By Nathan Janick
If the NCAA’s television revenue was split like the NBA’s, the average player would receive roughly $77,000 per year from the NCAA’s contract with Turner Sports for the NCAA tournament alone. This doesn’t include the multimillion dollar revenues from television deals for regular season games and ticket sales. At Emory you can join a fraternity, eat out all the time, blow a ton of money at Pitch ‘N Putt every weekend and pay for room, board and books for less than $77,000.
This is an unrealistic example because student athletes are compensated with over 13,000 scholarships per year instead of a percentage of revenue.
It would seem, then, that the NCAA ought to allow athletes playing for top-revenue teams to be paid for their contributions.
Due to a few factors. however, it’s not that easy. It’s more complicated because not all college sports bring in tens of millions of dollars for their universities.
The current system would work if the revenue of all sports resembled the current low revenue sports like golf and gymnastics, but the reality is that NCAA revenues have exceeded $800 million in recent years largely due to football and basketball. With revenues this large, one might ask why the NCAA doesn’t just compensate the players like they are professional athletes.
In an institution of the complete opposite of the current system, athletes would be paid at their market value. Star players and high school recruits would be paid large sums of money and athletes for less popular sports would likely be paid nothing. This option would be like a death sentence for low revenue collegiate sports, and there would be many consequences down the road of giving young athletes huge sums of money even earlier in their lives.
Since the current system is broken and a revenue sharing system comparable to a professional sports is unrealistic and would prove disastrous, the solution has to be constructed using two methods: athlete stipends and the player’s ability to profit off their own names.
In efforts to appease critics of the current system, the NCAA has proposed to give Division I athletes a $2,000 stipend. At Emory, this wouldn’t even cover the freshman meal plan. The NCAA should give all athletes a larger stipend to help cover college expenses, because lets be honest, college isn’t cheap. These stipends won’t apply to Division II and Division III schools (sorry, Emory athletes), because sports in those divisions do not make enough money for universities, hence the limited scholarships in Division II and no scholarships in Division III.
Opponents will argue that there is no money for this, but one doesn’t have to look further than the $71 million surplus the NCAA, a non-profit organization, recorded in 2012.
Even if the stipend is implemented, the unethical treatment of collegiate athletes will continue until the metaphorical wall of amateurism that the NCAA hides behind is torn down.
In order to maintain “amateur status,” the NCAA has incredibly strict rules and guidelines against players receiving impermissible benefits. Every couple of months, star player X has their picture on SportsCenter while the anchor reads something along the lines of “Player is currently under investigation by the NCAA for receiving impermissible benefits.”
So what is the big deal about these “impermissible benefits”?
Impermissible benefits are any tangible benefit that a player receives. They range from Reggie Bush and his family receiving approximately $280,000 in benefits from a sports marketing agent, to Geraldo Boldewijn being suspended and forced to pay back $700 for an impermissible use of a 1990 Toyota Camry with 177,000 miles on it, to Cedric Febis paying $20 to a charity, which was the value of the “benefits” he received.
The latest trend in the attack on amateurism is a players’ right to profit off their own likeness. Ed O’Bannon’s lawsuit against the NCAA is addressing this issue, and deals with the NCAA profiting off the use of athletes’ likenesses in the EA Sports NCAA Basketball video game. The court ruled that banning payments to players “unreasonably restrains trade.” The ruling continues to say that players should receive “a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images and likenesses in addition to a full grant-in-aid.”
Friends of mine that play for Division I sports teams joke that their universities own them because of the amount of time and effort their coach demands of them. What is being addressed in this case is how the NCAA actually owns the rights to these players’ names and can profit off them without compensating the student-athletes.
The NCAA only sells jerseys without the players names on the back, but high profile college athletes can be easily identified by their number. However, when Jay Bilas, a college basketball analyst for ESPN, searched high profile athletes’ names like Johnny Manziel on the NCAA online shop, the search results returned the player’s jersey. The corresponding player’s jersey would not pop up when searched without the name of the player being written into the computer program of the listing of the jersey. Bilas caught the NCAA profiting off the names of current college athletes, who would then revoke their amateur status. The players whose jerseys are being sold don’t receive a penny from the NCAA for the use of their name. Within 24 hours of Bilas’ tweets, the NCAA released a statement saying that “the NCAA online shop will no longer offer college and university merchandise.” The irony of the whole story is the NCAA violated these athletes’ amateur status for their own benefit, even though it is the way the NCAA is able to justify their treatment of these athletes.
The best solution is to give every student athlete the same stipend no matter what sport they play. I believe it should be higher than $2000. If you say the NCAA and colleges cannot afford this, look no further than NCAA revenues and coaches’ salaries. This system is fair to everybody except the high profile college athletes. This is why I propose that athletes should be allowed to profit off their own name and image while they are still in college. Athletes should receive financial compensation for the use of their name for life and compensation for the use of their number while that number is still theirs, including if the number is retired. This proposal will prevent the NCAA from exploiting athletes under the protection of amateurism.
– By Nathan Janick, Contributing Writer
The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.
The Wheel is financially and editorially independent from the University. All of its content is generated by the Wheel’s more than 100 student staff members and contributing writers, and its printing costs are covered by profits from self-generated advertising sales.
