That's supposed to be the whole point of college and literally everyone who has been has been graded for something that has absolutely nothing to do with their major. I get your point about the athlete having to keep up with two things, but at the same time on the academic side for scholarship athletes it's not much more than being able to read and write like an adult
If you got my point, you wouldn't make your last sentence a point.
My point going back multiple pages is that if you want to hold student-athletes to the standards of students then you shouldn't make athletic performance part of how they keep their scholarship.
For example: If student is in school on an athletic scholarship and suffers an injury that prevents him from ever playing again, he doesn't get to keep his scholarship based on his academic performance. No one says "Well, you're a good student but a non-entity athletically so we'll give you an academic scholarship instead."
Or when said student wants to transfer from one athletic program to another, they make him sit out for a year. Why? If it's really about academics, so long as the student is attending his classes, why can't he also participate in the sport?
Or why is there only 4 years of athletic eligibility when most students now take 5 years to graduate academically?
It's not just that the student-athlete has to keep up with 2 things. It's that they're forced to abide by stricter rules on the academic side, while the school is always making it very clear that their ability to engage in academics always comes 2nd to their athletic performance.
If schools said - you get 6 years to graduate and your athletic scholarship is only related to your academic performance (ie - your coach can never cut you from the team so long as you're on target to graduate within 6 years) and you can get a job to get some spending cash and basically do everything the same way as other students, just you also have to play sports, I'd be more sympathetic to the NCAA. But that's not what's happening.
What's happening is that people applaud their schools for paying coaches millions of dollars to recruit the best athletes, not the best students. Then when the best athletes show up to school, they get criticized for not being the best students. However, no one is dragging the low academic performance non-athletes through the mud. Yet, if the coach only recruited athletes that met the upper half distribution of the school's criteria, people would fire the coach.
People applaud that system and then say that the athletes are to blame? How? They wouldn't be in that college if not for sports, of course they're going to prioritize sports once they get there. Hence the math job analogy. If keeping your math job was dependent on how well you played music, you'd be a fool not to prioritize music over math in your free time. What's the point of focusing on math when subpar musical output means you get fired? Meanwhile a bunch of people start criticizing you for your music obsession. But they're not going to lose their opportunities for following that advice...you are.
That dichotomy is at the heart of the why the NCAA will never have my support without significant reforms.
