Wall Street Journal Thurs Oct 18th 5:29 PM by Jason Gay.
The End of the NCAA Illusion
Court cases and athlete empowerment challenge old beliefs about amateurism. And the public is getting wise.
Jason Gay
Updated Oct. 18, 2018 5:29 p.m. ET
I’ve been writing
this nonsense column for close to a decade—
Sheesh, you say,
it feels like a century—and if I had to pick a pair of major changes in the sports universe over this period, I’d offer these two:
1. There was once a time in American history when it was socially acceptable to talk about your fantasy football team in public.
2. Fans have
really woken up to the shameless business that is college sports.
No. 1 is self-explanatory. Nobody wants to hear about your fantasy football team. Or fantasy teams. Ever.
No. 2, I’d like to spend some time unpacking.
A bright light has been turned on in big-time college sports—which, for the purposes of this column, I strictly mean men’s college football and men’s college basketball, which are both multibillion-dollar businesses. Is there a human being alive who still believes in the purity of these enterprises? Whatever fairy dust the NCAA used to sprinkle over the college game—a blend of nostalgia, regional pride, and, most of all, amateurism—doesn’t work anymore.
The jig is up. The money is just too much in everyone’s faces now. Everyone sees the absurd amounts TV networks pay for these games (a billion a year for March Madness alone). Everyone sees how the games and athletes are packaged and sold to sponsors, which then turn around and sell them back to you and me. Everyone knows
their college football coach is probably overpaid.
Except for you, Handsome Nick Saban. You might be earning every penny.
There’s not even a facade of innocence to it anymore. We’re all hard-bitten realists.
You can see it in the eye-rolling reactions to the
college basketball trial wrapping up in New York, where a ragtag bunch of bagmen and other assorted characters have laid out the blueprint of college basketball’s underworld of shoe companies, secret payments and recruiters.
There was a time when the revelations at this trial—wanton mercenaries lurking around programs; stacks of bills in envelopes; players steered to programs—would have provoked a breathless response:
Look at these scoundrels, sullying our beloved game.
Instead, a lot of us are still trying to figure out what the government is doing here—what it’s attempting to prove, why it’s playing strongman for the NCAA. Technically, this is a fraud case: a jury must decide if NCAA member universities were victims, helplessly defrauded by rogue types steering elite players to their campuses.
I’ll pause here for you to laugh. It really is worth a laugh.
How does anyone not see the direct connection between this “illicit” economy and the phony construct of NCAA amateurism? Talented players clearly have a cash value—to schools, to coaches, to multinational shoe corporations—and the rules simply push the money under the table. The notion that schools are being victimized is comical. It’s like a cupcake claiming it was victimized by sugar.
I get why people are intrigued by this case; the government has used the threat of punishment to give the public a detailed look under the hood of college sports. But what’s really been shown here is felony hypocrisy—a system set up to penalize rinky-dink payoffs to desperate players and parents and middlemen, while coaches, conferences and universities drive off in a Brinks truck weighted down by billions.
I think the public sees this very clearly. It’s why the NBA can propose a pro option for 18-year-olds uninterested in a four-month college career, and everyone agrees it’s a good idea. And it’s why once-heretical suggestions
like compensating athletes (sakes alive!) are gaining traction.
Will paying college athletes stop envelopes from being passed under benches? Of course not. But if legit money is being offered, trouble loses a good deal of appeal—not to mention the millions saved in enforcement costs. (Here, the University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson quotes Butch Cassidy: “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.”)
Yes, there is always going to be an audience that believes paying college athletes is insidious—that the cost of a four-year education plus benefits is a more than fair exchange. (And for a lot of athletes, it
is a great deal.) There are significant considerations about what compensation in men’s football and basketball would mean for nonrevenue sports. But more and more, those roadblocks feel like excuses. Difficulty—and it will be difficult, likely involving courtroom sagas and Title IX exemptions and so on—is not a reason to not do the right thing.
Honestly, though, it doesn’t matter if the NCAA acts, because the athletes are coming for the NCAA. In Oakland, players and schools await a judge’s ruling on a case involving compensation caps—if it’s fair for the NCAA to prohibit compensating athletes much beyond the cost of attendance, or if the universities should be allowed to decide for themselves. It’s this case that’s the real deal. At the heart of the matter is whether amateurism precludes fairness, and a lot of testimony centered on what being a college athlete today entails—whether it’s the part-time avocation of a college student (the cheery upbeat version), or tantamount to a full-time job.
Spoiler alert: In 2018, it’s a job. Handsome Nick Saban would tell you that. Anyone half-awake would tell you that.
Coach Nick Saban of the Alabama Crimson Tide looks on during a recent game.
If you want more proof that change will come from the athletes, look at the story of Nick Bosa, the talented Ohio State defensive end who announced this week he will not return to the team after he’s done rehabilitating an injury, but will instead focus on the upcoming NFL draft. It’s possible that Bosa could have rejoined the Buckeyes for a championship run, but he’s expected to be a top pick, an instant multimillionaire, and it doesn’t make sense to risk all that for an endeavor that will pay him nothing.
And here’s the thing: Pretty much everyone agrees that Bosa is being smart. A decade ago, he might have been chastised for bailing on his teammates, for disrespecting college sports, but now everyone gets the deal.
This a business. Nick Bosa knows it. You and I know it—and so does the NCAA. That’s what’s changed the most in college sports. No one buys the illusion anymore.
