisory also was issued suggesting that any student feeling sick in this swine-flu era should be expected to miss class, too.

Athletes and the sick get priority treatment on college campuses everywhere these days. The reason is to maintain good health for the school. With athletes it just happens to be about the good financial health of the institution rather than good medical health of the inhabitants.

So don't be shocked about the allegations Michigan football coach (for a little while longer) Rich Rodriguez is denying about his broken program, that he or someone on his staff put the Wolverines through their paces beyond the time limit prescribed by college athletics' overseers. Ball State got busted for doing so. San Diego State was caught. Texas State in San Marcos failed to watch the clock. It happens everywhere, I bet. It's just when you're 3-9 while expected to be the mirror opposite, at least, that everyone else finds out.

Even one of the Michigan whistleblowers owned up somewhat unknowingly that what went on in Ann Arbor wasn't unusual.

"I've played for three coaches, I've seen three different systems, three different personalities of programs," Michigan transfer Toney Clemons told the Detroit Free Press from his new school, Colorado. "Not every coach does that [push players beyond practice time limits]. With Coach [Lloyd] Carr coming in as freshmen, we understood the rules early in the summertime. We never had anybody come out and monitor anything that they weren't allowed to be there for. And compliance at the University of Colorado is real in tune. They make sure that we know the rules."

Clemons explained, however, that most players were willing to work beyond the required hours, and that at Colorado "it becomes mandatory through your teammates. It's not forced upon you by the coaching staff.

"The difference that came with it, and what really bothered the people, was that if they missed it, the things they had to do for missing it. It became a problem whenever people would miss a workout and had to be punished or reprimanded for missing one. That's where the problem lies."

It all reminds me of what Pro Football Hall of Fame member Bobby Mitchell recounted once to me about his college experience. He wanted to study to become a doctor, he said, but one of his college coaches told him Illinois recruited him to play football. He'd have to find time to study medicine.

Michigan shouldn't be excused if it is guilty. The whole point of the time-limit rule is to bolster the first part of college athletics' favorite phrase -- student-athlete. At most large schools and those others where football and basketball are revenue generating, or strive to be, student-athlete is mostly fantasy. Athlete-student would be more accurate. At a few places, adding "student" is nearly fraudulent.

This is another reason college football and basketball players should be paid. They labor at least 20 hours a week and, to hear Michigan players and look at other programs, sometimes more. The beneficiaries of their blood and sweat are athletic programs that take in $70 million, $80 million and $90 million each year and head coaches who get paid $2 million, $3 million and more annually. A potential two-year probation, which the NCAA handed San Diego State, may be worth the price of doing business. It's not as if a Michigan team, no matter its lore, that went 3-9 last season was ready to march back to a bowl game this season.

But that really obfuscates the underlying issue here of a ripped off proletariat. If the National Labor Relations Board ever handled the matter of College Players v. College Athletics of the United States of America, the defendants would be tossed out on their heads.

When Huston Street was pitching for the Texas Longhorns, he shared his schedule one semester with me. I wrote what it went like pretty much on a daily basis when he didn't have a game: In the weight room at six in the morning. Done by about 8:30 a.m. Home to get ready for school. In class from about 10 until two in the afternoon. In between, he squeezed in lunch. After class, he headed to the swimming pool but not for recreation. He put in an hour's workout in the water to strengthen his body for the rigors of college pitching. Then it was off to the baseball field for a little long toss, a little running and a little more weight lifting. By then it was five o'clock or later. It was time for dinner and, if he wasn't too exhausted, studying and working on whatever paper he might have due.

But Street was really lucky because it all paid off in a handsome multimillion dollar major league baseball career. Most of his peers who put in the same amount of time didn't wind up pulling a winning lottery ticket-like contract in The Show.

So I don't want to hear that college football and basketball players have some crackerjack of a deal by getting a "free" education in exchange for a little elbow grease. I'm not shocked -- not shocked, I say -- by the allegations at Michigan or similar ones anywhere else. This is the way it's done. Its winning that keeps it in house.

Playing major college revenue-generating sports isn't a privilege. It's a job and it should pay like one.