Today In the Noble Ideals of Amateurism

I knew this would happen when the NCAA removed bans on compensating players:

As you might expect, many of the course assignments that the support staff emailed to players’ professors had not been written by those athletes. The report cites an internal investigation that checked the metadata of the documents handed in, and found that “the ‘Author’ and ‘Last edited by author’ field was attributed to someone other than the student-athlete.”

This stuff presumably goes on at most programs, and it’s tough to get too worked up—neither these athletes nor their programs believed they were in school for any reason other than basketball—but there are two things worth noting:

1. I’m impressed at how streamlined Syracuse made this process. Rather than requiring the players hand his assignment to a tutor, getting it back completed, and turning it into his professor, Orange players could stay out of things altogether and let the tutors just pretend to be them at every step.

2. I’m depressed that a university was devoting time, money, and resources to tricking itself.

Hopefully, we can go back to the good old days in which players were denied compensation and hence student-athletes were students first and athletes a very distant second.