Bachelor of Sports?

[EnmoreCat]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/business/college-sports-academic-major.html

Not really a D3 issue, but the only surprise is that it hasn't already happened I guess.  The top level of college basketball and football is clearly the second tier beneath NBA and NFL and will continue to separate from all other sports over time potentially.

[IC798891]

Thorny issue.

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the unique time/travel demands of being a student-athlete closes off certain types of majors to them.

I'm on board with the idea of giving the athletes a formal education in some of the more modern issues facing student-athletes — working for NIL deals for example, or navigating social media as a public facing member of the campus community. As well a deeper understanding the way that sport impacts society and culture. And I very much like the idea of pairing things — strength training with exercise physiology being an example.

I agree with the idea that there is an academic degree program in there somewhere — albeit one that requires a lot of cooperation and creative thinking, not to mention a willingness to put aside biases about athletes and academia (as referenced by quotes in the article)

Credit for playing and practicing seems like the spot where you're going to run into the most resistance, though. I think it's going to be really tricky to navigate. What's an equitable system look like when playing time is different for QB1 vs QB3? Your three-time All-American at 149 is going to wrestle a lot more than the first-year at that class.

Is it based on effort in practice? What happens if you're injured? How do you prevent favoritism? What sorts of objective criteria do you have to prevent grade inflation, but also to settle a disagreement?

I mean, let's be honest: We live in a world where coaches not only depend on these athletes for their success, but get direct financial bonuses in their contracts based on their academic performance.

I don't see a way you can give a coach a monetary bonus for team GPA and then give him even partial direct control over his team's GPA, not to mention control over his athletes ability to remain academically eligible.

[Kuiper]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/business/college-sports-academic-major.html

Not really a D3 issue, but the only surprise is that it hasn't already happened I guess.

I actually think it's more surprising it hasn't happened in DIII, where there wouldn't be the revenue pressures to create as many conflicts of interest for teachers/coaches.  It's not really difficult to imagine a sports major or Bachelors in the Art of Sports Performance or something like that.  It wouldn't be dramatically different from a BA or BFA in theatre or dance, which are offered at many colleges that also offer DIII sports (e.g., Carnegie Mellon, Otterbein, Muhlenberg, Emerson, Shenandoah, Baldwin Wallace, NYU, Rowan, Montclair State, Pomona, Ithaca, just to name a few).  To receive the degree, they often have to take a wide range of courses that are either scholarly (e.g., history of theatre, scholarly analysis of scripts etc, often involving a writing component), study of the industry (e.g., business of theatre, guild rules etc), practice-related (how-to courses in voice, dance, acting) and performance-focused (e.g., 2-4 one-two unit (often) P/F audition-only production practicums, which basically means participating in a theatre production in some capacity, whether in a performance or technical (crew) capacity).  Plus, the students have certain general education course requirements in the university, although less with the BFA than the BA.  All of those things are replicable in sports, especially as sports has become more of a scholarly and professional discipline itself in the context of the economics of sports, sports law, and the study of sports and society.  It's no less academic than plenty of other majors/degrees colleges have added in recent years and it's no less practical than many of them.  Heck, with the number of DIII athletes who go on to become agents, coaches, and general managers in pro sports these days, it's kind of surprising that someone isn't jumping on that train to try to gin up enrollment.  You can't skim through an alumni magazine these days without seeing at least one article every couple of years that highlights the school's grads who are now working in the sports industry.

Of course, the fact that all of those people got high powered jobs in the sports industry without a sports major may be an indication that going to places like Amherst, Williams, Haverford, Wesleyan, etc, as many of them did, is good enough preparation on its own.  More likely, it probably reflects the fact that smart people from wealthy, well-connected, families are the types of kids who go to those high academic DIII schools and then go to law school and the combination of all those factors, plus background as a college athlete, is the secret sauce for getting jobs in the industry.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

You can already find coaches teaching coaching course and leadership courses - along with plenty of sports psychology offerings.  It wouldn't be too difficult to combine like some athletic training or basic biology courses into something relatively well rounded.  A wholistic study of what it takes to perfect a sport is likely an attractive major for future pros and future coaches alike.

[EnmoreCat]

All interesting points, I guess my cynical side wonders if it's more an opportunity to reduce actual academic effort so that more time can be dedicated to the underlying sport.  In the bigger picture, it might be doing the players who do get drafted, a favour, but the ones who don't are possibly left with a less useful qualification.  But, if they have good fortune with NIL, perhaps it won't matter as much.

[ChickenHoops]

I sought an ornithology degree but was unable to do that and make the team at Iowa State or Kansas State. 

I lowered my expectations and went to Stevens Point. Since it was close by, I could help my family feed their chickens while I studied environmental studies. I couldn't make the Point team either.  But I see a bright future working for the Department of Natural Resources cataloging the travels of turtle species throughout Central WI.

[Ralph Turner]

United States Sports Academy ussa.edu in Daphne AL offers majors in Sports Management, Sports Coaching, Exercise Science, Sports Studies and a BBA.

Minors include Nutrition Science, Analytics, Marketing, Sports Media and Commumication, Women's Sports and E-sports.

USSA is a provisional member of USCAA. Its best known grad may be the late Mike Leach.

[Ralph Turner]

USSA is accredited by SACSCOC.

[mhm0417]

My son got a couple offers at D3 schools for basketball.  He accepted one, enrolled and majored in engineering.  He ended up failing out after a semester. The time demands of the sport and the major were too much for him at 18 years old.  I'm sure he's one of many young people that has happened to. His coach told us that most of these kids major in business or sports management so they have easier workloads while they were on the teams. He hated it but said it had been that way for years.  I remember him telling us a story of asking a senior what he wanted to do after college.  He told him with a straight face "the NBA".  Some of these young people go into college with no grasp of reality.

I disagree with the idea of majoring in the sport.  I think you keep it as is and let kids decide for themselves and then face reality when they are 23 and have a degree that is marginal.

[IC798891]

My son got a couple offers at D3 schools for basketball.  He accepted one, enrolled and majored in engineering.  He ended up failing out after a semester. The time demands of the sport and the major were too much for him at 18 years old.  I'm sure he's one of many young people that has happened to. His coach told us that most of these kids major in business or sports management so they have easier workloads while they were on the teams.

Yep. There are some majors that are just really, really difficult to excel in if you're also a student-athlete. Obviously there are people who can, and do. But many years ago, I worked at USA Today and we did a study on the majors of football players at D1 schools, and there was a lot of clustering around certain majors. You can read the resulting article on a forum post here:

https://forum.iacbg.rs/index.php?/topic/1490-news-college-athletes-studies-guided-toward-major-in-eligibility/

At least D3 athletics is mostly regional, which cuts down on travel. Penn State's basketball team played UCLA on Saturday afternoon and USC on Tuesday night. So you're missing what, at least four days of class?

[mhm0417]

He's back in a different school - majoring in engineering and doing well and NOT playing ball.  LOL

Turned out for the best.  Good lesson.

[mhm0417]

My son got a couple offers at D3 schools for basketball.  He accepted one, enrolled and majored in engineering.  He ended up failing out after a semester. The time demands of the sport and the major were too much for him at 18 years old.  I'm sure he's one of many young people that has happened to. His coach told us that most of these kids major in business or sports management so they have easier workloads while they were on the teams.

Excellent article. 

Yep. There are some majors that are just really, really difficult to excel in if you're also a student-athlete. Obviously there are people who can, and do. But many years ago, I worked at USA Today and we did a study on the majors of football players at D1 schools, and there was a lot of clustering around certain majors. You can read the resulting article on a forum post here:

https://forum.iacbg.rs/index.php?/topic/1490-news-college-athletes-studies-guided-toward-major-in-eligibility/

At least D3 athletics is mostly regional, which cuts down on travel. Penn State's basketball team played UCLA on Saturday afternoon and USC on Tuesday night. So you're missing what, at least four days of class?

[Gregory Sager]

My son got a couple offers at D3 schools for basketball.  He accepted one, enrolled and majored in engineering.  He ended up failing out after a semester. The time demands of the sport and the major were too much for him at 18 years old.  I'm sure he's one of many young people that has happened to. His coach told us that most of these kids major in business or sports management so they have easier workloads while they were on the teams.

Yep. There are some majors that are just really, really difficult to excel in if you're also a student-athlete. Obviously there are people who can, and do. But many years ago, I worked at USA Today and we did a study on the majors of football players at D1 schools, and there was a lot of clustering around certain majors. You can read the resulting article on a forum post here:

https://forum.iacbg.rs/index.php?/topic/1490-news-college-athletes-studies-guided-toward-major-in-eligibility/

At least D3 athletics is mostly regional, which cuts down on travel. Penn State's basketball team played UCLA on Saturday afternoon and USC on Tuesday night. So you're missing what, at least four days of class?

I can remember when ABC, which used to be the primary channel for watching college football, began showing a player's major as part of its headshot graphics when highlighting that player on the telecast of a game. The major was almost inevitably something along the lines of "Recreational Studies", "Undergraduate Studies", "Liberal Arts" or somesuch. My friends and I would laugh at what were obviously sham majors designed to disguise the accommodation by D1 schools to providing the easiest academic path possible for these "student"-athletes to maintain eligibility. We'd make jokes about football players majoring in basket-weaving, and it was generally written off as just further evidence of the age-old stereotype of the dumb jock. That stereotype never kept anybody out of the stands of a football stadium on a Saturday afternoon, nor did it really get in the way of anybody's desire to watch college football on TV.

But it bothered me, not because I looked down upon dumb football players but because I increasingly saw this to be an exploitation of them. They would be churned out as raw meat by institutions purporting to be about the process of higher education, but that in reality were either selling them a false bill of goods regarding their education by steering them into phony-baloney majors that didn't prepare them to become useful members of society after they left campus or by feeding their dreams of careers in the NFL that for the overwhelming majority of them were completely unrealistic. I knew that this was just as true -- perhaps even more so -- for D1 men's basketball. And it wasn't any flash of insight on my part, either. I had attended a D3 school, and so I knew from direct observation that football and MBB players at the D3 level typically go on to lead productive and successful lives in professional fields of occupation. That was what made me see the rank hypocrisy of major universities that claimed to be all about education but which were in fact steering their athletes in the two major sports in directions that would neither educate them nor usefully prepare them for their futures.

While legislation and court decisions in recent years have returned a modicum of agency to D1 athletes by allowing them to attain a sort of semi-professional status through NIL, they're still forced by the demands on their time placed by their coaches to be funneled into academic paths that are neither useful nor fruitful. And I share mhm0417's concern that the creeping competitive demands of the arms race in D3 football and MBB are causing the same sort of harm to its student-athletes.

I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, because, after all, we're talking about 430 or so different institutions of higher learning here, and even within the same institution there are different levels of rigor from one department to another, depending upon the makeup of the faculty and the sources of institutional control over course offerings and curricula. There are plenty of schools that have economics/business departments that make a sufficient amount of academic demand upon their students for their bachelors degrees to be considered desirable by future employers, and if a sports marketing or sports management major is well-tethered to such a department it can still be a useful starting point to gainful employment.

But if a D3 school ever gets to the point where the demands of an athletic program (and not just football or men's basketball, mind you; it could be any sport) make it impossible for a motivated and diligent student-athlete to succeed in pre-med or engineering or nursing, or any other rigorous and time-consuming academic path, then it isn't time for that D3 school to re-think its priorities. Rather, it's time to re-think its expectations for that particular sport.

[Ralph Turner]

Way back in the day, we had a cross country team at my medical school that competed against local colleges. There were 4 D1 track stars and a D1 baseball player on our team. They said the admissions committee gave them about 0.3 on a GPA because of their time management skills. They were solid medical students.

[IC798891]

But if a D3 school ever gets to the point where the demands of an athletic program (and not just football or men's basketball, mind you; it could be any sport) make it impossible for a motivated and diligent student-athlete to succeed in pre-med or engineering or nursing, or any other rigorous and time-consuming academic path, then it isn't time for that D3 school to re-think its priorities. Rather, it's time to re-think its expectations for that particular sport.

I agree with you on a lot of this, but there is also no escaping the finite amount of time in the day and week, and that athletics, regardless of how dedicated you are to your studies, how supportive your coach is, is going to take up a huge chunk of that time. That there may be a fundamental incompatibility between athletic participation and a time intensive major that features work that can't be done on a bus or a hotel room does not necessarily point to a misplaced focus on athletics, but merely the realities of the limits of time.

To take an example, almost none of IC athletes are music majors. But that's because music is massively time intensive. So much so that a few years ago, students in the music school met with professors over the challenges balancing their mental health and the required workload. Useful excerpt:

"One of the main discussions that took place centered on the viability of the Carnegie unit, which is defined as one hour of classroom instruction and two hours of work outside the classroom, for a period of 15 weeks for each credit. The unique nature of music courses, which often require many hours of practice, make meeting this workload a challenge."

And mind you, these weren't student-athletes — because again, there are almost none in the school. So if those students are feeling overwhelmed, imagine adding in the time commitment of being an athlete.

There's a difference between "Let's find you the easiest possible major so you can focus on football" and "This major has requirements that may be very difficult to pull off as an athlete." The former we need to fight against. The latter just may be an unavoidable truth.