With NCAA March Madness at a lull until Sweet 16 play begins Thursday, now is as good a time as ever to discuss the state of NCAA athletics. Setting aside the human factor of student-athletes and coaches engaging in acts of misconduct, we can look toward the root of the problem lying in the broken structure of collegiate athletics today. The problem runs the entire gamut of college athletics, whether it is from the bottom in the arbitrary rules and regulations that student-athletes are subject to, all the way up to how the NCAA works as a cartel, but I see most of the controversy bubbling to the surface in student-athletes.
The issue starts from the legal groundwork the NCAA is built upon. Something smells fishy when you realize the NCAA is a tax-exempt non-profit that is in charge of wrangling the massive operation that is United States’ collegiate athletics. For its troubles, the NCAA pulls in approximately $11 billion in revenue, which makes me scratch my head at the term ‘non-profit.’ I can feel the sneer crawling up on the face of an armchair legal professional as I write this out. Classification aside, it’s hard to imagine that with $11 billion floating around, the NCAA still relies heavily on donors, taxpayers and students who do the heavy lifting in the cost of athletic facilities, as well as costs associated with funding major athletic programs, which made me balk at the figures I discovered online.
Even if you manage to swallow the pill that is the NCAA’s seemingly ridiculous profit margin, the next fact bowled me over. In 40 states, the highest paid public position is the head football or basketball coach of a public university. While I have realized it’s a matter of paying wages to hold on to the most elite of coaches and dissuade the coaches from leaving their universities, it’s a ridiculous thing to have the cost of a couple of coaches run the costs up for an entire team of athletes while a head coach can earn millions of dollars, but NCAA athletes must jump through hoops to receive anything beyond their tuition.
Ultimately, collegiate athletics wouldn’t exist without the student-athletes themselves. Getting an education paid for in return for participating in a sport these students love enough to train for all their lives seems like an equivalent exchange on paper. Looking deeper, however, it’s clear athletes are nowhere near adequately compensated for their time and effort. They practice in elite facilities and receive physical rehabilitation that regular students don’t have access to, but have to tread extremely lightly when doing seemingly trivial things such as signing memorabilia (even for free), receiving gifts from fans or even taking out loans. I can’t fathom how students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds can go to bed hungry and have their housing hang in the balance based on their family’s monetary situation, all the while their tuition is completely paid for by their university.
The struggle of athletes in college goes even deeper when they commit up to 40 hours a week to their sport and still are given these arbitrary restrictions on privileges they can receive from the university. I’ve read dozens of stories and events on athletes in college struggling with finances because of NCAA rules. At best, student-athletes flock to majors with lax requirements at the price of job prospects out of college, and at worst, flock to classes notorious for handing out “easy A’s” and commit acts of academic dishonesty. While the NCAA has cracked down on such behaviors in recent years, the problem remains, and the root cause lies in how student-athletes in programs that require so much of their time must sacrifice academics to perfect their craft as athletes, or vice versa.
I don’t know how the problem might be remedied. Paying student-athletes won’t make them study harder, and would likely further divide the football and basketball elite that most universities’ athletic programs focus on. While every school is different, at Madison there is definitely a media bias toward our winning football and basketball teams. All I see is the NCAA earning beaucoup bucks while student-athletes bleed themselves dry just to earn the shot at what could hardly be called an education, and taxpayers and fellow university students feel the pain in their wallets.
Sergey is a freshman at UW-Madison majoring in economics. Do you agree or disagree with his stance on the NCAA? What do you think could be done to better reward student-athletes? Send all feedback to opinon@dailycardinal.com.
