With the shellacking that bigtime football has taken from a couple of major documentaries in the last couple of weeks on TV, you’d think there would be a big shakeup in the hugely popular sport. Or at least a hint of change.
Alas, the sport is too big now to listen to the reason of the concussion crisis in the “Frontline” special on PBS or maybe the latest hard-hitting documentary “Schooled: The Price of College Sports” (Epix, 8 p.m.).
Inspired by Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch’s notable article two years ago in The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” the film illuminates his argument that in a billion dollar a year endeavor, in which coaches typically make the largest public salary in every state, and the NFL gets a free farm system, students ought to be paid something.
Instead, they’re granted scholarships for educations they have little time for, given all the training and travel for their unpaid sports careers. Nor are the scholarships for four years, the film argues. Instead, they are renewable one year scholarships based entirely on the whim of the coach who will decide whether you’ll play or be cut.
Players whose name and images are used in video games have to come up with their own $60 to even have a copy of the game.
Few are the players willing to step up and criticize the system, but a few do, particularly Houston Texans running back Arian Foster.
The value of “Schooled” is to remind us how the once clerical NCAA grew into the powerhouse it is today by devising the term “student athlete” primarily to remove liability from schools to pay employee workers’ compensation to players who are injured or even die on the field.
There are a few appalling examples of players who are deep in debt and still suffering from injuries on the field. It’s a fast-moving documentary full of interviews from players, coaches, journalists, historians and administrators, with animation thrown in to help explain the history.
Producer Andrew Muscato said he had far more interviews for the film than he could use in it, telling a D.C. screening last week something former UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun told him: “Any system that punishes you for helping a kid get home for Christmas is a bad system.”
Former Mets player and coach Bobby Valentine, currently the athletic director at Sacred Heart University, another executive producer of the film, said that after people told him player graduation rates are climbing, said, “We don’t want to graduate them, we want to educate them.
“I don’t believe players should be making millions of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said, “But there are rights they should have.”