King Kaufman's Sports Daily

NCAA's Big Lie exposed -- by the NCAA. Funny new TV ads drive home a point the association probably didn't intend. Plus: Sweet 16 preview. And: Disclaimeritis.

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March 27, 2008 | The NCAA has had an advertising campaign for several years promoting the idea that most college athletes really are students. They're nice commercials. You know them. They end with some version of the tag line "There are over 380,000 NC-double-A student-athletes and just about all of them will be going pro in something other than sports."

The ads usually have moody shots of athletes in action, then end up with the same athletes in work clothes.

This year's crop has injected some laughs. They're up to the high standards of the campaign. They're funny. But the very nature of the central joke in them highlights what a bogus idea it is that forms the foundation of the NCAA. I and others call it the Big Lie, that big-time college sports are purely amateur, mere extracurricular activities, and the athletes who play them are students just like any others on campus.

It's one thing to talk about the true fact that most NCAA athletes really are students doing something very like an extracurricular activity. But these new ads get their humor from the difference between big-time athletes and ordinary students.

One depicts a meeting between shoe-company executives and the "three-time All-American with mad smarts and sick leadership skills" for whom they've designed a shoe. The joke is it's a business shoe. It has the kid's grade-point average embossed on the back.

In another, two pre-teen boys emerge from a convenience store comparing their new NCAA trading cards. One brags about getting "K-Mac" -- we see the card is that of one Kevin McCarthy -- "three-time architect of the year!" The other kid tops that with "the Jay Campbell rookie card," with photos of Campbell playing lacrosse and looking through a microscope. The first kid's impressed: "That guy dominates in the lab!"

Obviously, what's so funny here is that it's absurd that kids would idolize an architect or a scientist the way they do ballplayers. It's nuts to think a shoe company would design a model for some high-achieving biz-school grad the way it would for a star basketball player headed to the pros.

In other words, while almost all of the 380,000 student-athletes in the NCAA will be going pro in something other than sports, the few who'll be going pro in sports, especially football and men's basketball, are wildly different from all those others. Absurdly so.

It's right and proper not to think of them as being similar to ordinary college students who are on campus to get an education and might or might not play a sport on the side. It must be, because imagining ordinary students as being similar to big-time athletes is silly enough to be the central joke in a series of funny commercials.

Thanks for illustrating that point so clearly, NCAA.

Next page: Sweet 16 preview. Plus: Experiencing the side effects of all those ads for medicines