The NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been the focus of American sports fans for the past month or so, and this year’s Final Four, held in the economic wasteland known as Detroit, offered a barrel full of stories about economic impact and turnarounds and other social commentaries.
And, of course, it gave critics of amateurism their annual free shot at the NCAA, an institution they often equate to modern-day slavery. These kids, they say, generate all this money and get virtually nothing in return.
Their story sounds compelling. It casts every player as the gritty underdog railing against the Establishment. The power forward becomes the assembly-line worker to the Establishment’s bonus-swilling CEO.
Too bad it’s not that easy.
Insufficient Funds?
First, it's helpful to study some math. The athletes in this morality play are on full scholarships. Unlike 80 to 85 percent of their fellow students, they’ll leave school with no debt.
At Villanova University, one of this year’s Final Four, the cost of room, meals, tuition and fees in 2009-10 is estimated at $48,870. A reasonable estimate says these souls spend 1,000 hours in their jobs as basketball players over a year. That’s 20 hours a week for 50 weeks. (The truth is that nobody takes any time off anymore.) That works out to an hourly wage of $48.87.
Many American workers will gladly be exploited to the tune of $48.87 an hour. The players, in essence, are being paid.
The pay-the-players argument is based on a couple of premises, one of which implies that a free college education is insufficient compensation. If you believe that, then why would you even want to accept the deal? If college is that trivial, why bother to attend?
Many of those who claim exploitation are also among those who bitterly fought the NCAA’s raising of academic standards for freshman eligibility in the 1980s. The tougher SAT requirements, they said, would deprive minority students of access to education. (In fact, the percentage of Division I men’s basketball players who are black has increased in every year in which records have been kept.)
Rhetorically, the critics can’t have it both ways. They can’t claim education is vital in one breath and a pittance in the next.
Profit Marginalized
The other cornerstone of the pay-for-play movement suggests that colleges are making absurd money off the student-athletes’ labor. The truth? Fewer than half of the athletics departments in this year’s NCAA tournament reported a profit in 2007-08, and half of those in the black reported margins of 2 percent or less (relative to revenue.) That’s according to the U.S. Department of Education, which oversees implementation of the Equality in Athletics Disclosure Act.
Another Kind of Court Battle
And then there is the practical element. How would the NCAA feasibly pay for a payment program?
According to the federal government, NCAA Division I schools incurred two-thirds of their expenses on sports other than football and men’s basketball in 2006-07. Many of these non-revenue sports are women’s teams. So if you want to pay basketball players, you’ll have to whack women’s sports disproportionately, and federal law essentially says that’s a no-no.
A plan to redress alleged grievances would get torpedoed by legislation designed to ensure equality of opportunity. Rather ironic, isn’t it?
Speaking of federal law, what might the courts say to any payment plan? There’s only one way to give men’s basketball players the sort of revenue they allegedly deserve: Pay them and only them. Once you start dividing the pie with those greedy field hockey players, the individual shares are reduced considerably. (For the sake of argument -- and this is a gross exaggeration of reality -- say that the NCAA paid every bit of the $548,250,000 it received from television rights fees in 2007-08 to Division I student-athletes in all sports. That would work out to $3,407 per person. Or, to put it another way, about 6 percent of the value of a free education at Duke, Wake Forest, Villanova or another private institution.)
If only men’s basketball players were compensated and if the entire TV rights fees went to them, each athlete would get around $117,000 a year. That’s still only half of the NBA minimum salary.
If the system winds up paying only male college students rather than females, it would almost certainly be greeted with a legal challenge. The merits of any such claims would be debated in a courtroom, but the public-relations nightmare of perceived or alleged inequality is something any organization strives to avoid.
