My opinion about sports is squarely opposite of Ned's here (fake name). Because of this: I want to draw attention to the fact that there are more facets in which people can use college to learn besides the traditional reading and writing. There are geniuses besides those of the mind and in my experience, almost every college athlete (especially players for "money sports") are geniuses of the body. You can be bitter about their intellectual fallacies, but you must admit that they can do things that you can't.
Do we abuse our college and professional athletes? Absolutely! But who isn't abused? Who isn't whoring themselves to their profession and sucking up to their employer or their customers in order to sell their product and pad their wallets. In my experience, the principled idealists are at the economic bottom of the food chain or else they're lying (further proving my point).
Is music school an intellectual waste? What about the visual arts? Why should academic scholarships be the only and best kind? The college athletic system that we have now is extraordinary. Men and women advertise a school and bring in money which then gets turned over to other students who are equally talented in sports that have less media appeal. College sports put students in the classroom!
Pro sports offer a unique form of entertainment that unites all kinds of people: poor and rich, smart and dumb. All of this around their local athletic franchise. Why would you want to give that up. What is unethical about something bigger? Do sports detract from Jesus? No way, but they put the followers of Jesus and the unbelievers on bench seats next to each other and nothing is more powerful than that.
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