Negotiating the chaos
I’m agnostic about the hiring of John Calipari as the next University of Arkansas men’s basketball coach. I hope it works out. Calipari seems as capable as anyone—other than Dan Hurley—of negotiating the chaos that is currently men’s college basketball. Calipari can recruit. He can promise. He can close a deal.
Whether he’s a great tactician is a moot point. He can amass talent and set a rotation.
There are something like 1,500 men’s college basketball players “in the portal,” meaning they have filed for free agency and are entertaining offers from schools who might want to employ them on their teams next year. Those who can will mostly sign with the highest bidder.
And after next season, all college basketball players will re-evaluate their positions. Should they declare for the NBA draft or look to other professional options? Could they go to some other school that offers them a better Name, Image and Likeness deal? Maybe they should go where they are promised more playing time, or where they will be used in a way that will improve their chances to be drafted by a professional club, or where they have developed a personal relationship with a coach.
What we have here is unrestrained free agency. It’s the result of universities and the NCAA abdicating responsibility by refusing to accept student-athletes as genuine employees with contracts and structured benefit packages and allowing free market forces in the form of program boosters to take the charge of the process.
They’ve handed the reins over to wealthy zealots whose passion for their teams rationalizes the spending of millions of dollars. Does anyone think this is sustainable?
Let’s see if we can agree on a few things:
In a capitalistic society, money is considered an unalloyed benefit. Other people may think you have too much money, but their arguments are never completely convincing.
While most of us care about other things as well, what we care most about in terms of making a living is how much money we can bring home.
Fair compensation is something we can argue about; something that can be (and generally is) negotiated. At its core, the employer-employee relationship ought to be a symbiotic bond where each party feels it benefits from the association.
There are many factors a potential employer might consider beyond the numbers on a paycheck; workplace dynamics and interpersonal relationships and intangible advantages might accrue. There are reasons a worker might decide to sign on with a particular employer, and reasons an employer might decide not to hire a particular worker.
The relationship between an athlete who generates revenue for an “institution of higher learning” is more like an employee than a client of the university. Though that athlete might also be a student—serious or otherwise—doesn’t alter the point that people who work for other people deserve fair compensation.
Some would argue that it’s a privilege to play a revenue-generating sport at an institution of higher learning; that being a gifted athlete is different from being a gifted chemist or musician or entrepreneurial whiz kid.
This is not because you genuinely believe there’s something different about athletic talent as opposed to other kinds of talent, but because you understand that college sports are a mess—very different than 10 or 50 years ago. While there are reflexive contrarians out there, most of us who care about college sports perceive that the modern product is not as enjoyable as it was before we emancipated college athletes.
I miss the Big East of the ’80s and the ACC of the ’70s, when coaches like John Thompson and Rollie Massimino and Dean Smith and Lefty Driesel prowled the sidelines, when Michael Jordan and Chris Mullin played four whole seasons of varsity basketball. But I understand it is not fair to deprive individuals of the chance to be fairly compensated for their talents.
Yet if we fairly compensate them for their talents, if we professionalize college sports, we disrupt the enjoyable illusions that college sports are somehow a less vulgar, more honorable pursuit than professional sports, and that our athletes are playing for a higher purpose than self-advancement.
Because we believe we would in theory be willing to play these games strictly for the glory and thrill of competition, our young surrogates ought to do just that. We liked our games better when we could imagine that they were more than revenue-generating television programs.
A lot of us see college sports as having an intractable problem caused by irreconcilable moral differences.
In mathematics, an intractable problem is not a problem without a solution, but a problem for which there exists no efficient algorithm to solve it. The way to solve most intractable problems is by applying the same algorithm: a brute-force search. Or, as we lay folk are likely to call it, trial and error.
The thing about trial and error is that if a solution exists, it generally finds that solution. But it’s not efficient, and unless something lucky happens, it usually involves pain. What I imagine will happen is that, over the next couple of decades, men’s college basketball (football is another matter) will settle into a different kind of space. It will be a sequel to high school basketball, with the best players either going straight to the NBA or other professional developmental leagues or to vocational-technical minor leagues.
The players who stay and play for college teams will be of a different caliber; slower to develop or not as highly skilled. More of them will play basketball as avocation, for the reasons we imagine student-athletes played the game. There will be less motivation to switch schools, and there will be a lot less money.
The men’s game will more closely resemble what the women’s game is now.
The quality will suffer, but tactical coaches will regain their lost importance, and teams will stay together for three and four years. In the end, some of us will develop a taste for this slower, less athletic game, which—sometimes—might even be shown on television.