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SyracuseFootballPlayeriPadGate Is Upon Us

By Sean Keeley
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Every Syracuse Orange football player just got an iPad and people are freaking the f*** out!

You know, I get it. Especially if you're a Syracuse student scraping to get by or on financial aid or suffering through some kind of cutback in your curriculum, I get it.

Couple FYIs though...

  • This isn't something that SU Athletics just invented out of thin air. Tons of other college football programs are doing this. Ohio State just did it, a bunch more schools have and you can bet you're going to see this happen more and more. It's a "cost of doing business" thing for FBS programs. If you want to attract quality recruits that improve the football program, you need to be ahead of or at least in step with the curve. There are more important components to that (facilities, stadium, etc.) but this is a message-sender to recruits.
  • Your tuition isn't paying for this. SU Athletics is its own entity and uses the money it earns through things like football games to pay for almost always pay this stuff. You wouldn't have benefited from that money if it hadn't been spent on this. It just would have been spent on something else for the football program.
  • Roughly-speaking, you're looking at a $40,000 cost here. That sounds like a lot. And it is a lot of money. But it's also a drop in the bucket in terms of what football generates from ticket sales, concessions and media revenue. That $40K gets recouped in single-game beer sales alone.
  • I'm not going to argue that there are dumb football players who don't care about their education but, for the record since you seem to be concerned, Syracuse football is the No. 1 Big East football program in terms of GPA with 28 members of the Big East All-Academic Team. Just sayin'.

Anyway, that's the flip side. You have the right to be angry about it, especially if you don't have an iPad to call your own. But...it's not the demoralizing FU to non-football students that some are making it out to be.

Now if you'll excuse Jerome Smith, he's got work to do...

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