Time for a Separation?

No need to worry...my marriage is fine.  But since I started teaching I've been bothered by the prominent place athletics is all too often afforded in schools.  From football teams being dismissed from class early for a home game that evening, to teachers who coach multiple sports missing dozens of classes each year, to pretty much all assemblies/celebrations centering around athletics, I can't help but wonder if the net effect on education is a negative one.  Certainly there are a lot of potential benefits of athletics (discipline, goal setting, teamwork, health, even motivation to keep grades up), but these would largely still apply if sports were overseen by cities and clubs.  There could be some challenges with equal access for the poor, but more schools are going to pay-to-play sports programs anyway.

While I've been annoyed by the reverence sports are given in schools for some time, I've recently had another thought.  What if sports were separated from universities?  There's been a lot of chatter lately about the injustice of collegiate student athletes not being paid while schools profit from their performance.  I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of paying college athletes.  Many of them come from poor families and don't have time to work since they're too busy with school and their sport, yet they are getting a free college degree in many cases and also a platform on which to display their talents to potential future employers (though only a small fraction will get job offers). 

So why not just separate the two?  Then we can stop pretending that some universities aren't lining their pockets by exploiting free labor (though I'm guessing that when you take all sports into account, not just football and basketball, that the majority of university athletic departments aren't turning a profit), and stop pretending that some of these athletes are actually students.  A former college (and professional) athlete that I taught with told me lots of stories about the special academic treatment that athletes get including when two athletes accidentally turned in identical papers when they were unlucky enough to grab the same essay from the team filing cabinet of ready made essays.

Sure there's all the tradition and whatnot, but teams can still be affiliated with a specific university (use their mascot, facilities, etc.), they would just be run like a minor league system.  Pay players as much as you want, and don't make them go to class.  You could keep players as long as they're productive or until they move up to the big leagues.  Athletes would be athletes and students would be students.

All the sports that don't draw much of a crowd would be tricky.  Tennis, gymnastics, and crew are not likely to turn a profit.  Not sure how that could be remedied, but I'm also not sure if it would be that big of a loss.  It seems the sports that have the smallest crowds are also those that don't feed into professional leagues (there is professional tennis, but most pros didn't go to college).  So what's the point?  Sure the athletes love their sports and each sport has its niche following, but is that enough reason for higher education to subsidize these activities?

Not that this will ever happen in America, but it seems to work well in Europe.