WordPlay - Populism, Problems, and Solutions

The NCAA and the Folly of Amateurism - (3) A Simple Little System

A college would not penalize an actor who was fortunate enough to gain an Equity card. He can still try out for the school play. A student trumpeter good enough to join the Musician's Union can still play in the school band - in fact, he likely gets the solo. And so on for all the other activities in which students can engage. Athletes should be no different, with a couple of modest exceptions.

(1) The reform suggestion is thus elegant in its simplicity. Reduce the essential enforcement obligation to the school mode - academic eligibility and a strict ban on illicit benefits from the school itself (level playing field). After that, anything is fair.

(2) Getting to details, first, begin with a whole class of exempt entities - the NFL, MLB, NBA, soccer leagues, reputable enrolled agents (certification program), and so on. These and their executives are exempt from enforcement - by definition, they're not college affiliates.

Second, define 'booster' as broiadly as you like - faculty, alums, season ticket holders, donors above a certain amount, relatives of team members - throw in your own additions. No financial arrangements with this group is permitted.

The athlete would be required to report any deal that is not with an exempt to the athletic department, where it escrows for a 30 or 60 day perios - long enough for the AD to verify that the deal is NOT with a booster. If not, then it goes forward.

And that's it. I'm sure some readers will come forward with science fiction thoughts about the Cayman Islands, nominee accounts, and the like. But since it's not happening now, it wouldn't happen then.

Finally, though I wish complete consistency was possible, a schedule for autpgraph signings and memorabilia sales would probably be necessary. But that's easy.

(3) Most important, practically, I would expect that most athletes with real career potential would arrive on campus with some affiliation already in hand. I'm discussing the NCAA here, not the NBA or the others - but I would envision a draft of all free agents every year, and a basic format of 4 year option contracts, scheduled along the present lottery lines.

(Thus, an Andrew Wiggin would be drafted first - if the club thought he was good enough to play right then, he immediately joins the franchise. But few are. So he pockets one-quarter of the first round money, and enrolls at Kansas. When and if the parent club believes he can play, it exercises the option, and he joins the club. The franchise credits the option money it has already paid against the first year salary due. Some of my readers wrongly see this as converting to the club mode, so the athlete can be 'called up' at any time. But I don't see that happening - I think it's a pretty easy negotiation for NCAA, NBA, and the coaching fraternity to work out. We stay in school mode - the option is exercised at the end of the season, probably with more notice than coaches get now.

The point is that an athlete in Wiggin's position has no interest in taking the comparative nickels and dimes that boosters add, and endager the exposure on which the really big money depends. For their part, boosters have not much interest in crippling the school, and not too much in spomnsoring third string point guards. Giving legitimate access to pro money and support actually makes enforcement far easier).

The result would be a system in which athletes, like every other student, explore all the life options open to them; colleges get the benefit of the revenues generated from the system they created; the athletes fairly exploit the financial potential of their ability with the larger world; and the fairness of the system is incredibly enhanced. Players who are good enough to join a professional franchise probably should. Players who are still developing their potential can develop ALL their potential as human beings, not simply as athletes.

Drastically simplifying the system by reducing enforcement to what school sports are all about works for just about everyone in the system. Time to put the phantom menance of boosterism behind, and think hard about how college and professional sports actually interrelate in the 21st Century.

The NCAA and the Folly of Amateurism - (2) The Myth of Boosterism

Whenever I argue against the absurdity of NCAA amateurism, someone suggests that separating boosters from legitimate third party sponsors would be an impossible task. They might as well be talking about buggy whips and whalebone corsets. Here's why. You have to be a real oldtimer to remember Hugh Mcelhenny, a really super broken field runner for the 49ers in the 50's. Back then, there was even more regionalism in sports coverage than there is now. But Mcelhenny was probably better than the more celebrated Doak Walker - he just didn't get the pub, being located on the West Coast for most of his career. At any rate, Mcelhenny famously said that when he left Washington (the university in Seattle) to join the 49ers, he took a pay cut. I always thought that was a joke. It wasn't. He was dead serious. Until thr 60's, the major fan interest was in college teams. They filled the stadiums, they got the press, and that's where the money was. Just about every NFL player had an offseason job - YA Tittle's insurance agency still exists around here - and they were important. You couldn't make a living playing professional sports. Not any more. I am also old enough to remember when Sonny Werblin offering Joe Namath a $400,000 signing bonus was headline news. Now Andrew Luck makes that much per game. The change in the amount of money flowing into professional sports in the last two decades is mind boggling, and only getting larger. As the amount of professional money has expanded exponentially, the importance of policing against boosters has similarly declined. A latter day Mcelhenny would be insane to take the nickels and dimes boosters might pay and endanger the major money that the publicity that comes with playing major college sports makes possible. And similarly boosters, who actually care about the consequences of what happens to their team, have become far more easy to police. No one wants to see his team miss the NCAA tournament or a bowl game, or even lose scholarships. The upshot is that the insistence on amateurism, which made some sense when most of the emphasis of the sport was at the college level, has become largely irrelevant. It's aiming a canon at a fly speck - and it results in the supreme hypocrisy of a system in which EVERYONE benefits financially, except the athletes themselves. I do NOT believe colleges should pay athletes, or let their affiliates do so. That's to shift away from the basic school mode in which these sports developed, towards a club mode, with all sorts of devastating consequences. Also, to be fair, the sensational success of the NCAA basketball tournament and the bowl system owes much to the way the NCAA has prmoted them. I think those revenues are deservedly earned. But to require a college athlete swear off ANY commercial exploitation of his skill and celebrity? By anyone? Because of the bare possibility that that third party might be a booster? That's absurd, unfair, and patent nonsense. No other class of student is held to that standard - and athletes should not be any exception. In the next post, I'll lay out a system by which college athletes could obtain the financial opportunities they deserve, while easily policing against boosters.

The NCAA and Amateurism - Club Mode and School Mode

(I'm going to post a whole series of articles on the the NCAA and amaterurism, which I hope some of you guys repost. They'll also be in my blog. I'm pretty much convinced that I see the future in this, and a much better system than we have now, and I'd like to get these ideas into circulation).

Understanding why the NCAA has gone so badly wrong in adminstration of college athletics, with respect to fairness to the players, has to begin with a consideration of how professional sports developed in this country. To state the obvious, ALL of them began with a base of enthusiastic amateurs - professionals as a class of athletes came later. But with respect to the three major sports in the United States, there were considerable differences in the basic form of organization.

Baseball began in club mode, like soccer in most of the world. Groups of participants organized themseleves in small towns and communities throughout the US. In the beginning, there was no particular distinction between one club and the next. No one classed a team as major or minor league. But as the game evolved, clubs in major cities became richer and more powerful. They either purchased or affiliated with clubs in smaller cities, and the system of minor leagues evolved. Although baseball was played in schools, participants did not have to go to school to play. You joined a club if you were good enough. Christy Mathewson famously graduated from Bucknell, one of the rare college men of his day in major league baseball. But he elarned to pitch playing semi-pro ball beginning when he was 14 - and that was the way baseball players got into the game.

Basketball and football, on the other hand, began as school activities - extracurricular activities for male students. (Basketball technically didn't originate on a school campus, but it quickly found its way there). The vast majority of participants were students, who played while they attended school and then moved on. The basic organization of the sports were scholastic leagues, and professional franchises of next to no significance. Football was played for nearly 50 years before George Halas organized a professional league, and professional basketball similarly followed well after college basketball was pretty much entrenched.

The practical result of this evolution from school mode is that for several decades the big financial opportunity for an athlete was in college, not professionally. 'Ringers' in the 20's were a problem for college sports, just as 'boosters' were in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. An insistence on an absolute amateurism probably made sense at that point. But not any more - the amount of money at stake in professional careers is now staggering, literally tens of millions of dollars. Boosterism simply is not the problem it once was anymore. I will get to that in the next post.

Finally, which mode is better for a young athlete? Without question, the school mode. As compared with going to school and pursuing an athletic career while at the same time obtaining some sort of education, baseball is a disaster, relegating the athlete to an athletic ghetto for the most formative years of life. If the career works out, fine - if not, he (sic) finds himself in his mid 20's with no real direction. I am fully aware that many 17 year old athletes don't want to do anything but play their sport. But that's because they are 17. Some are going to run right by all of the educational opportunities that exist on a college campus - but at least they DO exist, and many are going to find their way to them.

End of sermon. On to the myth of boosterism.