College stars fight amateur madness
The biggest sporting event currently taking place in the United States is a basketball tournament called “March Madness”. The term was first coined in 1939 by a high school official in relation to the excitement generated by the eight-team competition composed of colleges. Over the past 80-plus years, it has grown to a 68-team tournament lasting over several weeks. The excitement has kept pace.
In 2019, the competition generated roughly $1 billion (£726 million) for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the organising body, while $8.5 billion is wagered on the results. But the real mad part, the totally crazy part, the insane part, is that the athletes, who generate all these billions, do not receive a single dollar for their efforts.
In fact, they are banned from receiving any “extra benefit or expense allowance not authorised by the NCAA legislation” which could extend to having a meal off campus or accepting sports clothing from a potential sponsor.
This is not just basketball, but all American college sports. College football, which is played in some of the biggest stadiums in the world, pulls in around $1.5billion a year in television rights plus millions more in other forms of revenues. Again the athletes get paid nothing.
As former NBA player Chris Paul wrote recently: “Can you imagine what it’s like to generate millions in revenue for your school – without being able to buy a hot meal off campus? Can you imagine what it’s like to be a few months from being able to take care of your family – but knowing that if you twist your leg at the wrong angle, you could lose it all?”
All this could be about to change, however. Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States began hearing a case brought by Shawne Alston, a former college football player for West Virginia University, which charges the NCAA with breaking antitrust regulations. Effectively the colleges reap millions of dollars a year by colluding not to pay their athletes. The lower courts have already ruled in Alston’s favour.
The NCAA’S traditional argument is that the athletes are receiving a free education through scholarship schemes. However, the education takes a back seat to the student’s athletic pursuits. It is estimated athletes will spend 40 hours a week training, equivalent to a full-time job. Unsurprisingly, the graduation rates for student athletes are far lower than for the general student population.
Of course, the student athletes can go on to make millions in the NBA or NFL, but it is believed only four per cent of students will be drafted. They then must survive their mandatory rookie contract before their big payday. A severe injury could easily snatch away that dream. Meanwhile, coaches within college sports are paid millions.
The optics are not great. The basketball and football college athletes, who perform the labour, are predominantly black. Those who run the college programmes, who profit from those labours, are overwhelmingly white. At best, it is hard not to see this as a form of indentured servitude.
In this year’s “March Madness”, athletes have taken to promoting the hashtag Notncaa property. As Geo Baker of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights wrote: “We deserve an opportunity to create money from our name, image, and likeness. If you don’t agree with that, then you are saying that you believe that I, a human being, should be owned by something else.”
The NCAA continues to dig its heels in. Its fallback argument is that if you started paying athletes then it would blur the distinction between college and professional sports, which would lead to a mass decline in viewership. This seems tenuous at best.
Nor are the NCAA colleges particularly benevolent, far-sighted institutions. Just before “March Madness”, Oregon Ducks player Sedona Prince posted a video, which has been viewed 18 million times, of the difference between the women’s weights room, consisting of 12 dumbbells, and the men’s weights room, which was full of state-of-the-art equipment.
Indeed, the very adoption of amateurism as a founding principle of NCAA was born of a historical wrong. In 1955 Ray Dennison died of an injury sustained playing American football for Fort Lewis A&M Aggies. When his widow sued for workers’ compensation, the NCAA successfully argued that, as he was a student-athlete rather than a worker, compensation should not be paid. Subsequently, explicit pledges of amateurism were written into every college sporting contract.
It is high time the Supreme Court righted the wrong of this glaring injustice.
‘Can you imagine generating millions for your school – without being able to buy a hot meal off campus?’