The Big Ten, one of the five power conferences of the NCAA, recently announced that all its member institutions would guarantee athletic scholarships for all four years that an athlete attends college. This is a drastic step toward reaffirming the importance of academics in the collegiate model of athletics, and the conference should be applauded for its decision to run with the new degree of autonomy granted to it by the governing forces of the NCAA.
The Big Ten is absolutely correct to give these athletes the opportunity to complete their education if they decide to return to school after leaving early for any “bona fide reason,” as Big Ten Associate Commissioner for Compliance Chad Hawley put it, including potential efforts to join the professional ranks of a given sport.
This scholarship reform deserves plaudits, both for the good it does and for highlighting some of the fundamental failings of the NCAA’s current system. These failings are centered on a single reality: How, after more than a century of existence, has a national organization dedicated to the creation of scholar-athletes not considered it worthwhile to create a scholarship system that actually keeps athletes in college? The recent reform has laid bare this stark reality by highlighting the vast distance between the NCAA’s ideals and the way those ideals have actually been carried out.
In short, by putting some actual bite behind its bark, the Big Ten has illustrated that the NCAA has increasingly done the exact opposite. And that is no longer an acceptable reality. Before the NCAA can begin to honestly address the litany of other issues that plague it — questions of what amateurism entails in this era and more concrete things like player safety — it needs to rededicate itself to its core values, namely “the pursuit of excellence in both academics and athletics.”
The NCAA is incredibly fortunate that the Big Ten has already laid the groundwork for scholarship reform. If it chooses to adopt guaranteed scholarships across all Division I sports, then the NCAA will demonstrate that it is a body willing and able to institute needed reform. This sort of scholarship reform is not a panacea for all the issues in college sports, but it would solidify the legitimacy of the NCAA as an effective governing body. And most importantly, these reforms would define the NCAA as a bureaucracy that does not always stoop to its own greed at the expense of the values it holds dear.
While the NCAA could potentially do some good for football and other sports, it must also begin to address issues within its own backyard, especially because they are endemic and systematic. During the University of Connecticut’s run to the NCAA National Championship for men’s basketball in the spring, Shabazz Napier, the team’s star player, publicly decried the fact that he and other teammates had frequently gone to bed hungry, as they were unable to pay for food for themselves.
This incident says volumes about the deliberately out-of-touch behavior in which the NCAA is capable of engaging. But the NCAA has at least made an effort; a week after Napier spoke, it granted athletes unlimited access to meals and snacks.
If the NCAA shows an ability to address its own conduct, maybe it will also look into the issues that pervade some of the professional sports it brings to the collegiate level. And maybe it would not be too much to hope for the NCAA, unlike the NFL before it, to make some actual headway addressing those issues.
Maybe the NCAA can be part of the solution to the culture of violence inherent to football. Maybe it can strive to improve player safety and concussion awareness while also giving some thought to the issues of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) that plague football’s retired veterans and so significantly shorten their lives.
It is too much to expect that sort of foresight from the NFL itself — Roger Goodell and his cronies are far too reactionary and shortsighted in nature to truthfully offer solutions to the problems of this country’s favorite pastime. In that sense, the Ray Rice debacle was particularly damning of both Goodell and the NFL as a whole. We bore witness to an uncertain commissioner fumbling over what appeared to be a cut-and-dry disciplinary episode.
There is a hope implicit in the majority of my words about the NCAA. It may be misplaced, but it is my hope that the NCAA recognizes that it is at a crossroads. Between scholarship reforms, as offered up by the Big Ten, and questions of how to deal with potential player compensation following a ruling against it in federal court, the NCAA has come to where the roads diverge. And maybe it will learn from the mistakes made by the NFL. Maybe it will take the road less traveled and in doing so redeem itself. Maybe the NCAA can finally put its money where its mouth is and act as the benevolent bureaucratic body it has spent so long pretending to be.
Sean Blake ’17 can be reached at sean_blake@brown.edu.
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