Josh Rosen's Comments on academics and football

[DriveFor1Outta5]

 

 

 

Do we need a college degree for anything really? We could internship at probably 95% of jobs for a few years and learn how to do that job without a degree.

 

I could probably make a stronger argument that a High School kid needs more preparation/maturity/physical growth for the NFL than an 18yr old kid needs to go into marketing for example. Unfortunately or fortunately college is a means to an end for many things, whether it's deemed fair or not. It's a reality.

Great point. Being a pro football player presents a young man with far more important decisions than most 9-5 young men face. Historically the purpose of college was to train doctors,lawyers,etc. Education eventually became a big business, and went off the rails. Now you need a degree for everything. This is why I can't understand Rosen's point of being "forced" to go to college. We "force" millions of kids to go to college ever year without any practical reason.

Huh?? If someone is extremely talented at football but none too bright, they still should have a chance to apply their skills and be remunerated for it provided an organization that is willing to pay him. Or are you saying that a person who by every physical measure is a fit for professional football should forego that career path because he isn't good at college and instead ply his skills in a pizza parlor? Because that's the alternative if he doesn't go to college. No one can play in the NFL without going to college. That makes zero sense to me.

 

That's not what he said AT ALL. Sheesh.

I understood what he said, and I replied to it. You might want to re read the posts Mr.Editor. Edited August 10, 2017 by DriveFor1Outta5

[bobobonators]

Huh?? If someone is extremely talented at football but none too bright, they still should have a chance to apply their skills and be remunerated for it provided an organization that is willing to pay him. Or are you saying that a person who by every physical measure is a fit for professional football should forego that career path because he isn't good at college and instead ply his skills in a pizza parlor? That makes zero sense to me.

That's not what he said AT ALL. Sheesh.

 

Says who exactly??? The NFL (you know, their potential employer) says otherwise. That's like me saying I'm really really really damn smart and I would make an awesome intel analyst for the USAF, but I can't pass their PT requirements b/c I'm fat and slow, I should still be able to join b/c damn it I'm smart.

 

The NFL has their requirements for employment. Accept it or don't. But don't complain about it.

[DriveFor1Outta5]

 

Says who exactly??? The NFL (you know, their potential employer) says otherwise. That's like me saying I'm really really really damn smart and I would make an awesome intel analyst for the USAF, but I can't pass their PT requirements b/c I'm fat and slow, I should still be able to join b/c damn it I'm smart.

 

The NFL has their requirements for employment. Accept it or don't. But don't complain about it.

Exactly. The NFL does what every other employer does. They find a system that benefits them and use it to their advantage. The NFL gets a free farm system that develops players. Of course they are going to take advantage of it. How many employers ask for Bachelors degree just because they can? They understand that for everyone one person who isn't willing to attend college for the career, there are ten more who are. The NFL operates under the same premise.

[dave mcbride]

 

Says who exactly??? The NFL (you know, their potential employer) says otherwise. That's like me saying I'm really really really damn smart and I would make an awesome intel analyst for the USAF, but I can't pass their PT requirements b/c I'm fat and slow, I should still be able to join b/c damn it I'm smart.

 

The NFL has their requirements for employment. Accept it or don't. But don't complain about it.

So no one is ever supposed to complain about working conditions or career path requirements even if they don't make much sense. They should just shut up, never complain, and pretend that the big-time D1 college football system is the best system that there ever was.

[Bleeding Bills Blue]

Exactly. The NFL does what every other employer does. They find a system that benefits them and use it to their advantage. The NFL gets a free farm system that develops players. Of course they are going to take advantage of it. How many employers ask for Bachelors degree just because they can? They understand that for everyone one person who isn't willing to attend college for the career, there are ten more who are. The NFL operates under the same premise.

 

free farm system - but they don't get any money from it. There's gotta be some back-end deal between them and the NCAA to not try and supplement it. There's no way the NFL would do it if there wasn't a way for them to make some money.

[dave mcbride]

I understood what he said, and I replied to it. You might want to re read the posts Mr.Editor.

Your quote: "If football is stopping him from pursuing his degree of choice, why doesn't he pursue an easier one while he is playing or stop playing? He could easily pursue whatever degree he wants when he's done playing football."

 

Rosen never said that football is stopping him from pursuing the degree of his choice. Never. http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/20284353/josh-rosen-ucla-bruins-says-football-school-go-together-ponders-alabama-success-sat-requirement-raised

 

He is talking about the broader system.

 

free farm system - but they don't get any money from it. There's gotta be some back-end deal between them and the NCAA to not try and supplement it. There's no way the NFL would do it if there wasn't a way for them to make some money.

College football is a star-building system. The league receives a large slew of ready-made stars every draft day.

[Bleeding Bills Blue]

Your quote: "If football is stopping him from pursuing his degree of choice, why doesn't he pursue an easier one while he is playing or stop playing? He could easily pursue whatever degree he wants when he's done playing football."

 

Rosen never said that football is stopping him from pursuing the degree of his choice. Never. http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/20284353/josh-rosen-ucla-bruins-says-football-school-go-together-ponders-alabama-success-sat-requirement-raised

 

He is talking about the broader system.

College football is a star-building system. The league receives a large slew of ready-made stars every draft day.

 

The players don't benefit from it though. The only thing they get is education - which some don't want or care about. They're penalized if they get any type of income based off of their fame.

[DriveFor1Outta5]

So no one is ever supposed to complain about working conditions or career path requirements even if they don't make much sense. They should just shut up, never complain, and pretend that the big-time D1 college football system is the best system that there ever was.

You do bring up a good point, but in reality how many people are complaining about career path requirements? It's just something that hasn't entered the national spotlight. I think people just accept what's required of them without asking questions. We expect football players to do the same. Whether or not it's how it should be is another question. Football is a lucrative career. To the average guy asking a player to attend college with reduced academic standards doesn't seem so terrible.

[yungmack]

 

Baby boomers digging holes and yelling down at the people stuck in them that they are lazy. Even though we are kind of lazy......

 

UNFORTUNATELY, BOOMERS show no appetite for maintaining the assets their parents accumulated. Public higher education, nearly free for boomers, has become dauntingly expensive. Infrastructure is neither built nor maintained, and not even “responsible” boomers take this seriously. It was then-candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton, those paragons of boomer probity, who proposed a gas-tax holiday in 2008, the year the Highway Trust Fund went bust. Federal research and development funding also suffered, with dispiriting consequences for the future. Smartphones may be fairly recent, but their core technologies were developed with government money long ago. Enjoy your iPhone now, because your iCopter and iKidney will be indefinitely delayed.

The consequences of boomer overconsumption, underinvestment, and appetite for risk reveal themselves every time a bridge or bank collapses, but can be summarized in America’s prolonged economic mediocrity. Finding decent growth requires stretching all the way back to the 1990s, and even so, the 1990s barely edged out 1970s’ squalor on a per capita GDP basis. Thanks to boomer policies, the new normal is 1.6 percent real growth, well below the 2.5 to 3.5 percent rates prevailing from the 1950s to the 1980s. For the young, the price will be incomes 30 percent to 50 percent lower than they could have been.

What anger, what hate. BTW, John McCain isn't a Boomer; the Baby Boom generation was so named for the surge in births following WWII and is generally considered to run from 1946 to 1964. McCain was born in 1936. I wonder if the rest of your factoids are equally well-researched.

 

The whole "Generation" thing is the creation of lazy media and even lazier academics. There is no true coherent set of characteristics that can be applied to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. For every example found that's emblematic of a supposed "generational characteristic," another can easily be found to contradict it. For every kid who can't seem to get out of Mom's basement, there is a Zuckerberg or a Bren. Generalizing any group is not only intellectually lazy, it it is dangerous.

 

For the record, as a pre-Boomer myself, I very much like the so-called Millenial Generation which includes my grandchildren and their friends.

[dave mcbride]

Josh Rosen is a tool. The story is quite simple as that. Rosen just likes to hear himself talk. He already made a splash by saying that he didn't believe in god (he's entitled to his opinion, but it was an unnecessary attention grab imo). I view this story much the same. He likes stirring things up by throwing quotes out there. None of what he says has much substance. Josh Rosen isn't saying anything that drunken idiots don't already talk about at the bar. Nothing he said was original or intellectually stimulating. If football "dents" his ability to perform academically, why didn't he turn down football to focus on school?

 

Tons of college football players thank god publicly and demonstratively after every freaking game and often credit their victories to God. I find it highly irritating, but whatever. I don't hold it against them and don't treat it as an attention grab. But more to the point, how is that not expressing one's opinion about religion?

[bobobonators]

So no one is ever supposed to complain about working conditions or career path requirements even if they don't make much sense. They should just shut up, never complain, and pretend that the big-time D1 college football system is the best system that there ever was.

 

Hold on now Dave, you're arguing so many different things we need to focus here.

 

1. Working conditions? College players aren't in the NFL yet so they can't complain about working conditions. And like I said before, they can't really complain about "working" in college since the very college they're going to is giving them a free ride AS IS. In addition to countless other perks that the average college student doesn't receive.

 

2. Career path requirements? You know the requirements of the career you want to pursue (NFL) since the day you are born. Much the same way doctors, lawyers, engineers know the requirements of their career well in advance. What is their to complain about? You either accept it, or choose a different career if you can't deal with it. Geeze man. Tens of thousands of players have managed to go to college and then go to the NFL over the past 100yrs. Rosen isn't experiencing anything different than those other tens of thousands of individuals.

[dave mcbride]

You do bring up a good point, but in reality how many people are complaining about career path requirements? It's just something that hasn't entered the national spotlight. I think people just accept what's required of them without asking questions. We expect football players to do the same. Whether or not it's how it should be is another question. Football is a lucrative career. To the average guy asking a player to attend college with reduced academic standards doesn't seem so terrible.

Fair point, but I don't think it's right to jump on the rare person who does raise the issue. It is real and his argument is logical, even if it's also true that NFL players make a lot of money.

 

Hold on now Dave, you're arguing so many different things we need to focus here.

 

1. Working conditions? College players aren't in the NFL yet so they can't complain about working conditions. And like I said before, they can't really complain about "working" in college since the very college they're going to is giving them a free ride AS IS. In addition to countless other perks that the average college student doesn't receive.

 

2. Career path requirements? You know the requirements of the career you want to pursue (NFL) since the day you are born. Much the same way doctors, lawyers, engineers know the requirements of their career well in advance. What is their to complain about? You either accept it, or choose a different career if you can't deal with it. Geeze man. Tens of thousands of players have managed to go to college and then go to the NFL over the past 100yrs. Rosen isn't experiencing anything different than those other tens of thousands of individuals.

The working conditions for being a football player encompass more than just the paying part of the career - they also include the apprenticeship path. It's particularly relevant when said apprenticeship is an ironclad requirement for eventual payment.

 

Re 2: so you're saying it's not ok to point out problems because it has been that way forever? "That's the way it's always been done" is not an argument.

Edited August 10, 2017 by dave mcbride

[Sky Diver]

Why do you want him to get his ass kicked? I don't understand that.

Because he is a spoiled, elitist, rich kid prima donna?

[yungmack]

Is the quality of education at Alabama even relevant to this conversation? Rosen is bashing Alabama for low standards. Outside of the Ivy League most universities lower their standards specifically for football players. This makes the standards of the universities as a whole somewhat irrelevant to football. I'm not sure that calling out Alabama was fair. Alabama may have lower general standards than Michigan. This doesn't mean that Michigan holds football players to the same standard as the general student body. Every big time college program lowers academic standards for football players.

Pretty sure he mentioned Alabama because it is widely regarded as the number one collegiate football program and has been for quite a few years. I guess he could have picked Troy State.

[Sky Diver]

Pretty sure he mentioned Alabama because it is widely regarded as the number one collegiate football program and has been for quite a few years. I guess he could have picked Troy State.

So now Rosen is an expert on the academic quality of The University of Alabama?

 

His comments were nonsensical. The guy is a douche and likely a cancer in the locker room.

[bobobonators]

Fair point, but I don't think it's right to jump on the rare person who does raise the issue. It is real and his argument is logical, even if it's also true that NFL players make a lot of money.

The working conditions for being a football player encompass more than just the paying part of the career - they also include the apprenticeship path. It's particularly relevant when said apprenticeship is an ironclad requirement for eventual payment.

 

Re 2: so you're saying it's not ok to point out problems because it has been that way forever? "That's the way it's always been done" is not an argument.

 

 

Do you even realize what you're arguing? Everyone should argue the following then: Why do we need to go to college in order to join the workforce? It's all a scam. Screw it I'm revolting. It's not fair.

 

Who the heck cares if you're good at football? Playing football isn't a right in life, it's a privilege. If you want that privilege, you jump through the hoops. What's so difficult to understand about that? We aren't arguing about basic human rights here. We're arguing about the opportunity to play for the NFL - a private entity. If you're really good at football and don't want to jump through their hoops, go play for the CFL then. Or go play on some 3rd rate team in Germany somewhere.

[Bleeding Bills Blue]

 

Hold on now Dave, you're arguing so many different things we need to focus here.

 

1. Working conditions? College players aren't in the NFL yet so they can't complain about working conditions. And like I said before, they can't really complain about "working" in college since the very college they're going to is giving them a free ride AS IS. In addition to countless other perks that the average college student doesn't receive.

 

2. Career path requirements? You know the requirements of the career you want to pursue (NFL) since the day you are born. Much the same way doctors, lawyers, engineers know the requirements of their career well in advance. What is their to complain about? You either accept it, or choose a different career if you can't deal with it. Geeze man. Tens of thousands of players have managed to go to college and then go to the NFL over the past 100yrs. Rosen isn't experiencing anything different than those other tens of thousands of individuals.

 

Yeah - why question the status quo. Where'd that ever get anybody??

[bobobonators]

 

Yeah - why question the status quo. Where'd that ever get anybody??

 

Right.

[dave mcbride]

 

 

Do you even realize what you're arguing? Everyone should argue the following then: Why do we need to go to college in order to join the workforce? It's all a scam. Screw it I'm revolting. It's not fair.

 

Who the heck cares if you're good at football? Playing football isn't a right in life, it's a privilege. If you want that privilege, you jump through the hoops. What's so difficult to understand about that? We aren't arguing about basic human rights here. We're arguing about the opportunity to play for the NFL - a private entity. If you're really good at football and don't want to jump through their hoops, go play for the CFL then. Or go play on some 3rd rate team in Germany somewhere.

Huh???

 

Football has ZERO to do with academic learning. Football and, say, engineering or comparative literature are not in the same universe. If you want to be an engineer or historian, you better damn well go to college. And rightly so.

 

You appear to be relying on a "that's the way it's always been done" argument punctuated with resentment towards people you believe are spoiled for offering a dissenting voice about what in my view is an essentially corrupt system.

Edited August 10, 2017 by dave mcbride

[Sky Diver]

"According to several academic experts, the threshold for being college literate is a score of 16 on the ACT, and a 400 on the SAT critical reading, or writing subtest.

The university provided 494 separated scores, separated by subject test. They did not break down scores by sport.

Of 106 ACT reading and English scores, 15 were below the threshold.

Of 388 SAT reading and writing scores, 58 were below the threshold."

 

About 15% of the student athletes at UCLA in 2014 were college illiterate. Nothing to brag about. http://www.cnn.com/.../2014/01/us/college-scores/index.html

 

Rosen is detached from reality. Too much soaking in the hot tub in his dorm room?