Imagine going to work for an employer who:
■ Pays you a small fraction of what your skills are worth on the open market.
■ Refuses to let you negotiate for higher compensation.
■ Will not allow you to hire an agent who could negotiate for you.
■ Bars any form of union representation.
■ Does not provide health insurance except in restricted circumstances.
■ Can fire you if you get injured on the job.
■ Bars you from working for a competitor for a year after you leave.
■ Pays your boss millions of dollars a year.
Sound like a place where you’d like to work?
Me neither.
Welcome to the world of a major college football and basketball.
I first wrote about the inequities and injustices of major college football and basketball three years ago, noting that I was “tuning out” those sports until the NCAA undergoes major reforms.
I haven’t watched a minute of either of those big entertainment enterprises since then because I don’t want to contribute to TV ratings that keep the money flowing in support of the status quo.
In this I am somewhat like a recovering alcoholic. As a Mizzou alum, for many years I was a die-hard Tiger football and basketball fan. I even had season tickets back in the late 1990s when Larry Smith was the head football coach and Corby Jones was the quarterback.
In basketball, I was there with my son, Philip, in 2009 when Mizzou overcame a 30-14 halftime deficit in Columbia to beat Kansas 62-60 on Zaire Taylor’s jump shot with 1.3 seconds left.
The two big major college sports are unquestionably addictive, arousing passions to sometimes unhealthy levels.
What really tipped the scales for me on football was the Penn State-Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal in 2014. If you subscribe to Netflix, watch the documentary “Happy Valley” to see how big-time college programs can corrupt their fans, coaches, players and school administrators.
Thankfully, real change may be in the air, at last.
Right now the NCAA’s “student-athlete” model, a veritable brick wall protecting the legal structure of college athletics, faces a serious challenge in federal court. A class-action suit by a group of former male and female college athletes against the NCAA is on trial before U.S. Ninth District Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland.
The suit, informally known as the Alston-Hartman case after the two lead plaintiffs, former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston and former California center Justine Hartman, has a lot of complicated twists and turns, so let me simplify it for you.
The athletes argue that the NCAA’s scholarship limits on major-college football and basketball athletes suppress competition for their services and violate federal antitrust laws. In any other industry, an agreement among competing companies to arbitrarily limit employee pay, with no collective bargaining or individual right of negotiation, would quickly be exposed as an illegal restraint of trade.
Talk about suppression – a 2011 study by Philadelphia’s Drexel University Department of Sport Management found that the value of football scholarships at the top 10 revenue-producing schools (like Texas, Alabama and Michigan) were an average of $395,000 per year below a player’s fair market value. In basketball, the shortfall was much bigger: an average of $875,000 per year.
The athletes have recent precedent behind them. Former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon beat the NCAA in Judge Wilken’s court four years ago after suing for the right to negotiate for the monetary value of his name and image.
Also, the NCAA and the 11 major-college conferences settled out of court last year with a group of 40,000 ex-athletes who sued for additional money to cover the actual cost of their education. (They got $209 million, about $5,000 apiece.) That case drove the NCAA to allow stipends to cover athletes’ full costs.
This pending case is bigger. Alston-Hartman is legal D-Day for the big-money sports. The NCAA’s battalion of top-dollar lawyers argues in a court filing that paying athletes anything beyond the cost of their education will “inevitably reduce their incentives to achieve academically and participate in all other aspects of campus life and drive a wedge between them and other students.”
Yeah, right. It’s those pep rallies, 7 a.m. classes and ivy-covered halls that inspire the players – not the chance to perform in jam-packed stadiums on national TV and, oh, by the way, audition for the NFL and NBA.
The NCAA’s other line of argument goes like this: You love watching college football because the players are college students, “real” amateurs, not “paid to play.” Would it really matter to you Mizzou fans if quarterback (and Heisman Trophy candidate) Drew Lock earned $1 million or so above his scholarship and stipend?
“Oh, I can’t watch him play, he’s (gasp) a professional!”
Players earning reasonable pay can still be students and represent their schools. They can still graduate. (Some suggest putting the money in a “lockbox” until graduation – good idea.)
I’m not so cynical as to agree with former Ohio State quarterback Cardale Jones, who wrote on Twitter in 2012: “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”
The NCAA should follow the lead of the Olympic movement and dump the old amateur code, which dates back to the 19th century. Division I college football and basketball brought in about $9 billion last year. It’s time the players get more than crumbs from that very big loaf.