Cardale Jones Was Right: College Football Players Shouldn’t Have to Go to Class

By now, we have all seen the tweet that got Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback Cardale Jones in trouble back in 2012 criticizing the fact that college football players have to go to class. If you haven’t, here’s what he said on Oct. 5, 2012 as a freshman.

Of course this has been brought up constantly since he was inserted as the starter, and after the Buckeyes won the national championship Monday night with him behind center going up against the Oregon Ducks, everybody seems to be showing it.

I’m not going to defend him, Urban Meyer, or the school by trying to make the excuse that he was suspended that week, or maybe he has grown up and matured, or he obviously was joking, or anything like that.

I’m going to defend him by saying that Tweet was spot on, and if he walks it back for second, I’ll like him less, even though he probably had to.

Jones just played a crucial role in delivering the first ever College Football Playoff National Championship to Ohio State. He helped generate tons of revenue for the school by playing against arch-rival Michigan, Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship game, Alabama in the Sugar Bowl, and Oregon in the National Championship.

These were all giant revenue-generators for the school, each one bigger than the last, and Jones’s team won all four. He’s right. He went to Ohio State to do that. Not to go to class.

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As a Journalism major and a U.S. History major at the University of Maryland, I found it ridiculous that I had to take advanced stat classes to meet CORE requirements. Why should I have to take that, when it’s not what I came to college for? Many people reading this probably felt the same way about classes they took in college.

If you do, then why on Earth would you hold Cardale Jones, or any athlete in a revenue-generating sport, to a different standard? The same way you went to college for a particular major, these athletes came to play a particular sport. Yet the NCAA, under the guise of stressing academics, forces these athletes to go to class and have some sports management major at the very least, when we all know that’s not why they’re there.

Through the first half of the 20th century, the academic argument was a fair argument. Football was a club sport, something that smart academic students did on the side to be involved when they went to college, and if they got lucky enough they went to the NFL.

Now, college football, and college basketball, are nothing but money-makers for all of the major colleges to help all the other academic departments as they serve as pipelines for the athletes to get into the professional ranks.

For those two sports, the term student-athlete is more laughable than the notion that people don’t smoke marijuana because it’s illegal.

This isn’t to say these athletes shouldn’t take up classes or shouldn’t get the free ride to college. Of course they should. But if they want to make the ill-advised decision to put all their eggs in the NFL basket and not major in anything else, why not let them?

Who cares if they have very few career options then if they don’t make the NFL? We all know of plenty other pointless majors in colleges where there are very few career options upon graduating. Why should college athletics be any different?

If you want to say that athletes in club sports or sports that don’t bring in any money should have to go to class, fine. Their sport is useless to the school and the NCAA.

But if the sport is a revenue-generator for the pocketbooks of NCAA officials and other academic programs for the school itself, then the players in that sport deserve a degree from the school without attending a single class. They have already done way more for that school than 90 percent of the graduates from there will do combined.

So, again, let’s all open our eyes and see reality. College football is not a sport about student-athletes growing and developing as men. It is about those athletes bringing in as much money for the school as possible, dollars in the billions overall, and not getting to see a dime of it.

Then we complain that they don’t go to class?

Please.

Cardale Jones was right on the money with his tweet, and he shouldn’t have to apologize to anybody.

Next: Why Cardale Jones and Marcus Mariota Should Both Enter the NFL Draft

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