SMQ: The ethical failure of NCAA arguments for free labor in college football

Comparing student athletes to unpaid prison labor is ridiculous. The NCAA just used that argument to justify the concept of amateurism in college athletics.

The long offseason leaves plenty of time to think about the state of college football and college sports in general. And this Sunday Morning Quarterback has had a few days to mull over a recent article about Livers vs. NCAA. The governing body presiding over college sports is trying to get this case thrown out, as they do every case raising the question of paying athletes. This time, however, the effort hinges on a spurious argument.

The 13th Amendment is an interesting piece of work. Ratified in 1865, it is the amendment that prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. The prohibition, though, came with a catch. Unpaid and coerced labor was still legal for those convicted of a crime and under the ward of the state.

That this amendment would ever come up in the context of college sports shows the depths that the NCAA will go to preserve amateurism. Sports on college campuses originated as recreation rather than big business. More than that, however, they originated during the Victorian era. At that time, sport developed simultaneously as aristocratic pastimes and urban-industrial diversions.

By the early 20th century, professionalism was accepted not just among most American sports and leagues. This was also true on a global level, as soccer leagues either overtly or covertly embraced paying players. The push for professionalism was a universal construct, of course, except on college campuses. And that intransigence on the part of universities and the NCAA has persisted into the 21st century.

The courts have allowed the NCAA to create its own loopholes

Until now, colleges and the association presiding over intercollegiate athletics have been more subtle in their power grab. Prior to the Livers case, they have not gone as far as comparing their student-athletes to prison labor. In their motion to dismiss the Livers case, the NCAA cited the Vanskike vs. Peters case that legitimated the 13th Amendment as legally constructed but morally duplicitous.

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If prisons don’t have to pay their prisoners for the labor they perform, neither should universities. That is the crux of the NCAA’s argument, that the people performing on the field are in no way laborers in the employ of their universities.

Courts around the United States have historically acceded to the NCAA’s concept of amateurism. A student is an amateur under the NCAA’s policies because they fall under the NCAA’s definition of amateurism. A student-athlete cannot be paid because the NCAA defines an amateur is an athlete who cannot accept payment according to the NCAA.

It is this sort of doublespeak that allows the governing body to remain in cahoots with the colleges at the expense of athletes. Disproportionately-black revenue sports subsidize the education of predominantly-white athletes in non-revenue sports and the salaries of predominantly-white administrators. But, crying poverty, athletic departments force their way to non-profit status by bestowing bloated salaries on coaches and building pleasure palaces.

The danger of accepting the NCAA arguments as legal precedent

In every prior case where Vanskike vs. Peters has been raised in a court of law, the precedent was used in terms of prison labor. College students who sign scholarship offers with university athletic departments, though, are not prisoners. A disingenuous application of Vanskike attempts to extend the 13th Amendment’s sinister inequalities from prison yards to campus stadiums.

Fans of college sports rarely have kind words for the NCAA. The organization has ruled with a heavy hand within the spheres of its jurisdiction for much of its history. Programs face sanctions for any number of infractions on a daily basis. Even then, damages meted out rarely have a substantive long-term deterrent effect.

Student athletes are not prisoners. Taking extraordinary measures, though, would make life for students little different from that of convicted prisoners. Athletes in college football and college basketball already practice far more than the NCAA-mandated 20 hours per week. They watch athletic departments get richer as a result of their labor.

And in lieu of monetary payment for their labor, football and basketball players have to go to classes. In non-revenue sports, student athletes have ample time and encouragement to pursue whatever they wish in school. The classes for basketball and football players are chosen to fit their sport schedule rather than the other way around.

13th Amendment protections would exacerbate the problem for the NCAA

So much for going pro in something other than sports. In many cases, revenue sports athletes are set up to merely survive the college experience. If nothing else, that reality shows how much real value that degree will have down the road. If they fail to make the NFL or NBA, many of these football and basketball players will have nothing substantive to fall back on.

These athletes trust their authority figures. Sports are designed around being receptive to coaching, after all. The trust placed in the hands of the powerful is staggering. And if the NCAA gets its way and gets the Livers case dismissed, their rationale for doing so will only concentrate power further in the hands of coaches and administrators.

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NFL owners like Bob McNair cavalierly throw around phrases about their players such as calling them “inmates running the prison”. The NCAA tries to turn their facilities into actual prisons for student-athletes, where what small measure of individual agency these youngsters might have is subsumed to the greater goal of profits and victories. If the NCAA wins this case, student athletes risk becoming even further removed from the collegiate experience.