NCAA logoAndy Kelly remembers the old days, before the NCAA even pretended to care about its athletes.
“I was there when they put the 20-hour rule in,” said the former Rhea County High School, University of Tennessee and Arena Football League quarterback. “Before the rule, between meetings and individual workouts and stuff you’d be tied up six or seven hours a day with football. When they capped it at four hours a day, it was like, ‘Wow.’
“You had so much more time to study, not that I often took advantage of that. But you also had more time for socializing with your friends, more time just to wind down and relax. You just felt a whole lot more like what I imagined normal college students felt like.”
That was at the dawn of the 1990s, and in the 20-plus years since, not much dramatic has been done to drastically improve the lives of college athletes.
But by the close of the NCAA Convention in San Diego this weekend, major college athletics as we’ve known it the past 50 or so years may no longer exist. Athletes in leagues such as the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference are almost certain to be paid something annually, perhaps as much as $5,000 in some cases.