The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

Amateur athletics has been a joke for a very long time. The Olympics, once an important cultural and athletic event, has morphed into a marketing miasma filled with professional athletes in a dizzying variety of sports and pseudo-sports. They began to allow professionals in the 1980s, and every four years the Olympics has become less important, and seemingly more crooked and graft-seeking. Does anyone really care anymore?

But for sheer, disgusting, acquisitive, money-grubbing, power-hungry sleaziness, it is hard to beat the NCAA. It has been around for 115 years, and its stranglehold on college athletics has been a cash-cow for its leadership and major universities, but has also created a massive problem for itself, because it treated the student athletes -- the entire reason for its existence -- as chattel. They didn't want to share any of the oceans of TV money that suddenly flooded into its coffers, and why should they? Student athletes were a dime a dozen! So they created a massive regulatory apparatus that allowed them to control every aspect of college athletics, essentially a modern plantation.

Every dime went to the NCAA and the universities, and if an athlete had the temerity to make a few bucks selling autographs? Bang! Loss of eligibility!

But their generations of total control began to show some flaws, as athletes and even some schools began to attack the NCAA in court. In 2021, NCAA v. Alston, a unanimous SCOTUS decision held that their behavior was illegal, and that student-athletes could be paid.

That was good and bad, as the charming and romantic fiction that major-college athletes were "students" finally fell apart. But at least these athletes can now take financial advantage of their skills.

And the legal attacks keep coming!

College Athletes File Lawsuit Against NCAA To Change The 'Redshirt Rule'

Right now, the five-year rule that is currently in place only allows athletes to compete in four years of the five years granted to them, with plenty of athletes in football, basketball, baseball and other sports only being part of a team if they use a 'redshirt year' as part of their clock. Athletes are not given that opportunity to play in all five years, only four, with a set number of games during the redshirt year in place.

If an athlete wanted to maintain their 'redshirt year', they could only compete in four games during that initial redshirt season. If they were to compete in a fifth, it would count towards their eligibility clock.

In the new lawsuit filed by the 'Texas Trial Group' on Tuesday, they are challenging the NCAA's right to allow these athletes to participate in workouts, practice and other daily activities, but not allowed to play in the actual games.

It is sad that amateur athletics is rapidly disappearing, although one wonders whether it ever truly existed. But the eventual demise of the NCAA is an unalloyed good thing, no matter what one may think of the current state of college athletics. They have been a corrosive influence on American sports for too long.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter]. If you folks who are on X/Twitter would follow us it would be much appreciated!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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