Rose: NCAA system like ‘indentured servitude’
Jalen Rose has been down this road before.
Stories about college basketball players receiving illicit payments surface. The NCAA cries foul, not to mention the FBI. All along the way, as the discipline is doled out and the scandalous headlines keep coming, the white-hot spotlight never seems to be aimed at the real culprit.
The broken basketball system. The FBI’s latest probe into college basketball is front and center again after Yahoo Sports reported last week that a list of players (and some relatives) were paid by the now-defunct ASM Sports agency and thus violated the rules of the NCAA — an organization that had nearly a billion dollars in revenue in 2016 yet doesn’t share any of its profits with its players. That sound you hear is Rose, famed member of the Michigan Fab Five team that faced a similar scandal in the mid-1990s, laughing at the hypocrisy.
“I’ve talked about this topic for 25 years, and the thing that I truly appreciate is seeing so many people come full circle on this topic — even my colleagues today,” Rose, who serves as an ESPN analyst, told USA TODAY. “There were so many people who were on television, on media, who had the attitude in the early ’90s, ‘Just shut up and be happy that you’re getting a scholarship. I wish somebody was paying for my education. Who are you to ask for more?’ But that’s not what being American is truly all about, and for me the collegiate system has always represented what I call ‘indentured servitude.’ The colleges and universities and coaches, they’ve all been bought and sold, and now it’s time for the players to actually participate in this revenue stream.”
Few have been as close to this topic as Rose has throughout his career.
While he was cleared by the FBI after its six-year investigation into Michigan booster Ed Martin and his payment of players, four Wolverines (most notably Chris Webber) were found to have received more than $600,000 combined from Martin. The sanctions that followed stained the Michigan program but changed nothing of the question that remains today: Why aren’t the players who are driving these profits paid?
“It really just becomes a mockery when you hear that the players who are participating can’t profit off of their likeness, can’t get a summer job, can’t go to the pros right after high school (an NBA rule), all of these barriers,” Rose said. (NCAA athletes are allowed to get jobs, but whether they have time to, in combination with school and practice, is another matter.)
“An organization like the NCAA can still be classified as a 501-C3 (non-profit organization tax classification)? That in itself allows me to understand that there definitely needs to be change — swift, fast and in a hurry.”
Rose says it’s made worse by a racial component.
“So we live in a country that has profited for hundreds of years off the labor of individuals without having to pay for it,” Rose said. “So now you come full circle. Which sports are we having this conversation (about amateurs being paid) in? In football and in basketball, predominantly black sports. We’re not having this conversation about soccer players, tennis players, about golfers (who can play professionally at younger ages). No one is in an uproar about what they’re doing as amateurs. It only takes place in those two sports because that labor is now something that people are profiting on and they want to make sure they profit on it as long as possible.
“Those are the only two sports to have restrictions after high school. They’re the only two sports that have salary caps, the only two sports that we constantly talk about whether somebody is over or underpaid. And based on those dynamics, I think as a society we’ve become desensitized to really that’s the undercurrent of what’s taking place. And until we truly get to that issue and address it for exactly what it is (then it won’t change).”