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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

And speaking of momentum...

Our prior post on this blog dealt with momentum in another context.  Inside Higher Ed suggests today that there is momentum in the ongoing pressure on college sports that has resulted from litigation such as the O'Bannon court case (named after a former UCLA athlete).  The distinction between professional sports and "amateur-scholar" college sports is eroding.

A forum sponsored by the Big 12 Conference on Tuesday was billed as a discussion about whether college athletes should be treated as employees. Instead, it foretold a coming apocalypse to the status quo of college sports. “You’re going to be facing a day of reckoning,” Tom McMillen, a retired professional basketball player and former member of Congress, warned the gathering of college sports professionals. And that reckoning, he said, is coming sooner rather than later.  McMillen, who now serves on the board of directors of the National Foundation on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, was speaking on a panel during the one-day conference, called "The State of College Athletics Forum.” The reckoning, he said, would come in the form of Congress and the White House establishing a presidential commission on college sports, similar to the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 that established the United States Olympic Committee and provided legal protections to athletes...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/10/22/former-congressman-says-inexorable-change-coming-ncaa-sports 

Once something gets rolling, it doesn't stop:

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