Whether to Pay College Athletes

Transcription

1 NORTH CAROLINA DEPT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION/NC WISEOWL Title: Database: Whether to Pay College Athletes. By: Neuhauser, Alan, U.S. News Digital Weekly, 4/18/2014, Vol. 6, Issue 16 Business Source Complete Whether to Pay College Athletes Listen American Accent News Special Report NCAA players seek to change how they are compensated Trouble may be brewing for the NCAA. A high-profile ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, a giant antitrust lawsuit, provocative comments from a billionaire NBA owner, and one basketball team's all-freshmen March Madness starting lineup have together focused nationwide attention on two fundamental questions: What does it mean to be a high-profile student-athlete today? And what should the NCAA and professional sports leagues do about it? The answers could -- and many say should -- entirely upset how the NCAA works today. "This is serious," says Lee Igel, an associate professor and co-director of New York University's Sports and Society Program. "It strikes right at the foundation of the NCAA. What they need requires an entire rethinking of the purpose of the organization." For decades, students, parents, coaches, commentators and even pro athletes have assailed the NCAA for its convoluted and, at times, apparently contradictory rule-making, from penalizing players who sell their own autographs to temporarily barring a Marine Corps veteran from playing football last year for having joined a military-only recreational league while he was in the 1/6

2 service. Those decisions were all made in the name of "maintaining amateurism," a quality the NCAA insists "is crucial to preserving an academic environment in which acquiring a quality education is the first priority." In other words: no profiting off merchandise, no practicing with professional teams, no hiring of agents or private advisers and most certainly no salary. But with the evolution of outsized TV and video game contracts, sprawling memorabilia industries and other streams of big money swirling through college sports into the pockets of universities, coaches and athletic directors -- but not the young athletes who practice 50 to 60 hours a week and put their bodies and their brains at risk -- that distinction has become far harder to justify. "Sports have become bigger and bigger and moved away from the leisure side of things to a full-fledged unquestionable business," Igel says. The NCAA, however, hasn't changed with the times. That fact was brought home in November and again in February, when federal judges refused to dismiss an antitrust lawsuit brought against the NCAA by former NBA player and UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon, former Nebraska quarterback Sam Keller and other current and former college athletes. O'Bannon filed the suit in 2009 on behalf of Division I football and men's basketball players, arguing that college athletes, upon graduation, should be entitled to compensation anytime their images are used for commercial purposes. Video game company Electronic Arts and branding firm The Collegiate Licensing Company, previously two of the defendants in the suit, settled with O'Bannon in September, agreeing to pay damages to the more than 100,000 athletes that were featured in EA's popular NCAA basketball and football games. Meanwhile, the suit against the NCAA is pressing forward. "We give 96 percent of NCAA revenue directly back to schools (and student-athletes) through a variety of programs," the NCAA said in a statement. "While improvements need to be made, we do not need to completely throw away a system that has helped literally millions of students over the past decade alone attend college." It's hardly the first suit brought against the NCAA on behalf of players, yet "it was important because it was brought in an area of law that hadn't been addressed: the right of publicity," says attorney Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law and a legal analyst for Sports Illustrated. "That the NCAA was not able to have this case dismissed gave other attorneys ideas." In fact, roughly two months after the first judge's ruling last fall, Northwestern University quarterback Kain Colter filed a petition with the NLRB, arguing that the demands of playing football kept him from pursuing his dream of becoming an orthopedic surgeon -- a career that would have required him to follow an intense pre-med track at the school. Football players who receive athletic 2/6

3 scholarships, he asserted, should be considered employees and therefore allowed to unionize. Last month, the director of the NLRB's Chicago regional office agreed, finding: -- For their work, which was playing football, Northwestern football players received compensation in the form of scholarships. -- They could also lose that compensation by violating team rules and standards. -- Those rules and standards were different than those for other students. -- They were enforced by supervisors (the team's coaches). -- The players signed contracts stipulating what they must do to keep their compensation. All this was perhaps best encapsulated in the athletes' schedules: 50 to 60 hours a week of practices, workouts and other "football duties" during a one-month training camp, and then another 40 to 50 hours a week during the three- to four-month football season. "Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies," the NLRB ruling said. The decision was limited in scope, applying only to scholarship football players at Northwestern. Also, the university was expected to appeal the ruling to the full five-member NLRB in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, the implications were huge. "We're definitely seeing a breakdown in the traditional amateur status of college athletes," says Robert Boland, academic chair and professor of sports management at New York University School of Law and an attorney who has represented or consulted for coaches, management personnel and collegiate conferences. "I think we're seeing the end times of that." Not only have college sports seen an influx of big money, but the demographics of who attends college and, by extension, who pursues elite-level college athletics have also undergone a radical shift. "The people who are receiving scholarships in the main revenue sports are very different from the people who received them 30 years ago," Boland says. "It's less of a cross section. They're more down the economic ladder and more disenfranchised than others." Income, in other words, matters more for more athletes than it once did. "The athletes, particularly the high-level Division I athletes, are not getting the same educational benefit" as those who attended school 20 to 30 years ago, Boland says. That fact -- a perennial sports page and "SportsCenter" talking point -- was once again brought to searing light when a former tutor at the University of North Carolina told ESPN recently that athletes there were encouraged to sign up for so-called paper classes 3/6

4 -- independent study courses involving no work other than a single paper at the end of the semester. One jock turned in a 146- word, error-prone essay on civil rights icon Rosa Parks. The student's grade for the class: an A-. This kind of alleged academic fraud and corruption is familiar to anyone who's spent any time listening to sports radio. Universities have frequently been accused of coddling their elite athletes and recruiting players who lack the skills or preparation to handle college-level work. But the professional leagues are also to blame, experts say -- most glaringly the NBA and its so-called oneand-done-rule. Instituted in 2005 after Andrew Bynum became the youngest player ever to enter the NBA draft at age 17 and two years after LeBron James also entered the draft straight out of high school, the rule requires players to wait until they are at least 19 years old and also one year past their high school graduation date before signing with a team. Team owners called for the rules change, arguing in "elevated moral rhetoric about how important it was for kids to go to college," says Smith College economics professor and former NBA Players Association consultant Andrew Zimbalist. But the restriction has benefited everyone but the players. "There are hard dollars-and-cents reasons. I don't think any of it has to do with appropriate treatment of teenagers or young basketball players," says Zimbalist, who was also a consultant to the NFL, NHL and MLB players associations. "Colleges obviously like it because they have these potential future stars playing on their courts, and it creates interest in their game." The NBA, meanwhile, gets what amounts to a free minor league system. Plus, when it comes time to sign new players, teams are bringing aboard premade stars who already have a nationwide following, which in turn drives ticket and merchandise sales. Moreover, it didn't take long for one coach to exploit the one-and-done rule and reach its most logical -- and most cynical -- conclusion. John Calipari, head coach of basketball powerhouse the University of Kentucky, has fielded teams made up almost entirely of freshmen and sophomores in each of his past three seasons at the school. This season, in fact, his starting lineup was composed entirely of freshmen. And it worked. Two out of three times, including this latest championship tournament, he's reached the Final Four. And yet few of his players have returned for the next season; many entered the NBA draft instead. "I don't think anybody quite anticipated how manipulated the system would be," says Zimbalist. "We all knew it would be manipulated, but it's been really manipulated by Calipari: 'Come play for me, we'll get to the Final Four or Elite Eight, you'll get training and experience and notoriety, and I'll let you go after that one year. Is it a good system? No, it's an idiotic system," he says. 4/6

5 Speaking at a press conference in February in New Orleans, newly minted NBA Commissioner Adam Silver told reporters he'd seek to increase the age limit to 20 years old. "It is my belief that if players have an opportunity to mature as players and as people for a longer amount of time before they come into the league, it will lead to a better league," he said. His proposal would bring the NBA more closely in line with the NFL, which requires players to have been out of high school for three years. (The NHL, which benefits from a thriving junior league and minor league system, only requires players to be 18 or 19 years old, depending on when their birthdays occur.) Outside experts, though, have urged Silver to consider the model used by MLB, which gives players the choice of either going straight from high school to MLB (or to the minor leagues), while forfeiting their NCAA eligibility, or going from high school to college and then being barred from the pros for three years. "It's generally considered a fair trade-off," says UNH's McCann. "It protects college baseball because they know that the players who choose college will stay, so it gives them certainty over their roster and player development. And it gives room to the MLB marketplace." He and others -- including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban -- also have called on the NBA to build a more viable farm system by expanding its Development League. Colleges, they argue, should not be a de facto minor league system. "Can't we say, 'You want to work in the NBA? Come play in our minor league system, and in that minor league system, we'll develop and evaluate your basketball skills, and we will also help you with your life skills,'" says David Hollander, clinical assistant professor at NYU's Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management. Hollander points out that the U.S. remains the only nation in the world with an athletic system so rooted in colleges. "It's a structural anomaly. They don't have it in Europe; that's not how they developed their best football players." Zimbalist takes a different view. He calls for scrapping most age requirements altogether. "There's no reason why some 17- or 18-year-old kid who has no educational inclination, who has incomplete and inadequate intellectual preparation to do college work" should be told they have to go to college, he says. "For goodness' sake, if we want to promote the upward mobility of lowincome children, the way to do that is to go to their high schools and talk to their teachers and find the most intellectually gifted students and give them college scholarships. You don't give it to people who won't take advantage of a college education." By contrast, NYU's Boland is not ready to give up on what he maintains is the "transformative power of education" and its relationship with college sports and athletes. For all but the most successful pro athletes, he contends, a college education still has true value, and it can mean the difference between a successful post-sports career and poverty. "As someone who's represented athletes post-college in the NFL and who are now facing the biggest issue in retirement -- that they're not skilled and don't have the skills for a career -- education might be the most important issue," Boland says. 5/6

6 He suggested two paths: Allow college athletes who received athletic scholarships but left early to return and complete their educations for free or at a discount; and permit athletes to send family members to college for the same scholarship that they themselves received." While not opposed to offering athletes stipends on top of their scholarships, Boland notes these additional opportunities would bring greater equality to the scholarship system, ensure that student-athletes still remain students and capitalize on what schools do best: providing education. "The third-string left guard who's not a starter, how does he take [away] from that [payment] equation? But if he wants to go back and get a law degree when he's done, his value returning may one day be the same as that starting quarterback," he says. "That's my modest proposal: Schools should give school." The Connecticut Huskies, the 2014 NCAA men's basketball champions ~~~~~~~~ By Alan Neuhauser Copyright 2014 the U.S. News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved. Mobile Site iphone and Android apps EBSCO Support Site Privacy Policy Terms of Use Copyright 2014 EBSCO Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. 6/6