A profoundly wise and great article.
My son is a big kid and is playing high school football. It was not on our radar, so we have begun to navigate these kinds of questions. Like - do you want to play at the next level? What do you even need to do if you would like to? But also the realization of how much money is made off of these kids and how cruel and unforgiving it can be.
> but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball)
I think that list is two items too long.
Not the first time i see such comparison being made, but it is the first time I see someone go into so much detail about it — great read.
A postscript on this piece: unsurprisingly, the piece has especially resonated with parents of NCAA athletes, and I have since heard from parents in a wide range of sports (lacrosse, soccer, gymnastics) saying that the piece reflected their own experiences. It also resonated with athletes themselves, and anyone who liked the piece should check out the discussion that we had about it with a former colleague of mine, Robert Bogart, who also happens to have been an NCAA champion swimmer.[0]
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/diving-in-w...
I was surprised at how much sense this made
The latest Oxide and Friends podcast episode is - as one may expect - a great pairing if you enjoyed reading this.
I’m not a college sport expert, but it seems like the most obvious difference is that it’s much more unlikely that skipping college will lead to a successful pro outcome.
I’m not sure how or when, but it seems inevitable that college sports will be split off into club teams or some kind of minor leagues.
For the big sports like football, the college part seems barely relevant to the sport, it’s mostly just a logo and color scheme. The players don’t even go to most classes, it’s online, and there are full-time tutors assisting with every assignment. When they do have to physically attend class, someone drives them there on a golf cart, in order to minimize time spent on academic work. It’s not at all a normal college experience.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read
There is a great quote from Michael Lewis:
"If hedge funds could buy universities and then split them up so that the HF keeps the sports programs and they sell off the academic departments, they would most definitely do that"
This reads as if it were written by a LLM.
I think you can extend this transposition across a lot more career paths: athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, models, film directors, etc. Any career where the financial outcome can be described by a power law follows the same dynamics, has the same gatekeepers, who have the same abusive/sycophantic relationships to market participants.
When I was raising VC I related more to struggling artist than employed technologists. Being constantly rejected, needing to be seen as more gifted than the competition and the goddamn urgency to catch on fire yesterday were the same and we got along great even if we understood and cared nothing about each other's work.
People who are considering one of these paths have an opportunity to learn from folks who might not do what they do exactly, but have been in the same sort of system. To realise the relationships they're buying into, the price they'll need to pay for a shot at stardom and to think if it's really an experience they can afford.