Douglas Neckers: Do you ever wonder where our priorities are?

Wonder where our priorities as Americans are? Well, you aren’t alone — and I am not talking just about politics. Take baseball, the revered national pastime. Once, it was the all-American summer game. But these days, it’s usually relegated to the middle pages of the sports section while there are more stories about football, even in early summer than anything else.

Then there’s the "dribblers" — otherwise known as the basketball types. Now, I’ve been a basketball fan far longer than any of the current players have been alive. But there was a time when college kids played it mostly for fun.

These days, one of the rival University of Toledo (UT) coaches told me, even the most modestly talented players can take home $6,000 or more from product endorsements, thanks to the decision by the NCAA last September that allows student athletes to capitalize off their name, image or likeness.

Nor do I feel much pain for the coaches; the UT football coach makes nearly $1.2 million a year. Bowling Green State University’s coach is under fire, but hey: He still makes more than $400,000 a year, more than any faculty member there.

Funny thing — when last I looked, few football players ever started businesses that employ hundreds of other alumni because their brilliant ideas brought new products to the marketplace. If one talks about going pro, for every Miami University graduate like Ben Roethlisberger, who was making $34 million as an NFL quarterback, there are several like JoJuan Armour, who knocked around in the Canadian Football league for a few years after failing in the NFL.

Do those kind of dollar figures make sense to you? We need to face the fact that mid-size universities trying to be football powers are failing at it. Ohio State says it needs $13 million to pay its football players for the use of their names, images and whatever. The University of Toledo has less than a million, and it’s the best in their conference. Football for places like Toledo is too damned expensive. It isn’t paying back and it never will.

Enough about sports. Now let’s look at another story you might have missed from one recent edition of the paper. In a corner of the opinion page there was a small item from the Boston Herald talking about studies of what used to be called the “working poor” — women, mainly, who are living alone or in nursing homes and surviving on Social Security checks. Those in this group that I’ve known are teachers, nurses, home care workers, retail clerks, and some secretaries, many of whom worked to support a family on their own.

Some had disabled husbands; others had no husbands; still others are divorced or widows. What the Boston Herald story targets is the current proposal by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to forgive some student loans. Nationally, the total amount of student loan debt is now more than $1.7 trillion. The authors of the Herald piece argue that we are being asked to subsidize the misguided young, who in some cases may have been maybe those duped by the universities that take their money in tuition and fees, while letting those that have worked their whole lives and had no chance for higher education starve.

And the writer asked, as did one of my high school classmates when the teachers in her town’s school wanted a raise, “they are making a lot more than we are, and they want our taxes to give them even more?”

No one is more inclined to help young people achieve than I. I was a university professor for my entire working career; and I saw what a bit of stimulus at the right time can do for people hungry to live the American dream.

But young people who make big mistakes have plenty of time to make up for those mistakes. The elderly who have worked their entire lives, do not. Actually, we need to take care of both groups, and if we would only put aside our selfishness, we could do so. As for football … give me a break.

Except for a handful of large universities, the rest should drop the sport … or ask the students to do something really radical, and play sports for the fun of it, as generations and generations once did in America.

— Douglas Neckers is an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University, and a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Douglas Neckers: Do you ever wonder where our priorities are?