As football, the “big dog” in college sports, takes center stage this fall, it is reigning over a different situation – college sports as admitted professional enterprises.
Before I criticize this phenomenon, let me acknowledge that for decades I have argued that athletes in big-time college sports – those generating significant revenue, primarily football and basketball players – should be paid.
The college sports landscape has changed. As a result of various lawsuits, athletes are getting paid across college sports.
Big-time programs generate millions of dollars in revenue. Coaches of the top football teams have long-term contracts averaging $8 – $10 million per year. The problem here is not just that coaches receive exorbitant amounts of money. It is the point that head coaches are paid excessively, while the athletes, who generate the revenue, receive a pittance (tuition, room, and board), considering the hours worked and the money generated.
College football has long ceased to be anything but a big business. These college sports enterprises generate millions of dollars annually, with football leading the way. Twenty college football teams earn over $100 million a year. In 2017-2018, The Wall Street Journal estimated the value of several top college football teams and found that four – Ohio State, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama – were valued at over $1 billion each, with Ohio State topping the list at $1.5 billion.
While many of us were calling for big-time college football and basketball players to be paid because they generated vast amounts of money, the NCAA – and the colleges – were hiding behind the “student-athlete” sham. Note that in 2024, the NCAA, mostly from television and marketing rights fees, earned $1.16 billion.
The “architect” of the NCAA was Walter Byers, who developed and directed the NCAA from 1951 until 1988. Byers provided the “student-athlete” term to the NCAA lawyers in the 1950s to fight a lawsuit for workman’s compensation by the widow of a college player who died while playing football. The NCAA prevailed by arguing that he was a student-athlete participating in an extracurricular activity that just happened to be more hazardous than singing in the college glee club. Apparently, at that time, the amount of money was not so substantial that it was mentioned in the plaintiffs’ court briefs.
Significantly, in 1997, Walter Byers published his autobiography, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes. As the title suggests, Byers acknowledged the problems he had helped create, expressing regret that modern college sports had become a lucrative commercial enterprise. He argued that the athletes should have the same rights as coaches and be able to sell their skills to the highest bidder.
Byers’ admission was the first, but minor, crack in the “student athlete” armor. But this scheme began to unravel in 2009 when Ed O’Bannon, an African American who had played basketball at UCLA and had an 11-year NBA career, saw images of himself in an EA Sports video game, NCAA Basketball 09. O’Bannon sued the NCAA for licensing his “likeness” for use in video games and broadcasts without permission or payment.
Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell were among 20 former college athletes who joined the class action suit challenging the NCAA’s rules re
stricting compensation – beyond the value of their athletic scholarships – for the use of men’s football and basketball players’ names, images, and likenesses.
Electronic Arts and the Collegiate Licensing Company, both original co-defendants with the NCAA, departed from the case and finalized a $40 million settlement that netted as much as $4,000 to as many as 100,000 current and former athletes who had appeared in EA Sports’ NCAA Basketball and NCAA Football series of video games since 2003.
The district court judge ruled, and in 2015, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld that the NCAA’s long-held practice of barring payments to athletes violated antitrust laws. The Court ordered the NCAA to pay the plaintiffs $42.2 million in fees and costs. But the ruling allowed for full cost-of-attendance scholarships rather than cash compensation.
However, individual states began to enact legislation permitting athletes to be compensated, forcing the NCAA to adopt an interim policy in 2021 that allowed athletes to monetize their NIL (name, image, and likeness).
Then the floodgates began to open. Later, I will discuss some of those developments and associated problematic situations.
