I first started thinking about this last Sunday after watching the entertaining Fab Five documentary on ESPN. Since both my wife and I graduated from University of Michigan, we HAD to catch that movie, and it didn't disappoint. The Fab Five from Michigan are the first college basketball team I remember watching when I was younger, so it brought back loads of memories. Also, it made me really thankful that players like Chris Webber and Jalen Rose didn't play in my conference - if CWebb had stuffed me, gone coast-to-coast, and thunderdunked on my team in 8th grade like they showed in one clip, I may have given up sports altogether! For any young basketball fan growing up in the early 90's, the Fab Five were the coolest thing in town - the crazy dunks, the cockiness, and MOST especially, the long shorts!! Four years after the Fab Five were finished, our 8th grade basketball team staged our own rebellion against the tiny, tight, crotch-hugging polyester uniform shorts and bought our own shorts for that year. And like the Fab Five, they had to be baggy! We may have overdone it a little - I remember some guys on the team rolling up their shorts 5-6 times and STILL having them come halfway down their calves. (BTW - I still have those exact shorts, and they fit me perfectly now 14 years and at least 80 pounds later. Kinda scary!) You can actually see me in those shorts after our end-of-season 8th grade tournament in the picture below - I'm #21. Those shorts made us feel invincible - we felt like we were like the Fab Five and were the coolest thing in town.
 |
| Mom must have tried to time this so that not a single person in the picture was looking at the camera with their eyes open. |
Of course, talking about the famous baggy shorts is a perfect segue into the more serious issues that will perpetually be linked to the Fab Five, and that's how money fits into the collegiate landscape. I thought that the ESPN documentary did a great job of explaining how the players felt, as the marketing machine used their image (sometimes literally, in the cartoon caricatures printed on T-shirts) to sell millions of dollars of merchandise, but they felt as if none of that made its way back to their pockets. Almost 20 years later, and we're still facing the same issues - the recent Ohio State football suspensions the latest in a long line of "improper benefits" scandals in college sports. My wife and I have actually argued about this many times, and it's a favorite topic for sports pundits, since they can spew venom at a seemingly corrupt (and oftentimes, corrupt in truth) system and go on long diatribes about how schools and the NCAA are using the poor student-athletes. It seems like such a simple argument - major college sports generate major revenue, yet the players don't seem to see any of that (more on that in a minute).
The most visible pieces of the NCAA machine certainly give the appearance of professional sports - the big money of the BCS, the huge broadcasting contracts for the NCAA Tourney, the revenue streams of the Big Ten Network, etc, and the size of the coaching contracts for these big money enterprises certainly seem to support that. It does seem hard to accept that college coaches can be paid millions a year (sometimes just in their buyouts when they get fired!), yet can't give their players $50 for a Christmas present to take their girlfriends out for a nice dinner. For some of the profitable sports programs, the annual income per athlete can work out to over a million dollars a year AFTER the expenses, so why shouldn't the athletes be given a piece of that pie?
However, I don't think you can break it down QUITE so simply. First of all, the major thing that most people forget is that student-athletes DO get paid - and sometimes quite handsomely. My last year at the University of Michigan, my out-of-state graduate tuition was over $30,000 a year - had I been on an athletic scholarship (I wish!), that would have been paid for, more or less (A word of warning - this is a blog post, not a journalistic article. I'm not gonna research the exact numbers involved, but they're mostly irrelevant to the point I'm making. And if they DO contradict that argument, I'll just ignore them!). There are few jobs that you can get at 19 directly out of high school that make the kind of money. However, the student-athlete doesn't actually SEE most of that money - it's just routed through the Bursar's office in their account - so to them, it seems like they're basically living on nothing for their efforts. The Fab Five documentary showed how they drove beat-up cars and had to pool their money together to buy a videogame system. So, as too often happens, these young athletes end up accepting money, goods, services or other "improper benefits" from the legion of shady characters that swirl around them. The athletes are mostly young men (who, in my personal experience, don't always tend to make the greatest long-term decisions), since the "money" sports are men's bball and football, but I would imagine the top women's players in some sports may have been exposed to the same temptations.
Despite the appearances to the individual athletes in these positions, however, they ARE getting paid. They also get significant benefits outside of the sheer money. They are allowed to train at top-notch athletic facilities under skilled supervision and coaching, which should help them improve their games and make them more marketable to the pro leagues. They also get to compete on a grand stage - their colleges and universities built the stadiums and arenas they get to play in, create demand due to the student and alumni fan base, and negotiate the lucrative TV and merchandising deals. All of these things are done by the institution at no charge to the student-athletes - it's like free advertising and free rent for a business. And that's not even touching on the college education that's a part of the package (provided the athletes actually GO to their classes). As anyone who's had to look for a job knows, having a college degree is a necessity for many openings now, and a college graduate will generally earn more than someone without a bachelor's degree. So let's not pretend that college athletes are akin to forced labor.
The other major reality of the situation is that only a TINY fraction of NCAA sports programs actually bring in significant dollars, or even break even. Generally, men's basketball and football are the revenue sports (with some exceptions - at my other Alma Mater, the University of Minnesota, men's hockey might be more profitable), but even among the "major" college programs in those sports, most do not break even each year. There are a huge number of expenses - player scholarships, athletic facilities, those huge coaching contracts I mentioned, equipment, etc. And that's not even to mention all of the other sports, who generally get ignored by most of the population and need the revenue from the few profitable sports to pay the bills. This is probably the most significant argument against paying the student-athletes, even in the "profit" sports, and it's a two-fold argument: 1) most collegiate sports programs have no money to give out and 2) if you only give out money to the few profitable programs, how is that fair to the rest? Are we saying that if I buy a Denard Robinson jersey and he should get $5 of that, should a Michigan tennis player get $2 if I buy a tennis T-shirt? Quite simply, there is no way to make the math add up - even though there are seemingly gargantuan amounts of money on the table, there is just not enough left over to divvy up and give more to the student-athletes.
But I have been pondering if there isn't another solution to this problem. The primary argument that you hear is that players (like the Fab Five) who ARE big draws and create revenue for the universities are still forced to foot many of the day-to-day bills and expenses that are part of being young and in college (such as frat party door charges, among others). These are the players who have the vultures circling them, looking to make a connection and friendship now while the young athletes are seemingly in need, so that they will reap the rewards down the road when the hit the jackpot in the pros. When the details of most improper benefits cases come out, I'm constantly surprised at how little actual money is involved (in a relative sense, of course): the Ohio State players mentioned earlier got a few hundred or thousand bucks each, A.J. Green of Georgia sold his jersey for a relatively small sum, Jalen Rose admitted in Fab Five that he received a sum total of "a few thousand dollars" during his 3 years at Michigan. It's not like these kids need millions of dollars to make them happy - they probably just want a PS3 or a sandwich at the local burger joint.
So, given those realities, why not let the athletes decide where their scholarship money is spent? As I mentioned earlier, out-of-state tuition can be on the order of $30,000 a year - spread out monthly, that's over $2,000 a month, which would be substantial given the amounts usually mentioned in these scandals. Under my proposal, I would allow a student athlete to receive his scholarship either as a credit on tuition or a stipend. This way, for those that would choose to do so, they could get their precious spending money now and take out student loans (like most of the rest of the student body) to cover tuition and educational expenses. For those athletes that go on to make it to the pros, that piddly $100,000 or so in student loan debt could just be deducted from their first paycheck.
OK, while that may be a bit of an exaggeration, the basic concept seems to address all of the problems with the situation. The athletes could choose to see their money up front (which may or may not be a sound financial decision for them, but they have the fundamental right to make bad decisions like we all do), which would help them not feel so exploited and also minimize the temptation of accepting money under the table. Universities and the NCAA wouldn't have to pay any more money than is already done - the stipend would be capped at the amount of a comparable standard scholarship. This still puts athletes from all sports on the same, fair playing field - each athlete would have the same choice, whether their sport makes money or not. For those athletes from poor economic circumstances, they could immediately get some money to their family and might feel less pressure to jump to the pros before they are ready, which usually results in those persons washing out of the pros, and maybe they'd have more incentive to stay in school and finish their degrees. The whole process would be more transparent to the athletes - instead of vague wording of a "full scholarship", the schools would be offering a concrete dollar amount.
Of course, one obvious weakness to this is how do scholarships at different schools compare to each other. If an athlete could get $30,000 from Florida vs. $5,000 from Hampton University, that's gonna be a problem. For this to work, the stipend amount would have to be universal across all schools, and I don't believe that's currently how the money situation works (although I have no actual evidence or research either way). Maybe a certain dollar amount only could be converted to stipend (say $5,000 a year just to have a number), which would have to be less than the cash value of the lowest scholarship for all schools. Additionally, I fully recognize that lots of kids who probably should not take the money as a stipend would do so, and then turn around and squander that money on bling and electronics and cars, etc. It would not be in their best interests to do so, but I know that looking back on my own financial decisions from that age, I would do several things differently now myself - that does not mean that the student athletes should not be given that choice.
Anyways, something to think about. If anyone actually does read this blog (not likely, but possible), I'd be interested to hear your opinion. Do you think this would work? There are probably other glaring holes I missed, especially logistically since I know next to nothing about how athletic scholarships work, and I'd be happy get informed.
And as far as that group of exploited young men known as the Fab Five? It seems like things worked out financially for them in the end, too.
What a well-reasoned argument that I may or may not have helped you craft at some point...I think it could be the start of a solution!
ReplyDelete