Who, or what, will raise public awareness of the deformed nature of the NCAA money machine?
How can the door to millions in damages and a restructuring of NCAA athlete compensation be opened?
Isn't it time to put the NCAA's tax-exempt status into question, along with its anti-trust exemption?
NOTE: The lawyers on this case are high-powered and might actually get the job done.
It's about time.
"I've written extensively about the NCAA and what I perceive to be its consistent effort to exploit the black community," writes by Boyce Watkins, PhD. "It spends millions on public service announcements to protect its deception, but eventually the athletes and the public are going to wise up to what it is doing. The truth is that college athletes should be paid for the same reasons that any actor in a Hollywood blockbuster film would expect to receive compensation. The problem is that the families of athletes don't quite know how to organize and fight for their power."
Watkins, who teaches finance at Syracuse University, a school that earns millions off black families every year, analyzed the recent lawsuit against the NCAA for allegedly misusing the images of athletes for video games.
Collegiate athletics is not, in my opinion, about amateurism and it's not about education, he says. "It's about making money. Period. Many athletes are admitted to college every year, and they would not be granted admission were it not for their ability to play sports and make money for the campus. Making money is not a problem, but the problem comes when universities do not share this revenue with the families of the players."
In his analysis, Watkins concludes that College sport is far from being extracurricular: it is an exhaustively time-consuming set of activities in which athletes are consistently required to miss class, wake up early in the morning and engage in as much stress as a professional to represent the university's financial interests. This is not the typical experience of a college student, and it impedes the ability to learn.
The lack of revenue sharing with the families of college athletes is not coincidental. There is a complex nexus of carefully designed rules and regulations that keeps athletes and their families from getting any share of the money.
"These rules are supported by anti-trust exemptions granted by Congress and allow the NCAA to use education as its excuse for not paying the players and keeping their families in poverty; that's why they run those ridiculous commercials bragging about how many athletes go pro in the sport of basketball," Watkins writes. "The truth is that the organization is working to manipulate your mind ... The current NCAA system exploits the black community more than any other (outside the prison system), since most of the top college football and basketball players in the United States are African American. This exploitation is worsened by the recent commitment to use athlete's images for video games that gross millions for the organization each year."
Finally, someone is standing up against it. Former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA over the use of player images.