Current Light Reading

I don't follow college sports very closely except when their is a scandal involved. For as long as I have lived I have read about one young athelete or another being exploited for his talent by an organization (NCAA) that could be as corrupt as organized Boxing. Finally it seems that the corrupt system is on it's last legs and major changes are coming in the near future.

"College athletes are not slaves," writes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch in "The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA." "Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as 'student-athletes' deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch the unmistakable whiff of the plantation."

Branch, best known for his award-winning trilogy about the civil rights movement, "Parting the Waters", argues that decades of greed and self-interest have finally caught up with the NCAA and that the organization is poised to collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

From Reggie Bush and Cam Newton to Ohio State and the University of Miami, it's been one big sports scandal after another. But the true scandal, argues Branch in this gripping, deeply reported narrative, is the parasitic structure of college sports, a business that generates billions of dollars in revenue every year yet fails to provide even workers' compensation for its young performers. The outrage, he writes, is "not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it's that two of the noble principles by which the NCAA justifies its existence—'amateurism' and the 'student-athlete'—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not."