MIAMI - Brother, can you spare a dime? Because Daddy Coach needs a new tray of hamburgers.
The NCAA Legislative Council’s pronouncement Tuesday that Division I/Football Bowl Subdivision college athletes can receive “unlimited meals and snacks in conjunction with their athletics participation” told athletic departments living on thin margins, “You’re going to have to sell more apples to bring home the bacon.”
Allegedly, the NCAA was moving in this direction before University of Connecticut guard and Final Four Most Outstanding Player Shabazz Napier told national media at college basketball’s grand showcase he sometimes went to bed “starving.” Coincidence that in the ensuing reaction, the NCAA pushed this new outlook to the front of the line and quickly publicized it?
Of course not. The NCAA didn’t want to issue a statement saying, “Looking at the well-fed members of the UConn football team and national championship women’s basketball team, we’re not exactly sure how Mr. Napier went to bed starving unless his meal money went to pleasures other than the gastronomic. Also, at a school that collects national basketball titles, there are plenty of friendly fans and students willing to help a Shabazz out. Also, Mr. Napier clearly didn’t learn the bargain shopping and cooking skills that get many a poor student through years of low funds and little sleep.”
When you spend decades making your greatest profits off athletes who coaches all but discourage from getting a real college education, you’re imprisoned by the glass house from calling “balderdash!”
Anyway, this ruling didn’t just cover the stomachs of basketball and football players. “Division I athletes.” That covers 32 potential men’s and women’s teams of athletes, if you consider the heavy crossover between indoor, outdoor track and field and cross-country. That will soon be 33 when sand volleyball gains full status.
Few schools field teams in every sport. But whether you’re Stanford, with 27 teams, or Florida Atlantic, which fields teams in 17 sports, or Florida International, which fields 14, the NCAA just shot your food costs into the air. Where it will land, you know not where.
Look at the legs on the athletes in baseball, softball, men’s and women’s volleyball. You don’t build those with squats and jumps fueled by salad. And you want to give your nearby bodega owner a feel-good Friday, tell him a pile of swimmers or water polo players just moved into the area. Those folks burn calories like Terrell Owens burns bridges. Swim practices turned my daughter into Joey Chestnut at dinnertime. A woman told me last year she would come home to find her teen daughter’s swim pal, chair pulled up to the open refrigerator, fork in hand, pounding food.
As a person who worked in the operations department of a Division I football program said to me, it’s easier to get people to shed money when their names wind up on buildings, stadiums or parts of them. Getting them to donate for another training table nobody sees or discretely set athlete cafeteria isn’t as easy.
Sports, Pages 14 on 04/21/2014