Is a Scholarship Enough?: Boyce Watkins on NCAA Reform

We must remember that incentives roll downhill. A coach with high graduation rates and a low winning percentage would be fired, while a coach with low graduation rates and a high winning percentage is given a raise and promotion.  This shows blatant disregard for the value of academic success.  I see universities giving coaches blank checks for controlling every aspect of their players’ lives in order to get them ready to play, but they throw their hands up and negate their responsibility to see to it that these young men and women are getting educated.  The excuses are interesting: “We can’t make them study if they don’t want to!”  At the same time, the same coach who claims that he can’t make the athletes study miraculously finds a way to get 80 grown men awake at 6 am for intense weight lifting sessions.  They are able to motivate the athletes to do what coaches deem to be most important.

I don’t completely blame the coaches for these contradictions, I blame the campus.  Coaches understand that they are not going to be rewarded for academic achievement.  Winning, however, is key to their job security.  Campuses should take the lead in putting oversight in place that insures that academic progress is the most important part of any athletics program.  That means that if a player has practice the night before an exam, he/she misses practice.  If they have an exam during a game, they miss the game (even if it is a million dollar game on ESPN).  THAT, my friend, is the life of a student athlete. Right now, college athletes live the lives of professionals.

6) If you were named President of the NCAA, what other changes might
you make other than compensating athletes?

I am hesitant to be an armchair quarterback on the NCAA, primarily because I believe that many of the administrators in the NCAA know that what they are doing is wrong.  In fact, Walter Byers, the former executive director of the NCAA has reversed his position and stated that athletes should be paid.  Honestly, anyone with common sense realizes that if you earn millions for someone else, you deserve more than a college scholarship.  I believe that Myles Brand, in spite of the propaganda exercise performed by he and CBS Sports last year (in an attempt to refute my analysis), knows that he would never allow himself or his coaches to operate under the same constraints, penalties and exploitation placed on athletes and their families (especially if his mother were getting evicted, as many of these players come from poverty).  In fact, I found it quite ironic that nearly every participant in the CBS sports special was earning at least a few hundred thousand dollars per year while simultaneously explaining to athletes and their families why they shouldn’t get any of that money.

Beyond paying the athletes, I would make a decision: either the NCAA is going to be a professional organization or an amateur one.  It’s not going to be a hybrid.  A truly amateur organization doesn’t have coaches earning as much as $4M dollars per year.  Coaches earn no more than, say, $80,000 per year.

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