The biggest tragedy with sports these days should   not be about an 80 year old senile man who owns a basketball team and says bad things about people.  OK it   is   pretty bad but at the end of the day he will be making millions and millions of dollars when he sells the team for himself.  That sounds like a reward not a punishment.  To me the biggest tragedy these days with sports is how they change the rules for college athletes so that they are not required to learn a single thing.  Just play that sport and make millions of dollars for the college.

The athletes are not getting a free education that will prepare them for the rest of their lives.  In many instances the athlete   is not even required to attend any classes. Dasmine  Cathey from The University of Memphis plays football for the University and is known as the guy who reves up the team before a game.  After the game he struggles to learn how to read.  He only feels comfortable reading Dr. Seuss books.  I feel the biggest tragedy in college sports is that a college kid should know how to read.  A college kid should at least be able to read about themselves on the Internet especially if they are a star athlete.  At least the crazy old man racist team owner gave a lot   of guys   jobs after college because the young men are not trained to do anything in life.

This guy is not alone it seems to be happening at college campuses all over the country.  Big time  athletes were reading like little kids.  At the University of North Carolina learning specialist Mary  Willingham was baffled by what she was seeing from the athletes arriving at one of America’s most prestigious schools.  They were coming in with reading levels of fourth, fifth and sixth grade.  How did these guys pass any grade?  You would think the NCAA had a rule to ensure that incoming    could handle a college curriculum at least requiring them to score  a certain level on standardized tests like the SAT or the ACT.  In 2003 that rule was revoked.  Colleges could now put athletes on the football field or   basketball court no matter how they scored on any standardized test

If you want to respect the athlete treat them like everyone else and make sure they get a solid education.  Teaching phonics to college kids might seem very strange but at UNC and many other big time sports schools it suddenly became very important business because of the NCAA’s new policy that   eliminated standardized test scores for athletes with some   new rules.  The new rules are that roughly half   the athletes on each team would have to graduate or the schools would not be able to compete in the post season and would therefore lose out on millions of dollars.  That is probably why great athletes who were pretty much totally uneducated were suddenly getting basic reading phonics at college.

They did not have to show up for class and were basically required to cut and paste something resembling a term paper to complete requirements.  No learning took   place.  To me that is more disrespectful to human life than   being called something terrible by a rich old man.  It happened to Mike McAdoo at UNC and Brian Bishop who also played at UNC where the athletic department told these guys what they have to major in which was African American studies.  That sounds pretty racist to me.  Many athletes were funneled into that major because they said it would be an easy major to pass including seven members of the school’s 2005 National Championship Basketball Team.

They were told to take Swahili for a   language which of course none of the athletes learned anything.  Where   would that language come in handy?  Their education was a farce and a joke.  It seems that every big time sports school has some sort of   plan   to get these guys to graduate and to keep the money flowing for the college.  University of Oklahoma  Professor Dr. Jerry Guerney was in charge of Academic Athletic Affairs at the school and part of his job was to make sure these guys graduated and did not get hurt by the NCAA’s graduation rules.  Every school wants to be in a Bowl game but could care less if the athletes learned anything.  He was required to steer the football and the basketball   players to the easiest majors that was so general that it did not require any expertise of any kind.  It is a trend that is still sweeping big time sports schools nationwide.  Three quarters of the athletes graduate with unemployable skills.  The Professor quit his job.  The schools now say they are now   trying to reform their policies.  If an athlete gives  a school their  best abilities for free, the school should be required to give them a good education in return for  helping them make millions of dollars for the school.  Then the old racist team owner should respect them for allowing the old guy to be so wealthy.