Banning college football or burning money?

College Football game- flickr.com- Parker Michael Knight

College football has been barraged with multiple attacks on its non-existent safety warnings. They have also been under fire for paying large sums of money to coaches, but paying college presidents and professors significantly less. Football is probably the one thing that colleges need in order to pay for extra activities in the school. Without football, schools would have no sports, no arenas, and no form of consistent income.

College football’s biggest flaw is the fact that kids seem to not have enough time to do work if they have football practice. In a 2004 report by the NCAA, graduation rate was looked at according to race, athletes or non-athletes. The results showed that athletes graduated at a 65% rate and the non-athletes graduated at a 63% rate. This shows that whether or not the athletes study, they do well enough in school to get an education and graduate.

Another major problem is money distribution. People feel as if college football takes most of the college’s earned money and spends it on equipment and the salaries of the coaches. This can be argued by saying that the football team makes all the big income. Other sports like swimming and baseball cannot generate as much money as football can. "According to financial filings made to the Department of Education, all of Maryland’s non-football-or-basketball athletic programs operated at a combined loss of $7.3 million last year," said Chris Smith in a Forbes article. Football is in high demand and it even brings in money to local businesses. If Ohio State plays Louisiana State University in an away game, then all the Ohio State students will travel to Louisiana. This will bring up money to local hotels and diners.

Division one head coaches have been averaged to get paid $1.47 million dollars, almost 500 percent more than a college football coach in the 1980’s were paid. This shows that the coach is obviously being overpaid, but it’s for a better reason. The coach has to deal with a lot of pressure from the school. Without the coach and his football team, once again, the revenue will not be there.

Without college football, schools would not be able to have large scale building projects. The thought of removing college football is absurd, but reform may be the answer. "The argument to ban college football seems rash and tends to understate just how valuable a successful college football program can be to university initiatives," said Smith.