Politicians should worry about college kids’ health, not wealth
It sounds great.
What free-enterprise-loving American wouldn’t want to be paid for seeing his or her likeness or name on anything from video games to highlight tapes to T-shirts to jerseys to posters or anything else that comes with a sales tag?
And every college athlete who attends a California-based school of higher education may soon reap the rewards of that scenario if the Golden State’s general assembly passes Senate Bill 206, also known as the Fair Pay to Play Act.
Quite naturally, NCAA president Mark Emmert is actively lobbying the committees pushing the bill to postpone it, since college athletics’ governing body long has been opposed to any payment of student-athletes beyond tuition, room, board and the normal perks that come with eating at a training table, state-of-the-art medical treatment, being tutored, traveling all over the country and acquiring all matter of clothes, shoes and such that are supposedly necessary to winning.
And, yes, that’s a lot nicer than the average Joe or Josephine working two jobs to avoid a six-figure student-loan debt has it. But then some of these athletes do generate millions of dollars for their schools if playing football and men’s basketball.
As for the rest of those athletes in non-revenue-producing sports, well, we don’t really want to talk about that, though it is interesting that all those liberal souls who don’t mind pushing socialism on so many of us in the real world somehow seem to have a problem with men’s basketball and football players sharing their largesse with all those athletes who might not be able to be college athletes without revenue sharing.
Still, there is a difference where marketing and retailing is concerned. While it’s true that Zion Williamson probably couldn’t have led Duke to the Elite Eight in basketball last season without at least a little help from his friends, it was Williamson who drove television ratings
for the whole sport. It was Williamson who surely could have made himself seven or eight figures worth of George Washingtons if he’d been allowed to profit on everything from No. 1 Duke jerseys to video games.
And, no, this is not the same as the NCAA schools paying these players a salary. After all, the real cost of attending Duke this past year was over $72,000, and that’s well south of what attending Duke as Williamson did, flying all over the country — including Hawaii — on chartered flights, staying at the best hotels and eating the best food was worth.
So when Emmert writes, as he did to the California General Assembly — “When contrasted with current NCAA rules, as drafted the bill threatens to alter materially the principles of intercollegiate athletics and create local differences that would make it impossible to host fair national championships” — he has a point, even if the Fair Pay to Play Act does as well.
Moreover, because the government would seem to have better things to do than grandstand on this subject, the NCAA might tell California that you can do anything you want for your athletes as long as you understand that if it’s in excess of what athletes can receive in the other 49 states, your schools will be ineligible for all postseason competition.
But lost in all this frustration over a handful of athlete-students possibly receiving marketing royalties was a far more disturbing story that athletic trainers increasingly fear coaches going over their heads on medical issues in order to get college athletes back on the field or court before they’re completely healthy.
According to the National Athletic Trainers Association, 19 percent of college trainers reported that a coach they worked with played an athlete the trainer had ruled “medically out of participation.”
That statistic comes nearly three years after the NCAA passed legislation to prohibit coaches and athletic directors from meddling in play-or-sit decisions made by team doctors and trainers.
Of course, as an ESPN. com article pointed out Tuesday, when Maryland football player Jordan McNair died of heatstroke after participating in an over-the-top workout in June of 2018 and Garden City (Kansas) Community College football player Braeden Bradforth suffered the same fate two months later, you wonder how much any coach anywhere follows such protocol.
The same ESPN article detailed how two former Oregon football players are suing their school after they and a teammate were hospitalized following a workout and diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, which is a breakdown of muscle fibers that can lead to kidney damage. The University of Houston is looking into a similar situation involving its women’s soccer program.
The NATA report further said that 36 percent of trainers reported a coach successfully influencing the hiring and firing of sports medicine staff and 58 percent of those trainers also reported a coach or administrator pressuring them to make a decision that wasn’t in the best interest of the student-athlete.
“To think that we’re in 2019 and that would still happen is really concerning,” NATA president Tory Lindley said. “It should be concerning for everyone involved in that institution. It should certainly be concerning to the parents, and certainly concerning to the athlete.”
It’s concerning enough that if politicians such as those in the California General Assembly insist on weighing in on college athletics, they might at least focus on issues of health for all rather than matters of wealth for a few.