extra credit 2

I watch The Business of Amateurs documentary for my second extra credit project. Although this did not really deal with race that much, it still gave a lot of insight into the NCAA and their corrupt nature from the start. It is just mind-blowing the number of athletes that leaving college sports with debilitating injuries, mental and physical, leaving them unable to hold a job. Junior Seau, a former player, said that he believes that his medical bills post-graduation outweighed the cost of his education. It is not uncommon for players to get injured, continue playing, and then cause a tremendous amount of wear and tear on their injury. One of the players, waited one year until going to an out of university doctor to learn that his knee was torn and that he will need surgery. Since he went out of the school, he was responsible for all the medical bills associated with the injury, even though it was the school's misdiagnosis that led him to that state of his injury. One man that was interviewed (i forgot his name) was talking about the tremendous number of athletes that develop severe depression and anxiety due to their brain injuries and resort to drinking and pain meds, often leading to suicide. Sadly, this former athlete fell into the same hole one year later.
Another interesting statistic was that the average football player is worth 137,000$/yr and the average basketball player is worth 290,000$/yr meanwhile the average scholarship amount is 23,000$/yr. With this, the NCAA creates this absurd wording in everything they release about these athletes and how everything they do is for the athletes and all of the money goes towards them. One of the quotes that really grinded my gears was when the NCAA stated in one of their advertisements that "student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by commercial advertisements" and then the girl commented on it and said "what they are really doing is protecting others from the talent the NCAA is commercially exposing." Disgusting!
The other interesting scandal was the one associated with UNC, where they would throw all the Black student-athletes into the same "African American Studies" major where they would be provided with the answers to the exams, and in other classes, all they had to do was write a paper. This was called a Paper Class, a class created to keep important athletes in the GPA range to play their sport. Essentially, this was a guaranteed A with nearly no work. The sad part about this is that these players are tricked into believing that they are getting a scholarship to get an education meanwhile they are getting a scholarship to play for a team that is going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of you.

Here is the trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SGtoOFoEuM 

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