College athletics, particularly men’s’ basketball and football, are a multi-million dollar a year moneymaker for universities. Coaches and schools get rich off the work of the athletes, who are not permitted to be paid.

Worst, perhaps, is the polite fiction that big program college athletes are students as well. Most big time athletes play as few years as possible before making the jump to professional leagues, never earning a degree. Those athletes that are unable to make the leap to professional sports are given consolation degrees, either altogether unearned, or in fields that make them effectively unemployable.

The current NCAA system is set up to enrich schools and coaches at the expense of “student” athletes.

How about this for a new NCAA system?

1. All scholarship athletes in programs for which a viable professional league exists (e.g., football, men’s hockey, baseball, men’s and women’s basketball) will be paid a meaningful salary, say, $50,000.

2. Athletes need not be enrolled as full time students for the duration of their eligibility, which will be the same as current standards (four years, with a red shirt year, if applicable).

3. Schools will be required to admit and educate the athletes for six years at any time after the athlete’s college career and/or eligibility is completed.

4. Schools must provide any and all remedial schooling necessary for the returning athletes to succeed, and a program’s eligibility to continue in the NCAA will be determined in part on its success in doing so.

This program would incentivize athletes to enter an NCAA program, and stay longer. It would also recognize fact: student athletes are not students primarily. It would decouple athletics from academics, and allow athletes the luxury to pursue their education meaningfully when it becomes apparent they will not be playing pro, as most of them will not. It pays athletes a meaningful stipend for their efforts, hopefully drying up the illegal payment schemes.

What say you, Gormogons?

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.