Imrem: 12 ways to help the student-ATHLETE

College football enthusiasts can gloat over getting what they whined for: a cockamamie playoff system.

I'm gloating, too, as someone who opposed any playoffs because they're as obscene as predicted they would be.

ESPN promoting the games like they were a cure for the plague ... The College Football Playoff people plopping the final into highly professional AT&T Stadium ... The whole thing being about as much about college as the NFL is.

The first finalists, Oregon and Ohio States, wound up playing nearly a full NFL season, prompting Ducks head coach Mark Helfrich to concede, "It's definitely a grind."

Yet college players gladly will play 15 games, game after game. Nobody cares about his body at that age, does he?

Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said, "The biggest concern is the health of the player, the wear and tear that we have to be leery of."

Yet college coaches are paid millions of dollars to send unpaid players out game after game.

The more money at stake for schools - and the money is enormous now - the more that college players are forced to evolve from student-athletes to student-ATHletes to student-ATHLETES.

Now those same college football enthusiasts clamor to expand the playoffs from four teams to eight to 16 to enough is never enough.

Somebody has to save the players from themselves if college coaches, presidents and fans won't.

Television networks certainly won't. All they want is more programming to sell to advertisers and distributors.

It's time for reform and here are this panel of one's 12-point plan.

• Don't pay a player more than a free education but give him enough time away from the game to be a student.

• Lock the weight room until a month before the next season and cancel spring practice.

• Institute a salary cap for college coaches, athletic directors and presidents.

• Prohibit football-players-only dormitories.

• Ban any school caught breaking rules from the sport for at least a year.

• Require head coaches and assistants to teach at least one course every semester.

• State troopers and local cops can't escort coaches onto and off the field.

• Go back to freshmen being ineligible so they can prove they're capable of being legitimate students.

• Work with the NFL to establish a developmental league for players who don't want to attend college.

• Limit every school's regular season to 10 games, 11 at the most.

• Before signing a letter of intent, a player must pass a test on NCAA rules and pledge under oath to obey them.

• Quit tricking a recruit into believing the head coach will be at the school during his entire college career when contracts allow him to leave or be fired at any time.

So there you have my compromise: Institute these suggestions and the future of college football is free to include any form of playoff system it can concoct.

Sure, the proposals aren't realistic. Illinois head coach Tim Beckman isn't going to teach quantum physics down in Champaign, thank goodness.

Nor are freshmen going to be ineligible for fear your alma mater might be exposed as unable to educate them.

Overall, reform is needed but the only reform that university administrators are interested in is creating more revenue streams.

Then they'll gloat some more with little regard for the evolution of the student-ATHLETE.

mimrem@dailyherald.com