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.