The North Carolina scandal demonstrates that, if college athletes aren’t going to get even the education that is their ostensible compensation for generating billions of dollars, then they should at least get a share of the television revenue.
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I don’t envy the NCAA’s public relations team. During the three weeks that are supposed to be the pinnacle of college sports in this country, that are supposed to showcase all that is best about the game of college basketball, as yet another Cinderella—why, hello there, Dayton—is making a run deep into the NCAA Tournament, when the NCAA should be taking a bow in front of the adoring hordes, it is instead in damage control. On multiple fronts.
First came news that the National Labor Relations Board sided with Northwestern football players seeking to be considered employees of the University. The decision opens the door for the possible unionization of college athletes, a certain step on the road to paying them. Then, yesterday, Deadspin picked up on a story first broadcast earlier in the week on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, sharing the screenshot of a University of North Carolina football player’s one paragraph final paper on Rosa Parks for his African and Afro-American Studies class, a paper for which, though it would not be acceptable work in the 6th grade, never mind in college, the player received an A-.
Each of these stories brings up a topic the NCAA and its member institutions would rather not discuss, at least publicly. Billions of dollars are at stake and, in each instance, the question of whether the adults in charge are acting in the best interests of the young men they are supposed to be looking out for must be asked.
I’ve written before on the need to start paying college athletes. Just last week The Good Men Project reposted a piece I originally wrote in 2012 arguing that the very notion of amateurism, which has a class tinge to it, is out of step with the demographic makeup of the athletes who earn the overwhelming majority of scholarships in football and men’s basketball.
I’m not blind to the difficult questions that implementing a system of paying college athletes raises—not the least of which is whether you pay members of the non-revenue generating sports as well as the big ticket ones and, even within football and men’s basketball, whether you pay everyone on the same step scale or whether, instead, the star running back can negotiate a higher reimbursement than the third string left outside linebacker.
But I’m not here to answer those questions. I simply want to point out that, whether you agree with the idea or not, the NLRB’s ruling has us headed down the road to compensation. The momentum behind the proposition would seem to make it almost inevitable.
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The story emanating from North Carolina this week is just a piece of a larger story that’s been boiling for some time, ever since a member of the University’s faculty blew the whistle on what is essentially an internal diploma mill for athletes who come to campus clearly unprepared for college-level work. Mary Willingham’s research, which the University has disclaimed, “showed that between 8% and 10% of the school’s football and basketball players are reading below a third-grade level.”
Though that isn’t the true sin. The true sin appears to be that the University and its coaches make no attempt to close the academic gap for athletes, opting instead to ease their way through sham classes, leaving the young men, even if they do manage to graduate, without any skills to acquire a job that isn’t football or basketball related.
What the North Carolina story exposes is the lie that opponents of paying college athletes, including the colleges and universities themselves, like to tell: that the players are already being compensated with a college education. But everyone knows that isn’t true. The players are there for one reason and one reason only, and that is to compete. If academics get in the way, then they will be sacrificed.
What the North Carolina story exposes is the lie that opponents of paying college athletes, including the colleges and universities themselves, like to tell: that the players are already being compensated with a college education.
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Robert Smith, who would go on to play for the Minnesota Vikings, actually quit the football team at Ohio State due to the pressure placed on him by his coaches, who wanted him to drop his chosen major, which was premed, because it was taking up too much time, time they felt would be better devoted to football.
What makes the North Carolina story all the more damning is that it is North Carolina, one of the most highly rated public universities in the country, and not UNLV or Kentucky, and that one of the coaches in question is Roy Williams, who, despite winning two national championships and making countless other trips to the Final Four, has never had a whiff of scandal on him, and not John Calipari, whom everyone already assumes is cheating.
I am not opposed to lower academic standards for athletes, particularly athletes who hail from backgrounds that would all but otherwise block any chance they have at a college education. As I pointed out in my piece that reran last week, 85% of all scholarship athletes in football and men’s basketball at FBS schools live below the poverty line. That they might gain access to a college or university that they are otherwise academically unqualified for is no more pernicious than the continued practice of legacy admissions at many of our most highly regarded institutions.
What I object to is what happens once they get to college. It’s one thing to say that we know you are not on the same academic level as most of your classmates, but we’re going to make sure that you receive the support necessary for you to learn and to insure that, if you do graduate, the piece of paper saying so actually means something. It’s another to say that we don’t care if you ever learn anything, just as long as you can put an orange ball through a rim.
ESPN recently ran a 30 for 30 documentary (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you haven’t caught any of the 30 for 30 series, you really should.) on the Big East basketball conference. As would be expected, longtime Georgetown coach John Thompson plays a prominent role in the documentary.
That [athletes] might gain access to a college or university that they are otherwise academically unqualified for is no more pernicious than the continued practice of legacy admissions at many of our most highly regarded institutions.
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Thompson is a man who, during his coaching days, received a great deal of criticism for recruiting only black players and for recruiting players, such as Patrick Ewing, who were clearly not qualified for a college of the caliber of Georgetown. It was widely assumed at the time that Ewing was illiterate, and the documentary does an effective job of showing the torment Ewing experienced from fans of opposing schools, who would hold up signs during games that said things like, “Ewing Can’t Read.”
But whatever one thinks of Thompson’s exclusive recruiting practices or of Georgetown’s decision to allow an academically unqualified Patrick Ewing in, it is impossible to deny that, once Ewing arrived on campus, John Thompson wasn’t concerned about both his player’s academic and basketball development. To listen to a Patrick Ewing interview before he arrived at Georgetown and then to one after he left is to hear two different people speak.
John Thompson believed that basketball was a vehicle by which young black men could get a college education. He made sure that happened. Not every decision he made was a good one (and not every athlete he recruited deserved the chance he was giving him), but Thompson took that mission seriously.
What is obvious today is that, at least at North Carolina, people only pay lip service to that mission, which is, as much as any rationale, reason enough to advocate to pay college athletes. Because, if they’re not going to get an actual education out of the deal, they deserve at least a share of the television revenue.
Photo: John Bazemore, Associated Press
The system is obviously broken.Getting upset with players seems a fruitfless endeavor since they neither own nor define the system.Directing the anger at the owners and decision makers of this process may yield some answers.To that list of owners and decision makers I would add the NBA.They,even more than the colleges,benefit from what amounts to a massive and free player development system.At the bottom of this pyramid are the high schools and AAU. There are many siginificant differences between AAU and highschool ball so I don’t equate the two.High school coaches get screwed over royaly but are precluded from voicing… Read more »
paying them on top of the ludicrous benefits they already get is a complete sham. The only reason most of them are at the school is because they can play sports, if they can’t keep their grades up they shouldn’t be allowed to play. And if they can’t play they most certainly don’t deserve their scholarships. Scholarships which *MY* tuition goes to pay for. I pay nearly 15000$ a year in tuition, do you know how much of that is actually spent on academic departments? around 9000$. That’s just tuition, it doesn’t including meal plan or housing. Do you know… Read more »
Let me preface this by saying this entire topic really pushes my buttons after some years in academia so I apologize for my emotional rambling below. My immediate response to this idea of paying student athletes is: NO. They are all ready paid in so many ways as it is compared to other college students. Athletes have special tutors just of them and professors are always supposed to give them special understanding when it comes to assignments or tests — got to let them get to their games after all even if that single parent needs to take their kid… Read more »
“The biggest problem is that we have forgotten what college and university is supposed to be for — an education not a jumping off point for a professional sports career” Then the schools and the NCAA should not be making money off of these players. Your bias is clear from your experiences in your classroom. As an NCAA Division III football player, I never had an opportunity to receive a scholarship. We never had special tutors and the only benefit we did have was that we didn’t have to take a fitness course required as a gen ed. I had… Read more »
So don’t play sports then. Do what I have had to do, take out an assload of student loans to pay for college, focus on your classes, get into honors societies, volunteer, do internships, and get a job.