College Athlete Argumentative Essay

Cardale Jones, as a freshman football player for Ohio State, famously tweeted his opinion on college academics, saying “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS”. He was suspended for the Buckeyes upcoming game against the Nebraska Cornhuskers, and his twitter was taken down. Despite Ohio’s speedy action on the matter, I was curious as to what made Jones feel the need to tweet this in the first place. What made an athlete feel as though he was above the rest of his university, and what are the possible implications of this train of thought? College is presented as an opportunity to further education, but it seems to be presented to athletes a bit differently, as

Walk-ons are typically paying a large sum of money to attend school, thus taking advantage of both academic and extracurricular experiences. It is mainly the athlete on scholarships and those in mainstream sports such as football and men’s basketball that are showcased as “celebrities” rather than students. The university is paying these athletes to play a sport that will represent the school, so they strive to get the best players, and continue to make them better athletes rather than better students. Big name colleges make a lot of money on sporting events, and the better their team, the more fans they will have at their games, and the more revenue they can generate. This treatment and pressure on athletes may mean more intense practice schedules, increased time in the gym, less time in classrooms due to travel for games, and overall favoritism in some of the more elite athletic

The top athletes in any high school class are most likely going to receive financial compensation from a university, specifically in the form of scholarships. But even with these scholarships that range in amount based on the athletes talent and the division of the school, some members of society are fighting for the payment of athletes in addition scholarships-money that these students can use on things of their choosing, such as groceries or social activities. Former basketball player at UCLA, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in an article from The Guardian newspaper, plays to the audience's sense of compassion for college athletes. He tells the story of his starving student days, saying “It was frustrating to win championship after championship every year, hear thousands chant my name, and then go to my bedroom to count my change so I could buy a burger” (Abdul-Jabbar). His argument relies on the fact that athletes typically aren’t allowed to have a job while signed with a team, and even if they were they don’t have the time to work between practices and traveling to games. He claims that athletes have to work a “full-time job in the gym”, many of whom come from poor families who couldn’t have paid for college without a scholarship (Abdul-Jabbar. “It’s Time”). As a former college athlete himself, Abdul-Jabbar is extremely bias, so it’s hard to tell what parts of his story he exaggerated (if any)