How much is the UK football establishment entangled with universities or colleges? In the US, college football is an enormous thing, and many young men take the football route to get a scholarship for an education they otherwise couldn't afford.
The stereotype is that many of the players are there purely for the game and the academics are a thin veneer of plausibility, but it's a system that has to be also turning out young men who went in for the free education (and took the best of it while they had the chance) and then discover they can make a lot of money playing football before starting the career they actually want...
There is a lot of truth to that stereotype, to be honest.
Several American universities are more like front ends for college athletic organizations (*cough*universityofmiami*cough*). Promising football athletes get scholarships alongside a coaching staff that feeds them extra tutoring, prewritten essays and sometimes outright cheating to artificially inflate their grades high enough to keep their grades at the level required by the NCAA.
Plenty of college football players go in with little or no academic background, play for their college for four years, but never make it to the pros and never got a real education. After four years of ridiculously fast living, they're dropped on the street with no way to support themselves.
There are also some dudes like Mr. Kluwe. He's not the majority, unfortunately. I suspect his sort are outnumbered by those whose teams' legal staff are buying silence for rape cases on their behalf.
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theweaselking
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-08 08:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-08 01:25 pm (UTC)The stereotype is that many of the players are there purely for the game and the academics are a thin veneer of plausibility, but it's a system that has to be also turning out young men who went in for the free education (and took the best of it while they had the chance) and then discover they can make a lot of money playing football before starting the career they actually want...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-10 06:35 pm (UTC)Several American universities are more like front ends for college athletic organizations (*cough*universityofmiami*cough*). Promising football athletes get scholarships alongside a coaching staff that feeds them extra tutoring, prewritten essays and sometimes outright cheating to artificially inflate their grades high enough to keep their grades at the level required by the NCAA.
Plenty of college football players go in with little or no academic background, play for their college for four years, but never make it to the pros and never got a real education. After four years of ridiculously fast living, they're dropped on the street with no way to support themselves.
There are also some dudes like Mr. Kluwe. He's not the majority, unfortunately. I suspect his sort are outnumbered by those whose teams' legal staff are buying silence for rape cases on their behalf.