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College Athletes: Lab Rats?

In an article from the New York Times titles, “Football Players? Or Lab Rats Who Can Run and Pass?” written by Zach Schonbrun, the multimillion dollar facilities of big name colleges are referenced.

The first program and facilities that were brought up were Louisiana State University’s. L.S.U. recently got a new $28 million football operations building. Included in the building are jetted tubs, antigravity treadmill, sodium-infused water coolers, and even a centrifuge. “The centrifuge is used for a blood work for injury treatments such as platelet-poor plasma therapy and stem-cell injections.”

The article even mentions how the athletes get their sweat analyzed for “nutritional deficiencies” and they also swallow digestible electronic pills that monitor body temperature.

I think this article is news worthy because of the awareness it brings to the ongoing advances in college athletics. Some people would think that these methods are over-the-top when it comes to analyzing peak performance of athletes.

Some of these methods can be seen as bizarre, especially the digestible electronic pills. They may also fall under Human Interest, considering these are people that they are running these tests on. Overall, this article was very interesting.

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1 Comment

  1. fuglsang

    I am one of those people who believe this is over-the-top. I realize athletic budgets are separate from academic budgets, but I’m not ready to accept universities as feeder mills for the NFL.

    Good discussion, Nick.

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