Yes, perhaps this was inevitable, although we’re never ones to use slippery slopes here on The Daily McPlay. But stumbling across this piece of “news” from North Carolina demonstrates just the madness that has overtaken American capitalism, the resulting corruption, and the inevitable greed. If we knew the NCAA was signing its own death warrant five years ago when it unleashed the pay-for-play model, well … wow.

All this NIL nonsense comes back to the basic reality: those athletes who want to be paid need to go to the professional leagues, and in the case of football, that basically means the NFL. No public schools should ever bear the burden and responsibility of preparing “students” for professional sports when they don’t even have funding to prepare students for college and/or professional industry. It’s that simple … period.

Doesn’t matter what the level of schooling is: it is the NFL’s responsibility to train its own future employees, just as Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League do—and what the National Basketball Association is slowly starting to do, also. The National Football League is not special, despite what it must think of itself. Yet because of the lure of the cold hard cash involved, everything is corrupt and problematic.

Everything.

Human history has demonstrated this through the ages, no matter what the civilization or culture. We are greedy bastards; it’s impossible to prove we are not. Sports have shown themselves to be no different, either, on any level. The vultures come for all of us in the end, and those with more to offer the vampire get devoured first—namely, those who cannot protect themselves (legal minors in this case and their parents!).

Too many get seduced by the dreams of success, the lure of “easy money” … and like lottery winners, they will fall prey and victim to the demons in the world: “If they don’t fritter it all away on bad investments and extravagant purchases … [they] may find themselves the targets of scammers, harassment from friends or even complete strangers, and — in extreme cases — those willing to kill.” There is no anonymity here, either.

When will it end? When consumers stop buying the product, really, and perhaps we as a consumer society are unable control ourselves despite the better angels of our nature: when it comes to zealotry of any kind,
ethics, facts, law, logic, math, morality, reason, and science go out the window with common sense and rationality. There is no need to cite examples here, as anyone with a shred of life experience knows this.

In the end, it’s America, and everyone can choose their own destinies—until they cannot anymore, because it’s been taken from them by fraudulent means. So, if young boys and girls want to be professional athletes in this country, they have the freedom to pursue that dream … but they should never be exploited, at any level of education, by those only wanting to rob them of their dreams, their, finances, and their innocence.

Shame on us all.