'Schooled: The Price of College Sports'

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fans flood into the Florida State University football stadium. Shouting, covered in body paint and glitter. An aerial camera glides over the 80,000 seats. As athletes storm the field, students wearing Seminoles garb raise their forearms up and down, chanting in unison. In the official stadium store, an employee shows off jerseys that go for $55 to $60.

“It’s not about money,” a voiceover says. “It’s about love of the game.”

But the opposite appears to be true in "Schooled: The Price of College Sports," a new documentary film that screened here Wednesday night. Based on the widely read Atlantic article The Shame of College Sports, by historian Taylor Branch, the film aims to push the increasingly apparent tensions and moral dilemmas permeating money, student welfare and academics in college sports even further into the public consciousness.

“We all have a share in the dishonesty,” Branch says in the film. “That’s what blinds us to the biggest issue.”

For Branch, that issue is the fact that athletes are asked to give up their rights – the right to worker’s compensation, the right to hold down a job, the right to due process – in exchange for a year or four in the national spotlight and a shot at going pro.



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Schooled: The Price of College Sports" premieres Wednesday, Oct. 16 at 8 p.m. on the Epix Channel and will also be available online with a free two-week trial.