BERNSTEIN | The NCAA’s ‘Amateurism’ Fallacy

Do you, the athlete or the fan, prefer watching sports when the athletes are unpaid? Does that really change the way you watch the game?The truth is, it doesn’t. People like sports and players making money won’t drive away interest. It won’t change the way that college sports are played either.

KEMPFF | Antiquated Ivy League Rules Rob Student Athletes of University Careers

Jimmy Boeheim ’21 should have been the Ivy League dream. Towering over his peers at 6’8,” Jimmy always knew he would play college basketball. His arrival at Cornell seemed like a fairytale; he was the first recruit of the new head coach and quickly fell in love with both the campus and the team. 

His story follows a now familiar one: A promising junior season was cut short by the COVID pandemic. However, the National College Athletic Association extended eligibility for all college athletes by a year. If he wanted to play, he could.

AKABAS | Bracketology: Who/What is winning 2016?

There are many things that literally everyone on Earth hates, such as hangnails, hotels that charge for WiFi, late-2000s M. Night Shyamalan films, and that moment when you don’t check your phone for an hour and there are 257 unread messages from a single group chat when you come back. There aren’t many things that literally everyone on Earth loves, but one of those things is March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. A single-elimination bracket – the concept that you need to win every single game to stay in it – is ingenious. I support using the bracket concept whenever humanly possible, so let’s make a bracket to determine who or what has had the best 2016 so far. The competitors were determined subjectively by me, and the seeds, listed below, were determined primarily by number of Twitter followers (credit to former Grantland-writer Rembert Browne for this idea).

LEWIS | March Madness from Sportstradamus

As predicted, the Denver Broncos upset the Carolina Panthers to take home Super Bowl 50. Of course, you would have known that before the game if you would have read my column about The Fate Theory. With football over, it is now time for us to turn our attention to college basketball. With conference tournaments and March Madness quickly approaching, I think I’ll offer up some more of my famous predictions. And as you know now, never doubt Sportstradamus.

SCAZZERO | Paying Our Athletes

By SOPHIA SCAZZERO 

College football and basketball are huge spectator sports. Every year, hundreds of thousands of fans watch the Rose Bowl or participate in brackets for March Madness with the same, if not higher amount of enthusiasm than for professional sports. Teams certainly make a name for themselves when they are doing well, drawing attention with star players or playoff runs and bringing in masses of television viewers. So if college sports are so huge and draw in that big of a following, that begs the question: should collegiate athletes be treated like pros and compensated for their hard work? This is a tricky argument to make because of the understanding that student athletes are not just there for the sport, but to get an education, separating them from pro athletes who are just that — athletes.