Suggested reforms won’t fix NCAA’s broken model
While panel’s ideas fine in theory, they’re far from a panacea
On Wednesday, the Commission on College Basketball presented its report and recommendations to address the issues facing college basketball. What they offered was 60 pages of half measures and fingerpointing.
The commission, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was formed last October ostensibly to swoop in and save the sport from rampant corruption and a widespread black market where shadowy shoe company executives and agents and coaches at various levels use teen-aged athletes to further their own interests.
Their principal findings supported allowing high school players to jump directly to the NBA; allowing those who go undrafted the option of returning to college; devising a new way for certified agents to engage with athletes at an “appropriate” point; convincing the NCAA to commit to paying for the degree completion of scholarship athletes who leave member institutions after at least two years; “mitigating nonscholastic basketball’s sometimes harmful influence on college basketball;” and more stringent penalties for individuals and programs found in violation of NCAA rules.
Flawed from the get-go
Some of those ideas are fine in theory, but even if implemented all at once they aren’t a panacea. Adopting the proposed solutions would be like dressing a nicked artery with a handful of bandages and hoping for the best.
The committee’s first recommendation, allowing high school players to leap to the NBA, won’t stop those with a vested interest from trying to steer players to certain schools.
In 2015, Texas signed a 15year licensing and apparel agreement with Nike worth $250 million. Kansas and Adidas are nearing completion of a 12-year, $191 million pact. UCLA agreed to a 15-year, $280 million sponsorship deal in 2016.
Ten or 20 of the nation’s high school prospects declaring for the NBA draft each year won’t prevent companies from caring about the remaining players. They want their product to be seen on the best players at each level, simple as that.
The most obvious solution to fixing this mess is noticeably absent from the report.
The terms “amateurism” and “collegiate model” appear a combined 15 times, but there’s no talk of actually overhauling, or even erasing, the system as we know it. In an interview with Yahoo Sports, Rice said the “collegiate model is worth defending.” Worth it for whom? Why continue defending a castle when it has been breached and broken? Those sitting safely in the fortified confines — university presidents, athletic directors, coaches — don’t seem to mind that the rest of the compound has been overrun. They’re either too blind or too stubborn to see it’s beyond saving.
Sadly, that’s not exactly surprising.
College basketball’s ills date back to 1906, when over 60 schools came together to as charter members of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. The IAAUS, which became the NCAA in 1910, has clung to the concept of amateurism ever since, using it as a life raft whenever the “sharks” — those who believe the current model is outdated and antithetical to our nation’s capitalist values — start circling again.
The NCAA is hellbent on deceiving the public into believing the collegiate model — which, again, it created —is sacrosanct and as inalienable as the First Amendment. That’s just not true.
Paying lip service
NCAA president Mark Emmert has consistently said the “Olympic model,” which allows athletes to earn monetary compensation from commercial opportunities, is worth consideration. And he has consistently made those remarks sound like lip service to those who believe college athletes should be allowed to retain ownership over and profit from their own name and likeness.
He’s always waiting to strike with some peculiar, meandering explanation as to why moving to such a model is nearly impossible.
“First of all, Olympic athletes for the U.S. Olympic team has consisted mostly of professional athletes,” Emmert told the San Antonio Express-News during a March interview. “They’ve finished their collegiate career, they’ve become professionals, they’ve made that transition.
“And then second, unlike the collegiate model, the Olympic model isn’t based upon recruitment. The Russians aren’t over here recruiting our swimmers or the Germans trying to get our equestrians. The model works very, very differently.”
It’s not that the NCAA fears looking in the mirror. It already has and, clearly, it doesn’t mind the malformed figure staring back.