Shabazz Napier is the enormously gifted guard for the University of Connecticut who led his team to another national basketball championship Monday night. But before that, Napier spoke to the Connecticut Mirror about the Northwestern University athletes' attempt to create a union, and said the athletic scholarship is the only compensation allowed by the NCAA. "At the end of the day, that doesn't cover everything. We do have hungry nights that we don't have enough money to get food and sometimes money is needed," he said. "There are hungry nights that I go to bed and I am starving. So something can change, something should change."
Wow. It turns out that NCAA rules allow institutions to provide one meal a day to athletes, along with snacks. That merely underscores how tilted college athletics are toward the institutions and away from the athletes—at least those shaping the big-money sports like football and basketball—and how much change is needed, especially at the NCAA, which is thoroughly corrupt from the top down.
A couple of weeks ago, the usually astute Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins wrote disdainfully of the move toward a union, saying athletes are "highly privileged scholarship winners who get a lot of valuable stuff for free. This includes first-rate training in the habits of high achievement, cool gear, unlimited academic tutoring for gratis, and world-class medical care that no one else has access to." Apparently it also includes starvation diets for poor kids who come to college without any money. And the "unlimited academic tutoring" apparently led to the 8 percent graduation rate for these privileged athletes at UConn, which actually got the program suspended a year ago because the rate was so abysmal, and led no doubt to wonderful academic preparation for the "one and out" freshman class who have made many millions of dollars for Kentucky coach John Calipari. Not to mention the pathetic one-paragraph "research paper" written by a University of North Carolina athlete that was all over Twitter a few weeks ago.


