Won’t Let Them Be: On college athletes and the right to be students

When I left my small East Coast liberal arts college for graduate school at a huge Midwestern university, I thought I understood what college was. I had been formed on a campus where everything felt intimate, polished, and knowable. Then I arrived in the Midwest, and the scale of everything immediately made my old categories feel incomplete.

On my second day on campus, I was on my way to meet the supervisor for my graduate assistantship. I was standing near the elevators when I noticed a massive young man beside me in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops — each emblazoned with the university’s logo. I am not a small person, but this guy dwarfed me. He looked less like someone heading to class than someone who had been assembled in a football facility.

When I sat down with my supervisor, Will, he smiled. He’d seen me sizing the guy up.

“Freshman,” he said. “My guess — offensive line.”

Freshman? And in that moment I came to properly understand something I had technically known but had never really processed: the athletes I’d watched on Saturday afternoons were college students — kids, really. Some of them may be “big men on campus,” but they were still freshmen, sophomores, juniors. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. Still trying to figure out where the dining hall is, how to manage their time, what kind of adults they are becoming, and how to live inside bodies and expectations that make other people forget just how young they are.

We do this all the time with some college athletes. We confuse physical development with emotional and cognitive development. We see strength, size, speed, or extraordinary skill, and we assign adult judgment to people who are still very much learning how life works.

That mistake becomes even easier when the athlete is in the spotlight. It’s gotten easier now that money has formally entered the picture.

I thought about that elevator moment again tonight while listening to people talk about Darryn Peterson, Kansas’s freshman guard and one of the most closely watched young basketball players in the country this year. The conversations around players like him do not sound like the conversations I have about our freshmen. Draft stock. Development curve. Brand management. Readiness. Risk. Ceiling.

Some of that is unavoidable. He is not an ordinary basketball player. His talent places him in an extraordinary public category, and it is not unreasonable for people to discuss what his future might be.

But the danger is that we start confusing talent on the court with development off of it. We assume that advanced athletic performance is accompanied by advanced judgment, emotional regulation, self-awareness, and the ability to resist everyone trying to get a piece of him.

The Peterson conversation also showed how quickly public assessment can slide into something more personal. Questions about his availability at game time became questions about commitment, reliability, toughness, mental health, and responsibility to his team. Even when people were careful not to say too much directly — and, to be fair, some respected his privacy in ways that still reflect a real higher education value — the speculation did not stop. Instead, people read between the lines of Coach Bill Self’s comments, interpreting what had not been said. Self himself pushed back on narratives questioning the legitimacy of Peterson’s absences, saying the narrative was “BS,” while other reporting described the scrutiny around Peterson’s injuries, cramps, and repeated exits from games.

That is absurd when we say it plainly. But college sports encourages us to believe it anyway. It invites us to look at an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old with rare athletic gifts and talk as if talent should have solved all the developmental questions already.

And we make the same mistake in the other direction. We see the athlete’s body and assume that body tells us what kind of student he is.

My brother was a Division I athlete. At 6’4” and 270 pounds, some faculty seemed to decide what that meant before he ever opened his mouth. They assumed he was not serious about his academic career. They saw the body and filled in the rest of the story themselves. It annoyed him then, and it still does. Three degrees later, as the president of his own company, he still talks about what it felt like to have people look and see an athlete, a roster spot, a stereotype, anything except his brain and his motivation.

There is a racial component here too, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. On many campuses, a big or tall Black man is too often read through a narrow set of assumptions before he is understood as a person. Athlete but not serious student. Physically gifted but academically suspect. Present because of the body, not the mind. Those assumptions may be unspoken, but they are not subtle to the students who live under them. Except the assumption is wrong.

Big and Black does not mean athlete. Athlete does not mean unserious student. Physical presence does not erase intellectual ambition. And the fact that someone’s body makes other people reach for a stereotype says more about the observer than the student.

Even when the stereotype is disproven, the student is not always freed from it. If he is smart, motivated, gracious, and academically successful, he can become a different kind of story. Now he is the role model. The example. The nice guy. The athlete who “does things the right way.” He gets the feature during the game broadcast, the polished segment about discipline and character, the approving language from people who seem proud to have discovered that a large Black athlete can also be thoughtful, serious, and kind.

But too often, that spotlight is still organized around the stereotype. The praise relies on the expectation that he might have been otherwise. The story works because the audience is invited to be pleasantly surprised. He is not simply recognized as a full person. He is celebrated for overcoming an assumption that should never have been placed on him in the first place.

That is one of the ways college athletes get flattened. They are reduced when they confirm a stereotype, and they are also reduced when they become the exception used to reassure everyone else. The “good story” can be its own kind of box.

And when they stumble publicly, the same people who were so eager to turn them into symbols often come for blood.

The athlete who was too easily adultified, stereotyped, praised, packaged, and held up as a story becomes, almost instantly, a cautionary tale. The grace we extend to ordinary college students disappears. The developmental language disappears. The educational frame disappears. What remains is appetite for punishment, for humiliation, for certainty, for someone to be made an example of.

College athletes live in a spotlight that does not turn off when the game ends. It follows them from competition into class, into the dorm, into lunch downtown, into the weekend, and onto social media, where one regrettable moment can become public before anyone has had time to be embarrassed, apologize, learn, or grow. The ordinary mistakes of young adulthood do not stay ordinary for them. They become content, evidence, narrative, and judgment.

That is why the educational frame matters so much.

Colleges know that students stumble. That knowledge is built into the best versions of campus life. It is why conduct processes, advising structures, residence life systems, counseling resources, academic support offices, coaches, supervisors, and student life staff exist. Not because mistakes do not matter. They do. Not because accountability can be avoided. It cannot. But because the person who made the mistake is still a student, and the institution still has an educational responsibility to engage that student as more than a bad choice.

In those processes, at least when they are working as they should, someone may be willing to turn off the spotlight for a moment. Someone may sit across from the student and ask, sincerely, “How are you holding up?” Not as an excuse or a way around consequences. But because people who work closely with college students appreciate what public failure can do to a young person. They know that shame, fear, panic, addiction, immaturity, pressure, and bad judgment can all be tangled together. They know that accountability and support are not opposites.

But that kind of care has limits when the failure has already escaped the boundaries of the campus process. A conduct officer, coach, advisor, dean, or student life staff member may be trying to help the student learn from the mistake. But they cannot turn off ESPN, silence social media, or restore an NIL deal. They cannot make the student anonymous again. They cannot protect the student from becoming a segment, a meme, a message-board morality play, or a cautionary tale for people who have no responsibility for what happens after they finish talking.

And not every campus actor enters these moments with pure motives. Some administrators are more concerned with liability than learning. Some institutions will talk about care while moving quickly to protect the brand. Some will use educational language while making fundamentally transactional decisions. The point is not that campuses are automatically virtuous. The point is that higher education still has tools, values, and obligations that are different from the marketplace and the court of public opinion. When those tools are abandoned, the student loses one of the few spaces where someone might still see the whole person.

This does not mean college athletes should be treated as children. This is where Jay Bilas has been an important and necessary voice. Bilas has long argued that college athletes should be respected as adults when it comes to rights, compensation, mobility, representation, and control over their own futures. He is right to be suspicious of any argument that sounds like college athletes need to be protected from themselves. For decades, that framework sustained a system in which adults controlled athletes’ labor, limited their earning power, restricted their movement, and congratulated themselves for doing it in the name of education.

It’s hypocrisy when we treat athletes as adults when the institution wants them to be held accountable, but as children when the university wants economic control. I don’t want any part of that.

But the inverse mistake is also real. We should not respond to decades of paternalism by pretending that legal adulthood solves the developmental question. Eighteen-year-olds can have rights and still need guidance, deserve compensation and still need guardrails. They can have agency and still be vulnerable, and can be responsible for their choices while still operating inside an environment built by older, richer, more powerful people.

Bilas wants them respected as adults. I do too. But I also want them treated like college students. Those are not the same thing, and they are not in conflict.

College athletes deserve to be respected as adults in matters of rights, compensation, mobility, and voice. They also deserve to be supported as young people in matters of judgment, development, mistakes, and consequences.

That is not inconsistency. That is what colleges are supposed to do.

The difficulty, of course, is that this principle is easiest to defend in theory. It becomes much harder when the mistake is serious, public, embarrassing, and tied to something the sports world already knows threatens the integrity of competition. Gambling is one of those cases. It is where all the clean language about rights, responsibility, education, addiction, punishment, and institutional self-protection starts to collide.

Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby is not an abstraction. He is the current example of how quickly this conversation can collapse into punishment, eligibility, NIL contracts, NCAA rules, addiction, and public judgment all at once. Sorsby entered a treatment program for gambling addiction while facing NCAA scrutiny over alleged online sports betting. Reports have said the allegations involve thousands of wagers, including bets involving Indiana football while he was at Indiana, though not games in which he played.

Athletes should not bet on sports. The integrity issues are real, and the rules matter. But addiction is not simple, and “just don’t do it” is the kind of answer that sounds most reasonable to people who have never had to understand addiction as anything other than a failure of will.

It is also hard to take the moral posture of the sports industry at face value when that same industry has helped build a gambling-saturated environment. Legalized betting, sportsbook sponsorships, broadcast integrations, podcast segments, radio discussions, prop bets, parlays, odds, futures, and point spreads are now part of the ordinary language of sports. Fans are invited to think about gambling constantly. Media companies profit from it. Leagues profit from it. Broadcasters normalize it. Betting companies advertise through it.

Then everyone turns around and acts shocked when young athletes, some barely removed from high school, are unable to keep that world at a clean distance.

That does not excuse the conduct or erase the rules. It does not mean athletes should be allowed to gamble on sports. But it does expose a contradiction.

The adults created and monetized the environment. The athletes are expected to navigate it with perfect discipline.

When big money is involved, the human being can become secondary very quickly. If an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old makes a stupid, dangerous, or self-destructive decision that threatens the cash flow, that mistake is blood in the water. Suddenly everyone discovers their principles. Everyone becomes very serious about integrity. Everyone wants the system protected.

But fewer people want to ask why the system has become so comfortable profiting from the very pressures it then asks teenagers and young adults to manage with perfect maturity.

That is the conversation we are not having nearly enough.

The older academic critique of college athletics at least kept education in the conversation. People asked whether athletes were really going to class, whether they were being steered into easy majors, whether schools were keeping them eligible rather than educating them, and whether institutions were using football and basketball players while pretending the whole arrangement was primarily educational. Some of that criticism was fair. Some of it still is.

But the more recent cynical turn — “Come on, nobody is here for an education” — is not more sophisticated. It is just a different kind of reduction. It accepts the most exploitative version of the system as reality and then treats anyone who insists on the educational mission as naive.

I disagree with that in two ways.

First, degree attainment still matters. For the vast majority of college athletes, the most valuable thing they will leave campus with is not a professional contract. It is a degree. It is the credential, the network, the maturity, and the increased earning potential that can shape the rest of their lives long after their competitive careers end. Even in football and men’s basketball, most athletes will not have professional careers. For most, the educational outcome is not some sentimental leftover from an older model. It is the main long-term value of the opportunity.

Second, education is not limited to what happens in a classroom. Students learn during college through their successes and their stumbles. They learn through conflict, consequences, responsibility, freedom, bad judgment, recovery, mentorship, and repair. They learn from their faculty, but also from supervisors, coaches, roommates, advisors, conduct officers, student life staff, teammates, and the experience of living inside a community where their choices affect other people.

A college education is not only a transcript. It is also the structured process of helping young people become adults.

That educational frame should not vanish because the student is an athlete.

The old system too often used “they are just kids” to control athletes. This new system risks using “they are grown adults” to abandon them. Neither is good enough.

The answer to NCAA paternalism is not to stop treating athletes as students. It is to finally treat them as students with rights.

That means rights without abandonment. Accountability without disposability. Compensation without pretending money produces maturity. Consequences without forgetting development. Respect without cynicism. Care without control.

We keep turning college athletes into everything except students: assets, exceptions, threats, role models, cautionary tales, labor, brands, problems, and products. But if college sports is still going to claim a relationship to higher education, then the student cannot disappear the moment their humanity makes the story harder to tell.

The fact that students are athletes should not protect them from consequences. But the fact that they are athletes should not damn them either.

They are college students.

Higher education cannot claim them in principle and abandon them in practice.