by Wornie Reed, Ph.D.
Director, Race and Social Policy, Professor, Sociology & Africana Studies, Virginia Tech
Sports fans are in the midst of March Madness, the time of year when the NCAA crowns its men’s basketball champion with a tournament filled with emotion, euphoric victories, and heart-wrenching defeats. It certainly is a mad time. Please excuse me while I discuss another particularly mad aspect of March Madness. March Madness is big business, and everybody gets paid but the performers–the players, an undeniable economic injustice.
The NCAA is in the middle of a 14-year $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for the rights to telecast the men’s tournament. The players–mostly black–are running, jumping, and shooting basketballs, entertaining us during this three-week period, during which the NCAA gets $771 million each year for the players’ efforts, while the players receive none of that money.
Of course, March Madness is just three weeks long. During the rest of the basketball season the teams of players earn even more money for their schools, so much that some coaches have salaries over $7 million a year; however, the players are not paid any of this real money they generate. In fact, coaches receive pay for having their players wear certain brands of sneakers, but the players receive no pay for wearing these sneakers. Big-Time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes. Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA who created this system, readily admitted in his autobiography, “The college player cannot sell his own feet (the coach does that) nor can he sell his own name (the college will do that). This is the plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives.”
All this commercial activity is hiding behind the sham of amateurism. Those who run college basketball claim that the players are amateurs and should not receive pay. This argument is nonsense–the only way the players are amateurs is they receive no pay. They generate millions of dollars, and everyone gets paid but them.
You may counter that the players are paid, as they get scholarships, to pay for their tuition, room, and board. But I say that bigtime college basketball players are some of the most underpaid workers in America. Who among us would be willing to put in the hours of these players to earn the pittance they receive–about $27,000 a year for a scholarship at a state school–when they produce so much money for others. A study in 2012 found that more than 80 percent of top-level college athletes on full scholarship lived below the poverty line.
You may say that they receive a free education. Yes, some do get educated, but many do not. In their book, Indentured, Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss report that among a hundred major sports schools, 35 had graduation rates less than 20 percent for their basketball players.
Additionally, you may think that players get training and opportunity to go to the NBA. No, they do not. NBA teams draft only about one percent of male college basketball players. The real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein so-called “student-athletes” generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. It is time for this scam to come to an end.
