The problem with the article is they are specifically addressing big time division 1 sports like football and basketball, the ones that make a ton of money for their programs and where the players basically are there to play football. With other college sports, no one would argue students should study, for example, lacrosse or women’s field hockey or soccer, because the students in those programs are student-athletes, they are primarily there to get a degree and they play sports, whereas with big time college football and basketball, they are there to play the sport and in many cases we pretend they are students (not all, there are obviously students who get serious degrees while playing those sports). When you play those sports, between practice, working out, studying game film, there just isn’t the time. And not surprisingly, these guys are mostly preparing to try and become pro athletes, college basketball and football are the de facto minor leagues for the pros.
Okay, so why can’t we compare them to let’s say performing arts? First of all, the analogy with money is ridiculous, when you talk about a division 1 college football program, you are talking coaches making millions of dollars, schools with tv contracts that bring in 10’s of millions,not to mention ticket sales for their huge stadium. I don’t know where that guy has gone to programs, but most performing arts programs are free at colleges. At Juilliard, other than when they have a big name soloist or conductor,the programs are free, and even with the high draw artist they charge a lot less than it would in the outside world. Meanwhile, last year I looked at tickets for the Rutgers/OSU game, they were like 175 bucks…
Okay, then let’s look at the concept of studying football the way performing arts majors do. Performing arts majors don’t just play their instrument or sing, or play in the orchestra occassionally , performing arts degrees have liberal arts requirements, plus they have things specific to their field, instrumentalists take whole tracks of music theory and ear training, they take courses in foreign languages (voice), they take courses in the history of theater , of shakespeare and albee and these courses are on the level of a college english major would take, while obviously the people taking these tracks are looking towards performing in the arts, it is a different experience…and in those programs while there is a lot of focus on their art, it isn’t the same thing, and they certainly don’t get away with what division 1 athletes get away with.
The problem with such a program is the same one as today. A program with a degree in football could conceivably be rigorous, with the courses in sports physiology, business, training, coaching, you name it, but you have the same problem you do today, while maybe a football player would be more interested in this, these would still take time the kid doesn’t have, there would be the same pressure as today to forgo time on the academics to practice and so forth, and soon it would come to be the same kind of sham degree that phys ed often was with athletes. While there is pressure on peforming artists with time, there isn’t exactly the same forces pushing the schools towards bending the rules for performing arts students as there is with football and basketball.