Kansas State Football Head Coach Quotes on State of College Football
*Following post was written in November of 2016.
If you follow the link cited above, within the article from thecomeback.com are words that showcase the insightful and conscious quotes that the public needs from people in power around college athletics. From what I can recall from previous excerpts, Bill Snyder, head coach of Kansas State football, has had his mind on the problems of this current state of college football “progress.” Winning and dollars. Snyder points to these as being interchangeable as the real priorities of college athletics. Can this even be disputed or argued against? The verbiage that is perpetually doled out to the masses is the importance of the STUDENT-athlete. There are a multitude of reforms being floated around and voted on regarding the time demands associated with student-athletes’ consistently growing athletic-themed schedules. However, there seems to always be a grey area surrounding each new rule, or bylaw, as those who have no friends call them. The term ‘voluntary’ takes on a different meaning in college athletics and acts as a soft pillow for coaches and administrators to sleep on while absolutely nothing changes.
Selling out to the TV market has unintended consequences. In order to get more public exposure and seek out every possible dollar they can earn, smaller schools and conferences are forced to agree to weeknight games; a sort of trickle-down effect of the “free market” requiring ALL schools to engage in this money-making frenzy. Now I had written this last sentence prior to doing any research, just mainly basing it from memory. After some astute ESPN.com research, I found that there were games played on Thursday and Friday nights each week of the regular season and between Weeks 10-13, games began to be played on Tuesday nights. The teams that were playing on Tuesday/Wednesday were not Power 5 schools. In some sense, these non-Power 5 universities NEED to sell out to the TV markets and schedule games early in the week to hopefully gain some exposure to show potential recruits that they too can play games at prime time. When these games are scheduled during the week, the message that is sent to the student-athletes is that the game (and opportunity for revenue) is more important than anything else. This gets us back to what Coach Snyder had said about how money is eclipsing literally everything. When someone turns on a college football game on a Tuesday night, most, if not all, are not thinking that the away team had to miss classes on Monday to travel, will miss classes on Tuesday (game day), will probably miss some classes on Wednesday and if not, the student-athletes will be in class physically, but what about their mental status having traveled through the night to get back to their campus?
As I work my way through my thoughts, I find that there are several layers to this current problem that there will undoubtedly have to be more posts about this phenomenon. As TV revenue rises and schools chase the dollars to create better facilities to elicit prospective student-athlete interest in coming to play for their specific school, not many people take a moment to stop and assess where the college football machine currently finds itself. Reading this quoted interaction from Coach Snyder proves that some people, people in power, do think about the negative effects this system has on the student-athletes, support staff and even coaches. Speaking publicly about the issues is always a good start, but change only comes when people actually hear what is being said. I should not even say people, generally. It will have to be those people that have a platform with the opportunity to actually inflict change that need to hear these pleas. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone can really scream loud enough publicly for those influential people to care about altering a system that keeps themselves in this position of “power.”