College athletes deserve a little extra

Two decades ago, the University of Connecticut’s greatest athletic triumph could have been undone by some random guy in Hartford and his SUV.

In 1999, the men’s basketball team, cheered on by virtually the entire sports world outside a small slice of Durham, N.C., won its first national championship by defeating vaunted Duke. After a decade a nearmisses, UConn’s best team played its most complete game at exactly the right moment, prompting its rotund point guard to scream at the television cameras, “We shocked the world!”

Within a year, two incidents, both involving that same point guard, brought everyone back to reality. One involved an arrest in Hartford on drug charges; the other found him driving a car that wasn’t his. Only one was against the law, but it wasn’t a legal issue that threatened to cause lasting harm.

Khalid ElAmin was arrested in Hartford a few months after the championship on marijuana possession charges, a notunheardof experience for a college student. Then, at the start of the next season, a reporter (the multitalented former Hearst Connecticut Media journalist Brian Koonz) spotted him getting into a car that looked a lot fancier than something a college student on scholarship with workingclass parents could afford. That set in motion what could have been an existential crisis for UConn basketball.

College athletes are prohibited from receiving most anything in compensation for their labor beyond a scholarship. Anything that the NCAA, which governs college athletics, deems an impermissible benefit can render a player ineligible, and the punishment is retroactive. If a team used an ineligible player in the past, any wins involving that player are wiped off the record books.

This has happened many times. In 1996, the University of Massachusetts made the school’s first and only Final Four appearance, at least according to millions of people who watched it on TV. According to the NCAA, though, it never happened. UMass featured an ineligible player, so all those wins were vacated. UConn, too, has had wins removed over NCAA violations.

As it turned out, the man whose car ElAmin was driving turned out to be just some guy who let him borrow his car, and thus there was no violation. Had he been, say, a team booster, or the owner of a dealership who loaned out cars for highprofile players to drive, the ride might have been an impermissible benefit and maybe the end of his college career.

This kind of thing happens in the context of a system where everyone else involved — coaches, administrators, TV executives, advertisers — reaps millions of dollars based on the players’ exploits, while the players themselves are shut out. In the name of amateurism, a player can lose his future livelihood if someone buys him a meal even as others around him cash in.

Despite the inherent injustice, the push for meaningful change has been slow to arrive. Outright paying players remains anathema to many people, and questions of how to divide up the TV money among dozens of sports and hundreds of players remain unanswered.

But the calcified system is finally showing some cracks, and California’s governor recently signed a law that allows for some middle ground. It wouldn’t allow for direct payment of players, but it would allow them to cash in on their likenesses. They could be paid to star in a commercial, promote a local business or sell some jerseys. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that at least starts the process of fairly compensating people for a service they provide.

The NCAA’s response has been to predict Armageddon, and the end of college sports as we know it. There’s no reason to believe that would happen, and California, with a disproportionate share of people and colleges, is a big enough player that any action taken there must be respected elsewhere. The NCAA can’t just wish this away.

The next step is obvious. Connecticut, as one of the great college basketball centers of America, needs to follow suit. Let the players earn a little extra for what they do. As nearly everyone acknowledges, there are payments and favors happening behind closed doors around the country already — let it happen in the open and remove the threat of an arbitrary violation that doesn’t offend anyone other than the rulesmakers.

The system needs to be fair and understandable to all. Given that, what do we care whose car the point guard is driving?