Column: The NCAA must adapt or die
It appears the marriage between NCAA athletics and the notion of amateurism has hit another rough patch, and much like The Bachelor’s Arie and Kendall pairing, this union built on a shaky foundation of false pretenses is doomed to collapse any day now.
It is going to be spectacular.
FBI findings that your favorite blue-blood basketball program has definitely been cheating all along may have just turned the tide in a decade-long fight between a multibillion-dollar business unwilling to pay its labor force and every sports fan and player in the country with a scrap of common sense. In short, the schools listed here have been caught paying players under the table. The business of paying players essentially on the black market isn’t new, but the recent naming of names is as extensive as any major bust in NCAA history.
(Great job FBI, glad to see your priorities are in order).
Sure, athletes have been wise to the NCAA’s strained relationship with players’ amateur status for some time now. But this latest scandal driving college basketball’s most storied programs into the spotlight of national embarrassment could be the fatal blow.
The days of profiting off of college athletes probably aren’t over, but the time for fair compensation is finally here. Why here, and why now? Because this level of cheating will absolutely continue, as exactly and extensively as it is now, until players are given what they’re worth.
Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star via AP Arizona coach Sean Miller watches his team play Southern California during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018, in Tucson, Ariz. (Kelly Presnell/Arizona Daily Star via AP)
My stance on this today could not be more different than when I began covering Div. I athletics in 2013. Athletes acting like they were special because of their daily grind seemed quick to forget every other student was grinding too. Rent payments, debt, crap housing, four hours of sleep a night and constant condescension from others insisting they’ve not yet joined the “real world” are universal challenges posed to all students — not just those in uniform on Saturday nights.
Another near-universal truth for most students is the reality of working through college. If you’re fortunate enough to afford a degree without holding down at least a part-time gig while in school, congratulations. Feel free to exit this column now and get back to Instagramming your Jeep or whatever. For the rest of us, school sometimes feels like the side hustle you try to keep up with when your job isn’t running you ragged.
For student-athletes, which is a phrase I’ll be purposefully and aggressively discarding for the remainder of this column because it enrages me to even type it out, their sport is their job. I shouldn’t have to detail the sort of commitment required of an athlete’s time, mental focus and physical faculties in order to play any sport at the Div. I level.
“But wait!” I already hear some of you cry, “These kids are amateurs! The whole point is that college sports aren’t a job at all!”
I’m so glad you brought that up, bad-opinion-straw-man, let’s talk about that.
A seemingly impenetrable wall of self-serving circular reasoning has served as NCAA president Mark Emmert’s shield against legitimate player grievances since his watch began in November of 2010. It goes something like this:
Players aren’t paid because they’re amateurs, and players are amateurs because they don’t get paid.
This message is at the root of every NCAA battlecry — education is payment enough. Playing Div. I sports is a privilege. You chose to play, so shut up and play.
Tell you what, when your next paycheck goes missing and your manager tells you what a privilege it is to be employed at all, let me know how that goes. Remember, your immense freedom allows you shut up and work without pay or quit. It’s almost as if the ability to work stops being a privilege when your compensation evaporates.
This is not just a cute metaphor, it’s a college athlete’s current reality. This reality is why the NCAA’s fortress of logic suddenly looks less like a wall and more like a bubble — one that has well over-extended its reach and now awaits swift and terrible consequences (both from the FBI and athletes like former USU wideout Alex Wheat).
A CEO needs great management for the company. Management needs great employees to keep their job. In all of this, the employee makes the manager look good and the CEO is happy with the result but the employees get nothing.
— Alex Wheat Jr. (@KingWheatXVI) February 24, 2018
But let’s be real — a university like Utah State can’t just start cutting its players a paycheck. Where’s that money supposed to come from, exactly?
The expense would likely be passed onto other students by way of student fees, which is already a well USU draws from more greedily than your average university. In 2016, Utah State athletics pulled in $32,045,471 in revenue, with $2,329,092 (7.3 percent) coming from direct ticket sales and $4,332,793 (13.5 percent) drawn from student fees. That’s not a business model that can suddenly afford hundreds of additional full-time employees.
While comparing Utah State’s student fees to other schools is a depressing exercise for another day, the takeaway here is our university — most, in fact — don’t have the funds to pay players.
Luckily for us, some complicated questions have easy answers. All the NCAA has to do is get out of the way.
Allow players to profit off of their own likeness. Quit pretending all the no. 16 USU football jerseys hanging in closets across the northern half of the state aren’t Chuckie Keeton jerseys. Let athletes sign with agents as they see fit, let them sponsor local businesses and for crying out loud bring back the NCAA Football console games.
I’m Jalen Davis. I spend my Saturdays shutting down opposing wide receivers, but you can be shutdown specialists too. How? Shut down lights when you leave a room, shut down TV’s and computers after use. Rocky Mountain Power wants you to join our team and shut down energy waste.
— Kevin Floyd (@KFloyd34) February 24, 2018
Will this newfound freedom turn college recruiting into the wild west? Wake up — it already is. The same teams with distinct financial advantages today will sport the same advantages tomorrow. Giving players rights to their own image and star power will merely expand a program’s ability to profit off an athlete’s usefulness to the athletes themselves.
It’s time to adapt to a college sports landscape worth billions in TV money and sponsorships. The days of everyone getting rich off of football games except the guys getting hit on the field are done. The days of pretending Duke basketball and every other school exploiting the 1-and-done rule for profit actually care if players get a degree or not are done.
We’ll have some work to do to ensure the value of an education is stressed in the locker room. There will certainly be unforeseen negative consequences. But as a general rule, it’s best practice to side with the massive unpaid labor force when facing a handful of ultra-rich guys seeking a way out of paying their employees.
The NCAA doesn’t have to pay its players, but it must allow the players to be paid.