Every time I hear about the latest college football recruiting/scheduling/conference-jumping/coach-changing/insert-scandal-here scandal, I always hear someone trying to excuse it by simply acknowledging what we all know. “Hey, it’s a business!” they say, as if to imply, “Only foolish and naive people actually believe that crap about ‘the purity of the student-athlete’, pal. That kind of thing went out with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Get with the times.”
Which is all absolutely true, but misses the point: The problem isn’t that getting money involved in college athletics taints the purity of the sport and that they should return to the good old days when it was a sport for students, by students; the problem is that if it’s a business, then the college athletes are the employees. And if they’re employees of a business, then they should get paid. Instead, not only do they not get any actual financial compensation for their labor (they get scholarships, which generally include campus housing, but even at the most expensive colleges that usually amounts to less per year than you could make driving a garbage truck–not to mention, the kids aren’t getting as much use out of their scholarship when they have to spend so much time practicing and playing) but in addition to that, if someone other than their employer, the university, tries to recompense them for their labor, they’re suspended from their job without pay. The school gets to make as much money as they want off of the students, but the student has to stay broke to keep their love of the game “pure”.
Some people claim that the college players get valuable football experience that helps them make the pros, but that’s not an excuse either. Minor-league baseball players gain experience and get paid (although admittedly, they don’t make as much as garbage-truck drivers either.) The point is, if we’re going to have college teams serving as farm leagues for the NFL, then college athletes should be paid for their labor the same way every other working American is. Colleges that make millions off of their football programs, then insist they’re simply providing an extra-curricular activity for their students when it comes time to pay the people who are making those millions possible, are exploiting those kids. “It’s a business” isn’t an excuse, because it’s only a business when the people in charge want it to be a business. The hypocrisy of the stance is what people are complaining about, not the fact that money has sullied the sport.
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The amount of money put into collegiate athletics is deplorable enough. To add a salary on top of the free room and board and full scholarships so frequently handed out would be rubbing a lot of salt into the wounds of $60 million stadiums and the like.
A free college education, and good housing and food while you’re getting it, is more than enough incentive to participate in an extracurricular hobby.
TA: And what about those players that are injured? Does the college pay those fees? What if they become crippled from those injuries? Is the school responsible for anything once they’re off the field? And what about those students who don’t get a free ride? What if your scholership doesn’t cover everything and you still have to play and pay?
Oh man, that’s just what a typical college campus needs: for football and basketball players to be RICH, too!
Actually, I’ve always wanted to see the books on college sports fully opened to the public: how much profit does each school make off of sports, and what do they spend it on? Hypocrisy, shmypocrisy…if it’s really true that football and basketball are keeping the lights on and making it possible for students without trust funds to get a college degree, then I think I could live with that. But if most of the money’s just getting dumped right back into the sports programs, then fuck ’em, they should tear down the stadiums and put in more parking lots instead. Set up real farm leagues for basketball and football and get it the fuck out of our colleges.
And I guess I just can’t help but notice that football and basketball players in college tend to get free tuition, free housing, free medical care, free tutoring, and a chance at going pro (where they could make shitloads of money). Maybe they’re getting exploited, sure…but compared to the deal that the *other* students are getting, it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Robert, it varies from school to school, but the colleges themselves say that athletics programs generate (a) donations from alumni and (b) attention for the college that helps interest some prospective students. The first is probably easily measurable, the second might not be.
None of this is an excuse for not paying the athletes, though. As sports thinker Bill James once noted, it’s an environment in which everyone else involved (the schools, school administrators, coaches) are allowed to make as much money as they can, but not the people who make the whole thing happen.
TA: Er, why would it be like rubbing salt in the wounds?
Say that a star NCAA quarterback is worth, I dunno, an extra couple million a year. His room, board, tuition, medical care, etc. are -part of a compensation package-. If he’s generating more for the college than he’s costing, doesn’t that mean more awesome stuff for the other students?
Frankly, I don’t worry about the stars. They’re gonna be fine. I worry about the guy who is, say, a perfectly solid second-string WR, but who has no hope of being in the NFL one day, knows it, and needs to get that degree to have a career. I want that guy to be able to say ‘Sorry, Coach, I need to get my GPA up… no, I don’t want a fucking bye, dammit!’ without it being intimated that if he doesn’t get his ass out on the field and generate revenue he’s gonna be gone.
Basically, I am comfortable with a hypothetical ‘student-athlete’ role where some modest sports scholarships help those who can’t get an educations any other way, and I’m comfortable with a completely mercenary ‘they’re not even students; this college runs a farm team for the Bengals, and the fat coin we made doing so built us that new library’. It’s when you end up in-between that I look at it askance.
Say that a star NCAA quarterback is worth, I dunno, an extra couple million a year. His room, board, tuition, medical care, etc. are -part of a compensation package-. If he’s generating more for the college than he’s costing, doesn’t that mean more awesome stuff for the other students?
No, it doesn’t. It means that instead of, say, offering free tuition to the entire student body or completely renovating the campus or something like that, the school builds a $60,000,000 stadium instead.
@Garfield – Yeah, but what I was asking was how much money “everyone else involved” are personally making off of college sports, and *what other things it’s being spent on*. If they’re turning a massive profit on football and basketball and those massive profits are mostly going into things that benefit students (paying for more professors, paying to keep tuition costs down, paying to keep the library and other facilities up-to-date), then I’m actually okay with it.
If the money’s just getting cycled back into the sports program (new stadium! better skyboxes for alumni! higher salary for our head coach!), then I’d just as soon see the whole shebang tossed out on the street and turned into a real farm league.
If only Mr. Seavey had presented a more thorough analysis of the bottom line when blogging about the business-like nature of college sports.
Yeah, as someone who is still paying student loans it is difficult to feel extremely sorry for the guys who got that for free. I suppose I’m the nerd resenting the jocks if you’re going to go there.
There will never be a “minor league” replacing college football, there are too many loyal fans of college teams and too much money in the system the way it is.
@TA;
The article you link to is for a high school football stadium. I agree that on its face it seems a little outrageous to build a sixty million dollar stadium for high school ball… but the politics and finances of High School ball are radically different from those of college ball, which is what I think we were talking about. For starters, everyone going to that High School ALREADY goes there for free. For another… the article mentions that they built a bigger stadium because the old one was constantly building beyond capacity. If that’s the case (and the article doesn’t mention) the relevant question is ‘will the additional seating, and the revenue it generates, amortize out the cost of the new stadium in a reasonable amount of time, at which point the stadium starts generating MORE cash for all the other students?’ If the answer is ‘yes’ then it was a good investment. If the answer is ‘no’ it was stupid.
@Ken;
The jocks did not get that education ‘for free.’ They exchanged a service of their own for it. That’s how colleges work. You gave them money in exchange for your their education, which they ALSO like. The issue at hand is that said jocks actually paid a LOT MORE than you did for his education, and had to do more work (playing sports professionally, which is what NCAA ball basically is at this point, is a full-time job) to boot. And the college pocketed the difference. You might be okay with using that as a revenue stream, because colleges have to be funded somehow; I have to say that I do indeed find it problematic when literally everyone else but the players are allowed to make as much money as possible off collegiate sports except the people making it possible.
@Murc – I completely agree with your first post, where you pointed out that it’s unfair to expect student athletes to play to their own detriment (unable to study/work toward their future career because of sports). The system is very unfair to the dedicated athletes without star status.
Your second post, though, where you said that the jock paid “a LOT MORE” – well, that’s possibly true if the jock was not on a full ride. With a full ride – especially at the more prestigious schools – the jock is getting benefits greater than my current annual salary as a teacher, and I suspect that with the level of attention I give my students and job, I do an equal amount of work for less pay.
I have the greatest sympathy for college athletes with partial scholarships that keep them from the ability to earn their full keep or reap full benefits of their education. I have none whatsoever for a system that rewards the star players with full scholarships and often lavish fringe benefits. Those stars take away from the students who have to work their way through, and they make me rather disgusted with NCAA basketball and football.
@Kirala-
Well, what’s tricky about a large part of this discussion is we’re talking about intangibles. Your annual salary as a teacher is known. So is the cost of a students tuition. So is the cost of housing, etc. for a scholarship student with a full ride.
What ISN’T exactly known is how much is poured back in by a hypothetical full-ride scholarship athlete who is also the star quarterback who is the cornerstone of an offensive strategy that leads to a bowl victory that leads to record numbers of alumni and booster donations, not to mention a fat paycheck to the college for using his likeness in marketing materiel and other products. That guy is possibly generating more revenue for the college over the course of four years than its entire research department is in fifty (I leave the moral and academic implications of this aside) and he has to do that while still being a full-time student. So yes, that guy? He is paying a hell of a lot more than the non-scholarship student who took out loans.
It gets even trickier when you move away from obvious stars. Sports are team games. How much revenue is a single linebacker generating? The entire offensive line? The perfectly solid second-string wide receiver? That shit is real hard to quantify.
Baseball has probably the best system. A player can enter the draft right out of high school. Or, he can go to community college for a couple of years, then enter the draft. Or, he can go to a four-year college and enter the draft after three or four years. Basically, when a baseball player is good enough to get paid, he can.
Basketball isn’t as good, but the NBA only requires one year out of high school, and there are international leagues with no such restrictions.
Football players do have it the toughest among the major sports. There aren’t many alternatives to college for prospective professionals. It isn’t popular enough internationally to make a living playing overseas, and there really aren’t any viable independent minor leagues. The USFL went belly-up, then the XFL, then arena football.
But nobody is holding a gun to these players’ heads and making them play for room and board. They signed a scholarship agreement, outlining the terms of their “employment.” If they aren’t satisfied with those terms, they can go drive a garbage truck.
There is a difference between D-III and other levels in the Division III colleges offer only academic scholarships. I recommend “College Sports Incorporated” by Murray Sperber.
And wouldn’t you know Southern Methodist is on right now. :/
@ams: There’s actually a pretty good chapter in Freakonomics about the pay structure of careers with a high salary and an equally high bar to entrance. He discusses the way that drug dealers start out as drug couriers at a pay rate that’s actually less than working at McDonald’s.
That’s a good chapter; if I’m remembering it correctly, he actually compares working the corner to playing college basketball. You’re incredibly underpaid for the labor you put in and the risks you assume, all for an infinitesimally small chance of moving up and making big money later on.
But again, the critical difference in those two businesses lies in where the profits go, as far as I’m concerned. In drugs, the profits go to the guys in charge; in college sports, the profits go…?
If they go into supporting the school’s educational mission, that’s a good thing, and it’s up to the player to decide whether the deal is worth it; if they don’t, they can study hard and take out loans like any other student would. And if the profits just go back into the sports program (stadiums and whatever), that’s bad; it’s a waste of revenue that could be used to improve the school for all the students. But if the profits go into making administrators and coaches and other “bosses” filthy rich, that’s just fucking *criminal*.
With the exception of maybe a couple of schools a year, college sports programs do not pay for themselves directly. Whether or not they do indirectly (promotion for potential students) is debatable.
There is no “extra money” that’s going to finance the rest of the school.
A bit latecoming, but http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/16/ncaa has some hard data gathered after the NCAA revised their financial reporting guidelines and forced schools to stop paying for stadium electricity (and myriad other expenses) out of their general funds in order to claim “profits.”
Not only do the students get exploited, the school loses money in 90% of cases. Athletic success has also not prevented funding cuts to public universities both with and without athletic programs in many states as well.
It’s just a bad bargain for everyone involved.