Pay the players (redux)

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Over the years I’ve written a lot in support of paying college athletes in the big revenue producing sports. In the Madison market that point of view has made me pretty lonely. I suppose because of the sacred cow status of UW athletics, nobody else around here has taken up the cause.

And since Isthmus was purchased a few years ago by Jeff Haupt, whose other business interests are closely tied to college athletics, and whose partners include former Badger and NFL standout lineman Mark Tauscher, I’ve been well aware that my views are starkly at odds with the folks who, at least metaphorically, sign my checks.

But I need to give Jeff and Isthmus editors credit. While there have been tense moments I have never once had a blog or column spiked or a single word changed because it doesn’t sit well with the owners. And I have never held back. Instead, when I last wrote on this a couple of weeks ago Jeff followed up the next week with the other side of the argument. Fair enough. A respectful dialogue is how this is all supposed to work.

So, I might be testing the patience of my bosses, not to mention readers, by coming back to this issue yet again so soon. I can’t avoid it because so much is happening so fast.

First a quick recap. For a decade or longer there have been numerous efforts to allow players in the biggest college football and men’s basketball programs to get a bigger share of a billion-dollar industry. Those efforts have generally come in three forms: moves to force universities to treat players as employees with all of the compensation and conditions of employment protections that come with that status; efforts to allow players to unionize; and proposals to allow players to benefit from the use of their image and likeness.

Up until very recently the NCAA and the big college programs, including the UW, have been pretty successful in thwarting all of those initiatives. But a few weeks ago the dam burst when California passed a law, effective in 2023, that would prohibit colleges in that state from stopping players from profiting from the same kind of product endorsement deals that their coaches cash in on. So, for example, if a UCLA football player wanted to appear in the local Cadillac dealer’s commercials he could do that and pull down some bucks.

At first the NCAA and UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez predicted that the sky would fall. Alvarez went so far as to suggest that he wouldn’t schedule any future games with California teams.

But hard on the heels of the California law, it was reported that a couple dozen other states were considering similar legislation. That list now includes Wisconsin, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers — an extremely rare phenomenon these days — is drafting a bill. That bipartisanship extends to the federal level where Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah is teaming with Democratic colleagues to introduce California-type legislation in Congress.

The NCAA is trying to get back in the driver’s seat. Last week its governing board voted to instruct a committee that had already been convened to look at player compensation issues to draft recommendations to govern just exactly how athletes might be paid for uses of their images and likenesses. Don’t expect any action from that committee for months if not years.

As respected sports columnist John Feinstein has said, this is way too little way too late. The NCAA only reacted after it was clear they were going to lose. They could rattle their saber all they wanted to but they couldn’t impose any kind of real penalty on California schools, not with those huge television markets and all that money at stake.

In its statement, the NCAA continues to use the discredited “student-athlete” construct and call for a system that is “consistent with the collegiate model.”

Of course, nobody knows what the heck that means, but given the NCAA’s track record we can assume it means, “consistent with the model of everybody else printing money while we compensate the players as little as possible.”

My own hope is that Wisconsin, other states and Congress will continue to charge ahead and just ignore the NCAA altogether. The NCAA is simply a cartel whose main purpose is to fix and hold down compensation levels for athletes. If the NCAA just shriveled to an organization that simply standardized the rules of games and kept statistics that would be the best possible outcome.

But let’s also keep in mind that none of this goes nearly far enough. While it’s great that UW athletes might be able to appear in the same kinds of commercials that Alvarez does, this is likely only to benefit the star players. The next vital step is to allow the 98 percent of players who will never make it to the pros to get their fair share of those billion dollars in big time college sports revenues. Players should be paid a substantial salary and allowed to form a union.

Look, I have no problem at all with Barry Alvarez or the coaches or television networks or shoe and apparel companies making money off college sports. More power to ‘em. It’s the American way. I just want the young men and women who are producing all that revenue on the field and on the court to get their fair share. And, please, a scholarship and a stipend that is dictated by the schools and where a player is not free to negotiate in the free market is nowhere near fair compensation.

And if players get paid what they’re worth the world will not end. United States Olympic athletes have been able to profit from their sports, at least through endorsement deals, for decades, and some countries pay their athletes directly. Last year Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn pulled down $3 million.

Yet, the Olympics still make lots of money. So, there’s no reason why athletes can’t be fairly compensated while everybody else continues to get their big pay days as well. And then those of us who appreciate college sports as well as simple fairness can enjoy the games even more.