Camp Randall: Lectrician2 via WI
Bucky Badger, the Motion W logo, and Camp Randall Stadium with p
For those of us who read the sports pages, it has never been more true that you can’t tell the players without a program.
College athletes are transferring in and out of schools with dizzying frequency. Just when fans get to know something about a player, start to follow his development and maybe even form an attachment, he’s gone.
This is one bad outcome from an otherwise very good development. The advent of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation means that players are finally getting a piece of the enormous revenue they produce on the field and the court.
Yet, at the same time, fans have every right to feel frustrated by the constantly shifting rosters. The answer is obvious. Players need to be bound to schools by contracts. Just like the pros, they should be able to agree to play for a certain number of years in exchange for money.
But that will raise additional — and, in my mind, welcome — questions. For example, if athletes are being paid to play the game why do they need to be students at all? In fact, the UW men’s basketball team just added a player who had played in Australia’s professional league. I don’t doubt that this kind of thing will become increasingly common. Players who aren’t making it in the NFL or NBA and have a year or two of eligibility left, may suddenly discover a desire to complete their degrees or go to graduate school.
In fact, I’ve yet to read about a player in any sport who cited academics as the reason that they are transferring in or out of the UW. The football program signed no less than 34 players from the portal for this coming season. Not only did none of those players say they were transferring because of an academic interest, but apparently none will be denied admission. With a 44% acceptance rate for freshmen, it’s hard to believe that every one of those 34 athletes had the academic credentials necessary to be admitted, even granting that transferring in is somewhat easier. And, in any event, Badgers football recently crowed about how many of the state’s top high school players had committed to the UW. Nowhere was there any suggestion that any of them would be denied admission as freshmen.
Let’s just be honest. In most cases, these are not “student-athletes.” Instead, they are athletes looking for the best financial deal, the chance to play and perhaps a coaching staff that they feel can best develop their skills. There’s nothing wrong with that.
So, why cling to the pretense that they are also students? Sports writers rarely even talk about the players’ year in school anymore, but instead write about their remaining years of eligibility.
It would be a better and more honest system to simply give athletes five years of eligibility and drop any requirement that they be a student. In many cases that’s just a ruse and an unfair one when we consider that some academically qualified applicants don’t gain admission because spots are being taken up by academically unqualified athletes.
While we’re at it, and since the athletes are now being paid, we should eliminate athletic scholarships altogether. I have never understood why one kid should get a free education simply because he can run faster or throw a ball farther than another. Those scholarships could be converted to ones based on financial need.
And, if the idea of the nonstudent-athlete blows your mind, here’s something that seems to me to be the logical next step. Let’s spin off the money-making sports, which are currently football and men’s basketball, from the university altogether. Some private entity of investors — probably starting with the wealthy team boosters who are paying for some of the NIL deals now — would own and run these programs.
In exchange, they would pay a hefty lease agreement back to the university for use of its logos and other intellectual property as well as the physical facilities owned by the UW. Bucky Badger would come at a very high price. The school could then, if it chose, use that money to continue other sports that don’t make money. Or it might shut down some of those sports and use the revenue for — get this! — education.
This would solve a lot of problems. The Madison campus will soon have an interim chancellor who will lead the effort to pick a new athletic director after the welcome departure of Chris McIntosh. The result will almost surely be the selection of someone who will be paid much more than the chancellor and who will be given a contract with an obscene buyout and automatic annual pay increases regardless of performance — just as McIntosh had. For decades, the athletic department has dictated its terms to Bascom Hall and not the other way around.
And now, to make matters still more galling, on his way out the door McIntosh got the Republican Legislature and Democratic Governor Tony Evers to fork over $14.5 million in taxpayer dollars to help pay the players. Let’s close off that spigot just as soon as we can.
As a completely separate entity, “Badgers Inc.,” or whatever it might be called, can do whatever it wants just so long as it meets its high lease payments to the university. Let’s end the fiction that there is any meaningful control coming from the chancellor’s office.
The system I’m suggesting here — which I also think is inevitable in some form — is better because it’s honest. It is a reflection of the way things already are. And if you’re a die hard traditionalist who still believes in the “student-athlete,” ask yourself this. When that player steps to the line, do you ask yourself how he’s doing in chem class or what his free throw percentage is?
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.
