A Federal trial is under way, the LA Times reported today, where a group of ex-college athletes are accusing the NCAA of a multitude of anti-trust violations. The lead plainiff is Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball star, along with many others who charge that the NCAA is profiting from the sale of college athletes’ names, likenesses in TV broadcasts, rebroadcasts, video games and more. In 2010, I wrote a column entitled “A Scandal in College Football” which we are reprinting below in its entirety. The only thing that’s changed in the last five years is that the pay of football coaches has about doubled, with the the top five getting $5.5 million, $5.4 million, $5.1 million, $4.8 million and $4.7 million a year, respectively. In the last decade, the NCAA’s income and the income of its colleges have soared. Today, if a team like the Clippers is worth $2 billion, you can imagine what a championship college football or basketball team is worth. It’s high time that players are paid for their efforts, covered for their injuries and that we surrender this myth of amateurism.
A Scandal in College Football
A few weeks ago, the University of Southern California, one of the preeminent football schools in the country, cleaned house in the wake of a football scandal involving former star player Reggie Bush. Mike Garrett, a former Heisman Trophy winner for the school and longtime athletic director, was out, and a new broom swept in former USC quarterback and Rhodes Scholar Pat Hayden with marching orders to clean up the mess in his role as the new athletic director. The mess, it turned out, was a rank violation of the governing body’s (NCAA) rules. It turned out that someone had been slipping money to amateur athlete Reggie Bush when he played for USC, which is most certainly a no-no. The money appeared to be in the low thousands and paid over his college career. The NCAA investigated and obviously wanted to make an example of USC.
I probably would have passed the entire issue by, except there was something so self-righteous about the NCAA pronouncements and USC’s response that got me wondering just what it was all about.
To hear them tell it, the actions taken by the NCAA and USC were an attempt to keep the game clean and amateur and not let money, commercialism and greedy sports agents take over the college game and lead naive young ball carriers astray. I decided to test that rationale and dove into the Internet, which is a treasure trove on information and every reporter’s dream.
I started with the keepers of the holy grail of amateurism, the NCAA. The 2009-2010 NCAA Budgeted Revenues for year from the television and marketing rights fees adds up to $639 million, which is 90% of their revenue for the year. Additionally, they pick up in championship revues (which I assume means bowl games) in the amount of $62.3 million. The money surely goes out to universities, teams, conferences and overhead, but any way you look at it, amateur college football is a big business.
Forbes Magazine annually rates the “most valuable college football teams,” much the way they would rate business enterprises. The top school was Notre Dame, with a team valued at $101 million and an annual profit of $45.8 million. University of Texas is next at $92 million, with a profit of $46.2 million. Then, the University of Georgia at $90 million and a profit of $43.5 million, followed by Michigan at $85 million and a profit of $36.2 million, University of Florida at $84 million and a profit of $38.2 million. And, a few places down the list, our own USC, valued at $53 million showing a profit of $13 million.
It’s not that I begrudge the teams their value and annual profit. The colleges, like the pros, have plunged into selling special stadium boxes and sponsorships and demanding bigger cuts of stadium revenues. What bothers me is that the kids get very little of this enormous take. They virtually work for nothing. One thing for sure is the head coaches in this amateur sport are anything but amateurs, and they certainly don’t work for nothing. The coach of Texas gets the top $5.1 million per year, Michigan $2.9 million, Georgia $2.9 million, and the brand new coach at USC $4.0 million for the year — double what he earned at Tennessee.
One of the rationales for not paying college athletes is that they get a free education, which is in part true. The problem is that for most of them their major is football and between training, and practice and traveling and recovering from games, there really isn’t a lot of time or even less energy for academics. In many schools they don’t have very good graduation rates either. Notre Dame does very well and 93% of their players graduate. On the other hand, Texas graduates 42% of their players, Georgia 41% of their players and USC 57% of their players. Michigan and Florida do better with 73% and 72%, respectively. Some schools do wonderfully and graduate 90+% of their players, schools like the Military Academies, Boston College, Duke, but most languish in the middle with only one half of their players graduate within six years, and for many players their education ends when their football career ends.
We’re all also intrigued by the kids who sign big pro contracts for big dollars. But when you think about all the kids playing college football and then the relatively small number that get drafted by the NFL, I suspect that you, the average Malibu reader, has about as much chance of getting drafted by an NFL team as does the average college football player.
We ought to end this hypocrisy and the kids playing college ball should be paid much the way baseball pays their minor leaguers. In baseball, a new kid plays rookie league, and then at three different levels, single A, double A and triple A. At each level, the base pay goes up. Some make the majors but most don’t. There is no myth that these are amateurs, because in fact all the players are professionals trying to make it professionally. For most of the college football players, playing on a college team is their professional career. They risk injury and lifetime physical problems and they ought to be compensated. If college football is going to be a gigantic cash cow to the universities, a big payday for the coaches, a feeder system for professional football, an enormous financial enterprise for the peanut vendors, the lawn parkers, the ticket takers and just about every one connected to the enterprise we call amateur sports, it seems only fair that the college players be treated fairly also and we stop this charade that they are the amateurs.