Great story, I think that's really illuminating.
It's true that there are plenty of football players who really are just looking for the easiest way through school. There's nothing gravely wrong with that, as compared with other college students ... I bet a majority of college students are just looking for the easiest way through school. Some college kids are just going to be relatively unmotivated, and that is hardly the school's fault.
But it still really concerns me that former players are saying that, even if the football program didn't actively stand in their way to prevent them from achieving their educational goals, it nevertheless did stand in their way as a practical matter. Kain Colter testified before the National Labor Relations Board that he had to drop his pre-med major because he couldn't find enough chemistry courses that didn't conflict with football workouts:
Kain Colter takes on Northwestern in NLRB hearing - Chicago Tribune
(small world ... I used to work with Northwestern's attorney, mentioned in that article, and IIRC, she was a college athlete at DePaul, so she likely doesn't have too much sympathy for Colter ... but she's kind of a superwoman)
What sense does it make for a university to offer a kid a scholarship under conditions that effectively prevent him from studying certain subjects? If a school is going to have an athletics program, shouldn't the program dovetail with its academic programs, consistent with the school's mission of educating and developing students intellectually? If football is getting in the way of that mission, rather than advancing it, then I submit that a change is necessary.
