The timing of the Senate committee hearing, with a Big Ten presence (chancellor and coach) testifying, yesterday, and the Big Ten return of football announcement, today, is WILD

We’ll see the announced plan for other Big Ten sports soon. But if all this is what it takes for football to return, will all this be in place for other sports? If not, how can the Big Ten claim football is like all other sports, going forward?

And if football isn’t like other sports, can the conference start sharing TV revenue with football players? Setting aside culture wars and politics, TV did play at least some role is the decision to return to play, right?

There’s another part of this we should pause and think about. And that is, at what point do we see all that football players are giving to their schools and communities, and recognize what they currently are receiving in return just isn’t enough?

Dr. Jim Borchers, OSU head team physician, co-chair of task force medical subcommittee:

“The data we are going to collect from testing and the cardiac registry will provide major contributions for all 14 Big Ten institutions as they study covid-19 and attempt to mitigate the spread of the disease among wider communities.”

I imagine any historian of experimental medical testing on Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities will see red flags in this idea. Was an ethicist, historian, or humanities scholar involved in the conference decision-making?

When brands want to test out new products on college athletes of the schools they sponsor, athletes often see this as a cool opportunity, and I get that. But it’s a slippery slope, and my goodness look where we are now.

Athletes want to play. They want to help their communities. I get it. But for too long we have valorized this sentiment, constructing an idea with the false premise that if athletes get more out of the deal the goodness goes away, the morality becomes tainted. It’s just not true.

If it were true, coaches’ salaries would be on par with faculty salaries. Because they’re teachers of young men, and the sports are for them. It’s incredible we’ve convinced ourselves that the only way this system can work for the athletes is the scholarship model.

(Footnote: for the first 50 years of the NCAA, athletic scholarships were on the dirty side of the amateur line.)

Yesterday at the Senate committee hearing we watched the claim made, in various ways, by some under oath, that athletes aren’t responsible enough to have more money, that college sports could be ruined by NIL.

This, from @SportsLawGuy, is spot on.
I wish another starting point could be that what we’re doing right now isn’t a “collegiate model,” it’s something else. With this new starting point, we acknowledge the reality of college football, today, and build something new and better https://twitter.com/sportslawguy/status/1305885241853333506