Rejecting the Professionalization of College Sports

In late September of this year, Governor Gavin Newsom signed California's Fair Pay to Play Act, which allows college athletes to earn income from their name, image and likeness, notwithstanding NCAA regulations. The law has now set off a legislative stampede. Currently Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Washington State, are considering similar legislation.

 In New York, a state senator is going even further by pushing legislation that would require schools to pay 15% of ticket sales to the athletes.  

 Congress has taken note as well. U.S. Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio has discussed taking national legislative action soon, and Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz has also voiced his support for allowing pay for college athletes. 

 California forced a reckoning with the NCAA as well as with other states who have no choice but to follow suit or suffer a devastating recruitment disadvantage to California colleges even before its law becomes effective in 2023.

Now, the NCAA has apparently blinked. On October 29, After hearing recommendations from its working group on name, image, and likeness rights, the NCAA is preparing to revise its rules and allow compensation for college athletes.

 The discussion concerning college athlete pay inevitably revolves around the sacrifices and talent of the athletes, less so about the harm that athletic programs do to the regular student body. 

More often than not, a college's athletic program is a financial albatross around the college and its students. More fundamentally, by turning sports into a domain of semi-professional recruited athletes, it debases the higher purpose of college and academic life.    

 Consider Governor Newsom's statement upon signing the Fair Play to Pay Act in September:

  Collegiate student athletes put everything on the line – their physical health, future career prospects and years of their lives to compete. Colleges reap billions from these student athletes’ sacrifices and success but, in the same breath, block them from earning a single dollar. That’s a bankrupt model – one that puts institutions ahead of the students they are supposed to serve. It needs to be disrupted.

Gov. Newsom talking about the Fair Pay to Play Act and getting real in the barbershop.

 This is at best misleading. Colleges do not reap billions from the blood and sweat of collegiate athletes. Their athletic departments reap those billions, almost always spend every dollar of those billions, and then just keep spending. Except for a minority of schools, college athletic departments run deficits and end up siphoning money from the general fund of their college or university. The NCAA itself admits that the majority of athletic departments end the year in the red and cost schools money.  

 Even Division I programs that demand lucrative television contracts and receive revenue from ticket sales for games lose money. Bloomberg reported just a few years ago how top tier schools such as the University of California were heavily in debt and cannibalizing school resources at the same time that academic research was being cut. 

  College sports are too big to fail, and it is the regular students who are being bilked for a bailout. For nearly a decade, the Rutgers University sports program needed to take tens of millions of dollars each year from the university, including student fees, just to break even.

  A financial analysis released by the NCAA looked at the expenses and revenues of Division I Football programs from 2004 through 2016. These are the marquee programs, that boast superstar athletes who could presumably warrant lucrative endorsement deals. If any programs should be printing money, it is these. Yet it turns out that the teams comprising the so-called big-five Conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big-12, PAC-12, and SEC) have collectively failed to turn a profit since (at least) 2004, the first year of the study. 

 Athletic departments do not go bankrupt because one way or another there is always more financing available and more school resources at their disposal. Money flows from academics to sports, from the student to the athlete, not the other way around.

  In sum, Newsom and all the legislators across the country scrambling to get their cut of the action, have it backwards. if there are victims of the college athletics racket, those victims are the average non-athlete students, who are saddled with non-dischargeable debt to subsidize the career prospects of a future professional athlete. 

 Newsom and others insist it is unjust to rigidly impose amateurism on athletes who could be making money professionally. Yet, it is not the NCAA who is imposing amateurism on the athletes. The athletes impose this condition on themselves when they enter college instead of seeking to become a professional athlete. No one forced them to make that decision. 

 That decision has consequences for other students, however. It means the "student athletes" in major revenue-generating sports such as basketball and football are effectively semi-professional athletes "playing" student, not students playing amateur sports. They take a spot in the class of incoming students that might otherwise have gone to an academically deserving applicant, whereas their primary qualification for attending is bolstering the success of the athletic program.

 Academic fraud is necessarily commonplace. The University of North Carolina, for almost two decades, put its athletes into fake, no-show classes wherein they were guaranteed a passing grade. Syracuse went so far as to have athletic department staff complete academic coursework for their athletes, and even retroactively change poor grades.

 The moral question that must be asked of large college sports programs is not whether their star athletes should be paid, but why these programs should even exist as part of colleges and universities. If they have proven anything, it is that there is no ethical line that will not be crossed to produce a winning team. 

College sports programs were until recently notorious for "hostess" programs, in which groups of female students were encouraged to assist in recruiting talented football and basketball prospects. Athletic programs across the country had no compunction about using female college students as an escort service. It was only after a rape scandal erupted involving Baylor University's so-called "Baylor Belles", bringing to light evidence of 52 rapes by 31 players in only four years, that real efforts were made to disband hostess programs across the country, which have likely simply morphed into something less official. 

 As the issue of college pay is debated into the coming months, the only just course of action is to neither allow endorsements for college athletes, nor to endorse the status quo: it is to remove the blight of these teams from America's colleges and universities. 

 If advocates of paying college athletes believe that NCAA rules prevent these athletes from being justly compensated for their talent and sacrifice, let these athletes go prove it and try out for a professional sports team. For Football at least, this would require a change to the player's association collective bargaining agreement with the NFL, which restricts draft eligibility to those three years out of high school. If, as we are told, these players are talented enough to fill stadiums, attract commercial endorsements, and generate "billions" in revenue, that would be more than enough leverage to force a minor rule adjustment from the NFL, or better yet, attract investment for a new league. In any event, colleges are not a job placement program, and these athletes should be cut loose to seek their own fortunes, like any other young person trying to start a career. 

 What would college sports look like if instead of serving semi-pro athletes, colleges and their athletic departments went back to serving students? In other words, imagine if collegiate athletic recruitment were restricted such that teams would consist only of so-called "walk-on" players from the current student body of freshmen students admitted on academic merit. 

Obviously, the athletic talent of particular teams would suffer, but the quality of games might actually improve in two respects. 

First, there would be less lopsided games, where only one side had the cash and recruiting resources to field half a roster of future NFL prospects. If both sides can only pull from walk-ons from the student body, there would almost certainly be less blow-outs due to a regression to the mean. 

 Secondly, sports would become an organic piece of the college experience and of student life. The players would be first and foremost students, who share the same classes with the rest of the school and the same experience of campus life. After all, the idea of college sports is sport for college students, not a minor league for future professionals. 

 If college athletics were returned to college students, the games would become more meaningful to the students because it is their fellow classmates carrying the pride of their school, not a semi-professional mercenary planning to cash out to the NBA after sophomore year. 

 College sports success does not require climbing national rankings, boosting ticket sales, or notching bowl victories. It is not about fielding the best possible team of athletes. It is about fielding the best possible team of students engaged in athletics. 

The historian Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History, discussed a concept the ancient Greeks called “fiavavola," or an overspecialization in a particular discipline that undermines all-around development. The dawn of industrialization led to the penetration of market forces into every aspect of life. If our ancestors told stories or made their own music in front of the fireplace, for example, we now listen to mass-distribution television or streaming services. The market takes over what private individuals were one capable of doing for themselves. Profit-driven professionalism crowds out the amateur. As Toynbee states: 

 [S]port is a conscious attempt to counterbalance the soul-destroying specialization which the division of labour under Industrialism entails. Unfortunately, this attempt to adjust life to Industrialism through sport has been partially defeated because the spirit and rhythm of Industrialism have invaded and infected sport itself. In the Western World of to-day professional athletes, more narrowly specialized and more extravagantly paid than any industrial technicians, now provide horrifying examples of fiavavola at its acme. 

 Toynbee describes how "fiavavola" has permeated even college athletics: 

  The writer of this Study recalls two football grounds he visited on the campuses of two colleges in the United States. One of them was flood-lighted in order that football players might be manufactured by night as well as by day, in continuous shifts. The other was roofed over in order that practice might go on, whatever the weather. It was said to be the largest span of roof in the world, and its erection had cost a fabulous sum. . . . In truth, this Anglo-Saxon football was not a game at all.

 Sports should exist to create well-rounded human beings. That means that even if the economics of college athletics made sense, and these programs regularly generated profit, the commercialization of college athletics is completely anathema to the actual purpose of sport. 

 College sports can enrich the lives of young people, but only if such an enterprise is properly ordered to serve student life, not its own commercial ends. It's time to shift the narrative to the needs, interests, and yes, sacrifices made by regular students of our colleges and universities.