Ending Indentured Servitude in College Football and College Basketball

How to pay the athletes and end all the problems in college football and college basketball with one simple move 

This is part one of a three-part series.

Can we stop the hypocrisy of the unpaid athlete in college football and basketball?  The charade has gone on for so long that it’s embarrassing to everyone who participates in it.  The coach makes millions on apparel deals, radio and TV shows and endorsements, but the wide receiver gets kicked out of school for selling a jersey for a hundred bucks?  The university and the conference bank tens of millions from the TV contract, but the power forward rode around in a free car, so the basketball team has to give up its titles? 

Please. 

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad to listen to the hand-wringers fussing about “the integrity of the game” as they defend what has essentially become a system of indentured servitude.  Athletes provide years worth of free, and sometimes dangerous, labor in return for their freedom and the right to earn money, sometime down the road.

Is this a system the universities are protecting?  Could "the integrity of the game” possibly be more impugned than it already is?  ALL of the pie goes to the coaches and the schools and the sponsors and the TV networks, and NONE of it goes to the athletes who produce the show?  

It’s ridiculous and un-American and because of that simple equation, the game has no integrity left.

Let’s dispose of a few of the other tired objections to paying college athletes while we’re at it. 

“The athletes already get free tuition, room and board.”  True, but it doesn’t buy you so much as a donut at the off-campus coffee shop, and a sizable portion of today’s football and basketball players do not rank a college degree as a high priority.  When you come from the ‘hood, or the barrio, or the sticks, and you might be your family’s last, best hope at a decent house and three-square, you tend to be worried about the Benjamins.  

Welcome to Life 101.

“If you pay basketball and football players, then you have to pay (fill in the blank here: lacrosse players, female athletes, engineering students, etc).”  No, you don’t.  Football and basketball produce not just revenue, but PROFIT—huge gobs of it.  The players in those sports deserve some of the profit.  None of the other sports or departments in academia produces profit, so none of those others deserves to be paid.

Call that Life 102.

“There is a money problem in big-time sports and we need to solve it.  It is fundamentally at odds with the non-profit nature of the university.”  Absolutely correct.  There IS a fundamental problem with revenue-producing sports.  Their mission has evolved to become entirely inconsistent and incompatible with the mission of their university parents.

The mission of the academy is to educate young men and women, to broaden their minds and to prepare them for careers in the public or private sector.  They are also non-profit institutions—whatever profit they make is not taxed or distributed.

The mission of the revenue sports is to win, to maximize revenue and to prepare those with enough talent for a career in the NBA or the NFL.  Because of the money that has flowed into football and basketball, the sports subsidiaries have a purpose and a direction that is totally different from that of their academic parents.  They are essentially for-profit institutions inside non-profit universities.

When a subsidiary in Corporate America starts rowing in a different direction from the parent, there is a simple solution to it.  It’s called a spin-off. 

Some of the more recognizable spinoffs have been tech companies like Intel (from Fairchild Semiconductor) or Agilent Technologies (Eli Lilly).  LexMark printers were spun-off from IBM. Dr. Pepper soda, Wisk and All laundry detergents—all of those were spun off from larger parents.  At some point in the growth of each of those brands, they reached the fork in the road where football and basketball are today.  They took on an identity separate and distinct from their parent.

So they left.  They worked out a separation and set up their own shop with their own management, their own stakeholders and their own mission statement.  And in many cases they prospered.  The freedom to be themselves, the fresh air of getting out from under the suffocating embrace of their corporate helicopter moms, led them to heights of creativity and profitability that they never could have achieved within the fold.

And that is exactly what needs to happen now with football and basketball.  They are in the exact same place as Intel and LexMark and Dr. Pepper were years ago.  They are profitable and popular and rowing in an entirely different direction than their sponsoring universities.

It’s time for Junior to move out of the house and get his own place.  It’s time for college basketball and college football to be spun-off from the university.