I agree with Coach Hutchins, coaches are teachers. In fact, there's no justification for college sports at all if they aren't. As a college prof, I feel this very strongly. It's what my 40 years in academia has shown me over and over again. But even that justification can feel a bit thin, since the main thing coaches can teach is character, and a school is not an ideal place for that lesson. Note that I distinguish what they teach from what they coach -- athletic skill is coached not taught according to this very narrow reading of the words. Feel free to redefine them.
But there are ways an athletic program can be good for a school, in school spirit and in a general encouragement to physical activity as key to intellectual development. Intercollegiate sports contributes to this too, though it may lose sight of this function sometimes.
The problem is, once athletics is part of the mission of a college, and once it becomes a big money operation, other imperatives apply, like property rights. Schools have profited off students name image and likeness for many decades, and in the case of student-athletes they got away with preventing the students from having a share in what is clearly a property right of theirs. it was always wrong, and now this has been rectified. We can worry about the distorting effect of NIL on the sports we love. But returning to the old unjust system is wrong.
And if boosters (or even administrators) at some schools are violating the current rules, those programs should be sanctioned. This is the same solution as the NCAA has always had.
