The hottest college football controversy right now isn't a debate over who's the preseason No. 1 team, or who has an inside track to the Heisman Trophy. No, the latest buzz is whether the term "student athlete" is real, or just a cruel punchline.

UCLA star quarterback Josh Rosen ignited this controversy Tuesday in a Q & A session with the popular fan website Bleacher Report. Here's the sentence that set things off:

"Look, football and school don't go together. They just don't. Trying to do both is like trying to do two full-time jobs."

Rosen's comment cuts to the core of the supposed trade-off college athletes make when they agree to play for very profitable sports programs, but for no actual pay: They get a free education in return for sacrificing their time and bodies to bring in fans, as well as merchandising money.

But if the "education" part of that deal is a sham, or at least impossible to attain even if college football players make a decent effort to study and play, then that deal is a fraudulent one.

Over the course of the four decades that I've covered college football as a writer and radio commentator, academic controversies have ebbed and flowed. The nadir came in the late 1980s, when a college and then-NFL star player named Dexter Manley revealed he had remained eligible to play all four years at Oklahoma State — without being able to functionally read or write.

The zenith was when one of the captains of Nebraska's back-to-back national championship football teams in 1994-95 was Rob Zatechka, a biology major who went on to become an anesthesiologist in West Omaha. Yet it's been a generally accepted fact, long before Rosen made his comments this week, that major college football players can easily play their entire careers without taking a serious class.