Existence is brief, cold, and without meaning | Image: Getty Images
We’ve come to a point in NCAA college athletics where the only logical next step is blow it all up. Start anew. Turn the page. Go to rehab and move to Cheyenne. The system is so flawed that we’re excited about affording an unpaid workforce the ability to make money off of sponsorships they have to find themselves.
Universities are paying coaches millions of dollars to sit on their ass because the money is so plentiful that they have to give mediocre coaches huge extensions for fear of a bigger school swooping in only to fire the guy a year or two later. Auburn and Nebraska take turns leading the country in money owed to misguided, overpaid, and now fired hires.
The only way to kill college athletics is to make them pay every student athlete. And no cutting programs either. Make these schools run like businesses and see how quick they go bankrupt. I’m serious. There’s no way publicly-funded organizations should be allowed to operate as poorly as we see in college athletics.
In what other industry do we get told there isn’t enough money to pay for something while the people at the top somehow live paycheck-to-paycheck on exorbitant salaries? Well, shit, all of them, but this is the Sports Nihilist. I believe in nothing, so while we’re at it, incinerate it all. Dracarys.
Back to college sports. If a business needed money but just built a half billion, state-of-the-art spa and vanity facility, we’d laugh when they failed. It was literally an episode of Parks and Rec that I laughed at.
Colleges can go bankrupt — at least that’s what Google taught me. (I’m pretty sure ITT Tech went under, but that’s a trade school, so I don’t know if that counts.) Some of these places of higher learning have been around for over a century, and we just nod our heads and say, “What an institution!” as if it’s normal. Organizations that have been around for a long ass time are more often scary than altruistic. We thought the church was. Did you see Spotlight? It was not. We know not to trust the NFL, GE, or McDonald’s? There are horror stories based on weird cults as colleges, and football funds that shit.
It might not be a bad thing if a couple got torn down and remodeled — or discontinued. If a frat has a scandal involving buttchugging, the school should be fined like a big corporation that committed insider trading.
Plus, if a few of these schools went under, these kids could actually get student loan forgiveness. Washington sure as shit isn’t going to let Joe do it.
However, the only way to get reimbursed if your school files for Chapter Seven, according to my research, is if you don’t continue your studies. There’s no mention in the article I found of having to return the knowledge you gained, but I’m assuming there’s a device for that. It probably looks like the contraption Hydra strapped Bucky Barnes to in order to wipe his memory and reload his program.
And, with that, I think I’ve gone sufficiently off the rails. So, yeah, pay the students-athletes, lower tuition, burn it all down, I believe in nothing, all that stuff.
