I wrestled with whether I should cover the Supreme Court’s NCAA ruling in my news feature or in tomorrow’s academia column. It’s on my mind today, so today it is.
The state of Division I athletics is one of those persistent conversations in American life that draws some of the most extraordinary bad-faith arguments and denialism out of otherwise sensible people. If you enjoy one or more NCAA sports as a spectator, played varsity on an NCAA team (either Division I or in II and III), are attached to the team(s) of your alma mater, you are often determined to let nothing stand in between you and that attachment.
I get it. We all have things we love that we know we probably shouldn’t love. I’m a meat-eater and I just really do not want to hear it from people who I know have valuable and truthful things to say about the consequences of meat-eating. That’s on me.
With Division I athletics the consequentiality of the untruths involved in defending its status quo is enormous. More importantly, the status quo is unnecessary for the satisfactions that college athletics provides to fans and spectators. Or for the benefits of competitive athletics to university and college students. We could have it all, with none of the lies. The only people keeping the whole damn thing stuck in its untenable state are the people who specifically and unjustly benefit from it being exactly that way and the people for whom the status quo of college athletics is a perfectly calibrated way to express their contempt for the rest of higher education by corrupting every aspect of its core purpose.
What’s untenable about the current situation? NCAA Division I football and basketball make a ton of money for networks, advertisers, coaches, and trainers. They cost money for all but a handful of universities. (This is the first thing that some fans are just stubborn as hell about: they persist in believing that somehow Division I athletics are a bonanza for every institution that hosts them and keep the rest of the university alive. It is just not true.) The players get nothing over the table for all their labor except an extended audition for major league sports. Under the table, as we all know, at least some of the star recruits get quite a lot—privileges, perks, undisclosed payments to relatives—some of which takes a whole network of staff, alumni booster networks, community flacks and so on to conceal or manage. But other players get far less or none of that shadowy compensation, whatever it might be, and their auditions lead them nowhere professionally except perhaps into the entry ranks of coaching, training, sports medicine and so on. More likely what they get are lifelong injuries, depression and uncertain working futures. I didn’t expect it, but Justice Kavanaugh is rightly getting plaudits for saying as much with clarity and intensity in his concurrence.
The oft-repeated line that at least the athletes get their education for free is laughable to anybody who isn’t a shill. Yes, every Division I team has a few athletes who also happen to be strong students who will be able to catalyze on that education. But playing on those teams is a full-time job in football and basketball and really in most of the other Division I sports. Whatever academic aptitude the players might have, they’re mostly not going to be able to pursue that scholarly work while they are ostensibly full-time enrolled students. Many teams have staff whose effective job is to manage players’ academic careers to keep them from jeopardizing their eligibility, not to help them advance further within any real or meaningful curricular program.
Division I athletics supposedly gets the alumni to open their wallets and donate. Yes, for athletic-specific fundraising. It largely doesn’t warm their hearts towards anything else at those universities, or lead to greater support. Sometimes very high-profile donors who are prepared to give for major building projects will tie that willingness quid pro quo to unconditional support from the leadership for unlimited investment in one or more teams at a Division I school. Sometimes trustees and state legislatures effectively hold university leadership overall hostage to giving coaches, recruiters and trainers a completely free hand. There is nothing in any of those servile relationships worth preserving: they enshrine unaccountable, secretive forms of power over and within universities, power that muddies any sense of a distinctive mission or purpose for those institutions and conceals abuses at multiple levels. Paterno’s lack of accountability at Penn State wasn’t an isolated case.
What is worth preserving?
First, Division I teams (and even sometimes Division II and III programs) are as beloved as they are in their regional locations precisely because they provide high-quality spectator sports to regions that otherwise would have nothing of the sort. Smaller towns and cities across the U.S. genuinely need what these teams provide to their communities.
Second, the sentimental value of long-playing teams to alumni and long-term fans is important. That needs to continue.
You can have all that and pay the athletes what they’re worth while dropping the fiction that they’re also full-time students. How? The basic change that has been suggested over and over again is simple and plausible: make existing Division I teams with major commercial contracts into minor-league franchises. Create a minor league competitive structure for what used to be college football and basketball. Make the universities that presently host those teams into team owners. Non-profit organizations can own commercial profit-making assets. The difference is simply that the profit those assets produce for their owner are realized as revenue coming into a non-profit budget.
If it turns out that a given Division I team can’t make a profit if it’s not being subsidized like crazy by its university owner, then this structure would reveal that loss very clearly while the current structures conceal it. Right now, if a Division I team is bleeding money, especially at a private university, there are many ways to conceal or downplay that. Leadership is able to say that the football team is like any other department or unit at the university, and deserves support accordingly. If it were just one activity among many, rather than a part of a billion-dollar business led by coaches that pull down salaries many times those of any other person working at their universities, the leadership might have a point. But any other unit or department has to justify itself in terms of cost-to-benefit. If an academic department, no matter how desirable for attracting students, cost considerably more in terms of competitive salaries than it took in in terms of tuition or other revenue, that situation would not be allowed to stand indefinitely In fact, that is the grossest obscenity in the obscene situation of academic labor at the moment: remarkably cheap academic departments that nevertheless draw students are being relentlessly casualized and downsized. Division I teams that cost money? They still get all the money they want. Leaders say they have to pay what it takes to win, which means chasing the market rates for successful coaches. But the pressure to have the team be a winning team is partly about the ego of powerful fans, donors and state legislators and only barely about the revenues that winning provides.
If the team was simply a business that the university owned, the reasoning would be more coherent and justifiable. If Rutgers owned a commercial building or business that was bleeding $50 million a year, it would either sell the asset or it would change the way it was managing the asset. Small-market teams in professional leagues would either live with being less competitive or they would create some form of revenue sharing that produced more equitable competition for the health of the league overall.
Making minor leagues makes so much sense. It provides everything that the current system provides with no disadvantages at all. Except to the people who are making tons of money that they don’t have to share with the young men and women who are risking their health and their futures while they work their asses off.
Pay the players, stop pretending they’re students. Keep playing where you’re playing. Keep the names, the mascots and the existing warm feelings between fans and teams.
What about Division I sports that don’t have commercial potential? Well, maybe with the corrupting deceptions that surround the big money sports out of the picture, we could have a more honest conversation about how athletics and academics should relate to one another and why they belong in the same institutional setting, if they do.