Next week will be a big one for college sports fans. That’s when we will start to find out whether schools can continue to keep indentured servants — commonly referred to as “student-athletes.”
This world is about to change — a lot. And, as I’ve said before, it needs to.
College athletes who, like it or not, are almost always athletes first and students second, need to be paid for their often-hazardous duty in extracurricular activities.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is the plaintiff in a suit that is scheduled to begin Monday in Oakland, Calif. In the antitrust trial, former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon and other college athletes argue that players should be compensated when their images are used on products like video games.
The NCAA, of course, doesn’t want its schools to be forced to pay anything, despite the fact that they reap billions from kids who ostensibly give their prodigious talents away in exchange for free tuition (even though their grueling sports duties don’t allow many to attend enough classes to graduate), a dorm room and a shot at pro ball.
“That’s worth thousands to the students,” the defenders of the current system argue. “I wish my kid could get a deal like that.”
I’m a big sports fan. I enjoy college football and basketball more than I do the pros. And if I didn’t have a conscience, I would say that the current abusive system is just fine: it keeps ticket prices down and sometimes subsidizes other school activities.
But these so-called student-athletes enter college at 18. If their own families aren’t looking out for them, then other grown-ups and the courts should.
I say don’t just pay them for the use of their likeness, but also for the wear and tear on their bodies, the lower grade point average that’s a direct result of their three-a-day workouts and for the value they add to their schools.
I pulled up some numbers to put some perspective on this issue. Electronics Arts, the video-game maker, alone was paying the NCAA half a million dollars a year. EA has settled its part of the suit with the students.
Other revenue from college sports is astronomical. The Southeastern Conference, for instance, is distributing $292.8 million in revenue to its 14 institutions this year. That’s $3 million more each than last year.
In the Big 12 Conference, the revenue pool is $220.1 million — up a million per school over the year before.
The list goes on.
If someone could actually buy a college team, the most expensive one would be the University of Texas Longhorns, worth $139 million, according to Forbes. Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish are right behind.
The schools with the top 10 grossing revenues brought in $300 million more in 2013 than they did a decade earlier, according to statistics supplied by Aragorn Technologies.
Why shouldn’t these schools be doing well?
The NCAA has the perfect business model. It has a growing array of media outlets looking to distribute its product at ever-increasing prices, and free labor from kids whose visions of glory cloud the fact that they are risking their health in return for the right to fill an extra classroom seat that’s costing the school virtually nothing.
I’d like to think this was always my opinion, but I probably didn’t dwell on it much when I was in the stands to see the Rutgers Scarlet Knights football team upset No. 3 Louisville on Nov. 9, 2006. Or when Syracuse defeated the UConn Huskies basketball team in six overtime periods during the Big East Tournament in 2009.
That one didn’t end until 1:22 a.m. the next day, and my guess is not a single exhausted fan thought about whether any of the student-athletes might be AWOL for a test later that day.
My view definitely became a lot clearer on Oct. 17 in the Meadowlands when Rutgers’ Eric LeGrand was paralyzed in a football tackle against Army.
C’mon, these kids are in the sports business and are “working” for extremely profitable enterprises. So let’s quit the hypocrisy and pay them.
Go ahead, charge me a few extra bucks for my tickets if the NCAA is that desperate to maintain its profit margin.
You gotta love the French. Oh, wait, no you don’t.
Forget the skimpy food portions, the superior attitude and what they do to frogs. It’s the lack of gratitude that really gauls me.
Look, we appreciate the statue. It was a helluva gift.
But I wish the country’s leaders would think back a mere 70 years to when America helped save the nation from the wurst thing possible: an eternity of sauerbraten and bad haircuts.
President François Hollande’s senior ministers complained this week that its biggest bank, BNP Paribas, was facing a fine of more than $10 billion in a US probe for allegedly being a laundromat for the enemy: in this case Sudan, Iran and Syria.
This will hurt trade between our two countries, Hollande threatened. Wow. As if we couldn’t live without baguettes and croissants.
Next time France is in trouble, let them turn to Luxembourg for help.