There are so many bad generalizations here...I don't even know where to start.
You seem to have found a spot :-) Seriously, though, regardless of the quality of the generalizations, that's all any of us have, simply because there's so much variation.
Again, are you seriously suggesting that players just leave practice? What's the rationalization?
The rationalization is that you need to eat, and that if your coach wasn't an egotistical asshole, s/he should realize that poorly-nourished players aren't going to be performing at their peak.
"My coach is an egotistical asshole, so I have the moral authority to just leave and it'll all be OK?" Yeah, that's enough for me to walk out of practice and lose not only tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships (which would mean I would have to drop out of school immediately), but also my one shot at pursuing my dream of being a D1 and possibly professional athlete.
Is all that worth going to bed hungry? If so, you put up with it. If not, you don't have to allow yourself to be walked on. Unlike the military, you can quit any time.
Guess what? Sometimes practice was scheduled at 9pm-12am because that's the only time we could get the facilities in our offseason. Sometimes 7-10. And you bet your ass the dining halls weren't bending over backwards to accommodate that schedule.
Well, now you're generalizing your own experience, which is vastly different from mine, and what I think is typical of most major sports programs in most schools. Where I went, the student athletes in the big sports had their own special dorm, which had been a fairly nice hotel until the university bought it (and part of which still was a hotel for visiting scholars and the like). As I mentioned earlier, athletes got first priority at all gym facilities.
Athletic training may or may not have been difficult, but it didn't seem to keep a significant number of major sports players from partying, getting arrested, or taking advantage of the (rumored) free passed at the local brothel.
Participating in random sports on your own time, or even the military, doesn't make you remotely qualified to comment on the workload associated with that level of athletics.
Why not? I could observe what those student athletes were doing, and compare it to what I & other non-athletes were doing, as well as anyone can - at least without hooking everyone up to a bunch of instrumentation, and I can't find anything like that in a quick search.
Sorry, but arguments like this fire me up so much. I played D1 baseball while doing two majors - both of which my school was ranked top 10 in the country for. I worked my ass off to graduate in 4 years with an honor roll-level GPA. It's absolutely infuriating to hear people say (or strongly imply) that most college athletes are idiots who are skating by on the good graces of athletic department-friendly professors. The majority aren't necessarily in my situation either, but they are a lot closer to me than the illiterate UNC players who capture news headlines.
Now who's making (bad, IMHO) generalizations from their own experiences? Yes, there are people like you who manage to do both athletics and academics, but they aren't anywhere near the majority, especially in the big-name sports. Which baseball isn't, at the university level.
So all students have to take just as hard of classes to get an diploma? Or all classes are equally hard provided they are open to all students?
That might be news to some of us from the engineering department (among others). Granted we also had a guy taking PE classes to get his GPA high enough to graduate. Not sure he got a job but his diploma did say "Aerospace Engineering".
This. Sure, many of those RPED classes are real classes, which can be taken by non-athletes. But most of the non-athletes took them as recreation, while for the athletes they were the mainstream.
