As I watched one of the finest products of the Terrapin football machine, Shawne Merriman, get drafted by the San Diego Chargers Saturday, there was one thought on my mind: I wish I played football.
I’ll be graduating into a highly competitive job market, where I’ll be competing against millions of other recent graduates with similar skills and credentials, while Merriman is signing on a dotted line guaranteeing him some $10 million. And damn it, I’m jealous.
Sure, I’m happy for Merriman; his seems like a rags-to-riches story from which we can all take inspiration, and it’s always nice when someone from the university makes it to the NBA or NFL. I’ll always watch him play, just as I watch Steve Blake and Juan Dixon, with a certain sense of pride. As Shawne told The Diamondback Monday, he’ll “always be a Terp.”
I guess it’s true he’ll always be a Terp, although he decided to leave the university before actually graduating. But why bother to graduate when you’re getting paid millions of dollars without a degree?
It’s interesting how playing high-profile sports in college allows you to pursue an “easy” major only to wind up with a starting salary hundreds of times larger than other students in the same major. And because athletes in the most competitive sports, such as basketball and football, spend the majority of their time practicing, training and traveling, it’s hard to believe they spend any significant time hitting the books.
Obviously this is because they aren’t here to get degrees; they are here to catch the eye of professional organizations in the hope of making the spectacular career move Merriman just undertook. College football is essentially a farm system for the NFL, and if I were one of the best college players, I wouldn’t waste much time with classwork either. (I’m not talking about Merriman — I have no knowledge of his academic performance, I’m just saying.)
The university actually has a halfway decent graduation percentage for its football players; Collegefootballnews.com puts it at about 53 percent for 2004. But when compared to schools such as Notre Dame or Boston College, both of which graduate more than 90 percent of their football players, it’s easy to see why the notion of athletes as students first and players second is a bit of a stretch for this university.
So while I don’t play football, I found myself dearly wishing I had Saturday.
I wish I played football because then I wouldn’t have to finish college to be sure I could make enough money on my own to support myself after I graduate.
I wish I played football because then I might have been able to attend the university for free with an athletic scholarship instead of paying thousands of dollars and taking out loans I will have to start repaying a few months from now.
I wish I played football because then the university community might be willing to invest millions of dollars in huge stadiums for me to play in, high-tech equipment and clothing contracts to outfit me in, professionally produced films to play on Jumbotrons while I take the field and scholarships so I wouldn’t have to work during the semesters when I needed to practice all the time.
But I don’t play football, and I’ll have to live with the consequences. No bling, no TV appearances and no buying my grandmom a house.
How can I possibly console myself for not playing football? Another look at the numbers might help. According to NCAA statistics, only one in 50 college football seniors are drafted into the NFL. Assuming college players all played in high school, a fairly safe assumption, you can add in the fact that only one in 17 high school players plays in college. That leaves you with a whopping .09 percent of players who make it all the way from high school to the NFL, or 9 in 10,000.
So while Merriman is extremely talented and hardworking, the truth of the matter is he is also extremely lucky, and even if I had played football, I’d still have only a small chance of being in his position. And that I can live with.
Alex Dzwonchyk is a senior linguistics major. He can be reached at alexdz@wam.umd.edu.
