The humorist Max Shulman, best known as the creator of the TV character Dobie Gillis, wrote a column syndicated to college newspapers. On one occasion, he proposed that a school lacking success on the gridiron could solve its problem simply by hiring the Green Bay Packers as “artists in residence.”
That was in the late 1950s, a time when people still fretted over an increasing overemphasis on college athletics, especially football.
You haven’t heard that term lately. The overemphasis has become overpowering. Life is imitating Shulman’s facetious art.
What little was left of the wall between professionalism in practice and amateurism in pretense was washed away with the recent announcement that the NCAA and the five largest conferences will pay cash salaries to athletes in addition to — or perhaps in lieu of — the traditional in-kind compensation of free tuition, books, lodging and meals.
That’s if a federal judge approves the deal, which was negotiated to resolve antitrust claims filed by former athletes seeking a share of the boodle they had earned for their schools.
There are serious concerns about this that call for the attention of Congress as well as sober judgment by the court.
NCAA: Just antitrust us
For one, the NCAA intends to ask Congress for an antitrust exemption, much like those it gave long ago to professional baseball, football, hockey and basketball.
That doesn’t sound like a good idea. Antitrust waivers are inherently anticompetitive. The object seems to be to keep denying that the athletes are employees, which would leave them ineligible for worker’s compensation, pension contributions, collective bargaining and other benefits.
But athletes at schools such as Florida, Florida State and Miami are already employees in fact if not in name.
Another is the question of the deal’s effect on smaller schools, those below the Division I level, some of whom can barely afford to keep the field lights on let alone pay salaries to their players. Charlie Baker, the NCAA president, has argued that to classify athletes as employees would cripple the vast majority of programs outside the power conferences. But the deal with the big schools threatens the same consequence. The small-school athletes will want to be salaried too. They would have a case.
And what about Title IX, the federal law that requires male and female athletes to be treated alike? Will the money that the 69 big schools must set aside, estimated at an average $100 million annually, be enough to go around? Or will it precipitate the elimination of more women’s sports and minor sports for both genders? How much more pressure will be put on student activity fees, alumni donors and ticket-holders?
There will surely be bidding wars for the most sought-after high school players and would-be transfers. That had already begun with booster organizations set free by the courts to create combines that pay star players for the use of their names, images and likeness.
Scandal in the making
That’s a big-money scandal. The extent was exposed this month when Georgia transfer quarterback Jaden Rashada sued in federal court over a recruiting payoff he alleges that he was promised by University of Florida coach Billy Napier but never received. He claims he was to have a $1 million payment as part of a $13.85 million NIL deal also involving a top booster, and had passed up a smaller offer from Miami before decamping to Arizona State.
The NCAA, it turns out, was investigating the Rashada case until a federal judge, acting on a lawsuit brought by Tennessee and Virginia, ordered the NCAA to stop enforcing its NIL rules.
There may be no way of halting the increasing commercialization of college sports, but there are many reasons to regret how far it has already gone.
The United States is the only nation where colleges and universities are expected to provide the larger community with professional-level athletic entertainment having little if anything to do with their educational missions. In too many cases, the term scholar-athlete has become an oxymoron.
The stakes involved are evident in the realignment of the major conferences, including the dismemberment of the PAC-10, the expansion of the Atlantic Coast Conference to Pacific coast schools, and the questionable attempts of Florida State and Clemson to break their contracts with the ACC.
The paradox of college sports is far removed from its origin, when students formed their own clubs and rivalries and didn’t expect any freebies out of it. At some small schools, they still play for the fun of it and for the quaint ideal of sportsmanship.
Pro leagues should pay up
But the big school programs, in addition to creating illogical, unacademic burdens for their presidents, also function as a free training program for professional football and basketball, sparing them the necessity of running farm teams as baseball does. That freeloading is unconscionable, and a way should be found to make the NFL and NBA contribute to the colleges’ costs.
It needs to be asked, moreover, whether it is not profoundly hypocritical for the NCAA to continue to insist that athletes must be making “satisfactory progress” toward an academic degree in order to remain eligible to play.
In a tale from the ’50s that’s probably apocryphal, a college coach somewhere in Florida was upset to hear his prize freshman recruit report that he was making As in his classes.
“You’re here to play football,” the coach supposedly said.
True or not, the story made a point.
So did Max Shulman.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
