does anyone feel bad for our players
- Thread starter cybookie4
- Start date
Yes, I do feel sorry for our players.....from the '09 and '10 team. They busted their butts and put themselves out on the line every night, and didn't end up with more success to show for it. Hopefully the returning players will be better for the experience, and taste the rewards that go along with it.
Yea i would to, if i was being given a college education to play basketball, with most expenses paid for in the process....given access to educational resources, free books, ability to register for classes earlier than the rest of the student body, housing., meal plan etc......since i'm not or ever will, i can't really feel sorry for them.....they are being paid with a lifetime of opportunity for next to nothing...
I don't feel bad at all. A majority of them get to play basketball at a major BCS conference school. If ISU did not have a basketball program they would not even sniff the BCS conference bench!
Do I feel bad? Not necessarily especially for the guards. If Wilkins does not show up, they're all going to play because we'll have to go to a small lineup like Marquette since we don't have many forwards (Dendy, Vanderbeken, Dorr, and Railey). I mean, it sucks losing but at least most of those guys get to play especially when some of them are not the highest caliber of talent.
I often wonder if Div 1 sports are really that fun & enjoyable for a student-athlete.
I get the impression for most scholarship players, it's 24/7, 365 grind and not really an enjoyable College experience, but a semi-pro camp with little time for anything most normal people get during the college years.
Must be even tougher if one doesn't get playing time.
So everyone can lambaste them for quitting, not honoring commitments or moving on? Sounds like a no win situation to me.:no:
Unfortunately, most of them are enrolled in bogus, remedial, Grade-13, curriculums that have no relevance to the current job market / society; it was just a convenient schedule because of the time demands for sports.
Interesting article from last year which described many Div athletes have to reenter college in their mid / late 20's just to get retrained and educated in a relevant degree. What a shame and a waste of life.
I do get what you are saying, an athlete's schedule does absolutely suck. But a lot of that is personal choice. IIRC Paul Shirley left ISU with an engineering degree, and one football player was an Architecture major. Those are two of the most difficult majors at ISU in terms of time that is demanded - for engineering the amount of time needed for study and labs, for architecture the sheer amount of studio time that is required. If student athletes can successfully pull of that kind of curricula and participate in athletics, then I don't see how an athlete can't study business, communications, or something else that will be useful in a career outside of pro sports and be a student athlete at the same time. Now, I'm not trying to bring down business or communications majors, as I graduated with a Journalism degree with myself. But before that I was in both engineering and architecture, and communications classes don't even compare to the amount of time and energy that is required to pass.
The problem isn't (fully) in how much time they spend in training - it's in what they're doing with their down time. Now, I'm not saying that a person shouldn't be able to enjoy their down time. But perhaps if they spent just a little bit less of their downtime on the PS3 and a little bit more of their downtime in study, more useful majors wouldn't be so difficult. And yes, I wasn't an athlete, so I don't necessarily know what it's like. But I often worked two jobs while I was going to school, so I had outside commitments taking away from my study time as well.
I'm beginning to think it's not a choice.
A 3-part series conducted last year by USA Today looked at over 60 Div 1 schools (including Iowa, Kansas St - but not ISU). Over 75% of the men at Iowa's MBB & FB programs were "Clustered" into the same curriculum - some bogus major like (can't remember) "General Studies", or "Liberal Arts"..
other schools had over 80% of their MBB & FB athletes enrolled in programs like: Sociology, Communications, and other similar curriculums.
The point of the study was this "Clustering" phenomenon is prevalent at the Div 1 level and responsible for cranking out many athletes who have to renter college later in life because they graduated with a bogus degree that had little value to the job market. Instead their cirriculums were convenient to their practice and travel schedule.
Paul Shirley is the exception - I doubt Iowa State has ever had a MBB Mechanical Eng major since the 10-years Shirley graduated and probably another 10-years till we get another. Is that because our FB & MBB athletes don't want that major / can't hack it / or are "Guided" by athletic depts that it won't be "Convenient' for their sports schedule and they are better off majoring in XYZ because Professor Fanatic allows his exams to be emailed.
It's been a long time since I had my chemistry and biology lab courses - maybe ISU has a better variety of times and availability, but there is no way I could have had say Organic Chem Lab - which ran Tue * Thur afternoons for 3-hours each, and been able to make practice. Matter of fact, I had no athletes in my lab courses the entire 4.5 years at ISU....they were all majoring in Sociology.
