Millions of Americans tune in every year to the wild world of NCAA March Madness. Approximately 16 million viewers watched the most recent Elite Eight matchups, a record high for the round of eight games. The excitement is undeniable, the athletes masterful, and every game is unpredictable. March Madness is certainly an excellent source of entertainment, but as with all entertainment, the show inevitably comes to an end. When the final buzzer sounds in Indianapolis on April 6, another season of college basketball will draw to a close, and fall out of the collective American mind until March 2016. Underlying the random, volatile nature of March Madness, one can find a very deliberate exploitation of college athletes by the NCAA.
Bloomberg Business writers David Ingold and Adam Pierce recently published a piece detailing the breakdown of NCAA revenue in 2014. Of the $700 million that the NCAA received from the CBS and Turner Broadcasting TV contract, slated to continue until 2025, $498 million was given to Division I schools. This year, what is known as the “basketball fund” will be dispersed across all Division I schools in major conferences. The fund is comprised of almost $200 million, which has built up over the past six years. Depending on how a team’s conference has fared in the tournament over this period, they will receive some portion of this $200 million. It makes sense at this point to distribute some of this wealth to the individuals that are the centerpiece of the action each March, the players. As the NCAA grows in power and prominence in the United States it is important that we begin to actually reward players for the time they spend sweating, bleeding, and competing in the name of their university.
The traditional argument goes like this: “There’s no need to pay student-athletes because they are already receiving a free education.” Increasingly as of late, this logic is coming tumbling down at the highest levels of Division I competition. UNC History professor and learning specialist Mary Willingham recently published a book titled: “Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports.” In the book, Willingham, who worked at UNC Chapel Hill from 2003 to 2010, describes the institutionalized practice at UNC of enrolling athletes in pass-through classes designed to keep them academically eligible.
Willingham provided an anecdote of a class at UNC in an interview with NPR’s Robert Seigel on March 23. Willingham described a history class at UNC in which the professor held class once a week for three hours and then offered one final exam. Willingham claimed that it was widely known in the department that the professor of this class would only grade the answered questions on the test. If you felt like answering 11 out of 100 questions, only those 11 would be graded.
“The NCAA and its member institutions are promising these athletes a world-class education, and that’s not what they’re getting at all. Not even close,” said Willingham. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill went under investigation in 2011 for their academic dishonesty, and continue to face the repercussions of offering such classes to their student-athletes. Rashanda McCants, a former UNC women’s basketball player, filed a suit against the University for not providing “academically sound classes with legitimate educational instruction.”
McCants’ case also raises some disconcerting allegations against the NCAA. “Although the NCAA’s rules prohibit academic fraud, the NCAA knew of dozens of instances of academic fraud in its member schools’ athletic programs over the last century, and it nevertheless refused to implement adequate monitoring systems to detect and prevent these occurrences at its member institutions.”
The fraud uncovers a troubling treatment of student-athletes in the Division I system. In this moneymaking scheme, I’m not sure you can call it anything else, student-athletes are treated as worthless pieces of a machine. While athletes are essential to the success of the big-business machine that is the NCAA, they are not compensated for their role.
Especially in college basketball and football, student-athletes are critical marketing tools for universities. Large basketball and football programs at schools such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and UCLA are linchpins in the college’s mission of increasing applications, alumni donations, and ticket and merchandise sales. The student-athletes of these large Division I programs are kept faceless by the NCAA. Student-athletes are forbidden from capitalizing off their athletic success and creating a brand for themselves. Instead, universities sell jerseys emblazoned with school logos, and pocket 100 percent of the profit.
The decision by the NCAA to treat their athletes as faceless commodities has far-reaching consequences. As of 2013, according the NCAA the percentage of athletes that made it to the professional level in basketball and football was 1.2 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively. This leaves almost 99 percent of athletes leaving college to pursue a profession that does not involve playing their sport professionally. While I acknowledge that there are Division I institutions that provide an excellent education to their student-athletes, the majority are not preparing athletes for a future outside of athletics.
Steps such as offering Division I athletes stipends to help with living expenses are beginning to take hold, and will hopefully lead to a more equitable system in “big-business” college sports. The curtain behind the beautifully chaotic performance of March Madness is falling down, and changes are being made. The journey will take time, but eventually the hope is that the NCAA’s revenue-making machine will acknowledge its most essential component: the athletes themselves.