March Madness: Are the Players Getting a Raw Deal?
Wed Mar 14, 2007 at 05:29:28 PM PDT
Like millions of other Americans, I enjoy the annual ritual of March Madness. I've even been to three Final Fours--oddly, Michigan lost in the championship game each time--and seen quite a few early-round games as well. However, there's a dark side to the tournament, and to big-time college sports as well.
The bottom line is that the players are getting a raw deal. Even though they hold what amount to full-time jobs during the season, and which carry a greater than average risk of work-related injuries, they've been relegated to a legal never-never land called "student-athlete" status.
There's more beyond the 3-point line...
Many years ago, the legal eagles at the NCAA came up with the term "student-athlete," largely to defeat worker's-compensation claims by injured players. Treating intercollegiate sports as extracurricular activities benefits colleges in another way: it keeps the IRS from snagging a share of their television and other revenue.
However, major-college sports crossed the line from extracurricular activity into commercial entertainment many years ago. During the 1920s, football matchups such as Army v. Notre Dame drew huge crowds, and scalped tickets changed hands at Super Bowl prices. (Some college players made a few bucks on the side by playing for semi-pro teams on Sunday, under assumed names of course. Back then, the NCAA was powerless to stop this from happening).
Even though high-profile college games entertain an huge audiences and bring in millions in revenue, the players themselves don't see that revenue because they're subject to what amounts to a salary cap. Actually, worse than a cap: a student-athlete is limited to receiving tuition, room and board. (There are no such limits on how much a coach can earn. In many states, the head football coach at State U. is the highest-paid public employee.) For many athletes, who are not capable of college-level work and/or not interested in pursuing an education, an athletic scholarship is worthless: the school pretends to pay them, they pretend to study.
Unlike the salary caps in the NBA and NFL, the NCAA cap is not the result of negotiation with players but an agreement among member schools. Individual athletes are in effect non-persons with the NCAA; and, even though most are 18 years old or older, they're more or less treated like wards of the school for which they play. Or perhaps apprentices, who are forced to put in an apprenticeship thanks to age limits imposed by the pro leagues.
The NCAA, of course, doesn't use the term "salary cap." It uses the vaguer term, "amateurism," a bedrock principle of the organization since it was founded in 1906. Here, too, the NCAA plays fast and loose with words. Strictly speaking, an "amateur" is a person who plays a sport for the love of it. That term properly describes the weekend golfer, the person training for his or her first marathon, or the softball team sponsored by the local bar and grill--not the guy trying to sink a one-and-one with no time left on the clock in a regional final.
The term "amateur" was twisted out of context even before the NCAA seized upon it. In Victorian England, the upper classes used amateurism to protect themselves from competition from working men. Gentlemen shouldn't accept money to compete, they decreed. Of course, they didn't need the money. Hall of Fame sportswriter Leonard Koppett once called the concept of amateurism "sick," and it's hard to improve on his description.
To flesh out its notion of amateurism, the NCAA publishes a doorstop-size manual, which is so opaque and complex that even lawyers shudder at the thought of it. The organization's application of the rules sometimes defy logic. For instance, Drew Henson played quarterback at Michigan but spent his summers making millions playing baseball. That didn't endanger his amateur status in football. On the other hand, Jeremy Bloom played wide receiver at Colorado, but the NCAA stripped him of his eligibility because Bloom, a world-class skier, had been paid to endorse ski equipment.
The Bloom case gained wide attention, but NCAA bureaucrats have stuck their noses into much smaller breaches of their version of amateurism, such as athletes who get walk-on movie roles and modeling contracts, or who even posed for sorority charity calendars. At the same time, the local sporting goods stores sell replica jerseys of current players--an irony that hasn't gone unnoticed.
How unfair has the system become? Walter Byers, who for decades was the NCAA's executive director (which made him the de facto emperor of college sports), assailed amateurism in his 1997 book, Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Byers admitted that he'd helped create a monster, and accused the organization of being a conspiracy against college athletes.
Oddly, most of those who publicly advocate ending the hypocrisy of amateurism and paying players for their services are free-market conservatives. Many progressives wish that college sports would simply go away, which is highly unlikely given the political and economic forces that prop up the status quo. They ignore the issues of whether college athletic programs exploit players--one can argue that this is a labor issue--and what can be done about it.
This diary isn't a call for a boycott of March Madness, merely a reminder about the seamy side of big-time college sports--and they don't get bigger than this tournament. When you watch the games, think about this: What happens to those players who use up their eligibility, can't make it to the next level in basketball, and have no hope of earning a degree? You'll never see them featured in CBS's "up-close-and-personal" human interest stories. They're history. Literally.
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