UW Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank made a statement last week that is either incredibly naïve or designed to deceive.
In testimony she offered in an antitrust case brought by college football and basketball players, Blank is quoted as saying the UW might drop its entire athletic program if it had to pay athletes. Her office walked her comment back in a press release the next day, but she said what she said and this is the most telling part of her statement: “We’re not interested in professional sports. We’re interested in student-athletes,” Blank said.
There’s so much wrong packed into those two short sentences.
The UW isn’t interested in professional sports? Really? What else would you call its big- time football, basketball and men’s hockey programs? High school athletes are heavily recruited to come to the UW to play their sport. Academics is an afterthought if it’s a thought at all.
Coaches, athletic department personnel, NCAA officials, shoe and apparel company executives, television and radio networks, concessions operators and a lot more people see college sports as their richly compensated profession. In fact, it’s been estimated that when you count ticket and merchandise sales, television contracts, shoe and apparel deals and all the other ways people have figured out how to make a dime off college sports, they generate $13 billion a year, even more than the NFL. Only the guys on the field, risking their health, are expected to be “amateurs.”
But even more concerning than Blank’s statement about professionalism is her use of the term “student-athlete.” Let’s be clear. “Student-athlete,” when it’s applied to the young men who play college football, basketball and hockey in the biggest programs is simply a premeditated and malicious lie. Blank should know that, but I don’t know if she does.
It would serve her well to read Joe Nocera’s excellent recent book, Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA. That’s where the estimated $13 billion in annual revenues comes from. Nocera quotes a study by economist Dan Rascher who came up with that tally. More to the point, Nocera, who is a former New York Times columnist, recounts the history of the tortured term, “student-athlete.”
The term was coined in the 1950s by the NCAA’s first executive director, a former sportswriter named Walter Byers. According to Nocera, Byers invented it “to evade efforts by several states to classify athletes as employees, and thus allow them to collect workers’ compensation if they were injured.”
And that term has been tightly held to ever since for the same basic reason: If the players are not primarily students who just happen to be playing a sport, then they could be employees of the university entitled to pay and benefits. And, of course, if you actually pay the guys playing the game what the free market might say they’re worth, then what might that do to the slice of the pie that everybody else gets?
The answer is to do an end run on the free market, to create what is essentially a cartel to control compensation of workers. What if everyone who employed plumbers got together and fixed the wages of every plumber in the nation? Without any chance to move to an employer who paid more, wages for plumbers would stagnate or plummet. That’s essentially what the NCAA has done for players.
And that’s what the lawsuit is about that Chancellor Blank weighed in on. A group of players, including former Badger basketball star Nigel Hayes, brought the suit alleging that the NCAA’s rules prohibiting players from being paid anything more than a scholarship violated antitrust law.
To be fair, Blank also stood by her criticism of high coach salaries, including those earned by Badger football coach Paul Chryst ($3.2 million) and basketball coach Greg Gard ($1.75 million). But I actually don’t have a problem with those salaries. It’s just the free market at work and if it works for the coaches, why shouldn’t it work for the guys they coach?
On the actual question before the court, Blank could have struck a blow for justice consistent with the values of her university. Instead she testified in favor of the cartel.
To me this is a clear-cut case of social justice. The young guys who play the game and risk lifelong injury (at least in football) to generate billions of dollars of revenue are being taken advantage of by older rich guys who sit behind desks and push paper. And the chancellor of the great University of Wisconsin is taking sides with the rich guys.
As an alum I’m embarrassed. U-bad-bad.
