Student-athlete Bryce Love missing media day for class is fine

School is important. Media days are not.

Bryce Love might be the best player in college football. He’s surely one of the two best players on Stanford, where he’s a senior leader and leading Heisman candidate.

So it was surprising that Love wasn’t one of the two players to join coach David Shaw at the Pac-12’s annual media day, held July 25 in Hollywood. Shaw brought receiver JJ Arcega-Whiteside and cornerback Alijah Holden with him to the event instead.

Love skipped media day for the simplest, most reasonable of reasons.

“I really wanted to be there to represent the university,” Love said. “But I decided I just wasn’t able to make it happen this year. Based on other commitments, trying to graduate in December required me to take more classes over the summer.”

(Love could’ve made NFL millions this year as one of the highest-picked running backs in the draft. He decided to play another year at Stanford and keep taking classes there.)

Love doesn’t owe anyone a reason for not showing up at media day. These are banal events. Nobody missed anything important by not getting the chance to ask Love how it felt to be a senior leader on his team or if he felt the Cardinal had something to prove. Actually, they didn’t miss that chance at all, because Love video-conferenced in to take questions.

The running back’s absence (at least in person, because he participated remotely) has led to some hand-wringing.

CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd thinks it says something about the Pac-12:

Put it this way: Try to envision Tim Tebow in his heyday skipping SEC Media Days of because, well, school. Right or wrong, that wouldn’t have happened. The need to better himself, the conference and his school would have outstripped another summer school lecture.

That’s essentially what kept Love back in Palo Alto.

Love might be bettering himself more in class than by sitting on a TV set in Hollywood to answer boring questions about the coming football season, when he’ll be available to media members plenty. But that’s not the point, really. Dodd’s concerned that Love is setting “a dangerous precedent. This is going to give every star player an excuse to Skype in.”

It’s far from a majority view, but some similar sentiments have floated around Twitter.

Stanford is subtly countering protests of Love missing media day.

See if you can spot how this announcement that Love made a preseason watch list ...

... differs from other, similar announcements the team has sent:

Say whatever about the Pac-12 and how important an institution media days are, but none of that is Love’s problem.

Love already does a lot for college football media members. He doesn’t get paid but still thrills people every Saturday, giving my colleagues and me the chance to write posts like these. He makes Stanford games more fun, which makes more people watch them on TV, which makes more money for his conference and school (and, in a roundabout way, his coaching staff and others who work in this sport). He does it free of charge!

The term “student-athlete” is an NCAA concoction that’s designed to nod toward the organization’s model of amateurism. It’s a lot easier not to pay student-athletes, who are getting an education, than to not pay athletes who also go to school. But as long as the organization Love represents calls him a student-athlete and doesn’t pay him, we should let him be a student even when it conflicts with our convenience.