Muddled priorities

[unixronin]

OK, so you want to become an officer in the Army.  You make it into West Point, you graduate ... and then you go to play pro football for the Detroit Lions?

Uh, no.  This is wrong, IMHO.  You volunteered, you got your way paid through West Point, you committed to serve; now it's time to serve.  You want to play pro football, you can do that after you get out.

Comments

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

David Robinson graduated from the Naval Academy...and went to the NBA. IIRC, he had to reimburse the Navy for his college education.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

There's two paths here:

1) Become a spokesperson for the service, and serve time as a reservist (which is what I think David Robinson actually did)... in essence, you've just become a recruiter. I think they only offer you this option is it's likely that you'll become successful and popular enough that you being a spokesperson is going to be win for them.

2) Any academy service graduate is allowed to not serve, as long as they pay the academy back for their tuition/expenses/etc. It is in the rules/regulations/etc. for the academies (I remember being surprised by it when I was looking in to going to Annapolis... surprised because ROTC cadets/midshipmen don't get the same choice; once committed and paid for, you're committed and paid for: deciding to "not get your comission" means "you'll go enlisted instead of comissioned").


And David Robinson wasn't the first either. I don't remember what exactly Roger Staubach (sp? Dallas Cowboys QB from the late 60's and early 70's) did wrt to his Navy service, but he was an Annapolis grad as well.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

1) Become a spokesperson for the service, and serve time as a reservist (which is what I think David Robinson actually did)... in essence, you've just become a recruiter.

Good point.

2) Any academy service graduate is allowed to not serve, as long as they pay the academy back for their tuition/expenses/etc.

Yeah, that'd work too. But one way or another, you need to either honor that commitment or pay back what you received for it.

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

Here's what I know about at least the Air Force Academy back in the late 80's. You could attend for up to two years and then walk away if you want. You would be required to pay back some expenses, but that's pretty much it. Some people did just that because they would get three years of college credit in just two years, then leave and go one more year to a civilian college to obtain their bachelor's degree.

However, if you showed up for the first class of your junior year, you immediately incurred an "active duty obligation." If you then decided to leave the academy, you were required to serve as an enlisted member of the Air Force for a period of time. As you can imagine, this was an extremely rare occurrence.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

That's what my father did actually. 2 years at USAFA, then spent one more year earning a BS in industrial physics. This was around 1970 though.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

Mr. Staubach served four years active duty after graduation from Annapolis.

http://www.profootballhof.com/hof/member.jsp?player_id=201

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

Well, he does have to serve a tour as a recruiter...

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

And all in all, this is way more valuable to the Army than 1 more 2nd Lt who they know is out as soon as possible.

Roger Staubach, BTW, was a 10th round draft pick in 1964. He served his military commitment. He debuted as an NFL rookie in 1969.

David Robinson was drafted in 1987 and served 2 years of his commitment. The Navy waived the last 3 years. His height (7'1") was a real problem in assigning him to many normal Navy jobs. He served in the reserves and recruiting for quite some time after going into the NBA.

There really isn't anything all that odd about this. Also, it really hurts the Academy's recruiting for top athletes. You can certainly make the argument that this is irrelevant to the school's mission, but this ignores the fact that football and basketball programs are the best general marketing tools that schools have available, not to mention the revenue that a successful program generates.

Certainly the value of a new graduate (Robinson was a Lt JG) is nothing compared to the recruiting potential of a big sports star. I don't see where the academies aren't getting their monies worth to let a few go like this.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

When I worked in Admissions at Georgia Tech, we had a guy who put his application in at the absolute last minute before we started up the term, and I had to put his information in the computer, and had to help get him squared away. Didn't know him from Adam. Had to work with one of the central computing staff for some reason to deal with him--I forget why the data entry people couldn't have just handled it.

I say to the guy I'm working with, "It's [date]. I don't know why he thinks he's coming to Georgia Tech." The guy didn't have particularly special "numbers", either.

Pause as coworker absorbs that I are a chick who is truly clueless about sports.

"He thinks he's coming because his name is Stephon Marbury (sp?) and he is one hell of a basketball player."

Later on, I did ask my boss why we worked so closely with the athletic association. I wasn't bitching, just curious. There was a damned good reason: we had hard statistics linking how many applicants we got to a winning season. Special treatment for top athletes meant a much better freshman class, overall. Better freshman classes means better national rankings. Better national rankings means you can attract better professors and more top quality students, and so forth. So it's a multiplier far beyond what you would think.

Also, the jocks got lots of tutoring support, a lot of which was mandatory. They had a consistently higher 5 year graduation rate than the general student body. 60% vs. 57%, iirc. A lot of them were management majors or similar and so didn't need to take calculus, but management is arguably a much better major choice for the kinds of things top athletes do when they retire from active play if they're really successful, and is useful as hell if they get injured, or don't make the cut, or whatever for high-flying careers in the majors.

The athletes who are good enough to go pro are serving, it's just that--like with Marbury--it can be hard to see the benefits to the organization if you don't know the behind the scenes numbers.

We had hard numbers for exactly what those athletes were doing for us. I'm sure the Navy does, too.

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

Oh. Now I remember why they handed Marbury straight to me instead of the data entry staff. As the Admissions computer geek, I was damned sure to get it right the first time--they wanted no chance of mistakes.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I guess, lacking any interest whatsoever in team athletic sports, I have a tendency to think of them as being completely irrelevant in the real world. It makes it easy to overlook the fact that there are a lot of people out there to whom things like baseball, football, NASCAR racing etc are not only relevant, but actually important to their lives. I've always tended to consider the idea that "pro sports are important" more as a delusion than anything else, and I have to honestly admit I'd never really considered that kind of trickle-down effect. I've always thought of the massive pro-sports "industry" as a distraction that consumes time, resources and effort that could better be used elsewhere, rather than as anything that actually produces anything but overpaid celebrity athletes.

It's an alien perspective to me, but a thought-provoking one.

[laurarey.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find what Julie said - about the football team having a good season being directly linked to the quantity of applications and resulting other stuff - to be scary and foreign.

I mean, you basically have people going "I am not a football player. I am nevertheless going to apply to a school that has recently been successful in football, when I would not have applied otherwise."

To me, that's incomprehensible and totally illogical.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

You *seem* to draw distinctions between individual and team sports, and between amateur and pro sports. Why? I think there are good arguments why pro sports and team sports are valuable, if any sport is valuable.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I have rather more interest in individual-performance sports than in big-field team sports, yes. Team field sports, honestly, have never interested me (and in many cases, oddly, for similar reasons to why I could hardly care less about NASCAR). Seeing Colin Edwards make up 14 places and almost 30 seconds in 12 laps on the Moto-GP circuit, or Max Biaggi successfully recover from a power wheelie that actually put his bike beyond vertical, fires my interest and admiration at his skill far more than any two-million-dollars-per-advertising-minute major league final ever could. This may be partly because I know first-hand what's involved, and perhaps partly because in an individual sport, you can't swap out players at the coach's whim according to the needs of the upcoming play; the individual athlete has to be good across the board. (And, honestly, my schools managed to completely turn me off team field sports very early.)

As for amateur vs. pro, it just seems to me the extravagantly-paid pro athletes, together with the teams' constant demand for bigger, newer and more extravagant stadiums, are a bigger waste of time and money than the amateurs who play more or less for the love of it and more or less wherever they can.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Proponents of team sport can counter that synergy between individuals is a beautiful thing, and that there is something intrinsically rewarding in working together towards a common objective.

As for paying athletes, I don't think it's avoidable as long as we have a market-oriented economy. Athletes (or their agenst/promoters) understand their wide importance, and so internalize the resulting profit and attract more top talent to their sport.

[rob-thompson.livejournal.com]

There's another side of what Julie said that's equally as important - a winning season for a football team, particularly if it's Division I - means lots and lots of money for the General Revenues of the university. I was stunned when I learned how much money the football program alone at University of South Carolina returns to the general accounts - 20 Million. That's a 2 followed by 7 zeros - that's a lot of money for student programs, professor's and scholarships that aren't athletic. The entire football program is self-funded, from scholarships, travel, coaches salaries, etc. What they returned was after expenses...and they pay their head coach 2 million a year.

Instead of looking at like people are choosing to go to a university based on a football teams winning season...perhaps the students are looking at the winning season meaning the university has more money available for other things...good universities usually do. Georgia Tech is another school that I, even in the wilds of Canada, had heard of long before I ever got to South Carolina - they were famed both for college football and engineering.

You know why the Ivy League schools are important...because of money. They get their money through alumni donations - grateful alumni who have a Harvard/Yale/Columbia/Brown/Stanford degree earn more money (in theory) and therefore should donate lots to the foundations the universities have. Other schools earn theirs....why should they be seen as different or second rate?

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

I'm largely clueless on the intricacies of this, by choice.

However, I'm curious, how do they calculate expenses? I was at a school as it decided (enacted?) upon a plan to increase its sports division level and rankings with the claim that it would improve the cash flow. In the immediate lead-up, and what I saw of the enactment while I was there was a reduction in merit- and perhaps need-based academic aid, stagnation or contraction in several departments that were the school's current leaders (if I recall correctly), and degradation of communication between the general student body and the school leadership executives.

I don't know if this proved financially advantageous. But regardless of its success, I'm curious if it's part of a pattern in this argument. If so, I'd say the leadership needs to talk to their philosophy department, instead of their accounting gurus.