The college athlete is not the one who needs to be reminded that he is a student. It is the universities that forgot: they are the ones that became so lucrative that they turned athletes into labor law case studies. Once you make that simple shift in thinking, the NCAA mess becomes easier to solve. It will take an act of Congress to fix it, you can be sure. But what needs to be regulated is the behavior of the schools, not the children.
The major universities that control the NCAA became so disengaged from campus behavior that they are now pushing, even begging, for antitrust protection in the face of an endless cycle of multimillion-dollar settlements and court rulings they caused with their chronic commercial abuses of copyright. the athletes. . Without a federal shield, they maintain, university athletics will be ungovernable. Good. Grant limited antitrust protection, but with caveats that force these powerful conference schools to stop behaving like strip miners. Drag them back into the realm of learning.
You probably feel like a cat in the wool when you think about the NCAA. He’s navigating four antitrust cases and no fewer than five legislative reform bills introduced by everyone from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). They all fail a little because they mistakenly focus on athlete behaviors rather than institutional ones. The heart of the NCAA’s problem is not athletes appropriating name, image and likeness (NIL) money despite the blind congressional testimony of former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who earned more than $120 million. of dollars during his mandate. What ails the NCAA is an institutional dynamic rather than a personal one.
The problem is a structural flaw and a contradiction: “College sports are the only industry in the United States where nonprofits engage in fierce zero-sum competition,” says the former athletic director of the University of California at Davis, Kevin Blue, in an open letter. to NCAA President Charlie Baker.
The goal of a nonprofit organization is to fulfill its mission, which in this case is education. But these nonprofits are locked in bitter competition. The Football Bowl Subdivision’s median school saw a 67 percent increase in revenue between 2006 and 2015, far outpacing any other so-called “non-profit” sector. But that only increased the pressure to “compete” financially. The enormous revenues collected by schools were diverted from any clear connection to actual education and the well-being of student-athletes. Instead, money flowed into increasingly absurd luxuries and into the pockets of coaches and athletic directors who could help “win.”
This huge divide between profits and mission is what really triggered the current crisis.
No one describes this dynamic better than Blue, a former Stanford varsity golfer who earned his MBA and PhD while teaching and working in the athletic departments at his alma mater and UC Davis. According to Blue, the problem is not a question of “flawed leadership” or “greed.” College presidents and athletic directors have simply acted as people do in such a competitive economy.
“From a behavioral economics perspective, financial decision-making in college sports has been perfectly rational within the structures of the current system,” he writes. They have pursued their own competitive interest, the natural result of what he calls a “Eat all you can kill system.”
Now that the institutional dynamics are precisely described, the outlines of a response become clearer. First, it should be clear that Power Five schools cannot be allowed to write the new rules because they will only continue their “kill-eat” behavior. This is obvious from their proposed settlement of the antitrust cases: They want to shift 60 percent of the schools’ portion of a $2.8 billion settlement onto the shoulders of smaller colleges and universities that weren’t even named in the lawsuits.
Alabama should have to eat its own rotten food, not shove it down Seton Hall’s throat.
Congress should reject any antitrust exemption until those terms are adjusted. When lawmakers craft limited antitrust protection, they should demand fundamental fixes to the messy and contradictory structure of the NCAA’s mission. Starting with this premise: “Extracurricular programs that develop student talent through competitions and performance events are educational programs led by expert teachers,” writes the Drake Group, an academic think tank that has been consulting with policymakers on sports. university students. The emphasis is mine.
Here’s a perfect example: Speaking of Saban, Congress could pass a bill stipulating that sports revenues must go to the direct benefit of athletes “in an amount equal to or greater than the aggregate compensation and benefits for coaches and the staff”.
This suggestion comes from the Drake Group and it is beautiful. Now you can cut the thread away from the jack. If Alabama wants to pay its football coach a ridiculous $11 million a year, then it should have to dedicate the same $11 million to education-related benefits for the athletes on the other side of the ledger. Do you want to restore reason and equity? That will do.
The cascade of common sense that emerges from this structural solution is amazing. It limits wage spending and discourages the worst kill-eat behaviors without being anti-competitive.
The NCAA is in the worst crisis of its 118 years of existence. But this is good news. Congress has the organization right where it wants it. Lawmakers have all the influence and should use it. Let’s first solve this institutional problem. The rest of the solutions will follow.
Keynote USA
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