For years the NCAA and college sports powerhouses had a sweet thing going. Men’s football and basketball programs generated millions in revenue and raised the profile of well-known but academically middle-of-the-pack institutions. Deep-pocketed alumni showered cash on alma maters as they vicariously basked in the glory won by scores of players who received little education, few pro sports prospects, and no cash. The Supreme Court pulled the plug on the serfdom of the ‘amateur’ (read abusive) status of these unpaid mercenaries. Leaving commentators like John Ziegler incensed that the free supply of labor has been stanched.
And he blames liberals. He writes for Mediaite:
“One of the strangest of our many human failings is the apparent pathological need to destroy anything truly extraordinary.”
And then he gets specific
“it is hard to beat what a coalition of mostly extremely liberal factions have just done to the basic goodness — despite all the imperfections — of major college sports, all under the guise of a fake civil rights crusade.”
What have the liberals done? Zeigler elucidates,
“In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, the NCAA officially announced that, for all intents and purposes, there is no longer such thing as amateurism in big-time college athletics, as players can now be paid lots of money for their “name, image, and likeness.”
Reading this you may think it’s about time. I do. But Zielger dismisses us, and any like-minded thinkers, as children and “super-woke”.
“To someone with a third-grader’s view of the world (which includes many of the super-woke sports media personalities who have championed this foolhardy cause for many years), this radical change seems like basic “fairness,” and likely very beneficial to financially poor students, so it must be inherently virtuous. After all, in America, shouldn’t someone who is creating value for a business be allowed to profit from that? Even some conservative commentators have been hoodwinked by this initially-enticing argument.”
Like so many zealots — who create arguments to support their point of view, rather than develop their point of view from facts and logic — Ziegler sinks to ‘ad hominem’. There is no better way to show the weakness of you position by attacking your opponents personally rather than disputing the logic of their conclusions.
When he does get around to addressing the argument for paying college athletes he retreats to the sophistry of the well-worn but disingenuous, “Student-athletes are already well-compensated with non-cash bennies.”
“The most obvious fallacy is the premise that the athletes who would have real value in the open market were not already handsomely compensated with full scholarships, quality room and board, top-notch medical care, and massive amounts of free branding/business connections from their schools PR machine.”
I agree that, to many students, a full scholarship could be worth north of $100,000 or far more. But it’s only worth anything if the student graduates — and sports power-house schools generally have lower graduation rates for their football and basketball programs than for students in general.
But let’s celebrate the athletes who do graduate and schools who graduate their revenue-generating athletes in high numbers. In those schools, non-athletes on full academic scholarships are allowed to earn money. So why not the athletes?
He adds that athletes get top-notch medical care — of course they do, why wouldn’t a school want to protect their investment? However, the main reason they need top-notch care is they get hurt playing their sport. Many are permanently disabled and too soon physically old. And, worst of all, suffer from the ravages of CTE. Let’s note that Roman gladiators also got room, board and medical care.
What about the “free branding/business connections”? Again, this is something non-athlete scholarship holders have access to with job fairs, contacts between colleges and the corporate world, fraternity/sorority networks, and alumni associations. So where’s the logic in creating different standards of earning money for student-athletes?
Ziegler’s next argument is that it isn’t the athletes creating value. He claims that if the athletes formed their own league it would go out of business without the strong brand backing of the universities. He’s right. But with that logic, you could equally well argue that Tesla workers are overpaid because if they tried building their own electric cars they would go broke.
It’s ridiculous of course. Tesla workers get paid what they get paid because their compensation is set by the free market. They create value for Tesla shareholders. And student-athletes create value for colleges.
Perhaps Ziegler’s oddest argument is that paying college athletes doesn’t create a free market
The fundamental problem with the “free market” view of this issue is that the NCAA is NOT really allowing a very select few players who truly create value to finally cash in on that. Rather they are, perhaps partly unwittingly, generating a totally contrived and artificial market—more of a Pandora’s Box really–where the fans of schools have a huge incentive to grossly overpay even those athletes who barely play.
Ziegler completely whiffs on the meaning of ‘free market’. He says that marginal players will be grossly overpaid. Let’s note that many people think that professional athletes and CEOs are grossly overpaid. However, their pay is set by market forces. To claim they are ‘overpaid’ is a moral argument, not an economic one. There is no ‘over’/’under’ anything in a genuinely free market.
You could argue that it is in professional sports some marginal athletes are being overpaid. Collective bargaining has led to minimum wages in the professional leagues. In the NFL, $660,000, the NBA, $898,310, and MLB $570,500.
Ziegler claims to be a conservative — and yet his arguments against paying student-athletes are pure corporate socialism. He is the sort of economic free-marketeer who believes that the worker should be subject to the amorality of the market, while the capitalist/owner/management class should run their businesses enterprises on communal principles.
Zeigler puts the institution over the individual — something well known to Soviet citizens, but something that all liberty-loving patriots should reject as unAmerican.