Mar. 11-Mar. 17: The Madness of the NCAA
March Madness 2018: College Basketball with an added side of corruption.
Welcome to the Zeitgeist Chronicle. Every weekend we catch you up on the past week’s most noteworthy current events. Sometimes it’ll be what everybody’s talking about, other times it may be something we’d like to bring attention to. Our goal is keep you informed enough to be able to have a conversation about any of these current events. This week:
March is here, and with it: College Basketball, bracket-busting, and general madness. This time around, however, there’s something else: corruption.
Over the past few years, there has been no shortage of NCAA scandals (many of which Rick Patino were involved in), and while most of them can be classified under various degrees of shadiness, the sum that you get when you add up all those scandals is that there is something wrong with the institution that is the NCAA.
At the core of almost every single one of those scandals is the recruitment of student-athletes, or money, and, more often than not, both. This is, of course, because the NCAA does not pay its student-athletes. If that doesn’t sound crazy to you, then consider this: not only does the NCAA not pay its student-athletes, the NCAA does not allow student-athletes to get paid by other means that athletes usually can: endorsements, shoe companies, etc..
The NCAA’s stance is that NCAA athletes are, technically, not employees. They also argue that student-athletes are being paid, through athletic scholarships. The NCAA says that for their efforts, they’re being paid with an education. Except the NCAA makes a ton of money off of their backs.
The NCAA uses student athletes to market the NCAA, their schools, and March Madness, then cash in with the billion dollar TV deal they negotiate as a result, and make money off of apparel and ticket sales on top of that. Meanwhile, the student-athletes can’t even make money off of their own name. Think about that for a second. It’s maddening. But that’s the NCAA. March Madness is a spectacle – it’s the glitter that hides the rot.
What will it take to pay student-athletes? Critics of that sentiment point out various complications to that and why it’s not as easy as it sounds, but at the end of the day, it comes down to a lack of desire to do so, and it’s safe to assume that there is no desire to do so because that would mean less money for the NCAA, and that’s just not something businesses of any sort would volunteer if they didn’t have to.
