Stop NCAA bullying; allow athletes to sign endorsement deals
One of the great injustices in the world of sports is the NCAA’S long-standing refusal to pay the college athletes who generate more than $1 billion a year.
It’s a wonder that university officials can sleep at night knowing that 86% of college athletes live below the poverty line.
The refusal to hand out paychecks is just the beginning of the inequity.
In order to retain their NCAA eligibility, athletes are also prohibited from profiting off of their name, image or likeness. It’s not as if athletes will get their just rewards by turning pro. Fewer than 2% of college athletes go on to play professional sports. There ought to be a law. Enter state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-berkeley, whose SB 206 would require California’s public and private colleges and universities to permit athletes signing endorsement deals.
“Imagine if in any other billion-dollar industry, like TV and movies, college students were the primary source of the talent that generated the revenue for that business and those college students were completely denied compensation,” Skinner told the Los Angles Times last week. “There would be a universal outcry. And yet we say it’s OK for athletes.”
The bill was passed by the Senate in May and on Tuesday was approved by the Assembly Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media Committee.
The NCAA, which has a long-standing reputation for bullying member institutions and their athletes, made its opposition clear last week. It threatened to make California colleges and universities ineligible to compete for NCAA championships if Skinner’s bill is signed into law.
NCAA President Mark Emmert wrote a letter to the Legislature saying that “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. As a result, it likely would have a negative impact on the exact student-athletes it intends to assist.”
Hogwash. Emmert’s implication is that some schools would gain unfair advantages if their athletes were able to obtain more lucrative deals than elsewhere.
That may be true. But if the NCAA really cared about competitive balance, it would do something about the huge inequities between, say, football powerhouses, like Alabama and Clemson, and mid-major programs across the nation.
And it wouldn’t have a different set of compensation rules for college athletes who happen to compete in the Olympics.
The NCAA in 2001 started allowing college athletes to receive money from the United States Olympics Committee for training and winning medals. Stanford swimming star Katie Ledecky earned $355,000 in medal bonuses from her Rio Olympics performance while remaining eligible to compete for Stanford.
Despite the NCAA’S threats, Skinner says she plans to move “full speed ahead” with her legislation.
The Assembly should pass SB 206, and Gov. Gavin Newsom should sign it into law. This is a matter of basic fairness that has been ignored for too long.