March Madness, arguably the best two and a half weeks in sports, came to an end earlier this week with the Louisville winning their third title in their school’s history. The tournament, supposed to be a time of celebration and positive coverage for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reminded everyone that the ruling body of college athletics and college athletics themselves have turned into big business, business funded through the exploitation of uncompensated and unprotected labor … student-athletes.
To exemplify the exploitation of college athletes, look no further than the feel-good story of Kevin Ware. Ware was the role player for Louisville who had the terrifying injury in the Elite Eight game against Duke, when in the middle of a tied game he landed awkwardly, breaking his leg so badly that part of his bone came through his skin. The injury left Louisville players, Duke players, coaches and fans crying in the arena; Ware turned to his team and reportedly said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be OK. You guys go win this thing.”
Louisville ended up blowing out Duke on their way to win the National Championship. Following the Elite Eight game, Ware became the story of the tournament. The initial reaction was for Adidas, Louisville’s sponsor, to sell shirts using Ware’s jersey number, with “Ri5e to the Occasion” on the front and No. 5 on the back, seeking to cash in on Ware’s injury to the tune of $24.99 a shirt, of which of course Ware would see $0. Adidas was rebuked days later with what they say is a change in conscience, but Dan Wetzel at Yahoo Sports credits the change to fear of potential legal ramifications. Louisville acknowledged the “5” stood for Ware, which put the NCAA in violation of its own bizarre rules and opened itself up to potential legal action. So it’s likely that legal liability — not found conscience — is what stopped sales of the t-shirt.
While Ware will continue to be on scholarship next year, many like him are not always guaranteed a continuation of their athletic careers or even entitled to free treatment of their injuries from their respective sports, as scholarships are renewed yearly and are not guaranteed. What is most amazing about this lack of coverage is that it was all by design, through the naming of players like Kevin Ware a “student-athlete” by the NCAA, a term it coined in the 1950s. As pointed out by Chris Hayes and reported on by Taylor Branch, student-athletes are in fact called student-athletes as a way to circumvent worker’s compensation laws and lessen their liability to the many injuries that occur in college athletics.
The exploitation of the athletes’ labor goes undiscussed by the NCAA, which praises itself for providing the educational opportunities of a scholarship. But this scholarship does not even come close to fairly compensating student-athletes. A new study from the National College Players Association and the Drexel University Sport Management Department found not only that the full athletic scholarship left an athlete with $3,285 in out-of-pocket expenses last school year, but also that the fair market value for a “four-year career for the average football and men’s basketball player in the six BCS conferences is $715,000 and $1.5 million, respectively.”
If you’re not convinced that money is taking over the NCAA and taking advantage of athletes, look no further than the other three big stories in the past two weeks. Auburn’s 2011 National Championship-winning football team offered money to players to return to school rather than going to the NFL, all while it changed grades for players to remain eligible to play. The next big story was out of Rutgers, where now-infamous videos show head basketball coach Mike Rice assaulting his players while berating them with homophobic slurs. While the video surfaced in November and Rice was given a slap on the wrist, he was only fired last week after the videos became public, causing much speculation about the months of delay amidst Rutgers’ $25 million negotiations to join the Big Ten Conference. That deal would likely have fallen apart if their head basketball coach was unexpectedly fired and an ensuing scandal like that followed.
As Louisville’s men’s basketball team cut down the nets on Monday night, winning their third Championship in the program’s history, the women’s team was preparing to play in their own Final Four in New Orleans. The men’s team, coming off their historic run, hoped to make the short journey from Atlanta to New Orleans to cheer on the women’s team, eager to make Louisville the second program in NCAA history to win both the men’s and women’s basketball championships in the same year, a feat accomplished only by UConn in 2004.
Responding to this in usual fashion, the NCAA declared that if the University flew the Louisville men’s team from Georgia to Louisiana, this act would constitute an improper benefit. While this decision sat under scrutiny from across the national media, the University went ahead and booked the travel plans to send the men’s team back home to Kentucky, only to find out later that the NCAA had reversed their previous decision and was now allowing the national champions to cheer on their classmates and fellow student-athletes in New Orleans. The NCAA’s decision to reverse their previous decision was ultimately too little, too late, as the team that just helped make the NCAA around $771 million for this year’s tournament, in TV contracts alone, was not allowed to cheer on their classmates.
This dying business model in many ways incentivizes the improper benefits that the NCAA seeks to eliminate. Additionally, for student-athletes fortunate enough to be professional athletes, the inability to seek compensation incentivizes these student-athletes to not complete their education that the NCAA seems to covet so highly. For all this talk of protecting student athletes and providing them with educational opportunities, the NCAA is a business seeking to maximize their bottom line and should be treated as such.