Today’s guest column is by SUNY Albany professor emeritus Bruce Svare.
In 2001, the brilliant columnist Robert Lipsyte wrote a seminal column for The New York Times on the ugly status of college sports in American higher education. Entitled “BACKTALK; The Devil and an Angel Envision a Revolution in College Sports,” Lipsyte spent time with Sonny Vaccaro (the Devil), discussing his influential role with Nike in sports marketing and athlete advocacy, and with Dr. Linda Bensel-Meyers, then an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee and a whistleblower who was gaining national attention for exposing the academic fraud that kept athletes eligible to play their sport.
At one point in his article, Lipsyte reveals his “final four fantasy” in which the players will hold out playing in the championship game unless each is paid $50,000 for their participation. While the specific prediction never came true, Lipsyte’s forecast that commercialization would eventually take over college sports was prescient. In the year 2026, college athletics are all about athlete empowerment and welfare—think, stratospheric compensation in the form of name, image and likeness. It has completely overwhelmed any pretense for ensuring that athletes receive a legitimate university education.
The issues dominating college sports back in 2001 seem almost quaint by today’s standards. Sadly, sports reformers across the country have abandoned the hard work of courageous whistleblowers, such as Bensel-Meyers, and now sing the tune of college athlete compensation. So much for the integrity of the university and the supposed mission of educating students. When was the last time you heard of a college athlete being suspended for academic reasons? Let’s face it: Education simply does not matter any longer.
“College sports is dying,” Geno Auriemma, the University of Connecticut’s highly successful and outspoken women’s basketball coach, said on the Yahoo Sports Daily show at the beginning of September. “I’m not saying, ‘Hey, don’t pay the kids. Hey, don’t let them transfer.’ But I think every fan out there, every day they look at Yahoo Sports or pick up any other source of information, and they read about another lawsuit, another coach trying to get away with anything they can, another school trying to do whatever they have to do to win. The more this happens, and the more these things keep being the central focus of the news, the more we’re dying one day at a time.”
Should college sports in its present form be “saved”? This question is asked all the time, and slowly, the answer is becoming more self-evident.
Consider the highly touted Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) of 2026. While it was designed to bring nationwide uniformity and stability to college athletics, its deficiencies are manifold. The PCSA is opposed by many athlete advocates, lawmakers and major athletic conferences because it grants antitrust exemptions to the NCAA and limits player freedoms without allowing athletes to collectively bargain.
If passed, the act will be in litigation for years to come because it will continue a pattern of athlete exploitation while at the same time bankrupting colleges and universities, most of whom do not have the revenue streams to keep it afloat. Not surprisingly, the legislation does nothing to curb the growth of compensation and other benefits for college presidents, athletics directors, coaches and staff who continue to be in charge of the athletes under their control.
Sports in our colleges and universities should be extricated from higher education as soon as possible. Like Lipsyte before me, I have my own college sports fantasy, rooted in the reality that the present college sports system is not worth protecting or saving. In the parlance of Lipsyte, the “devils” have now completely dominated the “angels.” I dream, I fantasize, that major college presidents from the power conferences will finally band together and make the following joint announcement:
“As of September 2027, our institutions will not support intercollegiate sports. We will no longer sacrifice the central mission of our university, the education of our young people, by pouring billions of dollars into an activity that ostensibly is about entertainment and developing athletic prowess for professional leagues.
“Going forward, we will be happy to hand over the teams and lease our facilities to the major—and we should add, very wealthy—professional leagues (e.g., NFL, NBA and WNBA), so they can run the whole operation as they see fit. That means that they will be involved in organizing and financing all of the costs associated with the running of college sports as their minor professional leagues. The coaches, administrators, staff and athletes will have no affiliation with our colleges and universities but instead will be employed by their respective professional leagues.
“As college presidents, we are now saying that enough is enough. College sports simply can’t exist in its present form without bankrupting our colleges and universities. There is a greater good to be attained and that is the emphasis that will now be placed on the education of our students. This is the proud mission of our universities and we will not back down from accomplishing these important institutional and societal goals.”
I learned about what ails intercollegiate athletics at the knee of Jon Ericson, the founder of the Drake Group. He championed truth-telling, transparency and disclosure as the solution for even the most egregious examples of corruption and wrongdoing in our society.
Our weak college presidents have avoided telling the truth for too long. Their secrecy and poor decision making have undermined the academic values of higher education that we once held as sacrosanct and immutable. They must cut the lifeline of financial support for college sports and hand it over to the oligarchs and owners of our wealthy professional sports teams and leagues. With the enormous distractions and investments in college sports now removed, our institutions of higher learning can focus on their only mission, and that is providing the best, most affordable education on earth for our young people. It can be done. It just requires the courage and spine to do it.
The jig is up. The famous German writer and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it best:
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
We are finally in the self-evident stage of truth telling about college sports. It’s time for college and university presidents to get to work.
Bruce Svare is professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the State University of New York at Albany. He has written extensively on issues surrounding education and sports in America. This piece is an edited version of an earlier publication on Substack.