A college football coach by the name of Steve Spurrier says that coaches should pay their players $300 a game out of their own pockets. I think he said that because he know it’ll never happen, and he can sound all “pro student-athlete” and shit. Of course, not all coaches make the big bucks, and not all schools have big-time football programs that can afford to pay off the kids (and never mind other sports, where kids work just as hard to balance school and extra-curricular activities). Now, I have no sympathy for schools that make a ton of money on the backs of kids who play sports in exchange for a free ride through school, but then again free tuition plus room and board isn’t exactly a bad deal, either – and better than most kids get. Our coach here at Syracuse – Doug Marrone – agrees.

“…we’re already paying our guys,” Marrone, the Orange coach, declared the other day. “A lot of people put a lot of emphasis on student-athletes and compensation. ‘We should give them this.’ ‘They don’t get paid for that.’ ‘Their time is tough because they have to practice and they have to go to class.’ There’s a lot of ‘Woe is me. Woe is me.’

“But it is very difficult for me to sit here and say, ‘Woe, woe, woe is the student-athlete.’ The student-athlete has a great opportunity to better his entire life, to change his family tree, to do a lot of good things. The fact is, at the end of the day scholarship athletes don’t have the kinds of financial difficulties that other students incur.”
[…]
“I think the focus is so wrong when it’s put on the student-athletes,” Marrone said. “It should be put on those people who can’t afford to go to school. Or on those people whose parents are working two and three jobs to send them to college. Or on those people who work and go to school part-time or full-time or through the summer. Or on those students behind the counter who are serving food to their peers or washing their peers’ dishes to pay for their education.

“The question should be: How do we get them an opportunity? Those are the people we should be trying to help. Not the student-athletes because when you think about it, they have pretty good lives.”

So maybe Steve Spurrier can take some of that $1.75 million he earns a year (to coach the South Carolina Gamecocks, fer chrissakes – who really ought to give Anthony Weiner an honorary degree) to lower the tuition for poor kids or something.

It’s gonna be hot here today. 95, they say. It would be a good day to be off, but, sadly, I’m not. It’s an early day for me, though, so that’s good.