Wisconsin Athletics
Former UW Badgers basketball player AJ Storr.
Former UW Badgers basketball player AJ Storr.
It has been a tough week for Badgers men’s basketball fans. And the team isn’t even playing games right now.
Last week Bucky buckets lost AJ Storr, its leading scorer and only genuine NBA-caliber player, to Kansas, and it lost its veteran point guard and team leader, Chucky Hepburn, to the transfer portal. The team also lost its one-time top prospect, Connor Essegian. He landed in Nebraska.
While this feels like a bad thing to Badgers fans, it’s a good thing for the players. It wasn’t so long ago that the players were indentured servants. If they transferred to another school they had to sit out for a year, a very big deal when you have only four or five years of eligibility. So, it was rare for a player to transfer even once and multiple transfers were unheard of. Storr played a season for St. John’s, transferred to the UW and has now moved on, after one year, to the Jayhawks.
Storr was so mobile because, under pressure from courts, Congress and state legislatures, that tough transfer rule went away. And now we have the Wild West, an unfettered free market, which has fans and coaches up in arms.
At the same time, another very good thing is adding to all the angst. At about the same time that players were freed to play wherever they wanted, they also got the chance to benefit from their own name, image and likeness. Before this, their colleges could, for example, put their names on the backs of jerseys and sell them for a small fortune. The apparel companies made money. The athletic departments — and by extension the coaches and administrators — made money. But the player, whose efforts made the jersey more valuable, couldn’t see a dime.
But these two very good things — freedom to play where you please and the ability to get paid for the value you bring to product sales — have combined in a way that was absolutely predictable. Boosters, who have always operated in the shadows slipping players cash here and there, are now doing it more or less openly. They’re using NIL to lure players through the portal. Technically, the NCAA doesn’t allow that, but nobody really cares, and they shouldn’t.
This is the free market at its best — and its worst. The good part is that players are finally getting to see a very small slice of the billions of dollars their play generates for others. The next step is that players should be recognized as the university employees they are and be paid a salary directly from the schools in addition to their NIL contracts with private entities.
If you don’t like the downside of this, like the loss of exciting players like Storr and Hepburn, I’ve got the answer, or rather the pros do. Over decades of sometimes contentious back and forth, professional sports leagues and their players have worked out systems that perform really well. The NFL, NBA and MLB vary in the details, but they all have the following two components, which should be adopted in big time college athletics.
First, don’t just let the players form unions, but encourage it. The unions can then negotiate with the NCAA or whatever entity takes over from it (the NCAA should be abolished) to set the floor and ceiling for compensation. That’s important because if there isn’t some sort of salary cap then the best funded schools will run away with everything, there will be little real competition and everybody’s golden goose will be dead.
Second, within the parameters negotiated with the player unions, allow each player to negotiate his or her best deal. This will result in contracts and contracts can require a player to play all four years with one team or a lesser number of years for less money perhaps. Contracts are crucial because they will end this endless game of musical chairs that cost Badgers fans Storr and Hepburn. But you can’t expect players to give up their freedom to move without getting something in return. That something is money.
And all this could be accomplished without any government action. Instead, the NCAA is running to Congress and trying to get legislation passed which would reinstate some of the old indentured servant system. They’re fighting hard to hold back the crimson tide of history. Those bills seem unlikely to pass and they most definitely should not.
The answer is right there before us in a sensibly regulated free market.
And one final note, before the transfer portal and NIL got going we heard all kinds of whining about how this was going to destroy “amateurism” and the “student athlete,” and why would anyone want to watch what are essentially pros at a lower level? Well, amid all this horror for traditionalists, ratings for the men’s side of this year’s March Madness were up 3% and, for the first time in history, there were more viewers for the women’s championship game than for the men’s game.
Big-time college athletics is not only doing fine, but it’s expanding with whole new markets growing in women’s sports. Money is being made hand over fist. It’s only fair that the players who make it all happen get their share.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
