The Denouement of the NCAA

The NCAA is in full defense mode in this emerging push by many states to pass legislation allowing collegiate athletes to "benefit from their likeness". This entire issue is a quagmire of epic proportions. I am surprised it has not received more attention than it has. I have some thoughts on the subject but admittedly am not edified enough to form a real valid conclusion of a solution. This issue is going to get very ugly very quickly. We live in a world where celebrity carries disproportionate weight in public debates. When people like LeBron James come out strongly on one side of an argument, rightly or wrongly that carries force in the debate. He has done exactly that in this debate. I think generally, the NCAA has many legitimate detractors for various and sundry reasons. I am also inclined to agree with those who would aver that the current collegiate model for athletes has become somewhat outdated, at least in some aspects. But society through the ages has generally responded to change with a tension between evolution and revolution. When revolution wins out (by that I mean the major overhaul broad sweeping types of changes) we often throw out the baby with the bathwater. There is much about the collegiate model that I personally think is still appropriate while recognizing that some things probably need to evolve. Somewhere in the debate it seems to me that the fact that all scholarship athletes are receiving something of extremely great value already is being sort of categorically and cavalierly dismissed. I personally worked a 40 hour per week job while attending Kansas. If any of you purchased gas from the Amoco on 9th and Iowa between 1976 and 1980, I probably pumped your gas. The idea of free tuition was a dream. Not to mention tutors and any other of the number of benefits they (scholarship athletes) receive. Now this again is not to say that the system is not in need of changes. But to frame all of the arguments on a foundation of "these poor underprivileged athletes who are being taken advantage of by the university" is tiresome and disingenuous. I have closely known a number of scholarship athletes and I can tell you I would trade my college experience 100 times out of 100 with theirs.

As for the benefiting from the fruits of their labors or likeness, I have a story for that as well. In my senior year, one of my professors asked me to join his research project in the Kurata labs on west campus. I actually got to pay for that privilege. We arranged for it to be 1 hour credit per semester for which I had to pay. In addition to my 40 hours a week at Ray Eckert's Amoco station, I probably spent 10 hours per week working on this project. I ended up publishing a paper on this research. When I was invited to speak at several other universities, I had to get dispensation to use any of the data from my research from KU. They owned 100% of my research. Now to be sure, I benefited substantially from this both in the knowledge I gained but immediately in the addition to my resume' and the endorsement from my professor when seeking employment. It was a win win all the way. But the moral of the story is, it was the University and Chemical Engineering Department that provided the resources and opportunity for me to gain this experience. Had that not existed, all my enthusiasm and brainpower would have been useless. And since it was their resources, reputation and infrastructure, they owned 100% of the fruits of my labor. I always considered myself to be pretty fortunate to have had that opportunity rather than feeling like I was taken advantage of.

That story may not be a perfect analogy but it sort of goes to the point that the likeness of an individual player is far more greatly enhanced by his association with the university than vice versa. Certainly in a handful of cases the university gets the better end of the deal on those handful of truly transcendent athletes in our hyper social media society. But considering the significant benefits athletes are actually receiving now combined with the fact that it is the university that is the source of most of the value, it seems that placing all the benefit on the athlete is a little misguided.

Again, I am not opposed to changes and in some cases significant changes. I am not even opposed (nor for as of yet) to enhancing the benefits that athletes may receive. I am just more cautios in a revolution that throws the baby out with the bath water. There is much about collegiate athletics that is worth preserving.

Here is the latest story about the NCAA desperately clinging to relevance. --> NCAA

Yes, as part of the employment contract, the University of Kansas owned the rights to benefit (e.g., from any patents) to your professor's research. But they also paid your professor a lot of money in return. And also any royalties from the research would have been shared with him (professor usually cuts ¼ and his/her academic unit gets ¼). College athletes should get a share of the revenues they generate. The NCAA only allows athletes to have one kind of contract and it is very one-sided in favor of the university. The word for that is anti-trust. Besides top athletes are taking matters into their own hands. With Weisman's withdrawal from Memphis, it is now likely that the several top picks in the NBA draft will have eschewed college altogether. We lost a player to Australia.