College tuition is skyrocketing and schools are slashing their budgets to make ends meet, but there's one program that is considered so sacrosanct that most people wouldn't even think of touching it: football.
Buzz Bissinger of the Wall Street Journal argues that the cost of college football is high (not to mention the injuries) and the benefits to students are low, so it should be banned:
In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
That's because college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.
Football only provides the thickest layer of distraction in an atmosphere in which colleges and universities these days are all about distraction, nursing an obsession with the social well-being of students as opposed to the obsession that they are there for the vital and single purpose of learning as much as they can to compete in the brutal realities of the global economy.
Also there's the old argument that school is about more than just academics.
Don't forget that the majority of those players are earning meaninless degrees because they are academically unprepared for college.
Don't forget that most of them will never benefit from the "degree" they've been given.