COLLEGE SPORTS: THE HOUSE THAT MONEY BUILT [W, 5-7-25]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Grievances of An Old Curmudgeon—COLLEGE SPORTS: THE HOUSE THAT MONEY BUILT [W, 5-7-25]

 

I don’t think people should be named House. I missed the first seasons of the TV show, “House,” because I thought it was one of those shows where girls in goggles use sledge hammers to destroy perfectly good homes so that they can add an interior bird bath. If they had even called the show, “House, MD,” I would have realized it was about the irascible Dr. House, played so cleverly by Hugh Laurie. I like that kind of show. I’ve always thought that if I were a physician, I’d like to be a cynical and misanthropic medical genius like Dr. Gregory House.

 

Now I’m confused because all the sports news is about the “House Settlement,” which sounds like the settlement house, Howell House, where I once worked, in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

 

No, it’s a law suit about paying college athletes, apparently brought by somebody named House, about who and how much money to pay students who like to play sports, and how colleges can maximize their profits while making it look like athletes are still students, and which athletes who weren’t paid in the past should get some bucks now to make up for their mistreatment back in the day when all they got for playing was a free education.

 

So, you can see why I think somebody should bring a suit to require all people with the name of House to change it, to something like… Domicile? It would get the same idea across, but I doubt that even TV people would be stupid enough to name a show “Domicile.” Well, maybe the House & Garden channel, but old curmudgeons don’t watch it, anyway, so we would not be confused.

I’m not entirely opposed to the new landscape of college sports. Transferring from one school to another, for instance. Why not? Some say because a student-athlete should honor hisher scholarship. I had scholarships in college, but there were no rules to keep me from transferring to a different school. Athletes, however, were required to stay at the school that gave them a scholarship. Until House complained.

Paying college athletes directly, though, is very different from just being able to transfer. “Paid” is the very definition of professional. [The obscuring attempt of NIL is already defunct.] College athletes are no longer student athletes; they are professional athletes.

 

Now, savants are floating the idea that college sports should be divorced from the university itself, live in a different environment and reality. Well, isn’t that already the case? As befits its academic reputation, The University of Kentucky has already split its sports department off into a limited liability corporation [LLC].

Indeed, I predict that within two years, athletes will not be allowed to be enroll as students because it will interfere with their “work” commitments. [Remember that you heard it here first.]

 

Now we have “students” who enroll in four different schools—that is not unusual at all—in their four years of “college” athletics, constantly hunting bigger bucks, a bigger arena to showcase their talents for the “other” professional leagues, where they aren’t bothered with having to go to class. [Actually, most college athletes don’t go to class, anyway. Their “sports marketing” classes are online.]

 

The main reason to go to college is to learn how to think. If you don’t learn that bigger bucks will not make you a better person, or if you don’t learn that a different place won’t solve your problems, you haven’t learned to think.

John Robert McFarland