Deprofessionalize college sports

I'm not a sports fan, so I don't feel I have a right to weigh in on sports-related issues. However, as Matt Bruenig's recent piece in Salon points out about college football, college sports aren't just about sport:

In total then, we have a system in which institutions of higher learning are working young men for 50 hours a week, in ways that scramble their brains, while shuffling them through a pretend education they aren’t prepared for, making millions of dollars for themselves and others by doing so, and then dumping almost all of them out into the world four years later, used up and still, one presumes, largely uneducated.

Bruenig brings up an idea he credits to Ralph Nader: de-professionalizing college sports by eliminating athletic scholarships.

I can get behind this idea. Sports as big business exert a distorting effect on colleges and universities. Time to kill this golden goose and make higher education once more about education.