Daily Affirmations is all about discussing and distilling the most cutting-edge topics our society faces, as if drawn straight out of the headlines.
Four weeks ago’s headlines, that is.
Conference realignment was all the rage until the impending storm became a small ripple, with only a handful of schools actually pulling the trigger to change conferences. The full-scale nuclear war that seemed likely at one point became just a small brush up in some Central African republic. This college football three-parter looks at realignment from the “student athlete” perspective, and next time, has some choice words for our friends at the agricultural and mechanical institution to the east. Finally, we conclude by examining this frequent labeling, by coaches, of the players as “kids.”
The Southwest Conference brings back some great memories of some incredible Cotton Bowls, intense rivalries, high quality football, and local flavor. The old Southwest Conference featured some of the greatest college football players of all time—Earl Campbell, John David Crow, Bobby Layne, Doak Walker, Sammy Baugh, Eric Dickerson, Tommy Nobis, Bob Lilly, Ray Childress, Jerry LeVias, Mike Singletary, and Jerry Gray. More than that, all the players were from Texas or near Texas, so the quality of play was usually outstanding. They grew up playing each other, giving the rivalries a personal edge. You could watch a game in one part of the state during the day, and often be able to drive to another game that night. Your friends and neighbors often went to these schools, so fan rivalries were intense and you could enjoy passionate discussions with people you knew about next week’s game. Because the games were played in Texas or Arkansas, good weather generally prevailed and games were seldom played in snow or slop. Though the Big 12 has taken away much of that, as a Texas fan, Missouri and Nebraska were the furthest teams. Most Big 12 members recruited Texas high school players, and those “other” programs had a lot in common with SMU, TCU and Houston whom they “replaced.”
The proposed realignment, having four Texas teams go to the Pac-10, or A&M and OU going to the SEC, would have turned college football into outright pro sports leagues. What Texas fan has interest in seeing Texas (or Tech, or Baylor) play Arizona, or Oregon State, or Washington State? Why Sooner fans would want an annual Vanderbilt, Georgia or Mississippi State game also boggles the mind. Other than for non-conference or bowls, the further away my team’s regular opponents are located, the less interest it creates. I care more about what happens down the block than two time zones away. I see A&M, Baylor and Tech fans and alumni all the time; I might meet five Washington State fans my whole life. Kind of hard to enjoy the post-game talk when there’s no one else to engage.
Though the universities at some level acknowledge this (Bill Powers expressly cited it as a reason to walk away from the Pac-10), money, as always, talked. All of this realignment was about money. Nebraska and Missouri pursued the Big 10 because their per-member revenues, bolstered by the $72 million the Big 10 Network gave the conference, far exceeded the average $11 million per member Big 12 payout. The Big 10 has the greatest revenue of any conference, at over $220 million, for a $19 million per member share. Texas and the Sisters (Tech, OU, OSU, A&M) all looked to the Pac-10 forecasting much higher payouts, brought about by the Pac-10’s incipient television contract renegotiation. OU and A&M also pursued SEC invitations, no doubt to create leverage against the Pac-10 and Texas, and possibly benefit from the SEC’s $11 million per member revenue share, driven by the SEC’s CBS contract (buoyed by the SEC Championship Game’s $14 million revenue). Texas, the richest college athletics program in the nation at $82 million in annual revenues, ultimately backed out because it could not pursue its cherished dream of a UT television network if it joined the Pac-10. With Texas’ participation as a bargaining chip, Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe was able to convince Fox and ABC to renegotiate the TV contract to afford remaining member schools a far greater payout. Bear in mind the Big 12 maintains a three tier TV revenue sharing system, so Texas, A&M and OU would receive the highest payouts, followed Tech and OSU, and then everyone else. If that sounds like Major League Baseball, with the Yankees keeping most of their revenues, give yourself a gold star. Texas backed away from conference realignment not to maintain all the traditional rivalries or to keep parents from having to travel further to see their little angels play, but because it could maximize its own revenue by staying in the Big 12 (which now has 10 members; the Big 10 has 12 members).
Keep in mind the TV revenues aren’t the full picture. University athletic programs obtain funding from donors, corporate sponsors, ticket sales, bowl games (for football) and merchandising. Take Texas for example, the richest college program in the nation. In 2008, it realized $82 million in revenue. $30 million was from donations, while $33 million was from ticket sales. Nike alone pays Texas $1 million in sponsorship revenues, while other corporate sponsors provide much more. This explains why every one of the major football factories, err, institutions, have all built or expanded their stadiums in the last 20 years. Except Notre Dame, which has a $9 million per year TV contract with NBC (the “Notre Dame Broadcasting Company”). The donations are tax deductible. In the end, Texas had a $59 million operating “profit,” which it used to fund other athletic programs or put back into the program (as by making Mack Brown the most highly paid college football coach in the nation at $5.1 million/year). The major college athletics programs collectively realized over $4 billion in merchandising alone (all those t-shirts and sweaters you insist on buying your uncle for Christmas). Bowl payouts result in another $210 million annually (which is staggering, when you remember all those seatback you saw last season watching such athletic gems as the Motor City Bowl or the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl). Finally, lets not forget CBS’ 14 year, $11 billion contract to televise the NCAA basketball tournament. Yes, that’s right, $11 billion. That’s bigger than the gross domestic product of roughly 30 countries. These may nominally be academic institutions, but they run a money laundering operation that would make Tony Montana envious.
All of this was played out against the larger backdrop of every conference trying to expand. The Pac-10, wanting to leverage its position for its next TV contract negotiations, sought to pick off nearly half the Big 12, but settled for Colorado and Utah. The Big 10 wanted Nebraska, Notre Dame, Rutgers and West Virginia, but settled for Nebraska when Notre Dame decided to stay above the fray. The SEC courted OU and A&M. The ACC also sought to pick off some Big East teams. The big dogs definitely want to eat.
So its fantastic that everyone’s getting theirs. But what about the “student athletes”? You know, the ones all these people are paying to see? The ones who generate all these billions of dollars? How much do they get?
Good question. The restrictions are lengthy. They get a scholarship, and in some cases room and board. The scholarship lets them take classes about which half could care less, based on their grades and achievement levels. How shocking that LSU isn’t fielding a bunch of chemistry majors on this year’s team. The room and board generally lets the players stay at some hellish dorm overrun with crickets and mildew, replete with the delightful Sunday morning aroma of throw-up from Saturday night jello shot parties. At the bowls, they get a free trip to Salmon World, or the Shreveport Zoo, or Boise Potato Museum, or some other local Chamber of Commerce expedition if their team makes a bowl game. And maybe a free xbox in the gift bag. That’s it. No stipends, no per diems, no share of the merchandising millions, not a dime of all those TV dollars, not a cent of the Nike or other corporate money. Theoretically they can have jobs, but the practice schedule makes that a virtual impossibility. And lets not forget coaches like to exceed the NCAA-mandated maximum practice hours (yeah, I’m talking about you, Rich Rodgriguez; hey, if you’re going to practice more than everyone, shouldn’t you be better than 1 and 7 in the Big 10/12?). They can’t sign endorsement deals (even though the college itself can, and each athlete is forced to wear a corporate logo whether he wants to or not). Vince Young had to watch everyone on the Texas campus wearing his number 10 jersey and know that he wasn’t making one red cent for it.
All these sanctimonious speeches about how all this corporate wheeling and dealing is to benefit the “student athletes” defies comprehension. These guys are just numbers, stats, height and weight, 40-second dash times…nothing else. Quick-who was the starting tight end at Texas last year? Exactly. Michigan and Texas and Florida and LSU and USC and Ohio State aren’t bringing these guys in because their promising chemists, or biologists, or engineers. And no one is paying thousands to the athletic foundation for tickets just to further these players’ studies or watch them take sophomore calculus. The players are generating all that money; no one pays money to watch . But with all that cash rolling in, and with an ability to open new revenue streams that makes the Cali cartel jealous, the players actually generating it get nothing. I’ll deal with the value of the scholarship in a moment.
That disparity brings something to mind. A plantation. The really funny thing about USC getting sanctioned for agents making money off Reggie Bush wasn’t so much that USC so cavalierly insists on its innocence despite overwhelming evidence that it knew Bush’s family was receiving agent money, but that the NCAA was so upset someone else may have been making money off an athlete other than itself and the school. And now that the NCAA has awakened to one college star receiving compensation for his labor, it turns out others are trying to get theirs too. Rather than acknowledging that the players drive the college football money-making machine, the NCAA powers that be have instead decided to clamp down even harder on players and agents. At least the agents only want 10 percent of the players’ revenues; the schools insist on 100%. The NCAA makes the most hard-core Oakland street pimp look generous by comparison.
If the NCAA and the universities truly had the players’ interests at heart, it would let them return to their universities after declaring for the NFL draft but going undrafted. It wouldn’t keep players away from school for a month-long basketball tournament. It wouldn’t have added a 12th game to football schedules. It wouldn’t allow conference championship games during the middle of most schools’ finals period. And its major conferences wouldn’t seriously discuss joining conferences two time zones away.
Fairness and reasonableness dictate paying the players. At least enough to get a pizza, or go home to visit their parents once a month. Certainly, universities should not pay NFL-type salaries, or anything beyond what it might pay graduate assistants in academic departments. Paying some sort of expense-level allowance wouldn’t deter the future first round draft picks from getting a head start on having their snout in the agent trough, but it would at least address to some extent the incredibly inequitable and victimizing relationship between universities, who pocket all the revenues, and players, whose labor creates those revenues. It would also at least redress the most egregious financial hardships imposed on these players, who in some cases can’t even afford airline tickets to go home and see their parents.
Hey, the coaches sure have cashed in on the players. Average college coaching salaries have skyrocketed. At least 66 major Division I college head coaches now earn in excess of $1 million per year. That’s just salaries. That says nothing of their endorsement deals, weekly TV shows, personal appearance money, and other perks. Again, the players’ sweat makes the turnstiles go, while the coaches get the money.
But the arguments against paying players some sort of stipend to cat least cover expenses don’t hold water, at least not at the revenue levels today’s universities realize. Let’s start with “the scholarship should be enough.” Maybe if you’re talking about an expensive university, like Duke or Stanford. But at places where they pretty much throw college credits into your car if you drive too slowly past the campus? Texas State? Kansas State? Wyoming? Child, please. They should pay people to go there. Face it, a lot of these guys don’t really put much value in going to class, much less getting a diploma. Many don’t go to major football factory programs for the great poly sci curriculum. They go to get ready for playing in the NFL. Many shouldn’t be in college in the first place. Besides, as Jeff Ward says, major college football isn’t malt shops and letterman sweaters. It’s a multi-billion dollar business, and a cost-free NFL training ground. The sheer disparity between any scholarship value and the amounts the players generate for the schools is so grossly overwhelming that a scholarship cannot possibly constitute fair compensation. Particularly when in most cases, these players have to take sharply reduced hours to have enough time to train (and can’t go to school during summers so they can have jobs). Besides, other students on academic scholarships don’t run the risk of serious or debilitating injury through accepting a scholarship. Also, other students don’t make money for their schools. The people at your job who make the most money generally are the ones who bring in the most money for the company. Universities are no different; accounting professors and physics professors make more than philosophy professors. Sad but true. Universities even let (and generally encourage) professors to obtain outside consulting jobs. Even academic department graduate assistants earn a small salary. Scholarships aren’t inconsistent with paying recipients a living stipend. But when it comes to the athletes who make the school its really big money, they’re expected to do it for room and board and tuition. That’s a plantation.
Then there’s the argument that paying players will disproportionately benefit the college “haves” against the “have nots.” Put another way, the big programs can either pay more, or if the NCAA adopted a standardized payment scale, could more readily withstand the cost. Wow, you mean Ohio State, USC, Florida, Texas, and Notre Dame might have a financial advantage over some other programs. That…is…shocking. We sure wouldn’t want to do anything that might give some programs a financial edge over others. Because it would be absolutely intolerable for some programs to have more money than others. Look. Who were the top teams with the biggest revenues in the 1960s? Notre Dame, Texas, USC, Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Penn State, Alabama, Georgia. Who are the top teams now? Pretty much the same. The past 50 years or so have seen a few programs (Florida State, Miami, LSU, Wisconsin) reach upper echelon status, but not that many others. The haves have always been the haves, and the have nots have always had not. The haves will always enjoy a huge financial edge over the rest of the pack. Paying players won’t change that fact. The Big 12 even enshrines that caste system, with the three tier system mentioned previously
Another argument contends that paying players would be unfair to those universities that simply can’t afford to do so. I call this the Bernie Sanders Theory of college football. You know, communism. If big time college athletics totally rejects financial equality when it comes to everything else (see above), it can hardly hide behind that fig leaf to avoid paying players some small pittance of the revenues they provide these schools. If some schools can’t pay players because they’re in the hole, like the Aggies, whose athletic department owes the main university at least $16 million, maybe they shouldn’t pay their players. But that shouldn’t prevent other schools, who through better money management, fan support, or alumni fundraising are able to make such payments. Not everyone should have to pay their players. Rather than paying a stipend, the rules should allow a university to instead relax the rules against taking a job, or should give athletes at those schools more opportunity to earn money outside the program. Even the poor schools should be able to provide some remuneration. That disparity exists now anyway. The football teams often play and train in palaces. The soccer team…not so much.
Then there’s those who complain that football players shouldn’t be the only ones who get paid, and generally that point leads to it being too expensive to pay everyone. Truly a strawman. Pay the lacrosse players. And the baton twirlers and the volleyball players. We’re not talking about Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett money; we’re talking about enough money to do laundry and go out on a date every now and then. But if a school choose not to pay the twirlers, too bad. Sorry, but they’re not adding suites and a third deck to the lacrosse stadium. If that’s unfair, those lacrosse guys should try out for football.
So that about does it. Its fine for the schools to get theirs. Again, and again, and again. Throw a few bones to the players who create the money with their blood, sweat, bones, and ligaments.
Next-Aggies, I love you, but come on fellas. The SEC. Really? You really want to become Florida's pinata?
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