Are College Athletes Treated Fairly?
March Madness: when I get mad about how college athletes are treated
Arguably the most exciting stretch of college sports, appropriately deemed March Madness, comes to a close tonight as two number one seeds, Baylor and Gonzaga, face off for the college basketball championship. The single-elimination format always seems to bring out the best in these student-athletes and makes for some amazing upsets. But when obscure schools like Abilene Christian topple household names like Texas, who really benefits?
You’re probably expecting this to be about whether or not college athletes should be paid — reminder, they’re not! While that is the “easiest” solution, the issue of equity in college athletics is about more than just athlete compensation. I want to use the March Madness basketball tournament as a case study, of sorts, to explore the NCAA, the governing body of college sports, and their relationships with these athletes.
Distribution of NCAA Funds
We’ve already established that the total amount of money college athletes get from the tournament’s $1 billion revenue is a whopping $0. So where does the rest go?
Admittedly, the NCAA doesn’t take as much of a cut as I would have expected, taking only about 4% for its own operating expenses. The rest of the money goes back to the schools, but the way in which this money gets distributed could be seen as less than equitable.
Firstly, money is paid for performance, so that’s nice; the more you win the more you make. But the problem is this money is paid out to the school’s conference. Conferences are honestly just arbitrary groups of schools. They were born out of convenience; it’s easier to schedule your season’s games if you know most of your games will be against other teams in your conference and most conferences are regional, so schools don't have to travel as far. But recently, conferences have become more of a marketing strategy, offering a “bundle” deal for TV networks and whatnot. It’s pretty easy to see how this creates a “rich get richer” phenomenon, since if all of the teams in a conference are good, viewers and TV networks are more likely to prefer the games in that conference, making conferences less likely to invite smaller/less competitive schools to join.
Once these conferences get the money from the NCAA, we have a similar allocation problem where the conferences have to distribute the money back to the individual schools. Not only can this lead to less money going to worse performing schools in strong conferences, it can disproportionately affect schools in smaller conferences. This is because the smaller conferences are less likely to have big deals, so any income must first go to operating costs to keep the conference alive, making less money available for the individual schools.
I’m not saying that all schools should be paid equally; I think there is merit to schools getting more money for winning more. The issue is that if a small school pulls off an amazing upset in the first round, there's a possibility that it can actually end up getting less money than its opponent if that school is from a larger conference that ends up winning the championship.
Distribution of College Athletic Funds
After the conferences send money to all the schools, things don’t really get any better. University athletic departments are made up of more than just football and basketball, yet those two sports combine for more revenue than pretty much all other college sports combined, with some sports even losing money.
Naturally, money made from football and basketball is used to fund other sports. This isn’t inherently bad, as colleges are still definitely putting more back into football as well. But the issue is that these sports that are being subsidized by the revenue-generating sports are made up of predominately white, upper class students — think golf or tennis. But from a University of Pennsylvania study, it was seen that in the six largest conferences, between 2007 and 2010, black men were 2.8% of full-time undergraduate students, but 57.1% of football teams and 64.3% of basketball teams.
If we look at each individual athlete and the money they’re bringing in versus the money that is invested back into them, we quite literally see the underrepresented providing for the rest.
Is it as easy as just paying college athletes?
It could be expected that the fix is just to pay the student athletes. But that’s only part of the issue. It’s about how college athletes, especially those in the refvenue-generating sports, are being used by these universities; they spend hours in the gym and risk injury every time they play to earn money that they don’t even get to see invested back into them. Some would argue that athletic sponsorships are enough. It’s true that college is getting more and more expensive and a free ride is nothing to take for granted. But college athletes are hounded by coaches to focus on their sport rather than their schooling. Furthermore, the same UPenn study showed that 96.1% of the schools surveyed had graduated black male student athletes at a lower rate than student athletes overall, and 97.4% had graduated black male student athletes at rates lower than undergraduate students overall. So even with this free ride, not all student athletes don’t get to reap the benefits.
Another argument against paying athletes is that those who go pro go on to earn millions, but we’ve also already seen that only like 1% of football and basketball athletes make it to the professional leagues.
So what about the other athletes?
We can pay them, sure, so that it feels less like they are just money making robots. We can let college athletes profit off of their likeness, allowing them to get endorsements and sponsorships.
But what about the athlete who spends all his time on the sport instead of in class but decides not to go pro? What about the one who does decide to go pro but can’t hang and is left without a college degree? What about the one who gets injured before she graduates and just can’t get back to where she was before?
Throwing money at these students doesn’t fix the problem. It doesn’t prepare them for the world like college should. As with most of these things I write about, I don’t really know what the solution is, but I can’t help but feel that the emphasis and adoration that we have toward college sports is just too much. For the 1% of student athletes I am glad they had the opportunity, but for the other 99%, I feel frustration. These athletes are put to work every week, bringing money back that gets redistributed by some larger entity whose decision makers likely haven’t stepped on the very field themselves.
Seen this pattern before?