North Carolina State on Thursday became the third ACC school to suspend in-person classes due to the coronavirus pandemic. N.C. State joins North Carolina, which has gone to an all-virtual format, and Notre Dame, which has put a two-week pause on in-person instruction.
Yet the schools still plan on playing football this fall? How does that make sense?
“This has been a charade anyway,” CBS Sports college football analyst Brian Jones said on The DA Show. “We knew going in the optics would be bad if everyone resorted to online classes, but optics be damned. This is all about money. It’s always been about the benjamins. Let’s just own it if you’re the NCAA, if you’re these member institutions. It’s about the golden goose, which lays the golden egg, which is big-time college football and big-time college basketball depending on which institution we’re discussing.
“It’s all becoming clearer to everyone involved – and a lot of us have already known this – that this is about money,” Jones continued. “They’re going to keep plowing forward, which gives them a chance to possibly have some semblance of a normal season. So I get that. But the charade is over. This isn’t about student-athletes. Take that bull-dookey out of the equation. It’s about the athlete. They want to sit here and act as if it’s about getting an education. Well, we’ve known for some time that you have to have participants that value that education. Some do; others don’t.”
Jones, 52, returned to the University of Texas after his NFL career to complete his degree.
“You have to value that education,” he said. “It’s not given to you as some would say. You earn it. You earn that college football scholarship. You earn that opportunity to get an incredible education. Now it’s about you taking advantage of it – and a lot of these guys don’t, unfortunately. And a lot come back like I did to complete their degree work. But the fact that this is a business, all that is now out in the open for everyone to see, so we can stop this charade of student-athletes. It’s about athletes and it’s about these athletes generating an inordinate amount of income and revenue for these institutions.”