After Tour de France rider Jonas Vingegaard was awakened at 2 a.m. for a doping test, and then broke his collarbone in a crash later that day, questions about the appropriateness of interrupting athletes’ sleep to test them for doping can’t be avoided.

There is no evidence that fatigue contributed to Vingegaard’s crash — which eliminated him from the Tour, where he was in second place at the time — but nor is there evidence it didn’t.

The response from the agency handling drug testing at the Tour didn’t help, either.

The International Testing Agency wrote in an email to the Associated Press Monday, “The ITA ... has the responsibility of the cycling anti-doping program and the integrity of cycling races.”

Well.

If all riders were wakened at 2 a.m. for a blood draw, then, okay, it’s all equal.

But they weren’t. That day, Vingegaard and overall leader Tadej Pogačar were the only two were were tested in the hours before Sunday’s stage. (Pogačar was woken up at 5 a.m.)

Expecting elite athletes to compete evenly on uneven sleep is surely not based on science. And in a discipline like road cycling, where riders are traveling at more than 30 mph in close packs puts an emphasis on clear thinking and fast response times. Even a fraction of a second delay in responding to road conditions can lead to crashes that can take out numerous riders all at once — like the one that Vingegaard got caught up in.

Surely, the “integrity” of cycle racing includes ensuring all competitors have equal rest and recuperation time available. Depriving only the leaders of that critical component of preparation very much calls into question the integrity of bicycle racing ...

Not the greatest

In the wake of Spain’s victory in soccer’s World Cup, sports writers and broadcasters are tripping over themselves to lionize Argentinian forward Lionel Messi, who has announced this was his final World Cup.

A great player to be sure, a generational talent even.

But the hyperbole is getting a bit nuts. Not only is the soccer media crowning him the greatest player of our time, but they’re now arguing he’s the greatest soccer player ever.

Some are even going beyond that and claiming he’s the greatest ATHLETE in history.

Which is, frankly, nuts.

As Nick Canepa, the longtime sports scribe at the San Diego Union-Tribune pointed out in this morning’s edition, you can’t possibly be in the conversation for greatest athlete ever if you’re a one-sport player.

I’ll take it further and argue that it’s not enough to play two sports — you have to excel in at least two sports (sorry, Michael Jordan).

So Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson both far outshine Messi in that regard.

By any metric, though, Jim Thorpe was far and away the finest athlete known to history.

He excelled at football and baseball (playing in both the Major Leagues and NFL), was on a barnstorming basketball team, boxed, played tennis, was an outstanding lacrosse player in college, and had an offer to play professional hockey.

Standing above even all of that, though, he won gold in both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics — the same year he won the National Intercollegiate Ballroom Dancing championship!

Jim Thorpe was one of a kind, and if he’d tried his hand at soccer, we might not even be talking about Messi as the greatest of that sport ...

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There was a time that all-star games were an Event with a capital E. The annual baseball All-Star Game even became known as the “Midsummer Classic.”

Of late, as each major sports’ all-star game rolls around, the main conversation in the national media is whether all-star games still make sense?

Back before cable and streaming packages made nearly every Major League game available to watch on television, there were relatively few chances to see baseball on TV. There was a game of the week most Saturdays in the summer on NBC, and then highlights on the syndicated “This Week in Baseball” with Mel Allen (which used B roll shot at each ballpark by the league office for posterity). But if your team was lousy, the odds of getting on the game of the week were pretty low.

Plus, there were no interleague games then, not before the World Series and the All-Star Game, which like the World series pitted National League against American League.

And unless you lived in one of the handful of two-team cities (New York, Chicago, Bay Area, Los Angeles/Anaheim) you didn’t get a chance to see the stars from the other league. Cincinnati fans wanting to see the Yankees or Orioles play would have to drive to Cleveland when those teams were in town to play the Indians; Red Sox fans would have to drive to New York to see the Mets play the Braves if they wanted to see Hank Aaron in action.

Which meant the All-Star Game had the feel of something special.

Today, Major League Baseball is so oversaturated on TV that the All-Star Game has lost much of its luster.

Since the streaming packages have helped to give baseball back some of its popularity, while interleague games that bring the Dodgers or Yankees to town generally bring bigger crowds and higher ticket prices, the reality is that the owners aren’t giving up any of that.

The NBA had an East vs. West format for many years. During the heyday from the early 1980s up through the early 2000s the All-Star Game had the sense of a real rivalry, with opposing stars from the annual championships facing off again in the next season’s All-Star Game: Magic vs. Bird, Jordan vs. Barkley, Kobe vs. everyone.

Then they decided to mess with the formula, using a “draft” system that made for unpredictable team lineups. Fan interest has not improved.

The NHL also abandoned its most successful model, of East vs. West, for a North America vs. everyone else format. Same result as the NBA.

And the NFL had long used a baseball-style conference format, the AFC v. NFC. But to be honest, the football and hockey all-star games were never as competitive or fierce as the baseball and basketball because it was at heart an exhibition game, and nobody wanted to get injured in what are the two most violent sports in this country over a game that didn’t really count. But in the years that the Pro Bowl was reliably held in Honolulu the week before or after the Super Bowl, it made for attractive viewing for the parts of the country living through another abysmal winter.

Today, Pro Bowl doesn’t even exist any more except as a weekend for the best players to be honored while competing in “skills challenges.” And now it’s just part of Super Bowl Week.

Which brings us to the WNBA and its ongoing, and apparently painful, growing pains — including the loud drama around its upcoming All-Star Game this Saturday.

After decades of toiling in relative obscurity — despite massive marketing budgets, generous subsidies from the NBA, national broadcast exposure, and the growing popularity of women’s college basketball — the WNBA received a marketing bonanza when Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese of LSU brought their heated rivalry from college to the pros.

It was supposed to be Magic vs. Bird 2.0, mirroring the arrival of college rivals Earvin “Magic” Johnson from Michigan State and Indiana State’s Larry Bird. Magic led the Los Angeles Lakers for all of the 1980s, while Bird did the same with the Boston Celtics. Their teams met in the NBA Finals three times in a four-year period, and one of their teams was in the Finals every single year of the decade.

The NBA leaned into their popularity, promoted the rivalry. And Magic and Bird did their part, too, not only through their exceptional levels of play, but by making the appropriately provocative comments to drive media interest.

The NBA quickly rose in popularity, going from having its playoff games shown late at night on tape delay to becoming “must-watch” TV with the Lakers’ “Showtime” and the Celtics leading the way. When Michael Jordan began leading the Chicago Bulls to the Finals in the 1990s, the NBA pivoted and marketed the heck out of him as well.

We also saw the PGA do the same with Tiger Woods - establishing him as the face of the tour in its marketing campaigns. Tiger (and nobody refers to him as “Woods” on second reference any longer, he’s that big of a star) helped grow the PGA Tour far beyond even what Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino had accomplished a generation earlier when they established golf as a viable TV viewing experience.

But the WNBA?

It’s like they think Clark is radioactive. The league office constantly, intentionally downplays her contributions. Denies that she’s anything special. Implies that the tens of millions of new fans who followed her from college to the pros are racist and probably prejudiced against gays.

When Clark got a fist to her throat while already on her back during a recent game, no foul was called. When the league later suspended the player who struck Clark while she was down, Clark was forced to publicly defend that player when the player claimed she was receiving racist messages.

The numerous, well-documented incidents of hard fouls against Clark are dismissed by the league as just the norm for any rookie or second-year player.

Were that true, though, Reese would be receiving similarly hard fouls in comparable number. And while Reese has been knocked around some her first two seasons, it’s simply not close to the pounding Clark is taking.

And now we get to this year’s WNBA All-Star Game. Clark received the second most votes from fans at the guard position (behind Paige Bueckers, who plays in Dallas, a much larger market) ... but was only the 11th top vote-getter at guard from her fellow players! This despite being among league leaders in scoring, assists and three-pointers.

As pioneering WNBA legend (and Hall of Famer) Candace Parker put it, “I think people need to look at themselves in the mirror and realize, man, if you got some insecurities, if you’re sitting down and you put in Caitlin Clark as the 11th best guard, y’all need to go to a therapist to figure out what childhood issues you have.”

When Tiger was ascendant but not yet dominating on the course, it was reported that a handful of PGA players complained to the office about all the marketing being done to promote Tiger - arguing that other players also deserved some of that attention.

The PGA was reported to have told them if they didn’t like it, they should win a few more tournaments over Tiger.

In addition to Clark’s on-court dominance is the impact she has on TV ratings and attendance. Her rookie season, other teams moved their games against Indiana to larger NBA or college arenas to handle the overflow crowds wanting to buy tickets to see Clark play.

That didn’t happen with Reese, or any other players.

Clark’s jersey is the No. 1 best-selling WNBA jersey, and has been since her rookie season. The Fever own the WNBA’s top five most-viewed TV broadcasts ever, and lead the league in ratings again this year — all while representing the small market of Indianapolis.

And yet the league promotes Reese — an exciting, charismatic young player with a fine all-around game — nearly to the exclusion of Clark. This even though Clark is provably more popular. It would be as if the PGA had decided to promote Trevino over Nicklaus, even as Nicklaus’ game and popularity outshone those of Trevino.

Tip Jar

There are lots of theories floating around to try to explain the WNBA’s curious approach to (not) growing its business as effectively as possible.

But the simple fact is that this week’s All-Star Game should be an effort to maximize exposure, to create excitement.

To grow the game.

Instead, the WNBA is downplaying its biggest star. Insisting, in fact, that she is not its biggest star.

When you have a league office publicly poor-mouthing it’s own main attraction the week of an All-Star Game?

Well, unlike Major League baseball, the NBA, HFL and NHL, at this rate the WNBA All-Star Game never will have a golden age before fading into obscurity.

The WNBA seems hell-bent on seizing obscurity for its All-Star Game right out of the gate.

-30-

Weird that UEFA didn’t find it alarming when Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo’s three-game suspension for a red card v Ireland in a World Cup qualifier last fall was reduced to one game by FIFA, allowing him to play in this World Cup. Nor did they get worked up when Nicolás Otamendi of Argentina or Ecuador’s Moisés Caicedo had their one-game suspensions lifted in May, making them eligible for this World Cup.

But let a horrible red card against a U.S. player be treated in the same way, and all of a sudden the Union of European Football Associations claims that civilization itself is at risk.

It must be hard thinking clearly without A/C ...

Still, even with their best scorer, the U.S. was clearly outmatched by the Belgians — unlike Mexico’s tough performance against England, fellow World Cup co-hosts U.S.A. and Canada both got shown up on soccer’s biggest stage. Again ...

Here’s the thing: In soccer-crazed countries, the very best athletes are identified at a young age and steered into a local developmental youth program.

In the United States, on the men’s side the fastest, strongest kids primarily gravitate toward American football. The next batch of kids will go into basketball (if they’re tall) or baseball.

Soccer is fighting hockey for whomever is left. And, frankly, rugby, lacrosse, volleyball, and the Olympic sports are also in that space, looking for undersized kids who didn’t have a chance in football or basketball and can’t hit a curve.

Part of the above also includes which sport individual kids are attracted to, of course — and in the U.S. culture, soccer is, frankly, probably behind the NHL in terms of prestige.

Few kids ever became BMOC playing soccer in high school. There’s no social benefit to it.

Other analyses to the U.S. loss v Belgium have compared the European soccer academies to the youth sports culture in the United States, and have argued the European system is superior and should be adopted.

In Europe, top prospects are identified early (usually between ages 6 and 8) and funneled into professional academies. The lives of these youngsters are organized around soccer — they attend special schools that schedule around soccer practice, and they generally move away from their own family and live in a dorm or with a host family nearer the academy.

In other words, they are denied a normal childhood in order to improve their odds of becoming a professional athlete.

An entertainer.

There is already debate in this country about the pressures we put young athletes under, and few of our kids face the above kind of pressure. Outside a handful of IMG academies and their competitors, we don’t have industrial-grade sports factories in this country.

Yet.

That seems to most of us a good thing.

There is even a growing backlash here against forcing kids to choose one sport to focus on before they even get to high school, as well as increasing questions about the propriety of year-round “travel ball” programs.

Our culture expends an enormous amount of its time, wealth and emotional capital on entertainment — and that is filtering down to our children.

The fact that the Europeans are even worse in this regard than we are doesn’t seem to be something we ought to emulate.

Organized sports were first developed as a method to provide regular exercise to growing young bodies. They have now morphed into little more than a talent pipeline for platforms for gambling interests to make their money off of.

It is more than a little ironic that greyhound racing has largely disappeared, with opponents arguing it was cruel to force dogs to perform so humans could have something to wager on — yet we’re more than willing to use our own children for that same purpose.

-30-

All those who bellyached about Jacob Misiorowski getting an All Star slot last year are likely lying low this year — the guy is legit, with a banner sophomore season to date. Yes, my Reds jacked up him up 7-2 on Thursday, but that was an outlier.

Even after that game, he maintains a 1.47 ERA, is 9-4 on the season, and has a 156:27 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Ironically, because of Milwaukee’s rotation schedule, Misiorowski probably won’t pitch in this year’s All-Star Game.

But at least no one is questioning whether he belongs on the National League roster ...

* * *

Perhaps Wyndham Clark’s U.S. Open playoff win two weeks ago over Scottie Scheffler is the beginning of the rehabilitation of his image. After trashing a locker room at last year’s Open (at Oakmont) and throwing his clubs in frustration at last year’s PGA Championship, Clark still has not regained the trust or respect of fans — as he heard all week with the boos and catcalls at Shinnecock Hills.

Trust, once lost, is difficult to regain. Winning helps, but conducting yourself with dignity and honor helps even more. And owning his past mistakes, as Clark repeatedly did that week, will further repair his strained relationship with fans ...

* * *

The WNBA trotted Caitlin Clark out to dutifully condemn “hate” supposedly being directed toward black and gay players on other teams in reaction to Clark getting, well, pummeled on a regular basis.

But why is no mention ever made of the racist nonsense Clark faces — not necessarily from fans (although a fair guess would be she does get a lot of that, too) — but from media gadflys who resent the fact that the most popular player in the her game is Caucasian? We have everyone from Jemelle Hill to Monica McNutt publicly, repeatedly claiming that Clark isn’t actually all that good a player and only gets attention for being white.

That public-facing racism goes unchallenged by the league, but unverified reports that the player who throat-punched Clark received racist messages on social media requires Clark to defend her attacker?

How is that not blaming the victim — making her come out and defend the player who assaulted her?

The WNBA’s tone-deaf moralizing cannot be without repercussion indefinitely, and my guess is that many, perhaps most, of the new fans Caitlin Clark brought to the league are already tiring of the constant lectures and false accusations of racism.

The ratings are clear, so is attendance, and so are licensed merch sales: Clark drives eyes and dollars.

Not any of the other players that the WNBA and its media apologists assure us are the real reason for the higher ratings and popularity. It’s Clark. When she plays, ratings spike. When she’s out — or her game isn’t being televised — ratings tank.

And the asinine argument that she’s only popular because she’s white can be disproven in under two seconds: If it was just being white, then Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum or Sophie Cunningham would have become as popular as Clark is. Fans like her not because she’s white, but because of her combination of playing style, success, and personality — the same combination that made Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods transformatively popular in their respective sports.

Yet the league not only doesn’t protect Clark from cheap shots no other players seem to receive nearly as often, when she is pummeled anyone who protests is branded a homophobe and bigot for daring to notice.

Again, at what point do Clark’s fans simply tune out the league? Tire of the nonsense and take their entertainment dollars elsewhere?

Success is not guaranteed — look at NASCAR, which ruled the sports landscape in the 1990s to the point the NFL didn’t want to schedule against it. But NASCAR not only banned Confederate flags from its races, but did so in as confrontational manner as possible — not just banning the flags, but making clear that those who had flown them in the past weren’t entirely welcome moving forward. They managed to alienate huge swaths of their existing fan base without ever replacing them with the new fans they thought that policy would attract. Or at least not enough of them.

A quarter century later, tracks have closed, and races still feature tons of empty seats.

If the WNBA’s new fans simply go away, how long before the league’s broadcast partners start demanding refunds based on lower ratings? (Usually built into most broadcast contracts, anyway.) How long before the NBA owners and players association tires of underwriting a league that won’t even embrace its best marketing opportunity ever? Compare the WNBA’s constant poor-mouthing of Clark to the way the NBA built an entire marketing campaign around Jordan, or how the PGA touted Tiger at every possible opportunity. (And when other players complained that the PGA was promoting Tiger to the exclusion of other players, the PGA basically told them to go beat Tiger a few times if they wanted more attention.)

It’s rare to see this level of incompetence in an established pro sports league. It’s almost as if Cathy Englebert has a deal with Rob Manfred to make him look better by comparison.

If the WNBA doesn’t get its act together and soon, they’ll be back to fighting rugby and indoor lacrosse for bottom position in U.S. pro sports leagues. That a pro basketball league trails its counterpart in soccer in terms of popularity in this country is testament to just how badly the WNBA has been run. It is entirely conceivable that Major League Volleyball could pass the WNBA in the coming years ...

-30-

When I graduated from San Diego State in ’86, I drove my ’67 Mustang fastback cross-country. My younger brother went with me as far as Dayton, then I pressed on to visit Trageser World Headquarters in Baltimore (they had like 3/4 of a page of Tragesers in the white pages, compared to a single entry in Dayton), and finally to Mineola on Long Island, where I stayed at Chaminade High School with my great Uncle Joe Trageser (who had taught at Cincinnati Moeller and Dayton Chaminade for many years before retiring to the Marian community at Mineola). While I was there, my Cincinnati Reds were also in town to play the Mets, and Uncle Joe got us tickets and a ride to Shea Stadium.

We settled into our left-field bleacher seats, me with my ever-present Reds cap on. (A Shea denizen some rows behind us yelled, “Motherf---er, better take that Reds cap off before I come shove it up your ass!” My uncle, wearing his Roman collar that religious brothers also wear, stood up, and said, “Sir! Your language!” The Mets fan was only slightly abashed, saying, “Sorry, Father — I didn’t see you there. Could please encourage that young man to take off his Reds hat before he pushes me into an act of sin?” Uncle Joe turned to me and said, “Take the cap off, Jimmy.” I tucked it inside my shirt.)

Pete Rose was back as player-manager for the Reds at first base, Tony Perez had rejoined the Reds as a part-time player to finish out his glorious career, and Davey Concepcion was still at short. Plus Dave Parker had joined the Reds a few years earlier, and a couple of youngsters by the names of Eric Davis and Kal Daniels — who would help the Reds beat the A’s in a classic World Series sweep four years later — had made the team. (The Mets had some star power of their own, with Darryl Strawberry and former Red George Foster roaming their outfield.)

But Uncle Joe didn’t care about any of those legendary or future stars.

Instead, when Buddy Bell came up to bat the first time, with men on base, Uncle Joe got very excited and told me and the younger religious brother who’d driven us, “Oh, I taught Buddy Bell math at Moeller! He’s a good Catholic boy. He’s going to get a big hit for us here!” I don’t remember the details — strikeout, ground out, fly out — but it was an out.

“That’s okay, Buddy!” Uncle Joe yelled. “You’ll get ’em next time!”

A few innings later, Bell again came up to bat with men on base. Uncle Joe was very excited as he told everyone around us how he taught Buddy math in high school back in Cincinnati. “A good local boy!” (although not, of course, to New York.) He then turned his attention to the field: “C’mon, Buddy, you can do it!”

Another out, and now Uncle Joe is somewhat quieter, and doesn’t say much.

When Buddy came up a third time, again with a chance to drive in a go-ahead run, Uncle Joe said loud enough for all of us around him to hear, “Ah, he’s no good! He’s just going to make another out!”

Buddy promptly got a knock and put the Reds up (they’d hang on to win) and Uncle Joe jumped up and down, high-fiving — or attempting to high-five — some very confused and sad Mets fans around us. “I TOLD you Buddy would get us a hit!” he yelled at me.

As we were leaving our seats after the game, the guy who’d been yelling at me to take my Reds cap off stopped for a second, slapped me on the back and said, “Good game today!”

New Yorkers ...

Now, according to the Baseball Almanac, the summer of 1986 had the Reds visiting Shea once, July 7-9. The first two games were both one-run affairs, and Bell went 1 for 4 with at least 1 RBI in both games. I remember it was still light when the game was over, so it was likely the Sunday afternoon game.

My one and only time at Shea ...

-30-

Earlier this week on Dan Patrick’s radio show, one of the Danettes made a telling comparison between Caitlin Clark and Tiger Woods.

Like Tiger, Caitlin drives ratings and attendance in ways no other player in her league does — as the TV ratings for the All-Star Game once again proved (and as everyone at ESPN promptly tried to disprove).

I’ll take it a step further than the Danettes: The PGA fully embraced Tiger — promoted him almost to the exclusion of other top golfers, and when there was grumbling from some players about all the hype around Tiger basically told them to suck it up and enjoy the bigger paydays he was making possible for everyone.

The PGA rode Tigermania like a world cup surfer riding a monster wave.

The WNBA? They’re either busy denying a wave even exists, or claiming it’s no bigger than all the other waves, and basically doing all they can to distract people away from the tsunami that is Caitlin Clark.

It is completely insane.

There was an even more telling difference last week in how the LPGA is welcoming Lottie Woad vs. how Caitlin Clarke has been shunned by her league.

The LPGA seems like it wants to grow, unlike the WNBA.

Woad has been dominating women's amateur golf the last couple of years the way Clark did women's college hoops. She won the Augusta National Women's Amateur last year while playing for Florida State, and later last year rose to No. 1 in the world amateur rankings.

This summer she just absolutely arrived on the world stage all Tiger-like:

• First week of July, while still an amateur she wins the Women's Irish Open by six flippin' strokes — over the pros!

• The next week, she misses a playoff at the Evian Championship — one of the women's majors — by ONE stroke on 18. She finishes in third. Still an amateur!

• Those two finishes give her an early LPGA tour card, which she takes. This last week, she wins her pro debut, the Women's Scottish Open, by three strokes!

Now, note that the Women's Scottish Open was available for streaming only ... until Woad climbed up the leader board on the second day, and the LPGA commissioner went to the networks and got the final round on cable! Her league went to the mat in order to have an opportunity to show her to the world — to bring in new fans.

And they've done this before, as well — with Nelly Korda, with Minjee Lee, with Lydia Ko.

No resentment, no begrudging the new fans the up-and-coming players bring with them.

Just: “Here, look, we have another great young golfer on the women's tour you golf fans might enjoy watching.”

Share

When some reporters grumbled a few years back that the Asian players were difficult interviews because they didn't speak English, the Tour defended its players — and hired more translators and tutors to help those players succeed.

Like the PGA with Tiger, the LPGA has kind of struggled to find someone, anyone to replace Annika Sörenstam the last few years.

But they keep promoting the players they do have — and Woad is a talent, dominating every event she's in right now.

It's a lesson the WNBA should emulate, but likely won't.

If Clark tires of being the most hated player in the league and ends up joining that breakaway 3 on 3 league, the WNBA will go back to being an afterthought on the American sports landscape — less popular than hockey, tennis or soccer, fighting rugby and lacrosse for scraps.

-30-

Unanimity makes me nervous.

Unanimity in the media makes me wonder what’s being overlooked.

With all the righteous posturing about the Saudi-backed LIV golf league, the nonprofit PGA Tour has its own Greek chorus singing its praises in the form of the national media. Talking heads on TV and columnists in print and online are all in agreement that LIV is bad, and the PGA Tour is unqualified good.

To be sure, the Saudi Arabian monarchy is not an organization that shares many values with American democracy. The lack of political accountability is most troublesome, but the Saudis get more flack from American journalists for their refusal to adhere to modern Western sensibilities on sexual mores.

Still, in the eight years the PGA Tour-affiliated Saudi Invitational was held in Saudi Arabia, I can’t recall once reading or hearing the phrase “sportswashing” — the practice of using sports to improve one’s public image.

It was only when the Saudis launched the LIV Tour and began offering appearance fees to top pro golfers that all of a sudden the Saudis displaced the Russians as foreign enemy No. 1.

Many of the questions about the appropriateness of taking Saudi money to play golf are fair — particularly from an American perspective. Do you want to promote a regime that denies everyone but Muslims the right to freely practice their faith? That allows no public criticism of the government? That only recently granted women the right to drive, and still holds them legally subservient to their husbands or fathers?

But these questions were just as relevant two years ago, when the Asia Tour — an affiliate of the PGA Tour — was sponsoring the Saudi Invitational, and nobody was asking American and European golfers why they played that event.

The hypocrisy is a bit much.

More to the point, there are important questions about the PGA Tour that are not being asked — apparently in some sort of self-adopted “solidarity” among members of the media with the U.S.-based PGA Tour.

The PGA Tour is organized as a nonprofit membership organization — one that broke away from the Professional Golfer’s Association that birthed it in 1968, as the top-echelon Tour players didn’t want to share financial proceeds or voting control of their organization with teaching pros that made (and make) up the bulk of the PGA membership. Professional golfers who have earned their Tour card — either through qualifying school (before 2013), or finishing near the top of the minor league Korn Ferry Tour — are not employees of the Tour. They receive no salary nor benefits from the Tour, other than the right to compete in Tour-sanctioned tournaments.

While Major League Baseball is, rightly, coming under congressional and media scrutiny for the below minimum wage pay offered to Minor League ballplayers, somehow the PGA Tour is escaping any attention for the fact that young golfers scrambling to make it on Tour not only receive no financial support, but many are losing money in the process.

A pro golfer on the PGA Tour is responsible for all their own expenses: travel to and from a tournament site, room and board, meals, hiring a caddy.

The only money to be made on the PGA Tour is by finishing high enough in a tournament to qualify for winnings.

Many a struggling young golfer just out of college is either taking out loans, living off their parents’ support, or spending their own life savings just to survive week to week. If they miss the cut, they typically don’t get a check at all — and may be out several thousand dollars for the weekend after airfare or gas, hotel, and meals.

A large number of these new golfers will not place high enough in enough tournaments to earn the necessary points to retain their Tour card for the next year — either sending them back to the Korn Ferry Tour or giving up their dream of playing pro golf. (And the players on the Korn Ferry Tour are in as tough a spot as those on Tour.) Many will end up taking jobs at a golf course or country club as a teaching pro simply to earn a living.

The LIV Tour offers each of its golfers a salary, plus the opportunity to win money at its tournaments. True, the LIV Tour is mostly skipping the younger players (outside a handful of top prospects), but the basic premise of paying its players is one it’s hard to argue with.

The PGA Tour’s argument that it’s model represents an ideal of meritocracy is a bit much, when you realize that the Tour’s CEO made more than $8 million last year — more than all but one Tour player. And with the LIV Tour now signing some of the most popular golfers in the world, suddenly the PGA Tour discloses that it is going to increase purses at its more prestigious events by adding in tens of millions of dollars from its “reserves” in order to make its tournaments more attractive?

Nonprofit corporations are not supposed to have reserves beyond what is necessary to protect the stability of the organization’s mission — any money generated is supposed to be poured back into the organization, by law.

Where did these reserves come from, and just how large are they?

The national media seems awfully uncurious about all this.

While the lower-ranked rookies struggling to make it on Tour might not drive TV ratings the way Tiger Woods (still) does, they are obviously needed to fill out the 150+ player fields that help create the atmosphere of a PGA Tour event and add drama to Friday’s post-second round cuts. At least a portion of the PGA Tour’s revenue comes from televising the first and second rounds of a tournament on Thursday and Friday — yet those players who help make that possible receive nothing if they don’t make the cut.

With the federal government announcing it has launched an anti-trust investigation into the PGA Tour and its decision to refuse to allow any golfers who play in an LIV event to participate in future PGA Tour events, perhaps some of the above questions will be asked. Maybe even answered.

But it’s worth noting that it’s not the LIV Tour that is making players choose. The LIV Tour simply put together a calendar of tournaments, and began inviting some of the better-known players to participate — and to pay them for their time.

It’s the PGA Tour that has said players have to choose between the Tours.

When you’re telling someone who’s not even on your payroll where they are allowed to go to earn a living?

That’s pretty rich.

Here’s an idea for either the LIV Tour or the PGA Tour: Want to set your Tour apart, make it more interesting? Give it an additional patina of eliteness?

Adopt persimmon woods.

Much as professional baseball still uses the more difficult wooden bats, while Little League, high school and college teams all use metal bats, adopting wooden drivers would force top golfers to use equipment that is trickier to master — but also once mastered gives more control.

With complaints that modern balls and metal drivers are making too many courses play too short (leading Augusta National, Torrey Pines, and other courses that host major tournaments to add hundreds of yards in length), persimmon woods would shorten the distance even the most gifted pro golfers can hit the ball off the tee. That would force them to use their long or middle irons for their second shots.

It would restore a purity of the game that has become, on too many courses for too many pro golfers, a game of driver, wedge, putter.

It was once said that only God can hit a 1 iron — and most of today’s pro golfers have likely never even used a 2 iron!

I think it would generate interest — and it would certainly differentiate the truly great golfer from the merely very good.

A professional golf tournament is supposed to test every part of a players game: Their drives, their irons, their short game, and their putting. Right now, due to the development of modern equipment aimed mostly at recreational players, too many pro players can simply skip their long irons — once a staple of the game.

A persimmon wood has a much smaller sweet spot than a modern metal driver; the clubhead itself is much smaller.

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But the giants of the past — your Ben Hogans and Arnold Palmers, Sam Sneads and Lee Trevinos — could shape their shots with a persimmon wood in ways a metal driver simply can’t. Metal woods are great at hitting the ball long and straight, but not so much at intentionally curving a shot.

And just as a wooden baseball bat hitting the ball makes a sound that no metal bat can ever replicate, so, too, does a persimmon driver.

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With the latest upending of the college sports landscape — University of Southern California and the University of California Los Angeles bolting their longtime home in the PAC 12 Conference for the Big 10 — an intriguing idea is starting to percolate in the media: Adopt relegation as practiced by the British soccer leagues (as well as the PGA Tour in golf).

The concept of relegation is simple: The bottom couple of teams in each higher league are demoted to the next level down at the end of the season — with the top couple of teams in that lower league promoted to the higher league. (The PGA Tour does the same with its individual members — the players at the bottom of the rankings each year lose their tour card, and are no longer eligible to enter Tour events, while the best-performing players on the junior Korn Tour are promoted.)

It rewards both effort and competence, and offers fans of teams in lower-level leagues the hope that one day their favorite team can compete for the most prestigious championship in their sport.

As applied to college football, by both Outkick’s Chad Withrow on June 29 and Andrew Beaton in The Wall Street Journal on July 4, each major conference — SEC, Big 10, ACC or Big 12 or Pac 12 (if any of the latter three survive the current chaos) — would have an association with a lower-level conference: The Mountain West, Conference USA, etc.

You could even extend that down to the next-lower tier, what’s known as the Football Championship Subdivision, still Division I level teams. Beneath that you have the Div. II and then Div. III programs.

At the end of each season, the two worst football programs in the higher conference would be reassigned to the lower conference, while the top two teams in the lower conference would be promoted.

Of course, your Indianas and Rutgers and Vanderbilt administrators are never going to go for it: The better the conference you’re in, the more TV money you receive, even though those schools rarely are in contention for a conference championship — or even a winning record.

Probably the only authority that could convince the university presidents in the big conferences to adopt such a scheme is Congress — which is presently so dysfunctional that seems highly unlikely.

But there are a heck of a lot more alumni of the 200-some schools with no chance to play for a national football title than there are of the couple dozen schools that currently monopolize the system — and income. So an effort to apply a modicum of competitive fairness to the university landscape would seem to have some built-in voter support.

(And as has been pointed out in this space before, only about two dozen schools so much as break even on their athletics programs — the rest are soaking their non-scholarship students with fees and assessments to underwrite their money-losing sports programs.)

As much money as the big conferences get for their television broadcast rights, it’s dwarfed by what the U.S. government spends on higher education: Pell grants, G.I. Bill tuition, guaranteed student loans — plus all the research grants from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Energy and Health & Human Services. Make eligibility for all federal programs dependent on adopting an open relegation system, and the college presidents may squawk — but they’ll eventually fall in line.

They couldn’t afford not to.

And it’s not as if Congress’ doesn’t have a legitimate role in this. After all, the NCAA — which the big conferences are currently busy writing out of the college sports landscape — was created in 1906 by congressional charter in reaction to a spate of on-field deaths and devastating injuries.

College basketball and baseball could be rolled into this, too — perhaps rather than having one school with teams in three different conferences, each year schools would be assigned on their overall competitiveness across different sports.

Although having a foot in different conferences wouldn’t be all that difficult, either.

Professional baseball is another sport that could use relegation — and the players’ union might actually find some reasons to be in favor of it.

While certain teams are known for spending the bare minimum in player salaries, giving themselves no chance to compete for the end of season playoffs — but fattening the bank accounts of their owners, who share in the Major League Baseball TV contract — relegation would force your Pittsburgh Pirates, your Oakland As, your, sigh, Cincinnati Reds, to spend money to compete for free agents in order to avoid relegation to the AAA level in the minor leagues.

And if the Buffalo Bisons or the Indianapolis Indians win their minor league championship, and draw higher attendance than, say, the Pirates or As, why shouldn’t they get a chance to move up to the big leagues the next year?

Now, since the minor leagues’ rosters are controlled by their Major League affiliates, perhaps the eligibility for relegation up or down could take into consideration attendance, marketing, etc. If Albuquerque or Sacramento is able to draw more fans and win more games than the Royals or Tigers, maybe those fans should get a chance at a Major League season the next year.

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The Major League teams that spend money on free agents, that put their TV revenue back into the product on the field, might even be supportive of such a scheme.

And heck, maybe just the discussion of adopting such a change would motivate the low performers to step up their game and try to win a few more games each season.

And, of course, Congress has an ace in its hand here, too: Major League Baseball operates under an antitrust exemption, allowing it to bypass certain labor rules that other business have to abide by.

Adding a requirement for relegation to the anti-trust exemption would, if nothing else, reduce the anti-trust behavior of Major League Baseball.

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As college baseball heads into its various playoffs, including the Division I NCAA “College World Series” in a few weeks in Omaha, I’m wrapping up my own post-COVID tour of local (San Diego County) college ballparks.

A reunion with some college friends earlier this spring ended with our attending a San Diego State — San Jose State game at Tony Gwynn Stadium.

I’d forgotten how joyous college ball is: Most of the players on most teams have no dreams or hopes of being drafted; they’ll play their last truly competitive game their senior year of college. Yeah, the ding of metal bats takes some getting used to if you’ve only watched professional baseball of late — but the level of play is surprisingly high, and the love these players have for the game is palpable.

When we saw that SDSU was playing across town at the University of San Diego a couple weeks later, a group of us took that game in, too, at Fowler Park.

A week after that, we drove a bit north for SDSU vs. University of California San Diego at Triton Ballpark.

Then USD and Gonzaga ended their regular season with a four-game series at USD for the regular season conference title — we took in a Saturday double-header back at USD.

Finally, when Point Loma Nazarene University hosted an NCAA Division II playoff series (a “super regional”) against Azusa Pacific last week, I went to that — and got to see the Sea Lions advance to the national championship in North Carolina this weekend. (And Carroll B. Land Stadium is called “The Most Scenic Ballpark in America” for a reason — where else can the outfielders look over their shoulder and see sail boats and dolphins?)

It was a heady, fun couple of months — small, cozy ballparks where you are close enough to the field that you can hear umpires explaining calls to coaches, where there is plenty of nearby parking, and you don’t need to take out a loan to buy a hot dog and soda. Plus, the tickets themselves are far cheaper than anything I could score at a San Diego Padres game. We didn’t make it to Cal State San Marcos this year — but it’s on the radar for next year, and maybe our community colleges, too: Palomar (which went to the state playoffs this year), MiraCosta, Grossmont, San Diego City College, Southwestern, Mesa.

That’s a lot of college baseball in one town, and that got me to thinking about the future of baseball, particularly given the recent decision by Major League Baseball to cut ties with 42 Minor League teams (shrinking from 162 to 120), citing the need to “save money.”

Re-reading Ken Davidoff's New York Post story on the challenges facing minor league baseball as the decision was being discussed last year pricked my curiosity even further. Could the decline of minor league ball be due to renewed competition for talent from college baseball — and, more importantly, can college ball help fill the void left by the shrinking of the minor leagues?

Lou Pavlovich, editor of Collegiate Baseball, answered that very question for readers of Lost in Cyberspace:

“My short answer is that, yes, college baseball can fill the void left by the contraction of the Minor Leagues. While you have all of these college baseball games taking place through May and several championships into June, the greatest hidden treasure are summer collegiate leagues which are scattered throughout the nation.” (More on that below.)

Looking at the numbers

In addition to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which has three divisions of athletic competition, with Division I being the highest, there are also more than 200 smaller schools affiliated with the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA.

Finally, two-year “junior” or “community” colleges have their intercollegiate sports governed by the National Junior College Athletic Association, which, like the NCAA, has three levels of competition.

I drew up the chart below, showing how many colleges and universities offer scholarships for baseball players - and also the total size of the rosters.

That's more than 53,000 prospects on more than 1,500 teams who might have helped field minor league teams a half-century ago. Today, obviously many of these players see baseball as a way to earn a college degree while extending their playing careers.

At their peak, in 1949, there were 448 minor league teams. Today, following contraction, the affiliated minor leagues — those that feed directly to one of the 30 Major League teams — have the following roster slots:

There is this, too: With most four-year universities — even public ones — now charging into the tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition and fees, plus the costs for textbooks, room and dining, a full-ride scholarship is almost always worth more than the $15,000 a year a top minor league prospect who was not rated high enough to qualify for a signing bonus might make.

Plus the living environment is usually better in college than in the minors: a shared dorm room on campus instead of 4 guys to a small apartment, or renting a room from a local family. You also have more structure at college: classes to attend, a weight room, you’re living on campus and have to check in with the coaches. There is simply less time for boredom to lead to mischief, or worse.

On the downside, the competition isn’t as good in college, slowing a player’s development. And fewer games are played over the course of a season, too.

Further, college isn’t for everyone. Not every high schooler wants to go to college or has the grades to get into college. Just like plenty of high school grads who don’t play baseball are more interested in learning a trade than continuing in school, so many ballplayers might be a better fit for professional ball than college.

Still, with more than 50,000 roster spots on college and university baseball teams, that’s clearly tapping into the talent pool that formerly filled out the minor leagues.

And when the minors were at their heyday, baseball was the first choice of most high school athletes. Today, the top athletes gravitate toward football and basketball — baseball is left to fight with soccer for the best of the rest.

Of course, college baseball won’t help build up a small town’s economy the way a minor league team can — particularly one tied to a Major League team. Having an established star who is working their way back from injury play a couple of rehab games on a farm team will fill that minor league stadium and boost the town’s economy.

And a minor league season is far longer than a college season — 140 games stretching over five months, compared to an NCAA max of 56 games in college. meaning more tickets sold, more concessions. It helps fill in the long summer evenings when school is on break in a way that college ball, which is tied to the school year, just can’t.

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But minor league teams exist at the whim of the Major Leagues. For years, the Dodgers’ AAA affiliate — the highest level of the minor leagues — was in Albuquerque. Then the Dodgers moved the affiliate to Portland. One of the best-known minor league teams (thanks to the character Max Klinger from the hit 1970s TV show “M*A*S*H” being a fan), the Toledo Mud Hens, have changed Major League affiliations and levels numerous times over the years, from the Minnesota Twins to the Cleveland Indians, to the New York Yankees and the current affiliate club, the Detroit Tigers.

A college team may move up (or, conceivably) down a division over the years, but it’s always going to be that college’s team. There’s a stability there that the minor leagues just can’t provide.

Weighing all of the above factors, it’s pretty clear that college baseball can’t truly replace minor league baseball — they’re two different animals.

A new model?

But a melding of the two is under way in some towns, particularly those whose minor league team lost its Major League affiliation last year.

Summer wooden bat college leagues continue to grow in popularity — both to give collegiate players more playing time over the summer when their season is over, and also to help fill the void left by minor league contraction.

There are now almost 90 summer baseball leagues, in every corner of the country, from the storied Alaskan Baseball League and Cape Cod Baseball League (going back decades) to new ones sprouting up from San Diego (hello, Pacific Coast Collegiate League) to Florida (Florida Gulf Coast League), the Great Lakes (Great Lakes United Baseball League) to Long Island, N.Y. (Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League).

The ballfields range from established minor league and college parks to high school fields; the seasons offer from a couple dozen to 50 games.

Pavlovich, the editor at Collegiate Baseball, ranks them this way:

“For elite baseball competition, nothing beats the Cape Cod League with numerous high profile college players who are expected to be picked high in future MLB Drafts. The stunning beauty of New England never gets old for those who attend games on the coast and other locations.

“One of my favorite summer wooden bat leagues is the Alaska League. They once had an airplane crash during one of their games (not on purpose). If you want to go out on a jog at any time as a player, beware. There have been tales about players who have been chased by bears.

“College baseball summer wooden bat leagues are the heartbeat of America with fun at every turn.”

Perhaps no team better exemplifies the creative thinking going into a post-contraction minor league world than the Savannah Bananas, a team Pavlovich singled out as an example of modern minor league ball done right.

Never a feeder to a Major League team, the Savannah Bananas have built a dual-purpose schedule that features their collegiate summer league season in the Coastal Plain League with a winter season built around a Harlem Globetrotters-styled exhibition game — featuring everything from flaming bats to pitchers on stilts. Management markets the heck out of the team to the community — issuing new highlight and music videos weekly or more — with the result that the team regularly sells out its home games. (And to be honest, “Hey Baby” beats “Take Me Out to the Ballpark” as a seventh-inning stretch song hands-down.)

The summer league is pure competition, though, as college players from around the country come to play in front of an appreciative audience.

The Burlington, Iowa team lost its affiliation — and now both hosts a summer college team, as well as a team in an independent, unaffiliated league, the American Association of Professional Baseball, which features 10 teams. There are another half-dozen similar leagues, some with business relationships to the Major Leagues (although not featuring any feeder teams), and some that are truly independent. It’s tough going for these teams, though, not having access to any of the top prospects — those with a viable chance of someday making it to the Big Leagues, “The Show” as the Major Leagues are called by players.

Back on campus

But the growth of college baseball over the past half-century does offer another alternative for those who love the game — fans as well as players.

In 1950, the University of California System consisted of five campuses. Today there are 10, seven of which offer baseball. Florida Atlantic, Central Florida, Florida International, South Alabama, Coastal Carolina, and Northern Kentucky are all major universities founded since 1950. (Another comparison: In 1950, U.S. colleges and universities awarded 432,000 bachelor’s degrees. In 2009, that number was 1.6 million.)

In addition to the raw numbers, college baseball is growing in popularity - most of the larger conferences now televise their baseball games, and even smaller conferences regularly stream their games online. The University of Tennessee just announced plans for a major upgrade to its stadium.

And many colleges are marketing their baseball programs in the community similar to the way minor league teams have for years: Reminding families that they offer an affordable entertainment option. At both USD games I attended this year, a local youth league was in attendance, announced over the PA, and players in their uniforms were invited to come on the field before the game to join the college players for the lineup exchange and national anthem.

There is, perhaps, another lesson in the growth of the college game that the Major League brain trust might want to consider:

The Major Leagues have already changed a few rules, and are looking at tinkering with more — putting a runner on second in extra innings, banning the infield shift, putting pitchers on a pitch clock. They are all based on the premise that baseball is losing younger people and has to do something to compete for their attention.

The 50,000 students playing baseball at our colleges and universities, though, offer a counterweight to that assessment.

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The conventional wisdom in the national media regarding collegiate sports is that the universities are making billions in profits off the uncompensated labor of their student-athletes.

As is often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong. In this case, it is spectacularly wrong.

Yes, new TV deals in football and men’s basketball continue to pay more and more money in rights fees. The Southeastern Conference and ESPN just signed a new deal that sees ESPN paying the SEC $3 billion over 10 years for the right to broadcast SEC football games.

But less often reported is the reality that the vast majority of universities continue to spend even more money than they bring in, hoping to someday join the handful of elite schools that actually do make money on athletics: Your Alabamas and Ohio States, your Floridas and Texases and USCs and Notre Dames.

Lost on too many reporters and columnists, though, is the fact that just because you’re bringing in billions of dollars doesn’t mean you’re in the black financially: No matter how much money is coming in, you can always spend more if you’re not disciplined.

And most of our nation’s largest universities are, in fact, not disciplined.

Study after study has shown that the overwhelming majority of universities continue to lose money on their intercollegiate athletics programs. The Best Colleges website ran an analysis in the fall of 2020 that found that of the 65 “Power Five Conference” universities (those in the Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12), only 25 broke even or made money on their sports programs.

Which means that even your smaller schools in the most profitable conferences are spending more on sports than they bring in.

The other 64 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision sports universities — Conference USA, Mountain West Conference, Sunbelt Conference, American Conference, Mid-American Conference — all lose money. Every. Single. One.

A median loss of $23 million a year.

And there are also 125 Division I Football Championship Subdivision teams, which aren’t even in the running for the big national football bowl games.

All 125 lose money.

A median loss of $14.3 million a year.

There are 97 Division I schools without football.

They all lose money.

All the Division II and Division III schools lose money on sports.

In fact, out of 1,100 schools in the NCAA (there are also 252 schools in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA, which typically don’t offer scholarships — or have TV deals), 25 made money on athletics.

That is fewer than 3 percent.

All of these schools are chasing a mirage; even those two dozen schools - again, your Ohio States, your Alabamas - that show a net profit on sports, the median profit is just under $8 million. Not billion. Million.

Considering that college and university presidents are paid six- and seven-figure salaries to manage their institutions’ assets, they seem to be awfully lousy at math. Even if they get to the promised land and are able to generate that $8 million a year in athletics profit, it is not going to do much to help the finances at a school as large as San Diego State — which has an annual budget of $1.03 billion.

College sports have devolved into an ever-escalating money pit, in which university administrators spend more and more money chasing a tiny hope of a relatively modest income source.

Desperate for money to prop up these programs and entice elite high school athletes to select their university and not someone else’s — building new stadiums and arenas, new practice facilities and team dorms, weight rooms and private dining halls for athletes — an increasing number of universities have turned to a largely unreported source of income: Non-scholarship students.

Students paying their own way through college — whether by working, taking out loans, applying for grants, getting help from mom and dad — now regularly have to factor in hundreds of dollars a semester in additional fees that exist solely to underwrite their campus’ intercollegiate sports programs. It’s basically a surcharge for the privilege of attending a school with sports teams.

Depending on the campus’ governing documents, fees can be imposed on incoming students in a variety of ways. Private colleges and universities may be able to simply add the assessment by vote of the trustees, or by executive fiat. But public universities in many cases require that students get a vote on any new fee assessment above and beyond tuition.

Just over the past few years, we’ve seen student government (often know as Associated Students) at numerous universities presented with requests from the administration to place a referendum on the next ballot to impose or raise an existing fee to underwrite intercollegiate sports programs:

• University of California, Riverside is currently requesting a $90 per student per quarter increase (from the current $25)

• Last fall, students at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas, were asked to approve a $23 per credit hour fee to finance athletics. (They voted no.)

• Washington State University five years ago asked its students to consolidate fees of $265 per student, making the athletics fee mandatory.

• Also five years ago, Texas A&M Commerce students approved a referendum bumping the Intercollegiate Athletics Fee from $11 per semester credit hour to $32. (So a student carrying a full course load of 16 credits would pay $512 a semester.)

• And the University of California, San Diego — one of the most academically prestigious public universities in the country — recently jumped to Division I (minus football), based on a 2007 referendum that added a $78 / student / quarter fee.

While students at many public universities at least get to have a say in proposed fees to underwrite athletics, these votes are rarely truly democratic.

At Texas A&M Commerce, for instance, the university press release touted the 4:1 victory margin. But out of a student population of more than 12,000 at the time, only about 2,000 in total voted. So rather than 80 percent of students approving of the proposal, the truth is that only 8 percent actually voted in favor.

Most never cast a ballot at all.

When I was at San Diego State in the mid-1980s, the administration wanted to assess a student fee for athletics in order to finance a new on-campus basketball arena. In order to do so, under state law, the student body had to be allowed to vote on the issue.

So a campuswide referendum was held, in which students were asked to vote on whether to assess “themselves” a future fee increase to help subsidize the new arena.

Except those of us casting a ballot (and, regrettably, I very vocally supported this effort via my role as opinion page editor of the student newspaper) were NOT, in fact, deciding whether WE would pay higher fees: We were voting on whether FUTURE students would pay the fee, as the new fee wasn’t going to kick in for a few years.

There was a time that sort of practice was known as taxation without representation.

And this is not an aberration — most of the examples cited above were similarly structured, with the new fee or the increase going into effect a year or two after the vote.

An NBC News report from two years ago determined that 80 percent of colleges and universities charge such fees — but that report barely generated a ripple of interest in the larger national media, with few if any outlets following up with their own reporting.

And once these new or increased fees are approved by the current study body, there is rarely if ever a method for subsequent students — the ones actually paying the fees — to overturn the agreement. Since these student fees are often used as collateral on building loans, it’s often a 20- or 30-year commitment — a commitment made when the students paying the back end of the loan weren’t even yet born.

(Although credit the current students at University of California, Davis, who last month managed to get a non-binding resolution on ending a current $570 annual athletic assessment in front of students. While more than 70 percent of those who voted favored ending the subsidy, fewer than 20 percent of the student body voted, so the measure did not qualify as an official fee referendum. And the administration had already indicated it did not endorse the validity of the measure.)

Now, the argument can be made that all incoming students know the fees and assessments they will have to pay, in addition to tuition, books and rent — and there is truth to that.

But in all the pious media sermons on how “unfairly” college athletes are treated, and how “rich” universities are getting off of this “free” labor, the plight of the vast majority of students struggling to pay for their education is almost universally overlooked.

For the average student, who is taking on student debt or getting help from their parents, it’s a pretty hollow argument that the free tuition, room and board that scholarship athletes receive in exchange for competing on one of the campus’ sports teams is a form of “uncompensated” labor. Most of us would consider $50,000 a year or more in benefits to play a game a pretty fair deal.

This is particularly true when students who are paying for college through loans are adding hundreds or thousands of dollars to their debt each year for the privilege of subsidizing private athletic facilities like dedicated weight rooms, dining halls and libraries that those footing the bill don’t even get to step foot in — outside a quick tour during freshman orientation!

With state legislators in California, New York, and other states now looking at requiring schools to pay athletes a salary in addition to their free tuition, books and housing, the only place campus administrators are going to have to turn is going to be the non-scholarship students.

It is difficult to imagine that this trend is sustainable over the long haul. The argument for having a competitive intercollegiate sports program that doesn’t provide an income stream to the university is that it helps increase the school’s national profile and prestige, helping drive enrollment of students who wouldn’t otherwise attend, would-be students who see having sports teams to cheer for as an integral part of the college experience, and encouraging alumni to donate at higher levels than they otherwise would.

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Butch Oxendine, executive director of the American Student Government Association, which assists student government at colleges across the country with training and materials support, pointed out that at some smaller Division III schools that don’t offer scholarships, many students choose that school simply so they can continue to play a sport they love at a competitive level: “Sometimes 50 percent or more of students at a school will be ‘college athletes.’ Many go to that particular school SO they can play a college sport.”

For those student-athletes, then, any fee to subsidize athletics is undoubtedly justified by the personal rewards they get from taking part in their sport of choice.

The larger question looming over these growing subsidies, though, is how long will the non-athlete, non-scholarship student be willing to attend a university where they may see thousands of dollars added to the cost of their education over the course of four years? A cost that will only increase if states begin demanding that athletes receive a salary on top of their scholarship.

Two other trends to consider regarding this issue in coming years:

• Will student debt “forgiveness” include the thousands of dollars a student paid in athletic subsidy fees? If so, are we really asking taxpayers to pick up the bill for underwriting college athletics?

• If, as many predict, the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments many elite college athletes are now receiving from alumni booster groups begin to cut into the donations those alumni would otherwise have given to the university’s athletic department, will administrators again turn to paying students to make up that difference?

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