March Madness and the Cruelty of The NCAA
I loved being a college athlete. But I hate the NCAA: Its refusal to pay college athletes is increasingly unconscionable and disproportionally disadvantages the black athletes it relies on for its success.
March Madness will end Monday night when Michigan and Villanova face off in the NCAA men’s basketball championship game. If the numbers are anything like last year’s, nearly 23 million people will watch two teams comprised of teenagers and young adults play for their shining moment. Among those viewers will be celebrities, politicians, friends and families, and of course, all of those who bet an estimated $10 billion on this year’s tournament.
I didn’t bet this year. For one, I forgot to fill out a bracket before the tournament started. And I guess I didn’t really want to, either.
As a former college athlete, betting on sports still feels off limits. Every summer, before the rest of the students arrived on campus, the athletes would sit in an auditorium and sign stacks of papers that contractually obligated us to protect the sanctity of our sports, our school, and by extension, the NCAA.
In addition to gambling, student athletes are prohibited from any action that would even obliquely affect their amateur status. That means no agents, no trying out for professional teams, and no money for any athletic participation whatsoever (except for prize money in some cases, but the risk usually isn’t worth the reward). College athletes also aren’t allowed to profit off of their likenesses in any way—the paperwork signing away their right to do so is in that stack. Athletes can even risk losing their amateur statuses by modeling, a bizarre notion in the age of Instagram and YouTube stardom.
But you know who can profit off of college athletes’ likenesses and efforts? Colleges and universities. The NCAA. Coaches, who can receive over $1 million in bonuses by the end of the tournament. Sports brands. Television networks and the companies that advertise on them. You, and me, now that I’m no longer a college athlete.
As a track athlete, I wasn’t exactly raking in cash for the university. But I can attest to the massive commitment, sacrifice, and pressure involved with being a college athlete at any level, much less at the level achieved by the young men and women in the NCAA basketball tournament.
These rules apply to athletes whether or not they’re earning a full ride athletic scholarship; the ones who do only account for about two percent of Division I and II athletes. Other athletic scholarships are divvied up among athletes and teams. Some schools — particularly private schools, like the one I attended — don’t offer full ride athletic scholarships at all. If you’re lucky and you have decent grades, you might receive a combination of academic scholarships, grants, and need-based aid to cobble together a free education.
The primary revenue-generating sports are almost invariably football and men’s basketball. So as a track athlete, I wasn’t exactly raking in cash for the university. But I can attest to the massive commitment, sacrifice, and pressure involved with being a college athlete at any level, much less at the level achieved by the young men and women in the NCAA basketball tournament. And it starts long before an athlete even sets foot on campus.
Youth and Corruption
From the time most future college athletes show any potential at all, they are thrown into the gauntlet that is AAU or club sports. Think Dance Moms, but for basketball, or soccer. I started club basketball at 11 years old; by 14 I was being watched by college scouts in camps and tournaments across the country. Before I got my braces off, I was daydreaming about playing for Pat Summit’s Tennessee Vols or Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies. But the goal was really any full-ride scholarship; my parents made it clear that was the only way we’d be able to afford college.
Given the increasingly high cost of youth sports and the necessity to participate in order to be competitive, it’s no wonder that families are under pressure to bend NCAA rules in order to see their children flourish. And with the potential to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses, coaches are heavily incentivized to recruit the best athletes. In turn, major sports brands want to sponsor the best teams to get the best—and most visible—athletes in their gear.
Enter the recent FBI investigation into the widespread NCAA corruption, as explained by Dylan Scott of Vox.com:
Under one scheme, assistant coaches at [Oklahoma State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, and Auburn University] allegedly accepted cash payments from sports agents and financial advisers in exchange for encouraging incoming high school players to commit to certain universities. As SB Nation outlined, one coach collected $13,000. Another brought in $22,000.
In a second related but distinct scheme, an unidentified sportswear company funneled six-figure payments to players, through the coaches, for players to commit to schools with which the clothing company already had a business partnership. The University of Louisville was eventually confirmed to be one of the schools involved.
I mean, that’s just good marketing: What “unidentified sportswear company” wouldn’t want all 23 million of those NCAA Championship viewers’ eyes on a team decked out in their stripes or swooshes?
Below are two graphics demonstrating the alleged transgressions discovered by the FBI probe (h/t the same Vox article referenced above):
Outside of the NCAA, media and entertainment companies usually live in fear of being sued for using a person’s likeness for promotional or paid creative work without their permission. This came to fruition for the NCAA in 2014 when Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, filed an antitrust class action lawsuit against the NCAA. The lawsuit came about when he discovered his likeness was being used in a video game long after he graduated, and long after his amateur status would have prevented him from profiting off of his image. The court ruled in favor of O’Bannon in 2014 and again in 2016 after the NCAA tried to appeal the ruling.
“I think it’s really as cut and dry as this: If you help make the money, you should be able to share in the profit,” O’Bannon said in a recent essay for The Player’s Tribune. “That’s the American way.”
An Education
One of the primary arguments against paying college athletes is that they already get paid by way of a “free education.” And, according to a 2017 Washington Post-UMass Lowell poll, 52 percent of adults—including 60 percent of white adults—think that’s enough. This idea is problematic for a few reasons.
For one, when most people get paid to do something, they’re allowed to spend that money as they wish. They can save it, spend it on food or clothes, or use it to go home for the holidays. When athletes get “paid” in an education, they don’t have the option to spend that “income” on anything else. In fact, a 2013 report found that, 86 percent of FBS full scholarship athletes live in poverty, putting them on or below par compared to most college students. And despite (rarely!) not having to pay for a bachelor’s degree, they end up spending about $3200 out of pocket annually. That’s not a lot of money for most adults, but when your “income” is nothing but an education, it’s everything.
So why don’t they just get a job? A ton of college students work their way through school, right?
In my experience, this was all but impossible. Division I rules require that athletes maintain a full class load while staying on track to graduate with a 2.0 GPA. Not only was I a double major, but I was also an art major: a single class could mean spending at least six hours in the studio per week, not including work outside of class. On my longest days, I would spend 9am to 9pm in class, track practice, and weight lifting. Then I would have to do homework or study.
Despite the economic recovery since the recession, even the best students have trouble finding entry-level jobs in their fields. The usual advice is to rack up internships while you’re in college, which is impossible for busy college athletes who, for all intents and purposes, already have jobs.
But my track schedule was nothing like football or basketball schedules. Unlike those athletes, we rarely traveled during the week, and our practices were relatively short compared to their endless drills, conditioning, play-running, and film-watching. And while the NCAA limits the number of hours athletes are allowed to train, coaches and athletes alike are willing to go above and beyond to achieve their goals.
Here’s another thought: a free education doesn’t always pay off right away. After all, the point of getting a quality education is to eventually get a well-paying job. But despite the economic recovery since the recession, even the best students have trouble finding entry-level jobs in their fields. The usual advice is to rack up internships while you’re in college. Which, like I previously illustrated, can be a problem for college athletes who for all intents and purposes already have jobs.
And finally, if you’ve heard anything about NCAA scandals in recent years, you’ve probably heard about fraudulent academic practices that allow otherwise low-performing students to maintain their athletic eligibility. Just last fall, the NCAA excused the University of North Carolina for such behavior. As Marc Tracy of The New York Times reported:
The scheme involved nearly 200 laxly administered and graded classes — frequently requiring no attendance and just one paper — over nearly two decades in the African and Afro-American Studies Department. Their students were disproportionately athletes, especially in the lucrative, high-profile sports of football and men’s basketball. They were mostly administered by a staff member named Deborah Crowder. In many cases, athletes were steered to the classes by athletics academic advisers.
The loophole the NCAA used to avoid punishing UNC was the fact that these classes were available to all students and not just student athletes. So, these athletes were be allowed to participate in their sports. The catch? Some of those students—among many others throughout the NCAA—were reported to be nearly illiterate. No degree can make up for that.
Brackets
Just a few months ago, when a former college football player sued the NCAA in order to obtain at least work-study wages for college athletes, the NCAA rebutted in part by citing Vanskike v. Peters. In 1992 a court ruled that Daniel Vanskike didn’t have the right to minimum-wage compensation because he was a prisoner. And that case cited the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865 but probably set the stage for the criminalization and mass incarceration of black people.
The reference is revealing. As Shaun King said in a piece for The Intercept:
It gets to the heart of what the multibillion-dollar enterprise that is the NCAA thinks not just of its athletes, but of its core business model. It is, in essence, admitting that student-athletes are working as slave laborers and, as such, do not deserve fair compensation.
What makes this reference even more insidious is the disproportionate amount of black athletes who participate in revenue-generating sports. In the 2016–17 school year, black athletes made up 53 and 44.2 percent of Division I men’s basketball and football players, respectively. And as black Americans, these athletes are also twice as likely to be poor than their white counterparts. Combined with the recent finding that black men are the most likely demographic to remain in poverty despite their parents’ success, it’s hard not to wonder if the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes is, as The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin puts it, “the organized theft of black wealth.”
Meanwhile, the vastly white and male college football and basketball coaches of are among the highest-paid — if not the highest-paid — public employees in every state. These guys are millionaires.
It’s hard to describe what it means to be an athlete. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s a lot like being in love. Your sport is the one thing that makes you feel whole, and it’s the one thing that can break you in half. You can see it in the way the athletes collide into each other with joy after a win; it’s even more evident when they crumple in defeat. These athletes’ lives — and then some — revolve around their sports, around their identities as athletes.
Knowing this makes the corruption of the NCAA all the more cruel. Under the gauzy guise of amateurism, fairness, and a non-profit status (seriously), the organization operates with cartoonish levels of callousness — and I haven’t even talked about the widespread cover-up of sexual abuse at Michigan State, or at Penn State before that. These athletes and their families often have everything to lose and almost nothing to gain, and the NCAA takes advantage of their passion and vulnerability.
So no matter how much sports gave to me—a scholarship, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, some of my very best friends—it’s impossible to ignore the structures that continue to harm these young athletes. And I certainly can’t in good faith profit off of their unpaid labor in the form of betting. Rather than bet on them, it’s past time we invest in them.
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