It’s almost time for another season of big-time college football and basketball. That makes it a good time to take stock of the NCAA, the body that oversees those sports.
For starters, let’s make one thing clear: the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a cartel, a membership organization designed to protect and advance the interests of the universities, the conferences, and the industry overall (including coaches). Everything else is secondary.
That’s why U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) is taking issue with the NCAA and its self-serving model of college sports. Murphy authorized the preparation of a series of reports, Madness, Inc., and he’s now releasing report findings to the public.
Here’s Murphy talking about the findings on ESPN’s Outside the Lines.
In the first report (May 2019), Murphy addressed what he calls ‘the compensation issue.’ Billions of dollars go to the NCAA, institutions, and conferences each year, he found, but relatively few of those resources get to student participants. Murphy and his staff found that “only 12% of revenue in the so-called Power Five conferences (that is, ACC, Big Ten, Big Twelve, SEC, and PAC-12) goes toward student-athlete scholarships.”
Courtesy: NewsBusters
Murphy’s conclusion aligns with activists and others who believe the NCAA is a corporate enterprise that operates on the backs of revenue-generating athletes, not unlike sweatshop industries. To do so, the NCAA also subverts the concept of amateurism.
As Michigan State law professors Amy and Robert McCormick assert: “Indeed, while many college sports may genuinely be amateur, others—most especially football and men’s basketball at major NCAA institutions—plainly are not…. These college sports are fantastically commercial and decidedly not amateur.”
NCAA officials don’t see it that way. Consider what PAC-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said recently (as reported by the AP’s Greg Beacham). “We are very clearly opposed to any type of pay-for-play system,” Scott said because it “would run counter to the fundamental nature of collegiate athletics and amateur student-athletes.” As commissioner, Scott earned over $5 million last year.
Courtesy: Huffington Post
In his second report (July 2019), Murphy focused on the issue of academic integrity. “The lack of academic integrity across college sports may be the most insidious piece of a broken system,” Murphy concluded. “Student-athletes, who sometimes spend more than 50 hours a week on athletic activities, graduate at significantly lower rates than non-athletes.”
In a phone interview, Murphy told the Hartford Courant that “the reality is that for many students, especially in the big-time college sports programs, the scholarship is illusory. They are full-time athletes, and they do not graduate, or if they do graduate, they don’t get the same education that everyone else gets.”
Murphy elaborated at his website: “Whether it’s academic fraud, overly burdensome schedules, or being pushed into easy pass coursework, the system often robs these athletes of their shot at a real education.” Murphy cited experiences of several student-athletes who said that advisers had completed coursework for them and had restricted their choice of academic major. One respondent said that he had ‘majored in football.’”
VICE Sports
These academic issues are especially onerous for African American athletes who make up a significant proportion of big-time college football and basketball. These athletes labor in an industry that’s dominated by Caucasian head coaches and athletics director. That reality–in plain sight at major college games–makes big-time college football and basketball a neo-plantation system.
Murphy’s work is being applauded nationally by activists and others concerned about major college sports. A prime example is The Drake Group, an association dedicated to ending the corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports (note: the author is a member). In a recent press release, the Group urged Sen. Murphy to continue “playing a leadership role,” including convincing his colleagues in Washington “to embrace a bipartisan Congressional effort to address these issues as it appears the NCAA will not do so itself.”
Murphy’s efforts are the most recent attempt by Washington’s at NCAA reform.
In 2015, U.S. House of Representative member Charlie Dent (R-PA) introduced a bill called “The NCAA Accountability Act.” The proposal was referred to the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training but never made it to a floor vote.
Dent had supporters, including Bobby Rush (D-ILL), who told McClatchy that the NCAA’s interpretation of amateurism is a smokescreen to exploit athletes. ”It takes the layman’s capital and talent and the skills of its participants under the guise of being amateurs,” Rush said. “It promises them education, but exploits their labor—without pay, I might add.”
A number of alternative models have been advanced in response to the NCAA’s static model, including one proposed recently by law professor Marc Edelman of CCNY and Fordham University.
In an article published in the Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport, Edelman proposed a two-tier system. One tier would include non-revenue generating sports, and the other would include revenue-generating teams.
Governance of the first tier would conform to international standards as promulgated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) using the general framework of student affairs. The other tier would conform to a commercialized business model (see my proposal for one method). As Edelman views it, such change would enable a “true employee-athlete model of college sports” while recognizing that “a certain number of sports teams as ‘minor league’ athletics rather than part of the traditional undergraduate experience.”
Courtesy: Inside Higher Education
Where all of this will end is anybody’s guess, but one thing is for sure: the NCAA will continue defending its model, including continuing lobbying Washington to counter any legislation designed to bring about significant change. Lobbying by the major universities and conferences will magnify NCAA efforts.
In the meantime, the courts will remain active as lawsuits against the Association continue to be filed, heard, and judged. For example, payments will begin this month in the sum of over $200 million to be distributed among 50,000 former athletes in football and men’s/women’s basketball. It’s the result of a court settlement reached between defendants and the NCAA.
Changing the NCAA is a steep hill to climb for a variety of reasons, including significant fan support for keeping the system the way it is currently. But there’s hope, mainly because—as J. Brady McCollough’s wrote recently in the LA Times—the NCAA’s duplicitousness is becoming more and more apparent.
Money and the control of college sports, not athletes, come first.
