…but it won’t. Here’s why.
The NCAA levied sanctions this week against Rick Pitino and University of Louisville basketball. The reason made headlines: escorts were hired to entice recruits to sign with the Cardinals.
Courtesy: WDRB.com
It’s a tawdry tale, completely inconsistent with the purpose of higher education—or any legitimate business, for that matter.
It’s also another example of an embarrassing pattern in the sport: Hall of Fame coaches at high-profile schools—Boeheim, Calipari, Brown, and now Pitino—have been punished by the NCAA.
But larger ills get lost each time there’s a scandal. That’s because fans and analysts dive into the particulars of the case. There’s always a debate between those who see the sanctions as too severe and those who say the NCAA didn’t go far enough. It’s a game of back-and-forth–of finger-pointing and defending home court.
That tradition also includes an institutional full-court press. The university president/chancellor, AD, and coach hold a press conference. They cry “FOUL!” and say they’ll appeal. That happened last year at Syracuse. It happened this year at Louisville. And no doubt it will happen soon at UNC, Chapel Hill.
All of this happens with such regularity that we’re inured to it. We expect it. We accept it as “normal.” We shouldn’t.
But the shocking thing is that nothing happens to clean-up the sport–despite that fact that there are repeated calls for reform. Those in the reform community observe, monitor, study, write, speak out, call out, and recommend. Sometimes they organize and lobby.
Reformers do those things. But one thing they can’t do is enact change.
Courtesy: KCUR.org
Those with that power … won’t – not university leadership, not athletics directors, not the coaching fraternity, not the NCAA, and not the Federal government.
Why? The prevailing opinion is that there are too many benefits associated with the system that exists to risk making major changes—benefits to the NCAA, the schools, ADs, coaches, and others associated with the sport, including the media.
The problem with that stance is clear. Some systems are worth defending and preserving. Democracy is an example. Other systems are not. And major college basketball is one of the not’s.
Why do I say that? Let’s look at what kind of system it is. Michael Harriot and Patrick Hruby did just that recently.
The root of the problem, Harriot argues, isn’t the amount of money generated by the sport, it’s about who gets the money and how the system is structured to enable that flow. Hruby elaborates (italics are his):
Waltern Byers (phtoto, ncaa.org)
“Many observers and critics—including yours truly—have described the NCAA’s amateur economy as both regressive and structurally racist, a system that annually transfers billions of dollars of wealth from poorer, predominantly black football and men’s basketball players and their families to better-off, predominantly white coaches, administrators, and non-revenue-sport athletes.
Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch has written that college sports exude “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation.” Former NCAA executive director Walter Byers, who built the organization and ran it for decades, wrote in his memoir that campus athletes were characterized by a “neo-plantation mentality” in which the economic rewards “belong to the overseers.”
The compensation rules are ostensibly color-blind, but the end results are not—who believe the NCAA oversees a plantation system with black athletes serving as “sharecroppers.”
Harriot describes the personnel structure of the sport’s neo-plantation system:
“During the 2014-2015 academic school year, black men were 2.5 percent of undergraduate students but 56.3 percent of football teams and 60.8 percent of men’s-basketball teams. The average graduation success rate for college football players in 2016 was 68 percent. For white football players, it was 87 percent. College basketball is even worse—it graduated only 53 percent of its black ballers…/while/…only 18 percent of college basketball coaches (pdf) are black and only 8 percent of FBS head coaches are African American.”
Harriot concludes: “If any other business in America had that much racial disparity in any of its industry practices, it would either be sued into oblivion or shut down by the government.”
While the situation is in full display, right before our eyes, we do nothing about it.
Watch any major college game. 70%+ of the players on the floor at any time will be black; and it’s likely that both head coaches will be white. Consider this recent headline: Black Coaches Vanish From Big Ten Basketball (Star-Tribune, March 4, 2017).
So why don’t we demand change? There are plenty of reasons, of course, but one reason is that we–that’s you and me, fans of the game–don’t call for change. We accept the system as is and don’t put pressure on America’s major colleges and universities to change. With no external pressure for change and no internal desire for change higher education maintains the status quo.
Okay, then why do we accept the system as is? Again, there are plenty of reasons why, but one way to shed light on the answer is to study why people are for/against compensating D1 players. Paying players would be one way to break the neo-plantation structure.
Four academic researchers–Kevin Wallsten, Tatishe M. Nteta, Lauren A. McCarthy, and Melinda R. Tarsi–did just that. They published their results earlier this year in Political Research Quarterly. That study, which was discussed by both Harriot and Hruby in their respective analyses, came across my desk a few months ago, largely because the authors’ findings received wide coverage in the mainstream media.
Here’s one finding:
Twitter, Sanjay Srivastava
The researchers categorize that factor as “racial resentment.” And it’s one reason why we have a collegiate system in revenue-producing sports that’s neo-plantational in structure and practice.
But the system is rarely interpreted that way. Instead most people see it as a form of entertainment and a way to support ‘their’ school.
If only it was that and that only. But it isn’t. And there’s serious attempt underway to make system less problematic, to make it more compatible with the institution (higher education) that sponsors it.
Honestly, there was a time when I was okay with it, too. I looked, but didn’t see the system for what it is. I see it differently today–only because I started thinking more broadly and deeply about the American circumstance and, with that, realized that higher education (the institution where I spent my professional career) was not only implicated, but was a primary antagonist.
Does any of this bother you, too?
Yeah, what happened at Louisville is indefensible, but so is the entire system.
