Wisconsin Athletics
Brad Davison, middle, is a good example of the benefits of an additional year of eligibility.
When you hear anything from the NCAA you can pretty much count on it being wrong or a lie.
So, when you’re watching the basketball tournaments in this month of madness, you’ll see NCAA propaganda mixing images of fencers and lacrosse players with Division 1 men’s basketball and football athletes. Turns out they’re all going pro in something other than sports. This is very specifically designed to confuse the public into thinking that it’s all the same, that these are all “student-athletes.”
Of course, they’re not the same. Fencers are student-athletes. Men’s Division 1 basketball players are athletes, first and foremost. Maybe they go to classes and maybe they’re even scholars. But for the purposes of the NCAA and the athletic departments they play for, they are assets, the means of production, profit centers.
The NCAA makes more than $1 billion a year from March Madness, most of it from TV rights, but some from ticket sales. And none of it goes to the players. Not a dime. And that’s why the NCAA and the UW athletic department want you to think these are “student-athletes.” It’s their sole justification for not paying for the athletes' labor.
But the ridiculous sham of the “student-athlete” is now being dismantled. Last year, under pressure from state legislatures, Congress and even the U.S. Supreme Court, the NCAA ended its decades of resistance and allowed their athletes to benefit from their own name, image and likeness. Basically, it meant they could get paid for ads from local car dealerships and the like, just like their coaches.
To hear the NCAA tell it this was going to spell the end of college athletics as we knew it. Except, of course, that it didn’t. We’ve now gone through a complete season of college football and nearly a full season of basketball and the world did not come to an end. Money is still being printed.
But the other big change that the NCAA had been fighting against is probably making your March Madness viewing even more fun. Until last year, the NCAA made it very hard for a player to transfer schools. Players had to sit out for a year when they changed schools, losing a complete year of eligibility. That was designed to essentially keep the servants indentured.
Now that’s gone away too. So, players can move between programs without penalty. In fact, they can essentially enter a pool, called the transfer portal, to offer their services to the highest bidder. My favorite Madness commentators, like Clark Kellogg, are crediting the portal with “flattening” the field and making all the games more competitive. You don’t need to explain this to Kentucky, a No. 2 seed with dreams of a national championship that saw its hopes dashed by 15-seeded St. Peters.
It’s easy to understand why this would be the case. Say you’re a very good player for one of the premier programs. But that team is so good that you’re sitting. Well, you toss your name into the portal and you go play for a team that will make you a starter. This is essentially the free market working at its best. Everybody benefits. The players get to play and the fans get a better product on the court.
In fact, the transfer portal exposes the “student-athlete” label for the hoax that it is. Players are now freely transferring between schools entirely because of athletics. Nobody even bothers to pretend that it’s about a change in academic interests. This week, according to a Wisconsin State Journal story, the UW announced that four-year starter Avery LaBarbera would transfer from Holy Cross to join the women’s basketball squad as a point guard for her last year of eligibility. UW coach Marisa Moseley and LaBarbera talked about the relationship they developed when Moseley coached another team in the Patriot League. There was no reference to any academic reason for the transfer.
Add to that the benefits of COVID. Yes, fans, the pandemic made for a better game. That’s because the NCAA allowed another year of eligibility for players who were short-changed by the cancellation of the postseason in 2020. For the Badgers, fan favorite Brad Davison is the best example of the benefits of an additional year of eligibility. But the Badgers aren’t alone. For a lot of teams it means better, more experienced players. As a result, the games got better.
So, why not make that rule permanent? Why not just give everybody, say, six years of eligibility from the start? Or even more. Fans don’t know and don’t care much about what these guys are studying, if anything. We don’t care about their GPA; we care about their field goal percentage. We don’t care if they've already graduated; we care if they can play defense.
If we even got to a point where players simply played for a school, but didn’t necessarily have to be enrolled as a student, that’d be fine with me and, I would bet, the vast majority of fans. All we really care about is the quality of play and the level of competition on the court.
And that, of course, leads to the last piece. Schools need to start paying the players a salary. The problem with allowing players to do commercials is that it only benefits the stars. Despite the NCAA’s long fight against it, this really is no skin off their noses because the money doesn’t come out of their haul. But paying a salary to the labor that produces the profits might mean a slightly thinner slice for everybody else. That’s why the NCAA and the schools will fight this to the death.
According to the NCAA, allowing players to make a buck off their own names and allowing them to transfer seamlessly between schools was supposed to destroy college athletics. Instead, these things just made it better. The same would happen if schools paid their players.
But, of course, that would only benefit the athletes and the fans.
And on another topic: A few weeks ago I wrote about the attempted takeover of the Wisconsin State Journal, and other papers owned by Lee Enterprises, by the corporate raider firm Alden Global Capital. Alden has a history of buying up newspaper chains and bleeding them dry. Well, I’m pleased to report that earlier this month Lee fought off the acquisition.
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. He’s the author of Light Blue: How center-left moderates can build an enduring Democratic majority.
