Compensate athletes who bring bucks to campuses
In no particular order, the most evergreen of sports topics for fans to debate are: whether all-time hits leader Pete Rose should be allowed into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame despite his banishment from the game for gambling; whether Michael Jordan or Lebron James is the greatest basketball player ever (the Editorial Board is fiercely split on this); and whether college athletes should be paid. Of the three, only the paying of college athletes can be decided by Congress. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker is trying to make that happen. Last week, the New Jersey Democrat introduced an ambitious 61-page College Athletes Bill of Rights.
The legislation covers a variety of issues, including lifetime scholarships, long-term health care, concussion protocol and how sexual assault cases should be investigated. But what will generate the most heated discussion is language for athletes to not only be paid licensing fees for use of their images, but that those playing in revenue-producing sports, such as football and men’s and women’s basketball, share in the profits.
The knee-jerk reaction is that these are studentathletes who are receiving a free college education. The self-serving term “student-athlete” was invented by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, not out of concern for college athletes but to protect the coffers of colleges, which could avoid having to pay workers’ compensation to athletes. Specifically, in 1955, a college football player named Ray Dennison, playing for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies in Colorado, died from a head injury. His widow filed for workers’ compensation death benefits. The strategy the NCAA devised was to instruct its schools to call players “student-athletes,” a vague term but one that allowed schools to maintain the athletes weren’t employees entitled to benefits. “The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous,” wrote Taylor Branch in the Atlantic in 2011. “College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were highperformance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’S signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.”
In 1957, the Colorado Supreme Court sided with the NCAA, saying Dennison’s widow wasn’t entitled to benefits because Fort Lewis A&M “was not in the football business.”
Oh, but colleges are in “the football business,” and for many, business is booming. Take another school of Aggies, Texas A&M University, which generated $147 million in revenue in 2019 and pays its head coach an annual salary of about $7.5 million. A program with that kind of revenue can share some of its profits with the players generating them.
A study of more than 100 college football programs supports paying athletes.
“It is under this regime that college sports have been developed from games played by boys for pleasure into systematic professionalized athletic contests for the glory and, too often, for the financial profit of the college,” reads the report on American College Athletics by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “Commercialism has made possible the erection of fine academic buildings and the increase of equipment from the profits of college athletics, but those profits have been gained because colleges have permitted the youths entrusted to their care to be openly exploited.”
This report was released in 1929.
Let these young athletes share the wealth they are, and have been, creating.