Missouri bill aims to strip scholarships from college athletes who refuse to play

Legislation written by politicians that micromanages how an employee does their job is the worst type of legislation.

I agree 100% because a) this law is idiotic and unnecessary, and b) the threat of losing a scholarship already exists because coaches have a lot of power as to a players scholarship and its continuance.

Some scholarships aren't written that way, and if you're a "God" like player you can probably negotiate quite a bit, but your standard ones require all sorts of requirements, not just the NCAA requirements, but morals clauses, reporting, all sorts of things. You basically get a free degree for playing and winning games and encouraging donors to donate more to raise money for the college. Many academics hate the sports part of universities, but when that new library is wanted or the philosophy department wants a new building, its usually the sports boosters that can raise the money, it's not the basket weaving club bringing in $50 million for that purpose.

So winning games with amazing players is what raises money, gives status to the university, gives happy donors, and choice students to pick from. So there's a lot of incentive to lock down players like slave labor to make sure they continue winning and raising more money. And its a BS system and the NCAA is a criminal organization IMO.

It's kind of paradoxical to use contracts to shut down civil disobedience, when it's changing these contracts that is the aim of civil disobedience.

Sadly college players can't unionize like the NFL does. However they don't say they can't protest or wave signs or vote or sign petitions or the like against something else, as that doesn't effect their sports scholarship. If they were protesting because injured players on the field during games were being thrown out and denied medical care, that would make more sense, because they're protesting the thing they're brought in to do. But in these cases they're refusing to play because of something unrelated to the sports team. They coach doesn't care that you want to protest the biology department because they make you cut up frogs. That's inconsequential to your role as a student athlete.

Not that they have to keep their scholarships, they are welcome to turn them down, and protest, and the donors would apply pressure for change, but you aren't going to get that by just getting basically fired because you refuse to do what you're basically being paid to do. It would be even more powerful if they dropped the scholarship and (assuming they could) accept a scholarship to another school instead (I'm not entirely sure you can after a letter of intent but who knows). That would get donors attention fast. Or communicating with possible highschool stars and get them to refuse to sign with a school that does the things they're protesting against, so they couldn't be recruited. That would be powerful as well.

But just throwing away your own ride to protest something unrelated is ballsy, and ultimately might expose them to losing, since there are a thousand hungry high school seniors that would love that free ride.

Either way, the lawmaker is an idiot since this solves basically nothing anyway. Sports programs treat student athletes crappy enough without adding more nonsense to it.

/r/inthenews Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com