Last week, I sat in MacMillan 117, listening to a lecture I’d heard before. It was much like any lecture at Brown, except the lecturer was an administrator, not a professor, and no one was taking notes. I was attending the annual compliance meeting for all of Brown’s student-athletes, an hour-long meeting that is as boring as it sounds. The focus of the talk is compliance with Brown’s and the NCAA’s eligibility restrictions. Essentially, watch your step.
Over the past few years, more and more people have begun to question the practices of the NCAA. According to an article in the Huffington Post, the NCAA generated $989 million in revenue in 2014, mostly in television and marketing rights fees. This is a remarkable figure, especially when you consider that its most important employees are unpaid college athletes. It’s numbers like these that have athletes and fans across the country clamoring for student-athletes to be compensated for their work. The argument for compensation tends to center on the performance of big-time athletes at major sports programs. A recent article in the Washington Post, for instance, calculated that Jahlil Okafor, who led Duke basketball to a championship in April, generated about $3.3 million for the school in his one year there. He saw none of that money.
In my mind, however, there is a bigger issue with the NCAA’s commitment to amateurism, and it lies with the NCAA’s treatment of all its student-athletes, not just the stars. That the NCAA has the sole right to profit on a collegiate player’s athletic ability or reputation is accepted simply because it is deeply entrenched in the popular conception of amateurism, which has existed for some time. The authority of the NCAA over student-athletes, however, extends far beyond that of any other institution involving college students. Imagine, for example, that a writer for a college newspaper was restricted from providing writing help or publishing articles in another newspaper, or that a student with a perfect SAT score was barred from using this ability to make money tutoring for the test. The NCAA exercises a level of control over student’s lives that is unique and unmatched. What’s more, it operates as a blatant monopoly in collegiate sports, depriving athletes of their market value and of the compensation they could earn on their own as a result of their skills.
What the NCAA has done is effectively take away every right of a student-athlete to profit or benefit in any way from his or her athletics reputation, or even the network that being a collegiate athlete has afforded him or her. The language used to discuss such measures is almost comical. Last year’s Brown University Student-Athlete Handbook states that, though a student-athlete can establish their own business, “there must be no promotion whatsoever by the student-athlete or mention of the student-athlete at all.” Examples of impermissible behavior that the handbook cites are “using your Brown email address on the contact page of the company website” and “send(ing) an email to coaches, staff, teammates or friends to let them know that you are in business of some sort.” Athletes are not permitted to start a sports clinic, endorse products or accrue any sort of benefit from their athletic skill, reputation and expertise. The purpose of this is “preserving an academic environment in which acquiring a quality education is the first priority,” according to the NCAA website. At first this argument seems valid, especially at Ivy League schools like Brown that make it clear that academics always come first. But the NCAA’s policies are absurd when you consider that the very things that student-athletes are forbidden from doing, such as profiting off of their name or likeness, are exactly what the NCAA does in licensing such things as college sport video games. What’s more, the “academic environment” argument fails to explain many of the NCAA’s restrictions. For example, why are two Divison I soccer players not allowed to use their athletic reputations and abilities to run a soccer clinic in the summer when school is not in session? The reality of the situation is that the NCAA’s restrictions go far beyond what would be necessary to ensure that academics remain the first priority by not allowing student-athletes to monetize their athletic ability and Division I experience in the way any other college student can monetize their abilities and experiences. Despite its claims, the NCAA’s intentions are clear: You focus on your school work. We’ll worry about the money.
Forget about the star athletes who earn their universities millions, forget about the NCAA’s nearly $1 billion in revenue and forget about player unions. I believe that the NCAA needs to take a hard look at how its policies affect the little guys — the athletes that will never sign a professional sports contract or even earn a full-ride scholarship. The debate over whether players should be paid for their on-field performance rages on, but the NCAA’s restrictions on an athlete’s ability to make money off the field are an absurd and hypocritical stance for an institution that derives all its revenue from unpaid college students.
I hope this article isn’t an NCAA violation.
Nicholas Esemplare ’18 is a double concentrator in English and economics.
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