Could the XFL become NFL training ground?

Last week, an article in the New York Times sports section brought up an interesting question about the World Wrestling Federation's good-for-nothing new football league, the XFL: Might it, in fact, be good for something?

Specifically, the XFL is considering a plan to allow 18- and 19-year olds who have finished high school but have not met the academic requirements to attend college (or have no desire to attend) the opportunity to turn pro and join the new league. The NFL doesn't allow players under 20 to enter the league, and the sport has no minor league system comparable to those in baseball or hockey, so teenagers who aren't cut out academically for college are left in no-man's-land.

The lack of an adequate training ground for young athletes, unfortunately, results in a large number of young men (and some women) attending (a) college when they have no interest in pursuing their education or (b) colleges for which they would not otherwise be qualified. Fortunately, at Princeton, where most athletes are cut out for the University's academic rigors, the problem is not as pronounced as at many other schools, especially large public universities. On the other hand, do a couple hundred scholarship-athletes at Ohio State, with an enrollment in the dozens of thousands, really make an imprint on that school's academic climate, positively or negatively?

So on second thought, maybe the XFL actually does have a place in this picture. The athletes in question — as a prototype, assume a 18-year-old male from a poor family whose most marketable skill is his 40-inch vertical jump — are not at all comparable to the athletes who fill our teams here at Princeton. With only the most rare exception, varsity athletes here do not make their living playing their sport professionally. (The exceptions, mostly, are athletes in less marketable sports such as crew, squash, etc.) The athletes in question need, in effect, to receive the same vocational training on the college level that a student in a veterinary medicine program or in a hotel management program needs to receive at a major public institution (or Cornell).

Except for our engineers, we don't make a point of training students vocationally. We train people, essentially, to be the wise village elders of the future. Our distribution requirements and educational framework are designed to produce the leaders of tomorrow in (arguably) the most respected fields of society. Your classmates are the doctors, lawyers, newspaper editors, attorneys general and presidents of the future. (Terrifying thought, no?)

Such is not the case at most universities. Most students — and this is not in any sense a pejorative categorization — go to college to develop a particular marketable skill upon which they can base a profitable career after they graduate. The same goes for athletes, who by-and-large are not adequately prepared at the age of 18 to compete in the professional arena.

Is the XFL the solution, at least for the football world? After all, almost every profession has some sort of training ground — be it graduate school, an apprenticeship or the minor leagues — where aspiring participants learn the requisite skills to succeed. The new XFL could be football's answer, but only if it were wholly a league comprised of 18- and 19- year olds. It would be, then, a developmental league for the NFL; not a minor league, where teenagers would be forced to compete against underskilled — but physically mature — 25-year olds, but a league for aspiring professional athletes for whom college, for whatever reason, was not the right place to be.

It would need to refrain from paying its athletes, aside from giving them a basic stipend perhaps for room and board (like an athletic scholarship), or otherwise players might skip out on college just to make a quick million. It might even offer training in the life skills that are part and parcel of being a professional football player, such as money management or sports medicine, without associating the players with educational institutions at which they do not belong. It might work — and what's more, it might even make the XFL watchable. Dan Wachtell is a philosophy major from Rye, NY. He can be reached at wachtell@princeton.edu.