Great piece on the NCAA and amateurism

[Saintsfan]

Yesterday, Taylor Branch, the author of The Atlantic Monthly article was on the PBS NewsHour last night. A transcript is provided with the video.

I found the part where Taylor Branch said the Olympics moved from being amateur to professional interesting. I think I am right in saying that athletes don't get paid for appearing at the Olympics, although they can be professionals and have been paid. I wonder if something like that could apply to college sports- They couldn't get a wage for playing but could benefit from endorsements etc. Add that into a system of greater rigour over academic grades and you might get a more workable situation within the current NCAA system.

[dfwabel]

Yesterday, Taylor Branch, the author of The Atlantic Monthly article was on the PBS NewsHour last night. A transcript is provided with the video.

I found the part where Taylor Branch said the Olympics moved from being amateur to professional interesting. I think I am right in saying that athletes don't get paid for appearing at the Olympics, although they can be professionals and have been paid. I wonder if something like that could apply to college sports- They couldn't get a wage for playing but could benefit from endorsements etc. Add that into a system of greater rigour over academic grades and you might get a more workable situation within the current NCAA system.

The NCAA ruled against Jeremy Bloom in 2004. He was prohibited from playing at Colorado while receiving endorsement money from his skiing career and was two different sports.

[Saintsfan]

Yesterday, Taylor Branch, the author of The Atlantic Monthly article was on the PBS NewsHour last night. A transcript is provided with the video.

I found the part where Taylor Branch said the Olympics moved from being amateur to professional interesting. I think I am right in saying that athletes don't get paid for appearing at the Olympics, although they can be professionals and have been paid. I wonder if something like that could apply to college sports- They couldn't get a wage for playing but could benefit from endorsements etc. Add that into a system of greater rigour over academic grades and you might get a more workable situation within the current NCAA system.

The NCAA ruled against Jeremy Bloom in 2004. He was prohibited from playing at Colorado while receiving endorsement money from his skiing career and was two different sports.

So it wouldn't be hard for the NCAA to overturn that and allow players to get money from endorsements, it would allow elite level players the chance to benefit without knocking the applecart over completely, and would mean players would need to maintain academic standards. Do it NCAA, do it!

[Gothamite]

No, please don't.

It would provide too easy an opening for boosters to funnel money to players.

[Jigga]

No, please don't.

It would provide too easy an opening for boosters to funnel money to players.

Based on what's become of big time college athletics, I'm failing to see how this is a bad thing anymore, honestly.

If the players are going to be paid, it should be the boosters, hangers on and wannabees doing the paying, not the institutions. To hell with the "cost of attendance" or whatever, this is a completely different landscape now. These schools and conferences are running amok and falling all over themselves grabbing every loose nickel they can. It's time to end this holier-than-thou, protect the amateurism/integrity of the student-athlete charade. If Phil Knight, Kevin Plank, T. Boone Pickens, Sherwood Blount, Nevin Shapiro, Robert DiGeronimo, and so on want to give these kids money to play football and basketball, the last people that should be shouting no are NCAA officials and university presidents perched up in their ivory towers littered with huge stacks of money, while talking out of both sides of their mouths.

[Saintsfan]

Funnellers' money would be worthless to a top college guy if they have a multi million dollar endorsement from Nike, or whoever. It might get the money college guys get out into the open however, and make the system at least a bit more open.

The other stipulation I might put in there is that players receive a stipend from the contract and get the rest of the contract when they graduate, or as a regular payment after they graduate, just to avoid giving young students stupid amounts of money!

[DCDuck]

The other stipulation I might put in there is that players receive a stipend from the contract and get the rest of the contract when they graduate, or as a regular payment after they graduate, just to avoid giving young students stupid amounts of money!

Delaying the inevitable. It's not like those kids take fiscal management classes when they get to campus.

[The_Admiral]

This blog entry says it well:

http://www.mrdestructo.com/2011/09/scholarships-and-compensation.html

Unfortunately for these people, paying college athletes is now a subject on the table, and it's not going to come off. Consequently, what these critics need to do, will do and have already done, is shift their tactics opposing the payment of athletes to convincing everyone else that college athletes are already being paid. This is nothing new; simultaneously adopting two contradictory conclusions has always lain at the heart of disingenuously championing amateurism. Not only is it morally hideous to compensate college athletes and tarnish the pure spiritual heartiness of the turf, they argue, it's also irrelevant, because we're already paying them with scholarships.

It's an approach you can see from message board comments to a Sally Jenkins column in The Washington Post. Jenkins is obviously no racist ? and many board commenters aren't either ?but both employ the same resolution. After beginning the column with what appears to be an army of straw men in search of a leader, Jenkins confronts the problem of compensation, creates a false equivalency between player value and scholarship value, and everything's settled. Even if there were a problem, the argument goes, it's already been resolved anyway.

Such thinking instantly absolves the status quo of error because its very selfness already contains its own rescue. This kind of thinking perfectly accommodates those resistant to change, regardless of motive, because it allows them to seek correction of a structurally flawed system by applying the system to itself. It's the sort of string of broken tautologies that only an Objectivist would love: "We can fix how A is B by using A is A, because A is A."

That said, concluding that athletes are already satisfactorily compensated merely superimposes the large flaws of the system on three already flawed conditions.

1. "THEY'RE GETTING A FREE EDUCATION!"

Feel free to insert here all the jokes you want about how "only someone with a BA in General Studies from a massive state school would see any value in a BA in General Studies from a massive state school." Leaving cynicism and ugly generalities aside, there are multiple reasons to see athletes' degrees as valueless. First, as people who only have BAs can tell you, oftentimes only having a BA won't do you much good in the job market. Worse, with negative expectations of an athlete's intelligence and involvement in earning his own degree, he's just as apt to be hired for being a former athlete as he is for being someone with a BA. If the assumption is that athletes get a free ride and cheat their way through college (and that's a widely held assumption), they will be hired on the basis of what they've earned on the field or court, not what benevolent college administrations have bestowed on them.

Second, for all the talk of rewarding these kids with a free education, there's ample evidence that they're strongly dissuaded from actually taking advantage of it. One can't credibly defend the spirit of amateurism and intellectual exploration when it's an open secret that student athletes are, in order of priority, expected to be athlete-students. Complementing this academic disdain are the other open secrets: that teachers are expected to pad grades; that "tutors" write athletes' papers, and that every opportunity will be taken to bend or break rules to help athletes meet minimum requirements so they can maintain minimal academic attendance and attention.

With coaches threatening to cut them the next semester or next year, with people willing to do work for them, student athletes have little incentive to actually make something of their education and every incentive to avoid it. They'd be stupid not to let the tutors do the work, so they can double down on workouts and playbook study. How, then, do you compensate someone with something they're actively discouraged or implicitly turned away from using, something that may ultimately have little utility without a graduate degree, in a market where their athlete status might be of greater significance in hiring anyway?

2. SCHOLARSHIPS OFFER AN UTTERLY SCREWHEADED CONCEPTION OF MARKET VALUE.

Given that a lot of college football fans seem to skew conservative or at least adopt conservative attitudes of merit and personal achievement, at least within the sports themselves, it's bizarre how willing so many are to create a false equivalency between scholarship value and market value. That misappraisal seems doubly troubling given that there are so many historical examples that illustrate the other side of these poor valuations: career mediocrities given scholarships no different from those given NFL-bound superstars.

The same country that produces a veneration for exploiting one's talents for the absolute top available dollar in this case believes that anywhere from $60,000-$120,000 disbursed over four years is equivalent to an athlete's product and marketing value that could be in the millions per year. The same people who screech that socialized medicine would never work because no doctor would work in a government monopoly that paid them six figures instead of seven simultaneously totally embrace a sports monopoly that regularly under-compensates thousands of workers by orders of magnitude. Not only that, but they believe this is a morally superior system because state-sponsored equal disbursement preserves workers from the tainting hands of capitalism. Go figure. That this arrangement shows no familiarity with a labor theory of value and primarily greatly enriches comfortably seated administrators at the expense of thousands of poor people and minorities is at least politically consistent but no less ugly.

3. NAME ANOTHER SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM THAT WILL ACTIVELY DESTROY PEOPLE.

First of all, full scholarships can't present an adequate form of compensation when schools already give full academic scholarships to students whose activities will only supplement or improve their education. Say what you will about the value of a full ride as part of the school debate team, but spending hours each day researching current events only buttresses the knowledge of debaters, who tend to pursue public policy degrees. Athletic scholarships, on the other hand, commit students to hours of physical activity that leave them exhausted and distracted and whose knowledge and mastery frequently has no applicable academic value.

All that takes a backseat, however, to the second problem, which is that no academic scholarships actively endanger students via their use. Certainly risk attends any activity, but there is no inherent severe risk to, say, pursuing a specialty in radiology. An aspiring radiology tech doesn't enter school with the knowledge that it is very likely he could leave it permanently sterile or riddled with cancer. Studying history doesn't carry the potential to never walk without pain again, never walk normally again or simply never walk again.

Given our increasing knowledge of how even the most rudimentary football action ? the opposing lines colliding after the snap ? can cause lifelong brain and orthopedic trauma, resulting in depression, suicide and permanent disability, there is no credible argument for a full scholarship offering athletes adequate compensation. When their fellow students have access to the same level of compensation without the stresses, exhaustion, almost inevitable permanent damage and the ever-present possibility that even a conventional play can paralyze or kill them, full scholarships are neither just nor sufficient.

***

These three inequalities, of opportunity, earning and health, give the lie to the notion that college athletes are already being paid, but they overlook the larger, compounding problem: that the system itself exacerbates these inequalities. The "scholarships are enough" argument of Jenkins and others relies on a theoretical college environment, where all other things are equal, where conditions are fairly maintained, and the engines of student sports are overseen by the wise, attentive and impartial.

. . .

Solving the compensation problem in the NCAA by expecting it to clean house and enforce its standards while relying on scholarships alone is an exercise in fatuity and disingenuousness. The current system is unjust in terms of educational priorities, distribution of profits and the increased physical risk to students. Asking it to police itself to run "optimally" enshrines economic injustice as a best outcome. Worse, it relies on fortifying a current structure that, at its most productive, has no interest in effectively regulating itself, whose members have masterfully broken it to their greatest advantage.

[Gothamite]

Pretty funny, that author accusing others of employing straw men.