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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The solution to the rampant corruption in college sports might be to pay the players. It's a controversial idea -- and it's gaining ground.
Mar 8, 2003 | Fresno State has taken itself out of the postseason because of an academic scandal. Georgia head coach Jim Harrick is under fire, his son and assistant, Jim Jr., already dismissed in an academic and financial scandal. The University of Rhode Island, the Harricks' previous employer, is looking into similar charges involving them there, and recently settled a sexual harassment suit against the elder Harrick.
St. Bonaventure players boycotted the last two games of the season after one of them was declared ineligible because he'd received a welding certificate, not a degree, from his junior college. The transfer had been personally approved by the president of the university, who overruled the school official charged with complying with NCAA rules.
That was the news from college basketball this week.
It's not hard to conclude that big-time college sports are in trouble. Cheating, fraud and academic improprieties are rampant. The only thing surprising about this week's flurry of scandals is that nobody seems to be surprised by them. It's business as usual.
Or is it education as usual? That's the question at the center of college athletics: Is it a business or a part of the educational process? The NCAA, which governs intercollegiate athletics, argues vehemently that it's in charge of an amateur enterprise, a student activity. But with television contracts in the billions of dollars and athletes allegedly collecting six-figure payments from boosters while never going near a classroom, the argument is getting harder and harder to make.
And it may be time to stop making it. Athletic scholarships provide for room, board, tuition and books. The idea of going beyond that, of letting athletes share in the revenue they produce, has been batted around for a long time. Lately, it's gained some traction.
Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers made the papers by introducing a bill that would force the University of Nebraska to pay players on its powerhouse football team a $100 weekly stipend if three of the six other states in the Big 12 Conference passed similar legislation. Chambers got a similar bill passed in 1988, but it was vetoed by Gov. Kay Orr. This time, Gov. Mike Johanns has said he'd sign the bill if it passed.
In Texas, a Big 12 state, Sen. Ron Wilson introduced a bill in the state Senate that, like other bills he's authored in the past, would give all scholarship athletes in every sport at state schools $200 a month. Larry Eustachy, the basketball coach at Iowa State, another Big 12 member, went so far as to say he would be willing to donate part of his $1.1 million annual salary toward paying players.
The NCAA, meanwhile, which governs intercollegiate athletics, says that any player in Nebraska or anywhere else who accepts payment would be declared ineligible, regardless of any state's law.
But something of a drumbeat to pay players is developing, and why not? "They are unpaid workers, and in big-time college athletics, not just football, there are no amateurs," Chambers told National Public Radio. "What I want is the athletes to have some spendable money."
Chambers is talking about athletes whose labor, in the case of Cornhusker football players, generates $16 million in annual profit. That's more than $188,000 profit per scholarship, or more than 10 times the value of a scholarship at a state school.
The idea of the college athlete as exploited worker was most famously illustrated by Chris Webber's claim, first made in Mitch Albom's 1994 book "Fab Five," that while he was a star at the University of Michigan, replica Chris Webber jerseys were selling for top dollar in the same mall where the real Webber couldn't afford a Big Mac.
"I remember reading that and thinking, 'That is total bullshit! Chris Webber is getting a pretty good amount of money to play at Michigan, as are the rest of the Fab Five,'" says Murray Sperber, an Indiana University professor who has written extensively about college sports. And he was thinking that before anyone knew about charges that Webber had accepted $288,000 from a booster, a case in which Webber is now under indictment for allegedly lying to a grand jury. "I just knew the way the Michigan program worked," Sperber says. "He not only could have afforded to buy dinner at McDonald's, he could have bought the McDonald's franchise."
Having said that, Sperber believes college athletes should be paid, but not because they're exploited workers. He says paying athletes, treating them as university staffers who, like any secretary or clerk, had the option of attending classes for free but wouldn't have to, would end the corruption that plagues the college sports world.
"It seems to me the advantage of these staff contracts and professionalization is that all the stuff you're reading in the paper about, like, in Georgia, the Harricks, and the various other paying athletes under the table, all this bullshit ends," Sperber says. "The NCAA rule book, which is the size of the Manhattan phone book at this point, shrinks to a tiny thing."
