Pay attention to what’s behind the NCAA curtain
There has always been a certain amount of cognitive dissonance required to be a fan of college sports.
We love the pageantry, and the emotional ties that bond us to our favorite school’s teams, whether it’s our alma mater or just the team we adopted early on because of the colors, the fight song, the mascot. And as the games go on, we either ignore or stow away the imbalanced relationship between the administrators and coaches on one hand, who reap the rewards of the gate receipts and TV contracts and donors’ largesse, and the athletes who not only play for free but are barred from potential financial opportunities available to students who do not play.
It’s a dichotomy we often return to at NCAA Tournament time. It’s just never been as nakedly obvious as it has been during a pandemic.
Teams played while campuses were closed, in some cases (such as Stanford) relocating to neighboring counties because of stay-at-home orders in their own. Games were canceled, multiple times in some cases, and schedules were rejiggered on the fly. The reason: To get to the end of the season, conduct the tournament and reap the TV money that the NCAA and its member schools missed out on a year ago when it was canceled.
Yes, the pros chased the cash, too. But their players at least share in the wealth, and thus the financial motivation to play.
Meanwhile, college athletes are no longer silent about it. Maybe we need to listen.
This dates back to last summer when the ACC, SEC and Big 12 plowed ahead with their football seasons and the Big Ten and Pac-12 ultimately followed suit after originally saying they wouldn’t. And it has come at the very same time that the NCAA is trying to slow-walk the movement to allow college athletes to at least profit off of their names, images and likenesses, in response to bills passed or at least considered in any number of state legislatures beginning with California’s
2019 Fair Pay To Play Act.
The NCAA wants “guardrails,” as college administrators, conference commissioners and members of the Association’s leadership keep saying in reciting the approved talking points. It says any revision of the rules should follow “the collegiate model.” Its lawyers, in arguments before the Supreme Court last month in Alston v.
NCAA, a case challenging the NCAA’s restrictions on compensation, maintain people follow college sports specifically because the players are amateurs (i.e., unpaid). Their stance is that the current system “widens choices for consumers by distinguishing college sports from professional sports.”
That is so much eyewash. And have we mentioned that the NCAA is hoping to get an antitrust exemption from Congress in addition to watered-down legislation?
I’ve long advocated that the rules change to allow outside benefactors — boosters, agents, local businesses, host families, etc. — to take care of athletes, be it a car, a meal, a room, a few bucks or whatever, while not burdening the schools and athletic departments themselves with the added payroll. I’ve called it the Sam Gilbert Rule, in honor of the late UCLA booster who ignored NCAA rules because he considered them “arcane and silly,” as he was quoted in a 2010 L.A. Times story.
They were then, and are now, arcane and silly. And in an era where non-athlete students can make money as social media influencers in addition to leveraging their talents in other ways, those rules are also outdated, exploitative and unrealistic. Allowing NIL compensation at least makes things a little less uneven.
A number of college athletes, building on the rumblings of last summer, are using the #NotNCAAProperty hashtag during this year’s tournament. A group of men’s players requested a Zoom meeting with NCAA president Mark Emmert this week, as noted by National Collegiate Players Association executive director Ramogi Huma. The president’s response, essentially: Sorry, can’t find the time, maybe we’ll talk after the tournament (not coincidentally, when the public isn’t paying as much attention).
The players’ go-to quote: “Can you please explain what you will be doing over the next two weeks that is more important than addressing these matters?”
I’ve felt for a long time that there would come a point when players would at least consider a strike at the Final Four. That point may be closer than we think.
And given recent developments, maybe the women’s players will be the ones to take that stand, following the activist lead of their WNBA counterparts and given the way the NCAA has disrespected them so blatantly. The discrepancy in facilities and in treatment between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments became public last week thanks in large part to Stanford sports performance coach Ali Kerschner and Oregon player Sedona Prince via social media, displaying the differences between the men’s weight training setup in Indianapolis and what the women were provided in San Antonio.
As we subsequently learned, the disparity didn’t stop there. The women — who, may we add, are not allowed to use the March Madness™ label — also received the short end of the stick in a number of other areas, including COVID-19 testing. It reached the point where coaches who normally would not criticize the NCAA spoke out forcefully, with South Carolina’s Dawn Staley summing it up: “We cannot as leaders of young women allow Mark Emmert and his team to use us and our student-athletes at their convenience.”
Yes, chastened NCAA officials promised to do better after they were called out. Maybe they should have thought of that during the original planning.
But there’s an overriding tone-deafness throughout the organization. It dates back to the invention of the term “student-athlete,” coined by then-NCAA executive director Walter Byers in the 1950s to essentially avoid a workers compensation claim. If you’ve ever wondered why I never use the term aside from a direct quote (see above), that’s why. Years later Byers disavowed the term but by then it had become entrenched in the Association’s language, a form of message control that administrators, coaches and athletes follow to this day.
The NCAA will not change on its own. As you watch the games, it’s good to keep that in mind.