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Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

nytimes.com

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Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#101

Post by MisterBastahrd »

linuxftw wrote: post #14
harryh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should schools only provide a basic education? There are a great many reasons to participate in after school sports: general health and fitness, teamwork, confidence, community. Schools can't do this too?

The reason is money. Where I'm from, only the rich kids do after school sports. The poor kids have two working parents and they can't afford to miss work to pick them up after school. We're subsidizing the rich kids to play sports with public funds, and that's total BS. Not everyone lives in a city, so they can't just take a public bus home after school and the after-school activity buses were canceled.

That's a nice anecdote.

In the real world, though, athletics keep at-risk kids in school and trying to get grades because they want to play and need to make satisfactory progress in order to do so. Athletics have helped a ton of kids grow into prosperous adults because it kept them invested in their educations until they realized that it's what they needed to do anyway.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#102

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

dragonwriter wrote: post #97
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We let students major in theater, but not in football. There's a big difference.

> We let students major in theater, but not in football. Well, we usually don't call it “football” specifically, but “exercise science” or something similar is commonly available. And Baylor has “general studies”, which despite the generic name is intended to support “general career areas of health, fitness, recreation, and sport”, and that's what most of their football players major in.

Do you have to be on a team for those majors? Or does it count towards them? If not, I'd say that's still not the same.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#103

Post by aripickar »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #87
aripickar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Football in general provides massive benefits to Universities. 1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports…

> probably the most underpaid state employee What about the athletes themselves who are taking years off their lives, while getting absolutely no compensation?

If we're solely talking about underpaid, then the absolute peak value of a college football player at the top of the game is probably under 10 million. IMO, the value of Saban is probably closer to 60 or 70 million[0], so he is more underpaid. Of course, the situation for players is a much more egregious underpayment.

[0] Really hard to quantify, but comparing the revenue effects and higher order revenue generation of programs with elite head coaches to mediocre head coaches leads to this value.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#104

Post by Rebelgecko »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #94
aripickar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Football in general provides massive benefits to Universities. 1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports…

“Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US.” A coach that makes 5 million working with athletes that aren’t paid for risking their health is underpaid?

There's NFL coaches making twice as much as him while producing significantly worse results. And he's certainly bringing in more than $5 million of revenue and free marketing to the university

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#105

Post by Rebelgecko »

partialrecall wrote: post #66
headcanon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement was scoped to NCAA Division 1 schools, which I imagine all have profitable football programs. However most of those also happen to be top-tier academic and research schools as well (there are of course exceptions), so I'm comfortable scoping the conversation to those schools.

Well as I said previously, I take issue with the scheme as a whole. Furthermore, don't many players, coaches, etc, transfer up from lower divisions when they demonstrate themselves to have exceptional merit? It's not clear to me that Division 1 wouldn't be impacted if the lower divisions were eliminated. If that's true, then lower divisions are effectively subsidizing higher divisions, so it's a mistake to consider t…

For players, there's some transfers but I certainly wouldn't say "many"

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#106

Post by Rebelgecko »

aphextim wrote: post #24
partialrecall wrote: post #3

It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy (but there is no shortage of other non-academic activities that many students share, such as baseball...) And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game ea…

There was push-back a while ago to where the schools were using the student's identity for college based video games and profiting off the student's names, and the students never saw anything from it. There was a suit and the college kids won! https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-la...

Of course the end result was that the game series was discontinued.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#107

Post by frogpelt »

partialrecall wrote: post #16
linuxftw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is college baseball. I'm firmly in the camp that sports have nothing to do with education, and there should be no association of organized sports and public educational institutions whatsoever. Gym class is one thing, but after-school sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education.

Compare the proportion of MLB players that came from the university system, and the proportion of NFL players that did. Most MLB players come from minor leagues operating independantly from the university system. I'm not suggesting that universities ban sports clubs. I object to university systems become the primary feeder for corporate professional leagues. American Football and Basketball do it. Baseball and normal…

You can object to sports feeding corporate. But university feed corporations in every area.

I object to tuition going up 8% a year for the last 3 decades That's a much bigger problem even though it's sort of topic to the original article.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#108

Post by jumpman500 »

partialrecall wrote: post #3

It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy (but there is no shortage of other non-academic activities that many students share, such as baseball...) And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game ea…

>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy

I disagree with this. I was a college athlete. I firmly believe that being an athlete teaches you more about being a leader, a teammate and having discipline than almost anything else. Those are extremely desirable skills to have in any work place. I do think any team based activity can build the same skills if there's a common goal to be achieved. College athletes just have the guarantee that they've been doing it for multiple years.

Football players get picked on all the time because of a lot incorrect stereotypes about the people that do it. Not all football players are idiots. Look up John Urschel.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#109

Post by Jach »

klenwell wrote: post #89
tlrobinson wrote: post #37

Alternative less-clickbaity headline: Alabama incentivizes students to stay at games by offering improved chances of getting playoff tickets. When I first read the headline my mind naturally jumped to the most extreme interpretation: Alabama was using some sort of involuntary tracking technology to lower students' GPAs if they don't attend football games. Obviously very far-fetched, but knowing how much Alabama loves…

The current NY Times headline (did it change?) doesn't mention penalties but emphasizes the creepy tracking part: Orwellabama? Crimson Tide Track Locations to Keep Students at Games But for that gross invasion of privacy, I'd say this was a pretty clever solution.

It's not an invasion when you invite it.

Re: Alabama tracking students' locations to penalize them for leaving games early

#110

Post by jtcruthers »

selectodude wrote: post #82
cafard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not bet against the NFL. Still, the very short life of the XFL suggests to me that Americans want to see their minor league football with college branding.

College football is not a quality product. The kids are young, the vast majority aren’t going to even sniff a pro career, there are hundreds of teams to dilute all the talent and most of the games are blowouts. The entire business model is the personal connection with your school. There’s literally no other reason to watch.

> College football is not a quality product

The multi-billions of dollars spent on it begs to differ. Just because they aren't old (are 22 year olds really too young for athletics?) doesn't mean it is a bad product. Many consider it to be a much more exciting game opposed to the 7-3 games the NFL puts out.

I'd rather watch a 49-21 game than a 14-6 snoozefest.

This is really your personal opinion.

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