Myles Brand is the President of the NCAA. He makes nearly a million dollars a year as the steward of college athletics. He's adamant about those athletes not getting paid. And now he's been published in the Huffington Post (guess we know where his politics lean).Neither higher education, of which college sports is only a small part, nor intercollegiate athletics is truly capitalistic. They do not generate revenue to make a profit; they generate revenue to fulfill a purpose, to meet the mission of higher education. If they were models of capitalism, many academic programs and nearly all sports other than football and men's basketball would be dropped because they are too costly and do not generate enough revenue to pay their own way.Read the whole thing. I'm not necessarily in favor of institutions paying the athletes, but the argument itself isn't the most convincing.
Brand is right that most collegiate sports don't make money just as many college departments don't make money. They're still part of a broader, profit-driven institution however. Just as the janitorial crew that cleans up a pro sports stadium contributes to the product but doesn't add to the bottom line, some college sports are around and contribute something without profiting. However, the janitorial crew gets compensated because they are an essential part of the machine. So are the athletes, but without cash reimbursement.
The Reggie Bush situation was an eye-opener of sorts, for me. It exposed an opening that the NCAA simply cannot present an ironclad argument against. Bush was compensated for his own talents, outside of the view of the institution while at USC. In that he really isn't that much different from the star violinist being recruited by various orchestras while still participating in the college symphony.
The difference is the violinist can make those kinds of choices without repercussion. Bush (and many other athletes like him) can't. The logic as to why the NCAA says "no" is weak at best. Brand's defense of athletes' amateur status is as follows:
College sports has survived as a component of campus for a century and a half now for two reasons: 1) Those who play are students, and 2) Intercollegiate athletics shares in the driving purpose of higher education -- to educate students.
And none of that changes if someone like Bush takes cash or gifts in half-baked schemes from guys looking to start an agency with Bush as their headline client. He's still a student at the end of the day, taking classes in addition to his work on the football field. Brand adds:
Professional athletes are paid because playing sports is their job. Playing sports is not the job of student-athletes. They are amateurs at it.
And this reveals a bias against athletics as an actual vocation. Athletics is the only arena within academia that faces sanction for those under its jurisdiction attempting to become working professionals. The star engineering student and his school face no sanction for taking that big job before graduation, or accepting a fancy dinner from a future employer while still a student (or in the NCAA's language, a student-engineer). The music major can participate in the city's major orchestra as well as the one at the school. Those are respectable vocations, as is professional athletics.
There are better arguments to be made against the validity of Bush's actions, but not presented here. Namely, protecting a level playing field in college athletics.
However, the notion of amateurism is forever damaged and blurred into a million yes and no areas that make little to no sense even to the most intelligent of observers (quick, try to figure out why professional baseball players can return to school and have eligibility in other sports like football, but a guy like Jeremy Bloom could no longer play football at Colorado because of endorsement money he took to finance his other role as an Olympic-level mogul skier? Good luck). That edifice is crumbling and beyond repair. Better arguments must be offered than what the NCAA has provided to date.
Getting back to Brand for a moment, this is his third such article at the Huffington Post. I applaud the NCAA's efforts to reach out to broader media and attempt to defend itself. There is a worthy public conversation to be had discussing the NCAA's role, its arguments for why it does what it does, and what it does right and what it doesn't do right. I look forward to his future entries.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jeremy Bloom was not allowed to participate in football because he was STILL receiving the endorsement money from skiing. Endorsements are different from being paid to play a professional sport in that there can be a discrepency as to which sport the endorsement money is actually for (college football or skiing). A ruling committee would need to be in place to make that judgement, which is not feasible. If the US Ski Team were the ones funding Bloom, he would have been treated like any other professional athlete.
Jeremy Bloom was not allowed to participate in football because he
was STILL receiving the endorsement money from skiing. Endorsements are different from being paid to play a professional sport in that there can be a discrepency as to which sport the endorsement money is actually for (college football or skiing). A ruling committee would need to be in place to make that judgement, which is not feasible. If the US Ski Team were the ones funding Bloom, he would have been treated like any other professional athlete.
There is a big difference between eliminating the Janitorial staff and eliminating a non-revenue sport. If a pro team never cleaned up it's stadium people would stop coming (I'm looking at you Orange Bowl...). But if a college team eliminates women's gymnastics that would have absolutely no effect on the attendance at football games. Brand is right that if it were all about profit the only sports that would exist are football, men's basketball and ice hockey at a few schools.
Good issue.
The major fear (of course) is that if the schools paid the athletes at the revenue sports then they'd have no money remaining to spread around to the non-rev sports. Or -- at least -- much less, and that would nail their bottom line and hurt the game. Either way, it's a money issue with the schools but covered with a fig leaf of silly moralizing.
It seems to me there's an easy solution -- let the pro leagues draft them and put them under contract while they play college football. A caveat could (maybe should) be added that this ends the "pre-graduation" trip to the big money in the NFL: You stay in school until you get the degree or you turn 22.
Some players would be snapped up as soon as they graduate high school, others after they prove themselves in the college game, and most probably never at all. But the college game stays in tact (maybe improved if the best players stay on the college field longer), the pros still get their talent pipeline, and we stop treating college kids like indentured servants.