More than 10 years ago, CBS signed a six-year $11 billion deal with the NCAA for the rights to the March Madness Tournament. The math comes out to be more than an average $500 million a year. The most astonishing number is zero, which is the amount each collegiate basketball player gets paid. Although far from slavery, the treatment of student-athletes in revenue-generating sports may be the closest legal and accepted act of slavery that exists today.
The default rebuttal to this claim is that student-athletes are getting paid in the form of scholarships, thus their efforts are compensated. Although scholarships provide great opportunities for many athletes, a college education means little if there is no diploma to back it up. The graduation rates for student-athletes in basketball are increasing but are still embarrassingly low. According to a 2010 study on graduation success rates, only 44 of the 65 teams (69 percent) that made it to the NCAA tournament graduated more than 50 percent of their players.
The commonly accepted answer to this discrepancy is that athletes are simply not as intelligent. This misconception, however, ignores too many variables to have any validity. Many students feel that they are burdened by their extracurricular activities, yet our workload pales in comparison to that of basketball and football players. The weekly time commitment of athletic practice is enormous. They are expected to push their bodies to the limit during every practice and then are expected to memorize playbooks in their free time. It is a wonder that any student-athlete even bothers to go to class when he is constantly exhausted mentally and physically.
The reality is that for many fans, coaches and athletic directors, athletics come first and academics are often an afterthought. The importance of on-court performance and the lack of emphasis on academics make scholarships worthless. These athletes are merely here for the short term in order to raise money for the academic department and to raise the stature of their schools. Whether or not they get a degree is not the concern of the administration, as demonstrated by the graduation rates.
So should universities and colleges take a more aggressive approach in order to graduate their athletes? Maybe it would be easier to compensate them while they are in college, instead. The problem arises about how to decide who and how much to pay them. The simple answer is to pay to those who earn, even at the expense of other programs.
There are only two sports at pretty much any college that make more money than what it costs to run the program - basketball and football. Much of the profit goes back to these sports, but much of it also goes towards funding for non-revenue sports such as fencing or tennis. The rationale behind this is that it provides other student-athletes the chance to have the college experience while building their character by participating in these sports. Although this is true, it does not make it fair to the basketball and football players who devote more time to practices and have more pressure on them to perform well while getting more scrutiny for on and off the field mistakes.
There are many problems with this solution, one being the differences in payment between different institutions. Should a football player from Ohio State get paid more than a football player from William & Mary because he earns his program more money? Should the star point guard get paid more than the three-point specialist on the end of the bench? These are legitimate questions, but are just minor wrinkles to this solution. What is important is that these profitable athletes get some form of compensation.
It is time for college institutions to take a stance, whether it is on a school-by-school basis or as a united front. They should either compensate athletes monetarily for their efforts and for the revenue they bring or they should be more aggressive in making sure the graduation rates increase dramatically. Right now, basketball and football players are money-making machines but they are not getting a fair return for their worth. Although compensation may be a quick fix that has its flaws, it is still better than nothing.
Hung Vu's column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached at h.vu@cavalierdaily.com.
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