Post: #1More Swarbrick comments on college sports "broken system"
From the article:

"College sports has moved on from the beliefs of its Founding Fathers, beliefs that sustained the enterprise for more than a century. When the Fighting Irish athletic director, a pillar of the establishment if ever one existed, says, “Somebody tell me the positive value of amateurism,” you know the old order is dead.

“Did anybody ever argue the babysitter had a better experience if he or she didn’t get paid?” Jack Swarbrick continued.

College athletics has been a bastardized form of amateurism for decades. Someone decided a long time ago that bartering tuition, books, room and board for the ability to throw a back-shoulder fade passed amateur muster, a decision of convenience, if not principle.

The Olympic movement abandoned its insistence on amateurism a generation ago. The NCAA has been slower on the uptake.

“I don’t believe the NCAA can be reformed,” Swarbrick said. “I think it’s too broken.”


Swarbrick described the two models as the opposite ends of a spectrum. At one end, he sees universities licensing their names to a “franchise,” a choice no different for the athlete then the minor leagues. At the other, he sees players receiving academic credit for playing, a national policy for missing class – in general, a more 20th-century model.

“This isn’t some attempt at advocacy that one model’s better than the other,” Swarbrick said. “We’re just not prepared, all of us, to pursue the same one. We need to have the two options available. Let schools decide which way they want to go.”