And then there was one.
In the span of just 19 days, 67 out of the 68 teams in the 2014 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament have been eliminated. Despite its brevity the tournament has become firmly ingrained in the country’s cultural fabric since its inception in 1939. Its popularity — and notorious unpredictability — consistently spawns thousands of formal and informal bracket challenges, inspires millions of Americans to neglect work and generates intense interest from around the globe.
The NCAA, for its part, has been extraordinarily effective in transforming this interest into cold, hard cash. Of the $11 billion in annual revenue that the NCAA generates, approximately $740 million comes directly from its contracts with CBS and Turner Sports to broadcast the tournament.
As revenues have surged in recent years, pay for coaches and executives has followed in lock step. Pay for coaches across all sports, for example, has increased 26 percent over the past four years, while inflation has only driven prices up 7.7 percent over the same period.
While top NCAA executives and coaches now make well in excess of $1 million, the players who actually generate the NCAA’s revenue have not enjoyed a similar windfall. The NCAA’s laws of amateurism forbid student-athletes from receiving compensation for their talents while in college. While this policy has always generated some dissent, the NCAA has historically used the allure of amateurism to effectively insulate itself from charges of exploitation.
Two recent actions, however, have, for the first time, threatened the NCAA’s privileged position. A former star basketball player on UCLA’s 1995 men’s championship basketball team, Ed O’Bannon, is leading a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA for improperly using images of former college athletes for commercial purposes. And two weeks ago, in a groundbreaking decision, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Northwestern football players have the right to unionize on the grounds that they are employees of the university.
Are these lawsuits justified? Unsurprisingly, the NCAA and its supporters have argued all along that paying college athletes is misguided. After all, student-athletes are students first, and athletes only second. By facilitating the benefits of a solid education, the NCAA argues that it sets up its student-athletes for a long, productive post-collegiate career in the labor force. After all, as its commercials famously point out, most college athletes “go pro in something other than sports.”
These benefits, as it turns out, can be quite lucrative. At most schools, athletes are given free tuition, housing, food and access to quality medical care. Northwestern football players, for example, receive nearly $75,000 in tuition and other benefits annually.
The dirty little secret, however, is that the NCAA’s member institutions actually do a very poor job educating their student-athletes. While success in the classroom and in athletics are by no means mutually exclusive, with rigorous training schedules, frequent travel and an athletic culture that promotes winning over all else, it has become exceedingly difficult for student-athletes to keep up with their classmates academically.
A recent analysis by CNN estimated that only between 7 and 18 percent of student-athletes on revenue-generating teams at 21 public institutions can read at an elementary school level. Recent research of 183 football and basketball players at the University of North Carolina from 2004 to 2012 found that only 30 percent read at an eighth-grade level or higher.
Of course, much of the fault for these alarming statistics lies with America’s underperforming elementary, middle and high schools. However, if one of the NCAA’s prime justifications for withholding pay is the promise of a quality education, it is not unreasonable to hold it accountable for ensuring that its players leave college with the concrete, functional skills necessary to succeed in the workforce, regardless of their incoming abilities. By that standard, the NCAA’s own, it is clear that the association is currently failing abysmally.
Additionally, while the Northwestern scholarship is particularly generous, on average, a full Division I scholarship is worth only $25,000. While this is still a significant amount of money, it is often not enough to cover pocket money for players from disadvantaged backgrounds and is significantly less than the average American salary. Players in this year’s Final Four, for example, had to pay between $2,300 and $5,400 in additional annual academic costs that their scholarships did not cover. At a time when NCAA coaches and executives are making record amounts of money, this is particularly perplexing.
It isn’t hard to see a compromise here — athletes should, at a minimum, be provided with a small stipend to pay for the general academic and living expenses that are beyond their scholarships. In fact, the NCAA almost allowed its members to do this back in 2011, but ultimately decided to table the proposal after some of its members balked. This stipend should be indexed to inflation to ensure that student-athletes, especially those from less-advantaged backgrounds, are able to live an average college life.
Moreover, an independent body, free of oversight from the NCAA, should be charged with ensuring that colleges are actually adhering to their promises to educate their athletes. By stripping schools that fail to make sufficient academic progress of the ability to field athletic teams at all, and thus jeopardizing an important revenue stream for schools across the country, this regulatory body would likely spur universities to spend far more time monitoring and investing in the education of their student-athletes.
Free labor is fundamentally at odds with the goals of a free, capitalist society. Thus, defeat, whether through the O’Bannon lawsuit, the unionization movement at Northwestern, or some future legal action, is inevitable for the NCAA. For an organization that has shown a strong desire to protect its finances over the interests of its student-athletes in the past, there will likely be no better time than now to strike a settlement and limit any further damage to its privileged position.
Kunal Sindhu MD ’17 can be contacted at kunal_sindhu@brown.edu.
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