OT: OSU corner calls out the program
https://twitter.com/WW_Marcus/status/1477448756505321472?s=20
Sour grapes aside from being left off the travel roster, still an indictment of the OSU culture. Football>school, do as I say, etc. Certainly a degree of this is present in D1 football programs but this seems a bit far and fits the Urban profile.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:47 AM ^
It's an indictment on Urban (nothing new here) and college football in general. Really nothing there unique to OSU. Aside from Urban threatening to ruin his life this could literally be any player on any P5 team posting this.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:08 AM ^
Urban most probably the worst of the bunch given what most already knew of the sociopath and fraud.
That said, you play for a football factory, this is more or less the experience. You can still get drafted playing for good teams where you are treated like a student-athlete (UM, Utah, Wisconsin, Washington, etc). You may not be in the playoff every year, but you’re also treated like a human being, not expendable trash.
January 2nd, 2022 at 12:59 PM ^
Let's not get too preachy. Schools like Michigan, Notre Dame, etc. are not as ruthless as the "SEC" approach schools, but even at those places football players are not treated like regular students. It is not academics first. It's more like peaceful coexistence at best.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:05 PM ^
Didn't Jourdan Lewis have a twitter thread about how he wasnt allowed to take certain classes? Michigan is much closer to those ruthless SEC schools than people want to think. There's a little more emphasis on academics at the front end that can limit the pool a bit (but not as much as people think).
January 2nd, 2022 at 4:34 PM ^
football factory vs student athlete? NO.
I didn’t play football but was a varsity athlete for Northwestern.
We were literally told that we are totally expendable on a regular basis (also called c*ck suckers at least 15 times) and my teammates and I endured plenty of other traumas I don’t want to get into here.
what the OSU CB said is true everywhere I suspect. The transfer portal will minimize some, hopefully a lot of it.
January 2nd, 2022 at 6:15 PM ^
I say fucking wahhh....just like I joined the military, you know what you are getting into...wanna talk about being called names, being sent wherever, whenever, and it definitely wasn't to have a chance to win the lotto...no sympathy here.
January 2nd, 2022 at 7:20 PM ^
What an awful take. It's strange to me that people tolerate things that strip away a person's humanity or dignity simply because the dehumanizing culture has become the de facto status quo.
Who the hell knowingly signs up to get called "cocksucker" in college by a college coach? That's pathetic abusive behavior from a supposed leader who is tasked with molding young adults. A coach using "fuck" to express displeasure? Sure. But "cocksucker" or racial slurs ain't it chief. Take a lesson from Vince Lombardi. He threatened to fire assistant coaches for demeaning language like that directed at players. And that was back in the 1960s.
Btw, you signed up to be an easily expendable unit in the military-industrial complex? Fine. But that doesn't mean you should've had to endure shitty behavior from higher ups or peers. And it certainly doesn't justify others having to experience it in other disciplines.
I was top 10 in my HS class with damn good standardized test scores. I considered applying and going to West Point (partly because my father had gone the military schooling route). I knew a former Army Officer (about 20 years older than me) who discouraged me from doing it for a whole host of reasons not least of which was this: military culture can be quite toxic. (Do you want to talk about all the sexual assaults on various bases that go unreported and un-investigated every year? The military willfully turns a blind eye to it.)
Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be. Stop defending the status quo for the sake of defending the status quo.
January 2nd, 2022 at 9:25 PM ^
Get real! Talk about turning a blind eye....Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State and Ohio State, huge sexual assault cover-ups....
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:57 PM ^
He wasn't defending any of this in his response. My guess, based on his response, is that he'd be against the abhorrent issues within those institutions too. He did, however, call out your tolerance and, indeed, promotion of abusive behaviour.
January 3rd, 2022 at 3:23 AM ^
Yes, his response is weird. Did I strike a nerve by pointing out a seldom talked about toxic aspect of military culture?
I hate that major Big Ten schools have suffered sexual assault issues/scandals because none of the adults in charge stood up and did something to end it quickly/swiftly. Instead, the assaults continued over many years/decades.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:46 PM ^
You seem like a really enlightened, thoughtful person.
January 2nd, 2022 at 7:50 PM ^
there is a lot of shit about how people in positions of power always use it to demean others while trying to hide their own insecurities/failings. But why are these wisened pricks always demeaning a good blowjob. Cocksuckers are to be celebrated, its an art form and a thing of beauty and always makes me think the person who uses the insult is an incel
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:16 AM ^
Yes, it's a systemic problem throughout college football. This is a result of the NFL not having its own minor league and relying on the colleges as its feeder system. (The same is true for the NBA.)
The kids who want to train and play like minor league professionals should be able to do so without having to go to college and pretend to be students. (See minor league baseball, or something like Canada's junior hockey system.)
Ideally, college athletics should be for students who also want to play sport as an extra-curricular activity. But that ship sailed a long, long time ago, and the current collegiate sports system reigns. Sure, the quality of play at the collegiate level would be destroyed as we know it, but it would clean up the schools.
NIL was never the answer, the NFL & NBA establishing their own minor leagues would be the solution, but neither league will take on the burdens and costs of creating their own feeder system when the colleges are doing it for them for free.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:24 AM ^
Also it wouldn't be profitable even if they did. Like the G League has more overall talent than D1, but nobody watches that while most of us would watch a team of guys with talent to bounce around some European/Asian leagues for a few years before becoming engineers back home. You know, like the 2011 team.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:28 AM ^
As painful as it for me say, Buckeye Chuck nailed it.
January 2nd, 2022 at 12:02 PM ^
He nailed it, and it isn't "painful" at all for me to admit. BuckeyeChuck raises some good points.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:15 PM ^
It appears that this Buckeye football player failed to register for Professor Urban Meyer's course in Leadership.
January 2nd, 2022 at 7:55 PM ^
Chuck often makes points that are quite easy to agree with. But him being a Buckeye sometimes makes that... annoying.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:29 AM ^
I think the end game is that football turns into club teams affiliated with but not part of the universities themselves. Helps fix the Title 9 (or whatever) issues as well.
Of course, I fully expect some leagues to move to that system before others. I could see the Big 10 ending up like the Ivy league at least for a bit.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:20 PM ^
I think the end game is that football turns into club teams affiliated with but not part of the universities themselves.
We are almost there anyway. The football program at a place like Clemson or Alabama or Ohio State (or Michigan) exists as an island almost completely away from the regular university.
This includes the facilities and the financials too.
The only thing that is missing is the ability to pay the players at market value above board.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:59 PM ^
In point of fact, many (most? or at least most P5) athletic departments are already separate legal entities from the Universities themselves. They are affiliated, but managed separately.
January 2nd, 2022 at 4:45 PM ^
Financially, yes. But the players are still students, and even though a lot of them (most of them?) aren't maximizing their academic experiences, some of them still are and those guys are using their degrees to do things after football. Going fully away from that would be a major problem for the vast majority of even P5 players.
January 3rd, 2022 at 7:44 AM ^
And let's hope college athletics always fails to pay its players "at market value" because the ones in every sport other than football, men's basketball, and occasionally baseball, hockey, and women's basketball (but only at a tiny handful of schools) are paid far above market value, and this is a good thing.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:34 AM ^
100% agree.
January 2nd, 2022 at 11:41 AM ^
I don’t know… NFL minor league/football factory theory aside you still don’t have to treat your players like shit, that’s an individual coaches/programs choice not a systemic problem. I find it curious the systemic issue you’ve claimed thereby absolving your program of responsibility. Sounds like your saying everyone does it so my team does it to compete and be relevant, as if that makes it ok. oSU could choose to be leaders on this subject…seems like they’ve chosen differently. I’ll take my coach thank you.
January 2nd, 2022 at 12:43 PM ^
Say there is a minor league in football. What day would they play on and who would watch? HS has Friday night, college on Saturday, and NFL on Sunday. Got to play in the fall - maybe late summer/early fall since Spring pro football doesn’t get viewers. This also allows pro teams to call up players when injuries occur.
If they have a minor league, the NFL will likely have to follow the MLB route where games aren’t televised. The local fans and parent clubs funds the teams.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:57 PM ^
I've thought for decades that a football minor league (or development league) could play and be televised weeknights during the Fall (Tue-Thu). The MAC caught on to this same time slot to increase visibility with November MACtion.
Since the NFL Draft has become such a big spectacle, a major marketing push for a developmental league (as opposed to minor league affiliation with a specific NFL team) would be to sign top recruits out of HS and promote them as future NFL draft picks. That would be a beginning point to spark some interest among die hard football fans.
January 2nd, 2022 at 2:24 PM ^
1. i find it difficult to believe that any NFL minor league would fare much better than the virtually forgotten G-league for the NBA. rooting for your favorite college team is so much more meaningful than what i imagine rooting for the NFL version of the G-league could ever be even decades into such a change. all that to say the NFL minors would have to be completely financed by the NFL as there is no way owning those teams with the overhead for payroll, stadiums, etc, could be floated by the minors.
2. curious what would happen to current FCS, D-II, and NAIA teams, all of which have scholarships and allow for more actual academic work by the players. particularly FCS and D-II you would think might attract some better athletes who actually want to get a worthwhile degree.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:39 PM ^
I completely agree, XM. Who watches the G league? Who watches minor league baseball? Who watches minor league or junior hockey? There is no market for it. An NFL minor league system would help solve the issue discussed in this thread, and would ultimately help the NFL I guess, but it would severely erode the collegiate game with its massive media market. The current college football system is broken but I would much rather have this broken system than a minor league system that very few would care about other than the hard core NFL die-hards
There are ways to fix the student athlete problem. Others have mentioned it. Make your sport count for credit and reduce academic work load. Or if you choose you can take coursework toward a traditional degree, along with gaining athletic credits.
January 3rd, 2022 at 6:21 AM ^
if there ever was a true NFL 'minor league' don't you think that D-1 football would look like FCS football pretty quick and the TV contracts around such things would be worth a lot less? and if you have 132 (+/-) D-1 teams, times 85 scholarship players, what happens to the ones left behind? you aren't going to field 130 NFL G-league teams. you aren't going to field 30 of them. just don't see how it would or could work. would you have some players, like a hutchinson, start at a 4 yr school, anticipate that their draft stock might be worth something, and then 'transfer' to the G-league after a couple of years?
January 2nd, 2022 at 3:57 PM ^
Agree that the games could get viewership during the week. Disagree about HS kids going to this league. There are a ton of benefits to a college campus - NIL money, food, housing, and training rooms. I think it would be college kids trying to make the NFL post graduation and maybe (if allowed) a transfer portal like departure after X years in college.
January 2nd, 2022 at 12:51 PM ^
@ iMBlue2
Totally agree with you. Meyer is a unique level of dirtbag, but to be fair, most have known this for years. Those families and players that were fooled into playing for him probably didn't do their research on his history at UF or simply saw the NFL $ as worthy of the abuse. At this point he's pretty much exposed and burnt after the NFL debacle and NIL and transfer portal now giving CFB players more professional-like say in their optionality.
Running a football factory and treating people with respect need not be mutually exclusive. However, providing an actual - or even minimal student-athlete experience (classes, time for studies, time for family and friends outside football) and running an SEC elite level football factory are probably mutually exclusive at this point.
There is much less out there about Saban being a complete piece of shit and fraud compared to Urban, but he does run the ultimate football factory.
TLDR: College football is already the semi-pros, specifically for OSU, Clemson, SEC....but Meyer is the special type of asshole who exploited the system in the most tyrannical ways possible - specifically before NIL and the transfer portal were at the core of modern CFB.
January 2nd, 2022 at 12:20 PM ^
@BuckeyeChuck
Totally agree with you here. College athletics should be an extracurricular for students and not an on-the-sly minor league system, if for no other reason than to make all the spots available to what we derogatorily call "walk-ons" but are really just regular students.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:04 PM ^
Agree with Chuck. My issue is that guys get an expensive education, a degree and no debt. That is worth something to a lot of people. So if that’s not valuable to some of these players, it would be great if there was a developmental league where they could get the exposure they want, a small salary, and the opportunity to compete for a spot in the NFL. Leave the scholarships out of it.
January 3rd, 2022 at 1:03 PM ^
They might get a degree, but to assume they received an education is disingenuous at best. These kids are receiving passing grades in their classes solely due to them being on the football team, and I'm willing to bet that 90%+ of the players on our team would not be accepted to Michigan if it weren't for their sport.
What we have is kids not typically academically strong enough to handle the classwork, having a full time athletic job, getting a degree in a field they probably hardly participated in. The "expensive education" they "receive" SHOULD be free because the only thing they are actually getting is that piece of paper.
I mean, cmon, how many of our players major in "General Studies?" You think they come to UM due to academics?
January 3rd, 2022 at 1:03 PM ^
They might get a degree, but to assume they received an education is disingenuous at best. These kids are receiving passing grades in their classes solely due to them being on the football team, and I'm willing to bet that 90%+ of the players on our team would not be accepted to Michigan if it weren't for their sport.
What we have is kids not typically academically strong enough to handle the classwork, having a full time athletic job, getting a degree in a field they probably hardly participated in. The "expensive education" they "receive" SHOULD be free because the only thing they are actually getting is that piece of paper.
I mean, cmon, how many of our players major in "General Studies?" You think they come to UM due to academics?
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:11 PM ^
The kids who want to train and play like minor league professionals should be able to do so without having to go to college and pretend to be students.
A while ago a football player from the Ivy League wrote an article about this with an interesting perspective:
If you want to be an actor you can go to college to be an actor. If you want to be a journalist you can go to college to be a journalist. If you want to be an architect you can go to school to be and architect. And so on.
But if you want to be a football player or a basketball player you have to pretend to be at college for something else. Even though college is the best place for most to get high-level football and basketball training.
These are all high-risk, high-return fields if you make it at the highest level. But most people don't wind up making it. Yet we still allow people to try of their own free will. But not for football or basketball.
It is an arbitrary distinction.
January 2nd, 2022 at 1:37 PM ^
I would say that the counterpoint is that sports is a young adult's career - you can only play sports for a certain amount of time, before your body wears down. That's not the case for the other careers mentioned.
Ex-athletes can go into coaching, of course, but by playing collegiate sports they already have de facto experience in the field. Majoring in football, basketball etc. wouldn't really make them any more qualified. (U-M eliminated its journalism school for the same reason: students were already gaining live journalistic experience by writing for the Daily, so there wasn't much point in studying journalism in the classroom.)
I think the issue isn't so much about asking them to major in something other than their sport, but asking them to be full-time students during their season. This creates two issues:
1) Many athletes can't major in their desired field because they can't fit the necessary courses into their schedule.
2) Asking athletes to complete 12-16 credit hours during their seasons, when they're going to be pressed for time, makes it harder for them to succeed academically (and may lead to increased academic fraud).
Maybe allow them to take fewer credits during the season?
January 2nd, 2022 at 2:26 PM ^
His argument has me convinced. Let kids major in football and get credits for football activities. They would still have to take general credits that are required of everyone, such as English 101 and a math credit, etc., but that would leave them with with like one traditional class per semester.
It would also allow then to minor in something if they can handle some extra classes or, if they take the same workload current student athletes are burdened with, double major.
January 2nd, 2022 at 3:57 PM ^
Most D1 athletes, even the non-football and basketball ones, do take less credit hours during the season. It's one of the reasons why a lot of athletes take summer classes - to make sure they are keeping on schedule to graduate.
January 2nd, 2022 at 6:48 PM ^
To go along with this, my son was in the marching band for several years, which was a class for credit. So he had to pay for the privilege of being in the band, but he did get an M letterman jacket.
It really doesn't seem that much of a stretch to make football or basketball a class, there's so much X's and O's it gets as complicated and time-intensive to learn as anything else on campus.
January 2nd, 2022 at 2:33 PM ^
The other thing, to that point, is that the football players get 12 exams every week that likely involve getting sandwiched by 250 lb guys running really fast and are also televised. Given that, can you blame them for blowing off whatever other actual course they are enrolled in?
If that's what design studio* was like for me, you can bet your bippy I'd be expending less than zero effort on electives like Dinosaurs And Other Failures**
* For any other CAUP grads, even though the physical punishment wasn't comparable, I daresay we spent more time in studio than football players spent on football
** IYKYK
January 2nd, 2022 at 2:44 PM ^
typo? 12 exams every...year?
i'm old, but in my day the guys tended toward more mainstream courses, not all 'rocks for jocks' courses. i went to b-school and so did a couple of other guys on my team. maybe (almost certainly?) the time commitment has been ratcheted up and that's not possible, but there is a data point from the '80's.
January 2nd, 2022 at 2:58 PM ^
Yeah I meant year.
But you are right that - especially since your time - jocks tended to get more and more steered towards less rigorous courses. And that is, I suspect, large a function of the overall trend towards specialization in all things - if the football team wants to win then, let's be real, biochemistry isn't going to help you pickup blitzes better.
I have a not-terribly-interesting secondhand anecdote about that I have probably repeated at least twice here, but here goes: I took Intro to Urban Planning as a frosh because it seemed germane to my major. It wasnt a bad course but it was an easy A, alas without that fetching gamine Emma Stone. But I did have the Fab 5, Doug Skene and probably a few other players in the course. After graduation when I had my first job, I mentioned that to my supervisor who also went to UM, and he said that, yeah, that professor was well known for having blowoff classes that were popular with athletes.
January 2nd, 2022 at 6:59 PM ^
And to think our current football coach once blasted the program for steering him and other players to classes like these. I remember wondering why he thought this was a problem, Bo did have a few players who were pre-med and the like that took the hard classes, so I figured Bo knew what he had in Harbaugh at the time and was probably in his best interest to be steered in the direction he was. The athletes who could hack it clearly were able to take the hard courses.
January 2nd, 2022 at 10:52 PM ^
I had one of those blow off classes as well. The course was something about sports in ancient Greek and Roman times. I even took it as pass/fail. The exams were open book, as I recall. It was kind of a joke but I did learn some things that I now have forgotten. Anyway, the class was huge and there were recognizable faces in it from the major sports programs. I enjoyed going to the class and sometimes seeing these prominent athletic dudes there.
January 2nd, 2022 at 3:07 PM ^
This is why I advocate creating (or expanding) opportunities for high-level players to enroll in courses (even in major(s)) that relate to playing sports at the professional level. Marketing, branding, crafting the best exposure for NIL, then also courses in coaching / front office work, and also opportunities for coursework in training, medical treatment aspects....
Basically give the players that want them opportunities to learn about working in the professional sports world from every angle, including how to deal with agents, preserve their capital, etc.
Michigan has an amazing opportunity to do this in conjunction with the business school.
January 2nd, 2022 at 5:14 PM ^
It could even be structured like a junior college. Two years of courses with the idea that these guys are trying to go pro after two years of playing. Get the courses in that they need, nothing extraneous. If they want to get a BA later, they can do that. I think a lot of these guys could benefit from personal finance courses, too, so they understand their own finances better, and how agents and contracts work, etc....
January 2nd, 2022 at 8:20 PM ^
I'd go a little farther, create a School of Athletics and Physical Education that would essentially be the equivalent of a college music conservatory. You can get a B.Mus. in piano performance, or violin, or voice, whatever. Admissions are heavily weighted in favor of musical ability over pure academics, obviously, but those interested in both can double major. The vast majority of the piano majors never actually make a living playing the instrument, but the majors are constructed so that along the way you take a lot of courses that can give you a landing place: theory and history, music education. The double majors can really do this right: I know a guy who majored in physics and piano and is working for Steinway now.
Why can't we offer a B.Ath. in football performance, etc.? (And of course an associate degree along the way, for those leaving after two years.) And instead of forcing everyone into general-studies B.A. classes they may or may not be interested in, give them the opportunity to study stuff that will give them a landing area if they don't make it or get hurt: sports marketing, sports management, physical education...all of which could be majors in the School too, but performance students would be required to choose one as a minor.
Basically we'd centralize sports-related stuff that we're currently doing all over the place (education, business school) and in the process create a home for the less-academic athletes. I really think we could create a useful program if we put our minds to it.
(The John Urschels of the world could double major of course. Or he could just major in math and get credits for his football time, if he wasn't interested in the auxiliary sports stuff at all and just wanted to get on with the spectral graph theory.)
January 3rd, 2022 at 2:07 AM ^
Add in the broadcasting and public speaking angles as well.