College sports have become a lucrative industry for everyone except the laborers. Here is why the NCAA and schools should allow student athletes to be paid.
On Thursday, a piece was published here at Saturday Blitz about why student athletes are compensated well enough. Now I admit that it was the kind words for Mark Emmert that first raised my blood pressure. But it was some of the more substantive points made by my colleague that sent me to the keyboard for a rebuttal.
Despite what anti-pay advocates are prone to say, neither the scholarship nor the various benefits received by student athletes are sufficient compensation for the labor performed on the field. Let’s look at some of the talking points keeping student athletes locked in a self-reinforcing loop of amateur peonage. First, though, a word about revenue.
Not as much money as you’d think goes to student athletes
Then NCAA generates just under $1 billion in revenue each year. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Division I conferences each pull in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from football and basketball TV contracts.
The largest programs, like Texas and Ohio State, generate hundreds of millions in annual revenue when conference and bowl distribution is accounted. Those larger sources compound when factored in alongside booster donations to the school’s athletic fund, local sponsorship opportunities and media rights deals, and even stadium naming rights for on-campus facilities.
The $2.9 billion in scholarships touted by the NCAA, on the other hand, is really a shell game. Money moves around each university, and the numbers made up in terms of scholarship value are just that–made up. We can pretend to talk about the value of full tuition, but the university itself doesn’t have to pay that cost out of the revenue distributed by the NCAA and by conferences.
The money is there to provide a pool of funds to student athletes. How that pie is divided is really the question.
There is neither law nor NCAA bylaw requiring everyone get paid equally
The notion that paying players in revenue sports would require an attendant payment for every athlete in college sports is not grounded in any precedent. Title IX requires equality of opportunity in federally-funded education. It does not require equality of compensation.
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Evidence for this is readily available. Coaches in non-revenue sports earn substantially less than their counterparts in college football and college basketball. Men’s coaches regularly receive higher rates than women’s coaches, depending on the institution and which sports it chooses to prioritize.
Then there are those scholarships themselves. Not every sport offers full scholarships to student athletes. The NCAA allows schools to break up scholarship offers among more athletes in what they call equivalency sports.
Outside of football and basketball for men, and basketball, volleyball, tennis and gymnastics for women, schools can break up an equivalent number of scholarships among as many student athletes as they wish.
A school can offer a few select athletes full scholarships, or they can break up partial scholarships for a larger pool of candidates. The decision is entirely at the discretion of the coach in each individual sport at each school. A football player is already compensated better than a men’s tennis player or a women’s softball player.
Not all athletic scholarship educations are created equal
As Josh Rosen noted prior to the 2017 season in a Bleacher Report interview, the time requirements on football players are vastly different from those for student athletes in other sports. Likening football and school to working two full-time jobs, Rosen betrayed the myth of football as an extracurricular activity. And studies show Rosen is not merely engaging in hyperbole with his statements in that interview.
FBS football and some Division I basketball programs make the NCAA requirements for maximum time spent on sports look laughable. Yes, they have a shot at getting a degree. But most revenue-sports athletes are funneled into certain majors where the course load isn’t what they hoped to learn. We saw this exposed most recently at North Carolina, and it is naïve to imagine Chapel Hill being the exclusive site of such shenanigans.
Football and basketball players work hard on the field and on the court but are often steered away from majors they might actually wish to take. The same is not true of athletes in other sports. Though they might be on partial scholarship, that scholarship is actually worth a degree in subjects they actually wish to study.
Victoria Jackson, a former Division I track sports athlete who now works as a sports historian at Arizona State, noted recently in an LA Times op-ed that the system is effectively a redistribution of opportunity that disproportionately benefits predominately white non-revenue athletes at the expense of sports where people of color are more prevalent.
And the idea that they are able to graduate debt-free is also fallacious. Because so many scholarships are partial in nature, plenty of non-revenue athletes are leaving school in debt. So too are those on full scholarships.
The school need not even foot the bill for paying student athletes
What the discourse around pay-for-play misses is that the ethos of amateurism is nothing more than a convenient means of maintaining an underpaid labor force. For any other student on campus, working a job means getting a paycheck. When I worked at the campus newspaper, I received payment for every one of my articles.
I also received merit-based scholarships. Scholarships and payment were not mutually exclusive concepts. One could exist simultaneously with the other. The athletes I interviewed every week, on the other hand, worked even harder than I did. They exerted themselves, I wrote about it, yet they earned only their time in the classroom for the trouble.
Most of my living expenses, though, were covered by an off-campus job. And that is where paying athletes could easily be rectified outside of the purview of academic institutions. Amateurism is the only loophole preventing student athletes from taking endorsement opportunities, make-work jobs with boosters, and trading on their talents for outside compensation.
The folly of amateurism in college sports
For years, the Olympic Games labored under the illusion of amateurism. Allowing athletes to cash in on their likenesses however the market allows did not destroy the Olympic spirit. If anything, it only made the IOC more money in the long run in television broadcast bids.
We already allow for a variance in compensation when it comes to scholarships themselves. Distributing revenue to athletes in sports where revenue is generated isn’t going to kill other sports on campus. If anything, it would serve instead to force institutions to tamp down the escalating cost of coaches’ salaries. It would also limit the arms race of facilities development that comes when not-for-profit institutions have to spend money to break even.
Perhaps you are still squeamish about the Title IX implications even after learning about equivalency scholarship allocation. Opening the doors for third-party payment of student athletes is a fair compromise that removes academia from the issue and takes Title IX out of the equation.
College is supposed to be a learning experience. The young men and women who play intercollegiate sports are budding adults. They are mature enough to learn about unequal compensation in the real world.
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Some student athletes would earn more than others. Then again, some student athletes already do earn more than others. That alone does not negate the fact that a scholarship priced in the tens of thousands per player by the school itself in an accounting gimmick is insufficient compensation when billions are being passed around to everyone but the players. After all, the labor of athletes is what generates these billions. They deserve a piece of the pie beyond illusory scholarships.