The football teams across the country are working hard to prepare for the upcoming season. These guys, even underclassmen, are rich and hope to play well enough to become richer in the National Football League.
If you are a college football fan, you are familiar with NIL (name, image and likeness) and the fallout that has come about for this grand ole game.
To put in perspective how skewed things are, a seasoned upperclassman linebacker can make as much as $300,000, which is about $50,000 more than a tenured professor who might be an exalted scientist. If the professor breaks his leg, he keeps on working. There is no NFL in his future.
While I know nothing about compensation for the Georgia football team, which I have been promoting since my sophomore year at UGA, the Internet confirms that a hot prospect quarterback can command up to $2,000,000 in compensation.
Professionalism was looked down on in yesteryear. Jim Thorpe won gold medals in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics, a remarkable feat, but was stripped of his medals when it was discovered that he had been paid $25.00 a week to play semi-pro baseball earlier in his career.
Everybody knows the story of the great Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” of Illinois, who was paid $100,000 in 1925 to play professional football, which caused a rift between him and his coach Bob Zuppke. Grange responded to the controversy by saying that if his coach got paid to coach, why should he not be paid to play?
Today’s kids have done nothing wrong, but the consensus is that the system is broken and nobody knows how to fix it. All I know is that the old system worked famously well for so many years.
Think of the kids from the projects and farm boys who were recruited to campus and became touchdown heroes, earned a degree, and went back home and became pillars of their communities. Some became lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. Others chose teaching, forestry, farming, and accounting and owned small businesses.
They were bankers, pharmacists, and a dentist or a doctor or two; all loved the outdoors and kept up with their alma mater’s football program, buying season tickets and following the team devotedly on Saturday.
Many joined the Rotary or Kiwanis Club and supported the football booster club and took every opportunity to remind the best prospects in their area to “keep Georgia on your mind.” They took vegetables and peaches and pecans to the coaches on trips back to the campus and helped the institution they revered to recruit the best prospects in their neck of the woods.
There has never been a better tradeoff in our history than giving a free education to an athlete to play a sport. While some are responsible students, many kids think they are going to get rich in the NFL and never have to work.
That is likely to work out for many, but for most, it will probably be different.
When these discussions come about, I think of Theron Sapp, the man who broke the drought. He earned unending fame by scoring the only touchdown on Grant Field Nov. 30, 1957, to end an eight-year winning streak by Georgia Tech.
He recovered from a broken neck to play three years at Georgia and nine years in the NFL. He made good money for the times but retired and settled in Augusta, where he was very successful in business.
His scholarship was important to him, so he went to class as a responsible student who wanted a degree as much as he wanted to score the winning touchdown. Greed had not come to the game in his time.
Times change and you have to roll with the changes—but let’s not abandon the principles and standards of the past. Ultimately, those pay the dividends that last.