Outside of Stamford and the Ivies, I'd wager that most players, especially in football, are taking easy classes (and in some cases having tests taken for them) and even then, things are quite easy for them. They aren't taking physics, economics, etc.. that actually prepare students for the real world. There's not enough time for that.
I saw it for myself at a big D1 football program. You think at a school like Texas or Alabama, a school that worships football above all else, would let their athletes be preoccupied with school? Come on now.
Elite football and basketball athletes at major programs are tiny, tiny minority of all student athletes in this country. I went to a decent regional state school (DII at the time) and I had advanced economics and math classes with a number of athletes, including football players. It's just not correct to generalize from the programs that are NFL feeder programs.
Fair, but NFL feeder programs are not educating their athletes, including a number of athletes who will not make the NFL or NBA. They are getting little to no education and have no shot at turning pro.
Worse yet, the chase for more and more football money has screwed over regional conferences, which harms the run-of-the-mill student athlete in non-revenue sports (think track, swimming, tennis, etc) who has no pro aspirations. Why the hell is Stamford, a school on the west coast, in the Atlantic Coast Conference?
I definitely agree with your second statement about football ruining the conferences for all the other sports. I don't think it's sustainable and I think within 10 years we'll see a correction, where football largely dissociates from the rest of the regional conference model.
To your first point, though, whether an individual student athlete avails themselves of the free education being offered to them is kind of up to them. I know multiple athletes who played at elite programs who managed to get educated just fine. I suspect the ones who aren't getting educated would be no better off, or worse off, if they didn't attend college at all.
Outside of Stamford and the Ivies, I'd wager that most players, especially in football, are taking easy classes (and in some cases having tests taken for them) and even then, things are quite easy for them. They aren't taking physics, economics, etc.. that actually prepare students for the real world. There's not enough time for that.
I saw it for myself at a big D1 football program. You think at a school like Texas or Alabama, a school that worships football above all else, would let their athletes be preoccupied with school? Come on now.