SCHOOLS, MONEY NOT SOON PARTED
Big Ten-SEC alliance reeks of move to forestall inevitable payment of players
The thing I love about statements from powerful groups facing dilemmas is the language they use to hide what they’re really after.
Whether it’s obfuscation or blather, it’s a learned craft that makes whatever they really want barely recognizable.
We got a nice example of it the other day when the Big Ten and SEC said they were joining ranks with an advisory council that would try to figure out the problem they have with modern college athletes and the games they play.
Here’s how Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti put it: ‘‘The Big Ten and the SEC have substantial investment in the NCAA, and there is no question that the voices of our two conferences are integral to governance and other reform efforts. We recognize the similarity in our circumstances, as well as the urgency to address the common challenges we face.’’
I’ll translate:
We are the two richest conferences in the United States. Gracious, we Big Ten folks hauled in $846 million in 2022, and those fine SEC people made $802 million, which — when you put it all together — is more than $1.6 billion for one year. That is serious coin. And we aim to hang on to it. We just need to tame these upstart athletes a bit.
Oh, and we don’t much need the NCAA, either. We’ve got Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia and 28 other teams to fill bowl games and tournaments and put on TV. What’s the NCAA got? Rule books and dudes with whistles?
You see, the real issue is the blizzard of lawsuits the NCAA and member schools are facing from young people’s demand to get paid for the work they do. Kind of basic stuff. And the players ultimately will win all the suits. It just takes time.
At Dartmouth, by God, the basketball players just earned the right to form a labor union. Whoa, baby.
The work the players are talking about consists of playing sports at the highest level and entertaining hundreds of millions of viewers for lots and lots of cash. Those player-entertainers have created partial mayhem by suddenly getting the legal right
to be paid for their names, images and likenesses, even though the member schools insist on calling them amateurs, believing they should do everything for free.
The operative term is ‘‘student-athlete,’’ which was made up by former NCAA chief Walter Byers for nefarious reasons. If the unpaid players would just shut up, go to class and get A’s like nice student-athletes, everything would be fine.
But they’re not, and everything is crazy now.
The NCAA, which is made up of its hundreds of member schools, hung on to its marvelous unpaid-labor model for as long as it could — more than 100 years, actually — and now the stuff has hit the fan.
Hence, the formation of the Big Ten-SEC alliance.
The members of the advisory council will be school presidents and athletic directors, the same gaggle that always works on ‘‘reforms.’’ One such example is the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, an egghead group for more than 30 years, which sends out periodic studies that tell us big-time college sports are ‘‘out of control’’ and ‘‘reform is not a destination but a neverending process.’’
You got forever? Not me. Meanwhile, the last thing the Big Ten and SEC want to do is declare their athletes employees and start paying them. But if they could break away from the NCAA, form their own superpower confederation — with, perhaps, two other conferences and Notre Dame — they would have so much money that maybe they could share a little with their workers.
And, of course, the conferences want to get a handle on the NILs the players already are using to become unregulated pros.
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said recently: ‘‘It’s hard to root for the kids when they’re multimillionaires as freshmen and sophomores.’’ That was amusing because earnings didn’t seem to bother Colorado fans who rooted wildly for quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who reportedly has an NIL deal worth
$4.8 million.
Nor did any Michigan fans revolt because quarterback J.J. McCarthy had a $1.4 million NIL deal, which he reportedly shared with his offensive linemen. Nope, a national championship was all Wolverines fans cared about.
In fact, then-Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh said that college players should get paid, that they need ‘‘to be sharing in this ever-increasing revenue.’’
Money, folks. When in doubt, follow it. The Big Ten and SEC are awash in it. And how they fight to hang on to it will be rougher and more exciting than most games anywhere.