Senator Chris Shit-for-brains Murphy decided to Tweet about the college draft.

He reiterated some points about college football that I’ve heard before and I absolutely fucking hate with a vehement passion.

I’m glued to the NFL draft like most other sports fans, but it just reminds me how immoral the football syndicate is.

College football trains players for the pros, pays the trainees nothing, and forces them to endure 3 years of head trauma before getting a single paycheck.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) April 25, 2020

Hard not to notice all the shots of filthy rich, almost exclusively white coaches, GMs, and team presidents, drafting almost exclusively African-American players who have been forced to work for free for 3 years in order to get a shot to be chosen.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) April 25, 2020

Fuck college football player and everyone along with them tho think that they are so fucking special that they should get pro player salaries while in college or should be able to be drafted out of the freshman years in college.

If professional football is like any other profession, then college football players are effectively students majoring in football.  The time they spend playing in college is training to be professional football players.

This is no different than engineering students who spend four years working on a degree in engineering training to be professional engineers, or medical students training to be doctors, or nursing students training to be nurses, or even education majors training to be teachers.

Medical students, nursing students, education majors, law school students all have to do unpaid or internships as part of their education.

My wife had to do a semester of student teaching.  My sister had to spend a semester in a hospital.  My dad clerked for judges.  That is part of the accreditation.

I did two years of unpaid work under a PE in order to get my PE.  As a doctoral student I did research for companies and all I got was a discount on my tuition.

Playing college ball is the unpaid internship of the college football major.

Yes, the university makes money off of them.  The university made money off of me when I wrote grant proposals and white papers that brought in funding for research and equipment.

I’m tired of the bitching.  Football players should not be treated any more special than any other students who are required to do internships or student work to earn their degree and place in the professional world.

I’ve thought about this and have two sollutions.

One:

Colleges should create a BA in Football.  Any student who makes the team should be allowed to major in Football.  Forget making college football players pick a degree in some other subject.    Teach them game strategy, some sports medicine, the economics of football, personal money management, etc.  The stuff that a pro ball player needs to be successful.  Just admit that those kids are there to try to be pro ball players and stop bullshitting them and us with having them cheat to pass classes they don’t care about in degrees they might never use.  If they don’t get drafted, it sucks to be them, but lots of kids graduate with useless degrees too.  Not every kid with a journalism degree ends up a talking head on CNN or MSNBC.

Two:

End college football the way we know it altogether.  Spin it off as minor league like baseball.  I like this idea more because I really hate the fact that in many states, the highest-paid state employees are the millionaire salaries of the state’s big-school football coach.  In Alabama, Nick Saban is a state employee making an $11.125 million in salary.

Let the NFL create a minor league that young players can join out of high school and let it be easier for cities to create minor league franchises.  The let those coaches and players earn their money in the private sector.

I’d prefer the latter approach, but whatever we do, we need to stop treating college football players like they are pros getting screwed.  They are not.  They are students training for the pros and should be treated accordingly.