March Madness reflects black and white disparity in the U.S.
Whichever teams find their names on March Madness men’s basketball brackets, two things are certain: The overwhelming majority of the players will be black, and most of the handsomely compensated head coaches will be white.
The NCAA says the March championship season, a mere three weeks each year, accounts for most of its annual revenue — more than US$821 million.
But does that money disproportionately benefit the white men running the show at the expense of the mostly black athletes performing in it?
A new report on racial inequities in NCAA Division I sports takes a closer look.
The report, by the research centre that I direct at the University of Southern California, furnishes statistics from the conferences that have come to be known as the Power Five: the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC.
Black men are only 2.4 per cent of undergraduates in the general student body on these 65 campuses, yet they make up 56 per cent of basketball teams.
During some games in the NCAA men’s tournament, 100 per cent of players on the courts will be black. Despite their overrepresentation among players, black men are barely present in highly compensated courtside roles and in leadership positions across the Power Five conferences. NCAA data show that at these universities 79 per cent of head basketball coaches and 71 per cent of athletic directors are white men. All five conference commissioners are white men.
The NCAA and its overwhelmingly white executives, conference commissioners and head coaches at member institutions benefit enormously from profits generated during the three-week tournament. U.S. federal tax returns the NCAA filed in 2016 show that the organization’s president, Mark Emmert, a white man, earned nearly US$1.9 million in total compensation.
My centre’s report shows that Power Five basketball head coaches earn an average of US$2.7 million annually.
Also, on average, athletic directors earn more than US$700,000, and the five conference commissioners earn salaries that exceed US$2.5 million.
It could be argued that it is black male student athletes on basketball and football teams, the NCAA’s two revenue-generating sports, who largely earn these white men’s lucrative salaries. A common counterargument is that scholarship athletes benefit from simply being afforded the opportunity to enrol in college. I contend in the report that going to a university, labouring and generating millions for the institution — but ultimately failing to earn a degree — disadvantages student-athletes, a disproportionately high share of whom are black men.
Over the past four years,
55 per cent of black male student-athletes graduated within six years, a rate that is lower than student athletes overall, black undergraduate men overall, and undergraduate students overall.
Coaches who sustain losing seasons year after year are almost surely guaranteed to lose their multimillion-dollar jobs.
But there are no consequences for coaches who win games while continually failing to graduate black male players at equitable rates. Former U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan suggested as far back as 2010 that invitations to participate in championship seasons like March Madness be withheld from universities that sustain these inequities.
That would certainly be one incentive to graduate black male players at higher rates.