I wish someone would bring make the case that D-I scholarships are contracts for peonage and therefore unenforceable under the 13th Amendment..

At the bottom line, college sports should be for students, not a money making opportunity for television networks. Athletes who make money for others should be paid.

I personally experienced a brief halcyon period when Mrs. Barnes, my grade school P.E. teacher, gave me tutoring in the subject, until budget cuts required her to make the rounds and teach at three different schools. After that, and especially as I got older, it became clear to me that the main purpose of gym class was to allow the coaches to internally scout the school’s athletic talent (often these people were one and the same). The rest of us were largely left to our own devices at best, or starred in the entertainment of ridicule at worst. While I have little other than anecdotal evidence and pop culture depictions to support the idea that my experience was and is common, given the amounts of such evidence and the poor physical fitness of so many Americans, I think there is something to this notion.

I suspect that if big time sports weren’t so important in terms of money and prestige, there might be more room for the novel concept of tutoring athletically challenged children in more places. After all, we tutor children in math and English and other academic subjects. So why is tutoring in phys. ed. largely unheard of? (Aside from budget cuts and attacks on the public sector generally and public education particularly, that is.)