College football has been a fall sport since 1869. However, once again this year, the NCAA has approved of playing the College Football Playoff National Championship game on the second Monday in January, which for many schools falls after the start of the “spring” semester.
As a result, the college football players at Ohio State University are faced with a Hobson’s Choice—attend their first day of Spring 2021 classes or play in the national championship game. Of course, one could presume every Buckeyes football player will take the field—marking the further separation of college athletics from academics.
On the surface, the NCAA’s decision to require elite college football players at Ohio State to miss their first day of spring classes to play in a national championship football game may not to seen as a big deal. But when the NCAA, at the same time, is arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of athlete no-pay rules under the guise of “amateurism,” scheduling the college football national championship game in a way that conflicts with so-called student-athletes’ academic obligations seems most troublesome.
Making matters even worse, this is not the first time the college football national championship game has conflicted with the players’ spring academic obligations. An academic conflict with the first day of classes seems to occur just about every year since the national championship game began in 2014. The reason for this ongoing conflict is because even though college football games are traditionally played on Saturdays, the highly-paid executives who oversee the college football national championship game are insistent on a Monday night championship game to maximize television revenues.
Of course, if those who are scheduling college football’s national championship game won’t budge on the date, academic administrators could always act more flexibly on their end. For example, the University of Alabama, which is a perennial contender for the college football national championship, several years ago began pushing back the start of their new semester to the Wednesday after the college football national championship game—thus allowing for football players to attend the first day of classes without conflict.
But at Ohio State University, which remains outspoken critics against allowing for meaningful economic reforms to college sports, the academic inequities for elite college athletes also remain in terms of missed class time. The fact that Ohio State University neither wants to provide their elite college athletes with the full opportunity set of either professionals or students seems most hypocritical.
Colleges with big-time football programs such as Ohio State University, in good conscience, cannot have their cake and eat it too. Either these colleges need to recognize that their football players are members of the labor force and move toward a system of free-market economics, or they can take strong steps to ensure all sporting events, including national championship games, are scheduled around student schedules rather than maximizing television revenues.
It is simply one or the other. Colleges simply cannot have it both ways.
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Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business and the founder of Edelman Law. He is the author of “A Short Treatise on Amateurism and Antitrust Law” and “The Future of College Athlete Players Unions.”
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At Ohio State, Football National Championship Overlaps With First Day Of New Semester - Forbes
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