“Do college Sports Affect Students Grades? A Defense of the NCAA” by Megan Greenwell argues about whether college sports affect grades of the student-athletes or regular students and whether colleges would be better off without collegiate sport. Megan Greenwell in her article expresses her opinion on the following topic and gives some arguments in favor of having collegiate sports. In this article she is arguing about the connection between the grades various students are receiving and their involvement in collegiate sports events (football in this case).
Her opinion on this kind of connection is clear and straightforward. She is describes the arguments for and against collegiate sports as “paternalistic and shortsighted. ” The author is arguing with declaration given by a trio of economists which examine the relationship between a university’s success on the football field and its students’ grades based on the research made by 3 researches who are establishing a connection between bad grades and their team winning games.
She is giving an argument based on her college experience basically saying “I can assure researchers that we found other excuses to imbibe” and she is giving expanded facts from the report made by these 3 researches. The research suggests that various students will be more “predisposed” to face difficulties in college when “major distractions”, such as collegiate football, are involved, which aids Greenwell to prove her point that connection between grades and sport events is doubtable and students who are not struggling with class will not be struggling with classes even if their team is winning.
The author in her article also discusses whether to eliminate athletic scholarships or not to make all students equal and get rid of the “paying” factor, which can be seen as alternative of salary for the professional athletes. She rejects this argument by bringing up the fact that the act of illumination of athletic scholarships would greatly affect the vast majority of the NCAA athletes who have no monetary benefits, suggesting that most of those athletes will no longer be able to attend college due to financial restrictions imposed by such actions.
She states that allowing students to take this financial support makes much more sense than just eliminating their opportunity to play and even study in college. Instead of imposing great restrictions upon student-athletes and forcing them to choose between academics and sport, Greenwell is thinking about the ways to help students-athletes to succeed in the classroom.
She claims “getting serious about their academic performance, even at the expense of practice time, is a better response than forcing “student-athlete” to choose between two. ” In the last part of her article, the author concludes that collegiate sport is a gateway for many students to express their passion and fervor towards the sport, even if “going pro” is not an option, which proves the main idea of the whole article, which is trying to achieve a balance of how to spend time between academics, sport and other important aspects of college life.