Wisconsinites leapt from their couches Sunday night, spilling salsa and flinging chips all around as Bronson Koenig drained an improbable three-pointer from the corner to give the Badgers another trip to the Sweet Sixteen.
Many of us might agree that the man who drew up that play is worth a hefty sum. But is the man who executed it really worth nothing?
The National Collegiate Athletic Association will make about $11.5 million off of every game in this year’s March Madness basketball tournament. The NCAA gets an average of $771 million a year from CBS to cover the tournament’s 67 games.
In 2014, NCAA president Mark Emmert made $1.7 million, and NCAA administrators pulled in a total of $54 million in pay and benefits. Most of the rest, about $546 million, was distributed to universities.
Coaches get a lot of that. For example, UW-Madison just hired Greg Gard to be its men’s basketball coach for $1.75 million this year with automatic increases of $50,000 in each year of his five-year contract.
But the players get nothing. In fact, the NCAA enforces arcane rules to make sure that players get absolutely nothing. Joe Nocera reports that the NCAA has even prohibited colleges from picking up the tab for low-income family members to travel to watch their sons and brothers play in the tournament.
Nocera’s new book Indentured is another in a growing list of books, articles, documentaries and lawsuits that may one day topple the mighty cartel that is the NCAA.
Still, Gard’s and even Emmert’s salary isn’t the real issue. Too often the focus among academics is on resentment over the high salaries paid to coaches and athletic administrators. In fact, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank has called for a cap on coaches’ salaries.
But that misdiagnoses the problem. The trouble isn’t that Greg Gard’s salary will creep up toward $2 million a year. The problem is that Bronson Koenig can’t be paid a dime. The issue isn’t how much the coaches are being paid but how much the players are not being paid.
The UW’s “shoegate” controversy of several years ago points up the hypocrisy of it all. In 2001, an investigation found that 147 UW athletes received discounts on shoes at the Shoe Box store in Black Earth. The benefits totaled about $23,000, which comes to $156 per student. All hell broke loose. Some players were suspended, and all of them — some from very poor families — were forced to pay back the amount of their discounts to charity. Some were forced to do community service work as if they had committed a crime as opposed to having just violated an NCAA rule.
Flash-forward to now. In July, UW athletics will start a 10-year, $96 million deal with Under Armour to provide uniforms and, yes, shoes to all of its players. It is reported to be among the most lucrative deals in the country.
Let this sink in. The UW athletic department can pull down almost $10 million a year for requiring its players to wear the shoes it gets from Under Armour and act as billboards for the company. Yet, if those same players were to go to a store and receive a special discount for shoes that they might want to wear off the court, they’d be subject to penalties that might end their athletic careers.
This is why every economist on the face of the earth recognizes the NCAA as a cartel designed to keep the free market out of the competition for players even as it allows the market to work to the benefit of coaches, administrators, television networks, shoe and apparel manufacturers and all kinds of companies that make lots of money off of the performances of those very same players.
In a city as progressive as Madison, where social justice might as well be part of the official city motto, how can we let this fierce exploitation of labor go on without so much as a mild objection?
I love college sports, and the Badgers especially. But I can’t attend a game or watch one on television without a gnawing sense that I’m contributing to a system that is fundamentally and egregiously unfair.
I would enjoy the games more if I knew that the players were fairly compensated for their work. And no, a scholarship is not fair compensation when you consider the players who never finish their degrees because they weren’t ready for college. In fact, the NCAA can’t say that scholarships are payment because that would make athletes employees, subject to the right to bargain collectively. That’s why the NCAA insists on calling them “student-athletes.”
The NCAA is a voluntary association. There’s no reason that schools and conferences couldn’t simply choose not to join and get out from under its insane rules and its officious and inconsistent enforcement. I would be an even prouder Badger if my alma mater led the way.