Larry, the answer to the problems of life without NCAA is simple:  Make college sports what they were originally intended to be - amateur.  I am at a Div III school.  The athletes in our programs work just as hard and sacrifice just as much as they do at Div I schools.  We don't have the stars you guys do so the quality is not as high, but from the student athlete point of view the *sport* part of it is the same (OK, we do have a shorter season, too).  If athletic scholarships were ended the talent would spread out more across schools, but is that really such a tragedy?

So the question becomes, what do we value more:  Concentration of talent at some schools or purity of the sport?  I know others will disagree with me, but I think it really does come down to that.  To achieve some level of equity in the former we have the NCAA and all of its focus on big money (to not allow athletes to be bribed while lining their own pockets) leading to some rules that are good, some maybe not so good.  In the absence of the NCAA I agree that big time college sports at scholarship schools would become rapidly more corrupt - you do need some kind of external rule-making/rule-enforcing agency.  OTOH, the NCAA doesn't exactly have a good track record of equity, does it?  Some of the penalties they impose boggle the imagination.

For my money, I would just as soon see athletic scholarships ended.  I am sure that the best athletes who want to go to a big-time program would find some source of money to go there anyway.  Don't you agree?  So the Nebraskas, Michigans, etc., can still be the big programs and charge a fortune for tickets, the athlete gets paid to go to college, and the little guys like us have a chance to pick up some talent that would have been good enough for a scholarship in the old days but isn't good enough or clever enough to find alternative revenue sources.

If that doesn't generate a reaction, I don't know what will!  :-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 6:27 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Letters of Intent
>
>
> In a message dated 2/4/2002 9:52:25 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
> > And I thought Lincoln freed the slaves. Actually it was
> Pierre Eliot Trudeau
> > and Lincoln only freed the slaves in the states that were
> in rebellion.
>
> The fact is the "letter of intent rule" is designed to
> prevent a greater evil
> and that is the inducement to leave a school and/or renege on
> a commitment.
> Unfortunately those who constantly decry the NCAA on this
> list do not have
> any suggestions for what would be better. Read any of life
> long NCAA critic
> IU prof Murray Sperber's books and you will see that the flip
> side is the
> elimination of D1 college sports and scholarships. The players are no
> different than minor league players or in the case of hockey
> junior a. We all
> enjoy college sports and I guess we all choose to overlook
> the hypocrisy of
> "student athletes" and the big money nature of college sports. It is a
> business with many schools having one AD for revenue sports
> (really a pr
> finance guy) and a real PE who runs the non-revenue sports.
> Hockey is the
> bottom rung of revenue sports at most schools (exception
> where it is the only
> D1 sport). Does a basketball team need four assistant coaches?
>