Time to Pay the Players

The NCAA has operated for decades on the pretense that “student-athletes” are wholesome amateurs, trading their athletic prowess for an education and seeking only healthy competition and the joy of the game. This is mendacious cant, and everybody knows it. For decades, players at top programs have been paid via cash-stuffed envelopes slipped under their dorm-room doors and endless other in-kind payments. In many cases, these athletes are brought to campus solely in order to play, their grades and class attendance faked in a widely known sham.

An ongoing fraud investigation by the FBI is slowly exposing the corrupt system of illicit professionalism. NCAA scandals come to light regularly, but this one is sufficiently egregious to demand reforms. The NCAA is allergic to negative publicity and will surely propose weak or irrelevant remedies to make the whole thing go away and protect the key programs that generate so much attention and money. But if its leaders care at all about the integrity of the sports they regulate, they will consider major changes. Let us make one modest proposal: Abolish the strictures against paying athletes. We hesitate to suggest adding more money to the river that is flooding college athletics. And lifting the payment rules will create problems of its own, but it will improve a system in which everyone profits but the athletes and in which athletes are constantly tempted by illegal offers from boosters and agents.

Last fall, the FBI filed federal charges against four assistant basketball coaches and six other men, some with ties to Adidas, after an investigation revealed that representatives of the shoe company were, with the complicity of coaches, bribing or attempting to bribe high-school athletes to commit to college programs that had contracts with Adidas. Coaching legend Rick Pitino of the University of Louisville was the first to fall. An appalling point: Of the $39 million Adidas paid Louisville for its sponsorship deal, Pitino received 98 percent. Louisville is a public university and Pitino a servant of the people of Kentucky. But his greed raised few eyebrows until one of his assistants was discovered trying to arrange a $100,000 payment from Adidas to a recruit.

Pitino won’t be the last to fall. New reports are emerging that the FBI investigation will implicate two dozen more schools—almost enough to fill one side of the NCAA tournament bracket. Given that perennial favorites Duke, North Carolina, Michigan State, and Arizona are among them, the odds are not long that the NCAA could have to resort to its favorite—and least effective—punishment once the dust settles: “vacating” victories. Louisville just vacated its 2013 basketball national title, though not because of the current scandal but because an athletic department employee had spent thousands of dollars on escorts for players and recruits.

That the NCAA thinks forcing guilty teams to vacate victories is an effective means of dealing with rampant corruption is risible. These games aren’t forfeited—the opposing team doesn’t get a victory or hang a banner. The NCAA merely pretends the game never happened.

Corruption runs rampant. Institutions rake in ungodly sums for hosting games played by “amateurs.” The punishments for violations are a joke. Refusal to pay players directly feels more and more like rank hypocrisy.

It’s true, of course, that NCAA athletes receive payment in the form of scholarships, which are worth anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 and more a year in tuition and room and board. But scholarship amounts reflect the absurd costs of higher education, not the actual value. Does anyone really think a year’s education at the University of North Carolina, say, is worth $25,407? And the money generated by football and basketball players for their institutions dwarfs even these inflated amounts. Credible estimates suggest that the average Division I basketball player is worth nearly $300,000 per year to his school.

Student athletes face significant restrictions against earning money with part-time jobs—they’re actually forbidden to earn an income from doing what they do best. No school we’re aware of tells students on music scholarships that they’re not permitted to get summer jobs with orchestras or play in local bars on the weekends. Nor are student athletes living like royalty: A 2011 study shows that, even with scholarships, 86 percent of student athletes live below the federal poverty line.

In fact, the NCAA’s very use of the term “student-athlete” was always an exercise in cynicism; the term originated not as some philosophical ideal but as a formulation enabling the NCAA to block worker’s compensation claims. As Taylor Branch pointed out in his landmark 2011 Atlantic article, “The Shame of College Sports”:

Whatever was true in the 1950s, many NCAA colleges are now very much in the football and basketball businesses.

There is no easy or cost-free solution to this problem. Even if the association lifted the ban on payment for athletes, thorny questions remain. Once you decide who gets paid (what about softball players? swimmers? wrestlers?), how would payments work? There’s a reasonable case for creating trust funds that the athletes can access after they have graduated, or at least after their eligibility has ended. It’s tempting to look at what is going on now and decide that the simplest solution is to let athletes accept endorsements directly.

Whatever the appropriately nuanced compromise, we can all acknowledge that the status quo is wrong and corrosive. What we’ve already learned from the FBI investigation is ugly. What’s uglier still is that the NCAA and its members have long made billions of dollars on the backs of athletes who are disproportionately minority and low-income while forcing them to operate as “amateurs.”

Other reforms deserve debate, too—for instance, tying rankings to graduation rates, reducing the number of games to make academic life more central for scholar-athletes, denying freshmen eligibility to play for the same reason. But there is little hope of returning college sports to any genuine amateurism. The system simply will not reform itself as long as it remains a de facto professional racket in which hosts of administrators and coaches compete for massive salaries and universities compete for television and sponsorship contracts.

In an ideal world, student athletes wouldn’t be paid for performing. But in such a world, no one would get rich off them, either.