Apr 1, 2017 5 min read

Did you hear what Brock Boeser did?

He was involved in the best sports story of last weekend and it had nothing to do with basketball. Last Friday night, Boeser played for the North Dakota University hockey team in the NCAA quarterfinal. His team lost in double overtime to Boston University.

Saturday morning, Boeser, a sophomore, signed a contract with the Vancouver Canucks, who happened to be playing an afternoon game near his hometown of Burnside, Minn., against the Minnesota Wild.

Boeser, of course, scored a goal.

Imagine the coverage a story like that would have received if Boeser had been a football player and had gone from playing in an NCAA playoff game on Saturday to scoring a touchdown against his hometown NFL team the next day.

Imagine a kid losing a Final Four game in basketball on Saturday and then scoring a few points for his hometown NBA team the next day.

You’ll have to imagine it because it’s not going to happen.

NCAA hockey players can maintain their amateur purity and eligibility after they’re drafted by an NHL team, which is why Boeser could sign an NHL contract a few hours after he played his last college game.

Football and basketball players risk losing their eligibility if they’re caught talking to an agent. Why? Because football and basketball make more money for universities.

Remember Boeser’s story the next time you hear somebody whining about college football and basketball players not sharing in the millions of dollars they generate for their schools.

HBO’s documentary series, “Vice”, has an episode this month that focuses on the exploitation of football and basketball players and somehow managed to fill an hour without mentioning hockey and baseball players. Players in those sports have the option of playing professionally after high school and/or maintaining eligibility if they’re drafted by an NHL or Major League Baseball team.

Pittsburgh native Sonny Vaccaro, who introduced colleges to the multimillion dollar concept of using players to market sports apparel, is featured in the documentary. The show ends with him saying, “They’re not giving you a $50,000 college education and cost of living. They’re giving you a seat in a classroom. It’s a (expletive) chair.”

Clay Alexander seems to have gotten more than a chair from Harvard. His team will be playing in the hockey version of the Final Four next weekend. He’s a senior majoring in neurobiology. His teammate, Tyler Moy, who was drafted in the sixth round by the Nashville Predators, is a human evolutionary biology major.

Then you have the revered-going-on-sainted Roy Williams, who has his North Carolina basketball team in Arizona for the Final Four. None of his players has been drafted by an NBA team. All they get for playing basketball is a free college education and probably a lot of free shoes.

Most of them are majoring in something called exercise and sports science, which may be a perfectly good thing to major in, but it ain’t brain surgery.

Here’s what Michael Powell wrote in the New York Times about Williams’ basketball program: “Amid the blue and white pompoms, few are so rude to mention that the University of North Carolina, the Microsoft of college basketball, remains enmeshed in a scandal of spectacular proportions. Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student-athletes, most of them basketball and football players.”

An investigation by a former United States assistant attorney general found that 3,100 students had received one or more semesters of what the Times calls, “lousy instruction.”

Those must be the chairs Vaccaro was talking about.

Williams said he was shocked to find out the players he recruited had been taking bogus courses.

When the Raleigh News & Observer showed a little too much enthusiasm in its search for the truth, the university, according to the Times, accused it of scandal mongering.

The NCAA hasn’t handed out any penalties yet, but any sane person would say that UNC deserves the NCAA’s death penalty – the end of its basketball and football programs for the foreseeable future.

Of course, most of the football and basketball players who are being exploited are black. The hockey players, most of whom are not majoring in sports and exercise science, are white.

And it’s probably safe to assume that most of the families, who could afford the cost of their son’s hockey development, are better off financially than the families of the football and basketball players.

So, it’s mostly black kids, who need the money the most, who are being exploited the most.

Listen to the vast majority in the media and you will hear that the solution is to pay the players. All that would do is make kids less likely to take their education seriously and make 99 percent of them less prepared to face the world when they find out they’re not going to the NBA or the NFL.

The only solution is for the NFL and NBA to stop using colleges as their free farm systems and develop their own players in the minor leagues the way MLB and NHL teams do. That’s just never going to happen.

Meanwhile, if your son is a really good athlete and you’d like to see him playing professionally right after high school, maybe you should have him spend time learning how to hit a curveball or handle a puck.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday sports column for the Observer-Reporter.