Buzz Bissinger admits it’s a radical idea: a world with no college football. 

But at a debate on May 8, 2012 at New York University’s Skirball Center, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist stood at the podium with fellow journalists and former football players and proclaimed that college football should be banned from universities across the country. 

He pointed to health reasons. Academic reasons. Monetary reasons. Corruption. College football has evolved into one of the largest money-making enterprises in  all of sports, and football in general has surpassed baseball and every other sport as the  country’s most popular, as evidenced by a Harris Interactive Poll released by USA Today in January of 2011. The debate about whether or not to ban college football highlights a  number of issues surrounding not only college football, but all college athletics and the  National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) itself. 

“Radical times call for radical changes and this is a radical time in our society,  particularly economically as the challenges we face from the global economy are more  intense than ever…from India, from China, from North Korea,” Bissinger said. “Our  level of educational attainment is at 14 percent, which is very, very low. Yes, it’s radical  but it has gotten out of control.

“This is a problem that’s gone on for 80 years with virtually no change.” Boston University did a study that looked at the brains of football players who  died earlier than the average lifespan — either as the result of health issues or suicide. Of  the 44 brains that were examined, every single one of them had advanced chronic  traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a brain-destroying disease that has been linked to the  deaths of Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster, Philadelphia Eagles safety  Andre Waters and numerous other athletes. Waters, who shot himself in the head in 2006 at age 44, was found to have died with a brain comparable to that of a 67 year old.

Just recently, former National Football League linebacker Junior Seau, a likely Hall of Fame candidate, committed suicide after a 19-year NFL career that followed three  years of college football at Southern California, four years of high school football, plus  several years of youth football. Seau suffered countless concussions during his playing  career and his brain was also found to have suffered CTE. 

Football players are especially at risk for CTE because of the repeated hits they  suffer during their careers. Blows to the head damage nerve fibers, which release proteins  that sit in the brain and kill cells in regions of the brain that regulate emotions and critical  thinking. 

“He had very big exposure,” said Dr. Julian Bailes, the director of the Brain  Injury Research Institute, to the New York Daily News in regards to Seau’s condition. As a result, there’s a class action lawsuit in place where more than 1,000 former  NFL players are suing the NFL because of head injuries they suffered during their  playing years.

But keeping the focus on college football, Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock  was on the other end of the debate against Bissinger along with former NFL player Tim  Green, who is now an author. Whitlock, who played football for Ball State University and is now one of the leading black columnists who often tackles racial issues in sports,  said Bissinger wasn’t accounting for all of the good things college football brings to  universities and those who play it. 

Football was his “access to the mainstream and a better life” and allowed him to  be the first person in his family to graduate with a college degree. He called it “the  ultimate melting pot.” It brings together people from all walks of life and all different  races. 

“The reason I never lose faith in America is because of my college football  background,” Whitlock said. “I have seen people of tremendous differences come  together for one goal.” 

Of the 10 sports that contain the largest percentages of athletes of color, five (basketball, volleyball, cross country, softball and tennis) are offered by more than 83 percent of NCAA institutions as of 2008. Two other sports (indoor and outdoor  track and field) are sponsored by 59 to 68 percent of NCAA schools, according to the  Women’s Sports Foundation’s. 

Whitlock agreed that there were plenty of ways to change football — less  practices with padding where players take hard hits when they don’t need to, less games  per season, and just generally a better care given to athletes with head injuries. But he  couldn’t subscribe to the notion of banning college football altogether.

Neither could Green. He pointed to a statistic that said there are more indirect  fatalities in rowing (16) than football (2) each year. Furthermore, Green pointed to  monetary benefits. 

“You’re going to find that there are tremendous monetary benefits to the  university whether they’re direct or indirect,” Green said. “Look, this is America. Universities are businesses as well as educational institutions because they have to make  money to pay their professors, their staff and the grounds and maintenance. It’s just a  faulty premise.” Now that opens up an entirely new can of worms.

Is too much money put toward college athletics?

Since 1989, faculty salaries at U.S colleges have gone up 30 percent, while  university presidents’ salaries have increased by 100 percent. 

Football coaches? 500 percent. 

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the highest average salary for  faculty members was at Harvard University, where professors made around $198,400. That number was only higher than one head football coach’s salary prior to the 2011- 2012 season — Arkansas State’s Hugh Freeze. Freeze was the lowest paid coach in the  country at $151,600, while Western Kentucky University’s Willie Taggart was the  second lowest with a base salary of $225,000. 

Freeze left Arkansas State after one successful season to become the head coach  at the University of Mississippi for a far more lucrative salary. Freeze will make a base salary of $1.5 million with a chance to make up to $2.5 million after factoring in  incentives. At WKU, after going 9-7 and nearly playing in a bowl game for the first time  since it joined the FBS as a full-fledged member in 2009, Taggart was given a $250,000  raise, pushing his base salary to $475,000. That makes him the highest paid employee on  WKU’s campus. 

Coaches are rewarded with large pay raises after successful seasons because that’s  what the college football market has created. Sports nowadays are a “what have you done  for me lately?” enterprise. A good season for a coach can often result in job offers  elsewhere for a lot more money. That’s partly why Taggart was offered such a big raise  at WKU. The school wanted to keep its momentum in football that it built up under  Taggart in hopes of sustained success after a long period of disappointment, highlighted  by the nation’s longest losing streak of 26 games that was snapped in 2010 — Taggart’s  first season at WKU. 

Sustained success means more fan interest, which means more ticket sales, which  means more money for the programs. Football programs, on average, bring in millions of dollars of revenue to their university. 

Naturally, a few faculty members at WKU were furious when they caught wind of  Taggart’s raise. They felt the university was showing a serious case of misplaced  priorities, she told the WKU student newspaper in December.

“The university has sent a message that it values entertainment over education,”  Faculty Regent Patricia Minter said. “We’re delighted that athletics is an important part  of our extracurricular activity here at WKU. But ‘extracurricular’ is really the key word.” 

Minter was one of two regents to vote “no” to Taggart’s contract being approved  when it went before the Board of Regents in January 2012. She said she received more  than 70 emails criticizing the new contract, calling it unfair and demoralizing to those  faculty members who worked hard for raises. 

“This contract is the biggest merit raise in WKU history,” Minter said. “In  contrast, faculty and staff haven’t had a merit raise since 2007 — only small bonuses and  raises have happened since then.” 

Minter said that the new contract shows that academics are not as important as  sports to WKU. 

“If faculty are not rewarded for merit based performance, our equivalent of  having a good season, then WKU cannot claim to be a leading American university,” she said. 

As of 2010, athletic program subsidies grew 20 percent in four years, from $685  million in 2005 to $826 million in 2008, USA Today reported. At more than one third of  the 99 public schools in the 120-member Football Bowl Subdivision, athletic department

revenue coming from subsidies grew during the four-year period that was studied. 

Carole Browne, a professor at Wake Forest University, is a co-chair for the  Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a national faculty group that advocates for athletics  reform. She told USA Today in January 2010 that the trend is “appalling.”

“It’s appalling in the big picture and representative of what is going on within  athletics with coaches’ salaries and facilities,” she said. “It’s part of a bigger problem.” 

It’s brought up the question of who is actually running the school. Most recently,  Penn State University was the center of a national scandal regarding an assistant coach  who allegedly molested children in the football team’s locker room during his time with  the program. Testimonies revealed that long-time head coach Joe Paterno knew about  what happened and didn’t do anything about it. The school fired him, but not without  some serious pulling by higher ups. The students revolted, rioting on campus calling for  President Graham Spanier to be fired instead because of how beloved Paterno was. Fans  saw no wrong in Paterno. 

Prior to that, Ohio State football players were suspended or dismissed after  accepting improper benefits such as free tattoos and cars. In that case as well, the head  football coach was aware but never reported it. Even after those details were released that  head coach Jim Tressel knew what his players were doing, Ohio State President Gordon  Gee balked at firing Tressel. “I just hope he doesn’t fire me,” Gee said. 

Former Western Kentucky University Athletics Director Ross Bjork is the person who gave Taggart his raise, but he has since left WKU to become the athletics director at the University of  Mississippi. New Athletics Director Todd Stewart said he understands the faculty’s concerns when it comes to Taggart’s salary raise because the faculty as a whole is underpaid. Faculty members are making just $85,900 on average.

“Certainly, we’re all in the same boat in terms of the salaries — they haven’t  moved a whole lot in the last year, and we understand that,” he said. “We can certainly  understand why a faculty person or a professor who’s worked extremely hard feels like  they haven’t made a lot of movement with their salary, and then they see a coach double  their salary…I mean, certainly, I can understand why they’d be frustrated.” 

But Stewart said there are a couple of things that are important to point out. WKU’s athletic budget is only 5 percent of the university’s overall budget. He added that  $21 million is a lot of money, but in the context of an entire university’s budget spending,  

it’s not that much. The other 95 percent of the budget goes elsewhere. “So I don’t feel like it’s an excessive amount relative to all the expenditures on  campus. That percentage is probably favorable to us nationwide,” he said. But, as Bissinger asked, are the salary raises really worth it? 

Ohio State has twice the number of employees in the athletic department as the  English Department, Bissinger said. The Knight Commission, who has been a leader in  collegiate athletics research for some time, said there’s no correlation between wins and a  coach’s salary. 

But that’s just the cost of doing business in this day and age of college athletics,  Stewart said, and WKU was just doing what it felt it needed to do in order to keep a  coach that helped turn around a spiraling football program in just a few years. Secondly, football helps fund a lot of other things at schools.

“I almost wouldn’t look at it so much as a raise as it is an investment,” Stewart  said of Taggart’s raise. “We’re investing in a resource that is producing now and will  produce even more. A successful program brings all kinds of other things in.” 

Rachel Maddow, anchor and political commentator for her own show on  MSNBC, said if schools want to fix the spending issue and shift the money being used  for athletics to academics, they need to figure out how to buck that trend. 

“We get a lot of the same arguments in TV,” she said. “You’ve got a news budget  and you spend all this money on celebrity news anchors and you should be spending it on  shoe-leather reporting. The response from the people who are paying those salaries and  their agents — those are the people who are really bringing in the revenue, so we have to  spend on them even if it seems wasteful and profligate. 

“I think you get the same thing from athletics. As sort of gross as that argument  may sound, if that is the way that colleges are justifying divvying up their budgets this  way, you have to actually break that cycle. You have to say, ‘well, if the way we are  floating the rest of the university is by having a top-tier, national athletics program in the  ad revenue and the other kinds of revenue that are associated with that, you have to  imagine an institution where the revenue dependents don’t flow in that direction’…That’s  the argument you have to engage with. You can’t talk people out of what they think is  keeping them alive.” 

WKU earned $190,000 for making the NCAA Basketball Tournament in 2012 as  part of the Sun Belt Conference’s revenue sharing system. On top of that, the school is  still receiving residual revenue from merchandise and other sales.

But Stewart said the rewards don’t always come monetarily. Making the NCAA  Tournament or a Bowl Game provides a chance for a university to have its brand shown  across the nation. Using WKU as an example, or any of the schools that played in the  NCAA Tournament’s “First Four” round in Dayton, they received worldwide exposure. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron attended the games,  drawing a worldwide audience. 

“If you look at basketball alone last year,” Stewart said, “it’s hard to really  quantify and put a value — for our university, I’m not even talking basketball — of  playing an NCAA Tournament game on Tuesday night on national TV when it’s the only  game in the country, and you had CBS’ No. 1 crew doing the game and the President of  the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain are at that game, it’s getting  worldwide attention and it has Western Kentucky involved in it, that’s a high dollar value  to be a part of something like that and that’s what athletics brings. We take that  responsibility seriously, but we are kind of the front porch to the university and we take  that seriously.” 

That’s certainly the case at most schools. 

Typically, at least a portion of the money that football and basketball generate is  dispersed throughout the entire athletic department for some of the non-revenue sports to  use, like soccer, swimming, track and field, or tennis. When a smaller school goes to play  a big-time program in football, they’re often paid a large amount of money for that game. In WKU’s case, the school will receive $1 million for its football game on Sept. 8 against Alabama. It’s essentially a guaranteed loss every year they have one of these “money  games,” but it’s a necessary evil, at least for the time being. 

“We’d like to get to the point where we don’t need to,” Stewart said. “But I think  for the foreseeable future we’re going to need to play at least one of those. When you talk  about playing one game, and in the case of last year versus LSU getting $975,000, that’s  huge. That goes a long, long way.” 

In 2008, WKU’s paycheck of $850,000 for the game against Virginia Tech paid  entirely for WKU’s new football field. 

But when you talk about college football, it’s all about the bowl games. The  postseason for college football is quite different than other sports. It’s run by the Bowl  Championship Series, an entity that operates completely independent from the NCAA. They rank teams based on a computerized point scale and instead of a tournament, teams  are selected to play in a single postseason game, called a bowl game. Only the top two  teams in the BCS standings get to play for the national championship. There’s no  tournament to decide the winner. 

Bissinger said 43 percent of colleges lose money due to college football, and a big  reason for that is because of bowl games. 

Sometimes teams have to travel across the entire country in order to play their  bowl game and that proves to be a big hurdle for the team and most importantly the fans. “That happens more times than people realize,” Stewart said about schools losing  money. “A lot of times schools are happy to just break even. The benefit on that is that you can’t necessarily just measure it only in ticket sales because you do get a tremendous  amount of exposure with a nationally televised game. It helps with recruiting, certainly. You get side benefits from being with your team…there are a lot of plusses not  necessarily measured in dollars.” 

Last season, Illinois finished its season losing its last six games. Fan interest was  down, making it nearly impossible for the team to generate any revenue off ticket sales  for their bowl game. It didn’t help that the bowl game was in San Francisco — far out of  the reach of most Illinois fans. The school actually lost money on the game after travel  and low ticket sales were factored in. 

But the debate doesn’t stop there. Is all the money that could be earned by universities through football and other  athletics worth the negative effects that some perceive athletics to have? Bissinger asks  one question: what do sports do for athletes’ education? Unfortunately for some schools,  it sometimes leads to corruption.

Finding football’s place in academics

Bissinger said he has yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has  anything to do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education:  academics. He said it’s simply a distraction. 

“Who truly benefits from college football?” Bissinger asked in an op-ed piece that  ran in the Wall Street Journal in May. “Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their  alma mater based on the quality of the football team. Coaches such as Nick Saban of the  University of Alabama and Bob Stoops of the University of Oklahoma who make obscene millions. The players themselves don’t benefit, exploited by a system in which  they don’t receive a dime of compensation. 

“The average student doesn’t benefit, particularly when football programs remain  sacrosanct while tuition costs show no signs of abating as many governors are slashing  budgets to the bone.” 

Bissinger’s point on exploitation is really what’s at the focal point of this debate. College athletes essentially act as pawns for the university, bringing in millions of dollars  in some cases without being paid anything, apart from a scholarship. They can’t work on  the side during the season, so they have little money to spend on things that aren’t  provided by the universities. They have to figure out a way to come up with money from  outside if they can’t afford it. And as Whitlock pointed out, many of these athletes come  from single-parent homes. 

When that happens, oftentimes a former high school coach or mentor of the  athlete will give the athlete money to help pay for groceries, clothes, or even just give  them money for recreational activities like hanging out with friends and going to movies. If the NCAA sniffs this out, they bring the hammer down on the athlete. That sort of  interaction is seen as an “improper benefit” and will inevitably result in the athlete being  penalized — either by suspension or dismissal from the team, depending on the  seriousness of the violation — and the program will be penalized, either by probation or  sanctions. Sometimes programs have been forced to vacate wins and championships from  their record or forgo postseason play the following season.

To help that situation, the NCAA proposed a plan to give an athlete a stipend of  $2,000 to cover travel, laundry or any other needs. That policy likely won’t go into effect  until the 2013-2014 school year. 

Sometimes, the fame of playing a college sport leads to athletes dismissing the  importance of classes, or sometimes gives them a sense of entitlement where they feel  like they can cut corners. Or worse, coaches have been caught helping players cheat on  assignments in order to keep them eligible to play. 

In 2009, University of Southern Indiana’s head basketball coach and an assistant  coach were fired after such a situation. The head coach was specifically fired for  allowing an assistant coach to loan money to a player to purchase a plane ticket back to their Caribbean hometown to see his family over a holiday. But he was also fired, in part, for allowing an assistant coach’s relative to write papers for his players. 

At Florida State University, 61 football players took online tests when they had  been given the answers beforehand. The program was sanctioned and had wins vacated  from its record. 

At the University of Florida, the Computer Science program was dropped in order  to move that money to the football program, giving it a $78 million budget. If there’s a way to keep football, Bissinger said schools would have to cut all “non-revenue” sports so the money those schools would make could be put toward the school’s general fund. That way, everyone who goes to that school could benefit from it, specifically academic channels.

But Bissinger’s main point is that football does nothing to help the educational  efforts of an athlete. 

Some statistics don’t agree, though. Student-athletes in general typically have higher annual graduation rates than the regular student body. 

For a sample size, here’s a look at the three main state universities in Kentucky:  University of Louisville, Western Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky.

The NCAA measures graduation by a metric called the “graduation success rate.” A class is given six years to graduate according to the GSR, so the most recent figure that Stewart  had on hand was for athletes who came in during the 2004-2005 school year. Louisville  had 58 percent of student-athletes graduate compared to 49 percent of the general student body. WKU’s was also 58/49, while UK was the outlier at 56/58. The NCAA’s overall GSR for that class was 82 percent, a new high. 

For black athletes overall and especially in men’s basketball, the GSR number has  increased steadily as well, NCAA President Mark Emmert said. The single-year GSR for  black student-athletes is up two points from the previous year and one point for  basketball players. He also said in the latest report, there are approximately 400 more  black student-athletes and about 400 more black student-athlete graduates compared to  last year. 

That statistic was music to Dr. Richard C. Miller’s ears. Miller serves as WKU’s  Chief Diversity Officer and is a self-described “academic.” A former professional  baseball player himself and collegiate athletic director at Bowie State University, he knows all about the inner workings of college athletics and the decision athletes face on  whether or not to turn professional before earning a degree. Miller could have left college  early to become a professional baseball player, but instead stayed at Ithaca College to  earn his degree. 

After shattering his knee just three years into his minor league career, he said he  was “damaged goods” and couldn’t play baseball anymore. But he had his degree to fall  back on, so he wasn’t left scrambling to find something to do with his life. He hopes  other athletes make the same choice he made to get their degree because they too are just  an injury away from ending their career and not having a college education to fall back  on. 

“A larger percent of African-American players are on Division I-A programs,”  Miller said. “So when you have low graduation rates, you are especially taking into  consideration African-American players. I say to students and some of my colleagues,  ‘look. There are only so many jobs in the NBA. A lot of those jobs are beginning to go to  foreign players — Italians, Chinese, Korean players, which I don’t have a problem with at  all. The question is, when you recruit an African American player, what do you tell that  kid if he’s good enough that you have a chance to go to the NBA. 

“Well, there are only so many jobs there. You can be an excellent basketball  player — an African-American basketball player. But if there’s no jobs, where are you  going to go?”

That touches on one of the hottest debates in college sports today: Should the  National Basketball Association and NCAA create an agreement that would make the age  limit to enter the NBA Draft like it used to be? Previously, players could enter the Draft  out of high school if they chose to. Now, per a rule change by the NBA Players Union, they’re required to wait until they’re at least 19 years old or after their first year of  college, making players go to college for one year. The result was the inception of the  “one-and-done” culture of college basketball. 

It’s become a growing trend that the top recruits each year typically stay for one  year — two if the school is lucky — then go pro. Kentucky was the nation’s best college  basketball team in the 2011-2012 season and started three freshmen and two sophomores. Freshman Anthony Davis was the National Player of the Year and led UK to the national  championship. He’ll also likely be the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft this June. All five  starters from the UK team declared for the NBA together at a joint press conference in  April, joined by their head coach, John Calipari, who is now notorious for recruiting  “one-and-done” players. Since the 2007-2008 season when he coached at the University  of Memphis, Calipari has recruited 10 players who left for the NBA after their freshman  season. 

But Calipari said he doesn’t like the rule either, that he’s just using a statute that’s  in place and just trying to recruit the best available athletes. 

“I don’t think it’s a good rule,” he told media while in New Orleans for the Final  Four. “I hope we change it before this week’s out so all these guys have to come back. But it is a rule. It’s not my rule. It’s a rule we have to deal with.”

NBA Commissioner David Stern said he’d like to see the rule be changed to  where players have to stay in college at least two years before turning pro. But it’s not his  decision. 

“Everyone I hear from — NBA players, actually college coaches, NBA teams — everyone says it’s a pretty good idea, except the (NBPA), whose consent is necessary to  change it,” Stern told USA Today in late April. “So, what I tell people to do is, ‘Don’t  call me, call their union.’” 

Former NBA Player and current NBA/College Basketball analyst Steve Kerr  wrote a column for Grantland.com, an alternative sports press outlet, saying the age limit  for basketball players to declare for the NBA Draft needs to be raised to 20 years old. He  cited six reasons why, and one of them was one that’s not often discussed: Marketing. Extra time in school can result in better marketing for the athlete, Kerr said. People get  familiar with them. 

“In the old days, college basketball was the NBA’s single best marketing tool,”  Kerr wrote. “Nearly all of the league’s future stars were well known by the time they  were drafted. I’ll never forget watching the lottery in 1985, when the Knicks won the  right to select Patrick Ewing with the first pick. NBA fans had followed Ewing for four  years as he dominated college basketball at Georgetown; by 1985, they couldn’t wait to  see him on a bigger stage.” 

That’s the exact reason why former University of North Carolina star Harrison  Barnes stayed for his sophomore season. Barnes has always been a highly regarded student. He boasted a 3.6 GPA in high school and plays the saxophone. It was no surprise  that he attracted the attention of schools like Stanford, Duke and North Carolina. Barnes declared for the NBA Draft following the 2011-2012 season, but not  before two years of building his name at the college level. 

“The longer you stay in college,” Barnes told Jason Zengerle of The Atlantic, “the  better a brand you build.” 

But in the end, the biggest reason why athletes should stay in college is because of  education, said Miller, who openly proclaimed he wasn’t Calipari’s biggest fan and didn’t  approve of his mode of operation. 

“This one and done rule in basketball, to me, makes a mockery of the student athlete concept,” he said. “When you recruit athletes with the prospect of having them go  professional in one year, to me, that’s a mockery of the concept of student-athlete. I  literally despise the one-and-done rule.” 

Former head coach and current analyst for ESPN Bob Knight brought up his own  concerns about the “one-and-done” rule. He said theoretically, athletes could not go to  class at all in the second semester and not be punished for it. If they play on a team that  makes it far into the tournament, they’re travelling and worried mostly about basketball  from months of January to March. Tutors accompany the teams on trips and they hold  study sessions, but still, the athlete wouldn’t receive any punishment until the following  semester if their grades were bad. And if they’re planning to leave anyway, Miller asks  what motivation do they have to care about their grades. 

So should the NCAA do something to curtail that?

“Why would they want to?” Miller asked. “When the financial benefits to the  institution are so great, why would they do that? I think there are a couple things. One: I  would like the NCAA to be serious about graduation rates — factoring in graduation  rates. When it comes time to determine which institutions are picked to go into the  tournament…looking at graduation rates is really important.” 

The NCAA does have a metric in place to determine whether teams are  academically eligible for the NCAA Tournament called the Academic Progress Rate  (APR). Teams have to meet a certain benchmark number that’s taken from a rolling four year period or else they could face postseason sanctions. 

Additionally, Miller said he worries about the athletes who go to college for the  sole purpose of going into the professional ranks. He said it jeopardizes the academic  integrity of an institution. 

“I’m an academic because I know the value of a college education, even as a  professional athlete,” he said. “When a student goes to college, they should go for one  reason, and that’s to get an education and to get a degree. If they’re fortunate enough to be  skilled in athletics, that’s fine. But who’s to say that you sign a professional contract and  one year out you have a crippling injury and your career is done. You become damaged  goods. You are discarded and you have nothing to fall back on.” 

Perhaps there are misplaced priorities all around. Fans and alumni are wanting  one thing out of college sports while players may want another. In Bissinger’s eyes, none  of those priorities seem to focus on the academic aspect of college.

Bissinger and his partner Malcolm Gladwell won the debate on May 8, so maybe  their ideas of banning football aren’t too far from coming to fruition. The University of  Chicago beat them to it in 1939 when President Robert Hutchins banned football from the  campus for all the reasons mentioned previously. University of Chicago reinstated  football in 1969 in Division-III, but Bissinger said it’s an example other schools can use  because of how successful academically the school has become. Perhaps it will end the  exploitation, corruption and lack of academic fulfillment that college football, and sports in general, bring to the table in Bissinger’s eyes. 

Bissinger and Gladwell didn’t deny that there are plenty of good things that can  come from athletics. Teamwork, friendship and a sense of responsibility were some of  the aspects. And while football may pay for their education and players can get a degree  now, Bissinger and Gladwell asked, “what’s the point?” if years down the road they’re  not able to function with their degree because of head injuries. 

“It can happen,” Bissinger said of banning football. “It’s radical, but it should  happen now. Students now more than ever need to learn.”