Tommy Washbush / Freepik
A UW football player runs from one endzone labeled "student" to another labeled "athlete."
No story says more about the state of big time college sports than that of Chris Kiel.
Kiel is a standout wide receiver for Mount Horeb High School. He was heavily recruited by colleges and he had narrowed his choices to North Dakota State and Dartmouth. He chose North Dakota State.
The reasons he gave all made perfect sense from a football perspective. If academics entered into his decision, they weren’t mentioned in the State Journal story about him.
My intention here is not to second guess the decisions of a young man in his position. He is not only an outstanding athlete but he’s bright enough to get into Dartmouth. Good for him. I wish him well.
But I hope the story is one more nail in the coffin of the awful phrase “student-athlete.” Players of Kiel’s caliber are athletes first and students only as a second thought, if that. They are looking for the best opportunity to develop their skills or, increasingly, make some money through name, image and likeness (NIL) deals and, soon, direct payments from the schools. If they pick up an education while they’re at it, well, so much the better.
While we might question the long-term benefits of attending North Dakota State over Dartmouth, the kids, their parents and, often now, their agents will evaluate the offers, apply their own goals and values and make their own decisions. And they can change those decisions pretty easily if they want. Transfers between schools are now common, with some athletes playing for three or four different schools over their college careers. That’s actually something of a problem. I’ll get to that.
For those who long for the good old days when “student-athlete” was less of a scam (though it was always a scam), consider that those days weren’t so good for the young people competing on the field and the court. While their coaches raked in millions, while broadcast and concessions conglomerates like Learfield Sports raked in millions, while television networks and streaming services raked in millions and while athletic department front office hacks raked in six-figure salaries, the athletes could be (and were) penalized for stuff like getting discounts on shoes.
And they were essentially indentured servants as well. Once an athlete signed onto a school he could only leave to play elsewhere if he sat out for a year. With only four years of eligibility in most cases, that was too high a price to pay and so the kid was stuck, even if his coach was an idiot and he found himself on the third string when he knew he could have been a starter at another school.
After decades of fighting this while the NCAA — aided and abetted by schools like Wisconsin — fought them tooth and nail, the wall finally began to crack a few years ago when the players won the right to profit from their own name, image or likeness.
Previously, the schools could sell shirts and other gear with the names and numbers, and sometimes faces and bodies, of an athlete on them without having to pay the player a dime. Once that glaring inequity was finally busted down along with the one year sit-out rule, even better things followed. Boosters quickly came together to form collectives where they could pool their resources and essentially pay the players flat out, usually with some bogus requirement to appear in an ad or something.
The NCAA, clawing for any reason to still exist, insisted that the NIL deals couldn’t be used as inducements to recruit players. The NCAA didn’t also demand that water flow uphill, but that would have been in a similar category.
So, that rule was ignored and now, for all intents and purposes, the best athletes are offered money from boosters to come and play for a given school. Players are finally getting some piece of those billion-dollar pies. The free market is working wonderfully and just as it should.
The next step is for schools to pay athletes directly and as the university employees they surely are. That will likely start happening this spring when a federal court approves a settlement between the players and the schools allowing each school to pay players (all the players combined) a little over $20 million a year. That’s still way too little, but it’s a step in the right direction.
What’s obviously needed now are contracts. This system is miles better than the indentured servitude and exploitation of the old days, but it’s now swung over to the Wild West. Players are transferring willy-nilly. The only way to keep them in one place for more than a year is through an enforceable contract. The player gets paid and the team gets his services for some agreed upon number of years.
And those contracts need to happen in the context of some guard rails established through collective bargaining between a players union and some entity representing the schools — the NCAA has long been an embarrassment and a disaster and it needs to be disbanded and replaced with something new.
Moreover, just like the pros, there needs to be some way of ensuring competitiveness. Unless there is some limit on the size of payrolls, a few well-heeled teams will dominate and that will kill the golden goose. So, every professional sports league has some mechanism for preventing that from happening, though some systems (like the NFL) work better than others (like MLB). Capitalism meets socialism in a beautiful mix that benefits everybody concerned.
The UW may be inadvertently leading the way on all this. The UW has been terrible about this whole thing all along. Multiple administrations on Bascom Hill have been clueless while the Athletic Department has been firmly on the side of indentured servitude. Chancellors cling to the “student-athlete” myth because they’re academics who don’t get it. The Athletic Department clung to it because it kept the profits in the hands of coaches and administrators.
But now the UW is trying to enforce a “contract” with a star football player named Xavier Lucas. Lucas signed an agreement of some sort in early December and then changed his mind a couple weeks later and landed at the University of Miami. The UW is claiming that the document was a binding agreement requiring Lucas to play next season at the UW in exchange for some NIL money.
It’s a tangled story because the UW, as is their way, won’t talk about it. (Every story written about UW coach and administrator compensation or virtually anything else related to the business side of UW athletics is pried from them via an open records request.) But, according to State Journal sports writer Jim Polzin, the UW uses a standard form produced (unsurprisingly) by the NCAA which heavily favors the school. It’s not clear whether Lucas was encouraged or even allowed to have an attorney review the document before he signed it.
Now the UW is trying to enforce that biased paper. On the one hand, the document probably screws the athlete and so it shouldn’t be enforced. But, on the other hand, the whole affair could push us into the world of fair contracts negotiated between an athlete, represented by an agent or attorney, and a school.
The UW does not intend to do the right thing here. Quite the opposite. But they just might be stumbling into a solution that benefits everyone in the long run. With contracts, coaches won’t have to worry about their players leaving through a revolving door, fans can get to know and follow players while they develop and the players will have fair compensation.
This has been a long time in the making, but now athlete equity is coming on fast. The UW has been a bad player in all this and it continues to be, but it may be leading the way in a direction it had not intended. The Athletic Department and Bascom Hill are bunglers, but they may be bungling their way into progress.
I think this new era is wonderful because it’s so much more honest. The lie of the “student-athlete” has been destroyed, no matter how long it takes for Jennifer Mnookin to figure that out. Finally, young gifted athletes have freedom. They can develop their skills wherever they want to, get paid while doing it, and perhaps move on to professional sports. In the meantime, if they want to, they can pick up a college degree… or not. It’s up to them.
Personally? I think Chris Kiel made the wrong choice. But it wasn’t my choice. It was his and, finally, kids like him have the freedom to make their own mistakes or find their own fortunes. And that’s more important than anything else.
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.
