A Just Wage
The NCAA's financial disparities are obscene
By Lukas McKnight
Lukas is the director of baseball for Vizual Edge, an industry leader in sports vision evaluation and vision training. Before making a jump to the sports tech space, he worked for the Chicago Cubs for the past 20 seasons as a minor league catcher, scout, crosschecker and front office exec. He writes about baseball and prospects at Peloteros International as well as a freelancer/podcast guest on numerous baseball websites and blogs. In his spare time, he coaches 12u baseball, plays pickleball, and works IT for the writers at The Jesus Creed and Tov Unleashed.
NCAA sports are big business. Bigger than most of us may know. My sources tell me Mike Krzyzewski makes some $7 million per year in salary with some $3 more million in bonuses. How much do his players add to their pocketbooks? Without disputing the value of a college education at Duke University with its network of successful people, the pleasure of celebrity and fame, and the 24-7 attentiveness of tutors, trainers, and sustainers, the players will walk away from the university with nothing in their bank accounts.
The question: Is the NCAA system just?
(Another question for another day: Should educational institutions even have sports teams that have nothing to do with education? Truth be told: my father and I both benefited from athletic scholarships to fund our way through college. I bet you had no idea my dad played basketball. If you do bet, don’t bet against him at the free-throw line.)
Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash
The US Supreme Court started hearing the NCAA v Alston case last Wednesday as an anti-trust case. The case concerns whether schools have the right to impose caps on “education-related benefits.” Anyone following along knows this is actually the steady defense by academic institutions of their rights not to pay players. They, after all, are amateurs.
The NCAA continues to defend the quaint idea of “amateurism” while overseeing a multi-billion dollar business with coaches and administrators making eye-popping profits and not allowing the athletes any more portion of the pie than a free education. That those that are profiting from this are overwhelmingly white and male and those unable to profit people of color (and half female) is more than a minor issue as well.
The NCAA’s case is tenuous at best: they contend that fans tune into college sports BECAUSE they want to watch unpaid athletes. Amy Coney Barrett tidied this claim up with the formulation that the NCAA’s case rests on the fact that “consumers love watching unpaid people play sports.” Even acknowledging that there might be a segment of customers who tune out of pro sports because of the high salaries (another discussion for another day, BTW), hers is a hard case to make. The NCAA has a case without any evidence – do you know anyone who watches the NCAA because they are amateurs? Even if it is true of some folks, it’s still probably smaller than the group tuning out of college sports because of the current exploitative model.
Think, too, of this: Gorsuch and Coney Barrett’s comments sound like President Obama’s nominees. That is, the court agrees that the NCAA model is exploitative – and this agreement occurs when Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on what constitutes a coup in their own governmental chambers!
The NCAA’s worry is that by pulling the amateur stone out the whole structure will come tumbling down on itself. It’s fair to worry about some unforeseen fallout that may come from a ruling in favor of the athletes. We’d all hate to see March without Madness, the next Paige Bueckers not getting to add to the UCONN legacy, or college baseball players wanting to go nowhere other than Omaha in the middle of the summer. Perhaps. And only perhaps. Probably not. The NCAA’s speculation can only go so far until it sounds like special pleading.
It’s hard not to see the current model as anything other than exploitation of the athlete. Without those athletes, don’t forget, there’d be no economic driver to this money-producing engine. Why is this the case with sports? After all, there’s no rule in the music department prohibiting a promising guitarist from capitalizing on her ability by playing side-gigs and giving music lessons in her spare time. By the way, the head of the music department’s salary at Kentucky has little in common with John Calipari’s.
What’s the solution, then? Pay the athletes. They deserve just wages for the capital they produce. Make them professionals. Remember that only football and men’s basketball are consistent drivers of revenue at most Division 1 colleges (women’s basketball and baseball make some money in some schools). As such the ones producing the money deserve to get paid the most. Kansas and Duke and Gonzaga might have millions to offer to talented young basketball players. But for the Fordhams and UC Santa Barbaras of the world (and virtually any other athlete in any other sport on any other team outside of basketball and football), an athletic scholarship might be enough to entice athletes to come to their schools (apologies to any Ram or Gaucho fans).
Once in a while a player from a mid-major college might become famous (think Ja Morant blossoming into an elite talent at Murray State or Cameron Krutwig gaining a cult following with Loyola) — at least those players have the option to profit from sponsorships on Instagram and TikTok like every non-athlete at their respective universities.
Fair enough: the proposal, it is argued, will create a scenario of “haves” and “have-nots” in the college landscape. Such an argument flies in the face of an NCAA reality: the talent and money are going to top programs today more than ever. The one making this case will want to glue his eyes tight as he pulls his head out of the sandcastle he’s been building.
Ours is probably not a perfect solution, either, but it goes a lot further towards rewarding the talent on which this system’s been built. It’s closer to fairness and justice than the exploitative model at work today.
There was once a time where amateurism made sense as a model, but that was before NCAA sports turned into a big business where everyone was allowed to profit save the college athlete. It’s time to pay the athletes a just wage.
Having served churches in two SEC towns (Starkville, MS and College Station, TX) and having both athletes and coaches (mainly assistants or trainers) in my congregations, it has been interesting to hear from both groups. Surprising (at least to me) was most athletes didn't want to be paid by the university but did want to be able to make money in other ways, such as use of their likeness or being sponsored. And most of the coaches had no issue with students being allowed to do that. Small sample size (only two schools and a handful of athletes and coaches) but it does cast the NCAA in a poor light if the two major components of their "product" (players and coaches) are ok with it but the powers that be seem intent on keeping it from happening.
The machine that is the NCAA relies heavily on two things: men’s football and basketball.
The University of Alabama’s football team is home to arguably the best college football in the country, and it’s been that way for the last decade. “Of the $164 million in revenue for Alabama athletics, 59.8% came from football. The only other profitable program was men’s basketball with $66,921 more revenue than expenses.”* The money generated by football and basketball help to offset the expenses of every other program within an athletic department. A volleyball player from Texas Tech and a wrestler from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga do benefit from the obscene revenue generated by two specific sports, even though they don’t provide an economic benefit to the university.
The NCAA boasts 480,000 student-athletes from across its three divisions. In fairness to the NCAA, we are talking about a handful of athletes that serve as the “economic driver to this money-producing engine.” With that being said, the NCAA’s argument that I watch solely because the athletes are not paid is worth less than the paper it’s printed on. If Joe Burrow was making $150,000 to play QB for LSU during their championship run in 2019, I would’ve still watched. I watch college sports (primarily football and basketball) because they’re exciting, the future of the NFL and NBA are on hand, and because it’s always fun to root for the underdog.
The chief question is whether the NCAA system is just. I agree that the answer is no. Let the small percentage of college athletes that can profit off their likeness do so.
*(https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/2020/01/the-things-you-learn-reading-alabamas-164-million-athletics-budget-closely.html)