NCAA Student Athletes Ought to Be Recognized As Employees Under the Fair Labor Standards Act

Resolved: NCAA student athletes ought to be recognized as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

December 2017 PF Brief*

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1 Topic Analysis by Max Wu 5 1.1 Introduction ...... 5 1.2 Background Information ...... 6 1.3 Affirmative ...... 9 1.4 Negative ...... 12 1.5 Concluding Remarks ...... 16

2 Topic Analysis by Devon Weis 18 2.1 Introduction ...... 18 2.2 The Resolution ...... 19 2.3 Affirmative Arguments ...... 21 2.4 Negative Arguments ...... 24 2.5 Wrapping Up ...... 26

3 Definitions / Background 27 3.1 Overview of what the FLSA guarantees ...... 27 3.2 More specifics on who qualifies in the status quo ...... 28

4 Pro Evidence 30 4.1 Student Exploitation ...... 30 4.2 Corruption ...... 34 4.3 Race ...... 52 4.4 Injury Protection ...... 73 4.5 Economics ...... 85 4.6 Academics ...... 100 4.7 Institutional Trust ...... 107 4.8 Graduation rates ...... 110 4.9 Entrepreneurship/Financial Literacy ...... 112 4.10 Sports bad ...... 114 4.11 AT: Costs too much ...... 121

4.12 AT: Turns college into professional sports ...... 121 4.13 AT: Athletes get a free education ...... 122 4.14 AT: Ruins the student experience ...... 122 4.15 AT: This is unfair to non-athletes ...... 128 4.16 AT: Spillover to high school ...... 128 4.17 AT: Non-revenue sports will be cut ...... 129 4.18 AT: Too expensive for colleges ...... 131 4.19 AT: Costs too much ...... 132 4.20 AT: Turns college into professional sports ...... 133 4.21 AT: Athletes get a free education ...... 133 4.22 Generic non-unique to a lot of neg arguments ...... 134

5 Con Evidence 135 5.1 Title IX ...... 135 5.2 Cost ...... 136 5.3 Legal Considerations ...... 137 5.4 Benefits of Amateurism ...... 140 5.5 Competitive Balance/Intercollegiate Inequities ...... 142 5.6 Tuition Increases ...... 143 5.7 Tuition Rising Impact ...... 146 5.8 Academic Cuts ...... 150 5.9 Scholarship Cuts ...... 152 5.10 Program Cutting ...... 154 5.11 Impact to Program Cutting ...... 157 5.12 Short-changing ...... 158 5.13 Distraction ...... 160 5.14 Own your name ...... 161 5.15 Internship Model ...... 165 5.16 Reform ...... 166 5.17 AT: Student Athletes Deserve to be Paid for What They Do ...... 167 5.18 AT: Student Athletes are Exploited for Money ...... 171 5.19 AT: Students Would Receive Employee Benefits ...... 175 5.20 AT: Athletes and Schools Have a Primarily Economic Relationship ... 178 5.21 AT: Universities Can Afford to Pay Student Athletes ...... 182 5.22 AT: Improve the Quality of College Athletics Programs ...... 191 5.23 AT: College Sports Would Remain Just as Popular ...... 193

5.24 AT: Unionization ...... 194 5.25 AT: New NLRB Memo Recognizes Student Athletes as Employees ... 197 5.26 AT: Recognizing Student Athletes as Employees is the Only Solution .. 198

Max Wu debated for Mission San Jose HS from 2013-2017. Over his career, he earned 13 bids and 2 auto-quals in his junior year, reaching deep elimination rounds at almost every tournament he attended. Max was ranked as one of the top 10 teams in the nation in both the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 season. He reached the final round of the 2016 Tournament of Champions and championed the 2017 Harvard Round Robin, among other impressive outround finishes at the NCFL Grand National Tournament, the Glen- brooks, Stanford, Harvard, Apple Valley, UNLV, and NSDA Nationals. Currently, Max is a freshman at the University of Chicago, and hopes to double major in Political Sci- ence and Philosophy.

1.1 Introduction

Hi there! If you’re reading this, it means, hopefully, that you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on the 2017 December Public Forum topic, Resolved: NCAA student athletes ought to be recognized as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The status of student athletes in the NCAA is a recurring and hotly contested issue in both directions. Unlike many past topic areas, we are not very far removed from the world of college sports; students at nearly every American high school matriculate to higher educational institutions on the basis of athletic scholarships. I live on the same floor as football and basketball players (a constant reminder of UChicago’s storied Division III athletic departments). You may even know a few college athletes yourself.

Acknowledging our special relationship with this month’s resolution will you serve you well when developing a strategy. It will remind you that arguments divorced from reality will not be as powerful as arguments rooted in well-understood truths. It will also humanize athletes and give faces to the statistics and impact cards You may be inclined to believe this topic will produce uninteresting or repetitive rounds; I’ll be the first to admit that the NSDA hasn’t exactly been hitting home runs this year. After doing

a fair amount of research, however, I am confident that debates will be full of clash and have a diversity of warrants and impacts.

In this analysis, I plan to review information I believe to be crucial in understanding the resolution and to present a few potential arguments I think will be effective on both sides.

1.2 Background Information

The first key term in the resolution is ‘NCAA student athletes.’ The NCAA, or Na- tional Collegiate Athletic Association, is a nonprofit organization that oversees the official athletic activities of colleges across the nation. It includes 24 separate sports like and 480,000 student athletes. NCAA athletes are asked to practice on a consistent schedule and travel across the country to compete with other schools. The NCAA splits up college athletics into three categories: Division I, Division II, and Division III. Divisions are generally based on the size of schools involved, with larger universities competing in D1 and smaller schools in D2 and D3. An important distinction is that D1 and D2 programs are allowed to offer athletic scholarships, while D3 programs are not. There are 19 Division I-III men’s sports and 21 Division I-III women’s sports. The majority of students do not extend their athletic careers further than NCAA college sports. The NCAA1 specifies on its website,

“Fewer than 2 percent of NCAA student-athletes go on to be professional athletes. In reality, most student-athletes depend on academics to prepare them for life after college. Education is important. There are nearly half a million NCAA student-athletes, and most of them will go pro in something other than sports.”

With this information in mind, I would advise focusing your warrants and impacts on the other 98% of students who won’t make it to a professional league.

The NCAA is known for its men’s basketball and football programs. College football is the second most popular spectator sport in America, ahead of multi-billion dollar leagues like the National Basketball Association. Similarly, the Official NCAA College Basketball tournament, coined “March Madness,” is behind only the NFL’s Superbowl in viewership. As you can imagine, these sports are very profitable. A Washington Post

1“Recruiting Fact Sheet.” NCAA, July 2016, www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Recruiting%20Fact%20Sheet%20WEB.pdf.

article by Will Hobson and Steven Rich2 explains, “Big-time college sports departments are making more money than ever before, thanks to skyrocketing television contracts, endorsement and licensing deals, and big-spending donors.” The big phrase in the resolution is “ought to be recognized as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” I have three observations about this section. First, the topic clearly asks us whether or not a hypothetical change should be made to the status quo, in contrast to past months, where debaters were asked to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement about the status quo. In the debate community, there are names for both of topics. This December, we are debating about comparative worlds; the affirmative team’s burden is to prove a certain action in the resolution should be taken. In Septem- ber and October (and many other months), we debated a truth-testing resolution; the affirmative team’s burden is to prove that the resolution’s characterization of reality is accurate. Comparative world resolutions are generally prescriptive, while truth-testing resolutions are descriptive. Getting the two types of debate confused could lead to in- round confusion. Second, the word ought happens to appear in the topic. Since the actual inception of Public Forum debate, ought has only found itself in 4 resolutions, 0 times before the 2014-15 season. What makes this word so high demand? In my opinion, ought changes very little in relation to how topics are normally debated. Coaches and competitors alike tend to overplay its importance, contrasting its ethical connotations with should’s emphasis on the practical. In reality, the difference between should and ought are insignificant: both words are used to indicate moral correctness and can be used almost synonymously. Should does not necessarily imply practicality or utilitarianism. Ought does not always imply a debate about principles or deontology. Both words suggest a duty to act morally, as both means- and ends-based frameworks aim to do the right thing. I will not deny that ought carries specific linguistic implications, but they are generally unimportant when it comes to PF debates. Third, I would like to talk about what recognition under the Fair Labor Standards Act entails. Workers protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, or the FLSA, are granted a minimum federal wage of $7.25 an hour, guranteed overtime pay (after 40 hours, additional work is compensated at 1.5x the base wage), and entered into a government recordkeeping system. The most crucial part of FLSA recognition is the salary requirement, which entails legal and financial consideration as an official employee. By putting

2Hobson, Will, and Steven Rich. “College Athletic Departments Are Taking in More Money than Ever – and Spending It Just as Fast.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 23 Nov. 2013, www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-up-the-bills/.

all our parts parts together, we can simplify the question asked in the resolution down to five words: Should college athletes be paid?

With our ground rules set, the next step in deconstructing a comparative worlds resolution is imagining what the different worlds would look like. Currently, the NCAA operates on a scholarship-model, where D1 and D2 athletes are compensated for their work with a free or subsidized university education. The affirmative’s proposal would shift the NCAA to a play-for-pay model. Thousands of ex-players and social commentators have already called for this change to be made, only to be stopped in court.

There are, in my opinion, three relevant court decisions/legal cases debaters should ac- quaint themselves with this month. The first, and the largest, is Berger v. NCAA. In Berger, Gillian Berger and two other female track runners at the University of Penn- sylvania sued the NCAA for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The athletes believed that they deserved wage compensation as employees, and that their work was indistinguishable from other that of other employees who worked at concessions stands or as ticket sellers. After losing their case in district court, Berger et al. took the case up to the US Court of Appeal for the 7th Circuit. The 7th Circuit affirmed the initial decision. Their reasoning against recognition under the FLSA was two-fold: 1) players, unlike employees, had no expectation of payment for playing, and 2) The Department of Labor Manual found that students are amateurs and already receive benefits from college, denying them from employee status.

The second case is O’Bannon v. NCAA. Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, filed an antitrust class action lawsuit against the NCAA on the grounds that former student athletes should be entitled to financial compensation for the NCAA’s commercial uses of their images. While the district court ruled in O’Bannon’s favor and held that the NCAA had violated antitrust law, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals came to a different conclusion. District Judge Claudia Wilken required NCAA schools pay Division I football and men’s basketball players up to $5,000 a year for the appropriation of thier name, image and likeness rights. The Ninth Circuit maintained that the NCAA was in violation of federal antitrust law, but it reversed Wilken’s argument for compensation by concluding member schools only need to provide up to the cost of attendance to their student athletes.

The final and most recent case involves Northwestern University’s student unionization controversy. Quarterback and team captain Kain Colter led the Northwestern D1 football team in petitioning for the right to collectively bargain. In 2014, the Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board, Peter Sung Ohr, ruled in favor of the

Northwestern football team’s right to unionze and offered scholarship athletes recognition as employees. This decision was monumental, but it was also limited in scope to one particular team. Things took a turn for the worse in 2015, when the College Ath- letes Players Association took the Northwestern case to a full National Labor Relations Board panel (rather than a single director), and was unanimously dismissed. The NLRB sided with the NCAA and found that players were students first and amateur athletes second. As it stands, the scholarship-model seems highly entrenched. With a little bit of background information under our belts, let’s get into the specifics. I will explain a few promising arguments on both sides of the topic.

1.3 Affirmative

Economic Autonomy: The thesis of this argument is that NCAA athletes would benefit from economic autonomy. As employees, students would finally be allowed to market their own names and have their own brands, giving them the freedom to agree to endorsement deals and sell autographed merchandise. Among other things, it also allows them to pursue their own financial ventures and provides them a safety net in case their professional league ambitions don’t pan out. Viv Bernstein points out in a 2011 op-ed from ESPN3,

And what of all of those college athletes who likely will not have a chance at making big bucks as a pro? Consider forward Matt Howard, who helped Butler to two consecutive NCAA championship games, but went undrafted in the NBA. Howard should have been able to cash in on endorsement deals while at Butler, when he had some earning potential as a basketball player.

Students can also make great business decisions if given the opportunity. Jamilah Cor- bitt4 explains in a Huffington Post article titled “The Biggest Reasons Athletes Make Great Entrepreneurs,” NCAA athletes have unique skills that help them excel in en- trepeneurship: high resilience/mental toughness, system thinking, and persistent work ethics. Providing economic autonomy for NCAA athletes grants a few obvious benefits. It ensures a sustainable long-term income source and can offer an opportunity for

3Bernstein, Viv. “Pay-for-Play – It’s Time to Let College Athletes Market Themselves.” ESPN, ESPN Inter- net Ventures, 23 July 2011, www.espn.com/espnw/news/article/6794278/pay-play-time-let-college- athletes-market. 4Corbitt, Jamilah. “The Biggest Reasons Athletes Make Great Entrepreneurs.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 3 Sept. 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/jamilah-corbitt/the-biggest-reasons- why-a_b_5760290.html.

upwards mobility to impoverished families. It helps to combat deplorable living conditions for athletes, many of whom can barely afford to eat.

Racism: Racism will be a popular and powerful argument for judges of all types. The claim is that the NCAA derives most of its profit from a select group of D1 sports: men’s basketball and football. In analyzing the demographics of these unpaid athletes, Michael Harriott5 of the Root reaches a gut-wrenching conclusion.

In 2012, the latest year for which figures are available, black players made up 51.6 percent of FBS football players (far more than their 13 percent of the American population) and 57.2 percent of Division I basketball players. For years, colleges have made hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of these athletes with no regard for their future, and no one cares—simply because they’re black.

Numerous black scholars and social sciences professors decry the existing NCAA scholarship-model by drawing visceral comparisons to the plantation, Jim Crow laws, or paternal colonialist structures of history. The thought of young and predominantly black men putting in hours of work for white coaches and white owners with little tangible monetary compensation should absolutely evoke an emotional response from listeners. Far more explanation should be paid to how the current system of college athletics is racist and discriminatory; comparing NCAA students to slaves is not enough to constitute an argument on its own and could even be considered offensive without proper explanation. Finally, do not attempt to claim solvency for these racist power structures– your impact should be framed as a move in the right direction, not a magic bullet. Just as paying reparations would not make the vestiges of centuries of oppres- sion disappear into thin air, paying student athletes would not be the panacea to larger problem of institutionalized anti-Blackness. Instead, you can argue that much-needed income from college basketball and football will end up circulating in communities with high concentrations of minorities, or that granting collective bargaining power to all students would disproportionately benefit marginalized groups.

Unionization/Healthcare: I think this is a very straightforward argument. Granting students employee status also grants them the right to officially unionize under the National Labor Relations Board. What do unions do? They give workers leverage over employers, allowing students to go on strike, lobby with special interests, and negotiate

5Harriot, Michael. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecrop- pers.” The Root, Www.theroot.com, 31 Mar. 2017, www.theroot.com/just-a-reminder-the-ncaa-is-a- plantation-and-the-play-1793877559.

on pay standards, benefits, and safety and security issues. In the context of the NCAA, unions give athletes a voice to articulate workplace concerns with their coaches, owners, and adminsitration on issues like not getting enough to eat, being forced to miss too much class, or being overworked in practice. Most importantly, unionization would bargain for better healthcare and medical treatment in the case of injury. Phillip Litchfield6 of the Chicago-Kent College of Law argues,

Up to this point, universities have been immune from judgments that other employers would typically have to pay. Kavanagh and Rensing are both premised on the fact that NCAA student athletes do not receive wages and therefore are not employees. For this reason only, workers compensation and tort claims have not held up in court. Should the schools begin to pay their student athletes, however, this relationship will change; the universities’ primary defense to these claims will disappear.

Without this defense, schools become obligated to cover the costs and settlements of injuries that happen during practice or games, as well as worker’s compensation. FLSA recognition ensures that students do not bear the brunt of costs, which also provides links into social mobility and safety. In fact, the entire purpose of the notion of student athletes was contrived to avoid paying worker’s comp. Author Joe Nocera7 argues in the New York Times,

The phrase “student-athlete” was, in fact, dreamed up in the 1950s by then- N.C.A.A. President Walter Byers, after it appeared that injured athletes in several states might be allowed to get workers’ compensation. The phrase, write Nicholas Fram and T. Ward Frampton in an article in the Buffalo Law Review, was meant to “obfuscate the nature of the legal relationship at the heart of a growing commercial enterprise.” Today, that commercial enterprise brings in not millions of dollars but billions. Yet the players not only don’t participate in the spoils, they have no voice at all. “Players need to know that they will be taken care of if they are injured,” said Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association, which is aiding the Northwestern effort.

6Litchfield, Phillip. “Putting the ‘Student’ Back in ‘Student Athlete.’ ” Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, 2013, www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/seminar/Litchfield%20Final%20Paper.pdf. 7Nocera, Joe. “Unionized College Athletes?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 31 Jan. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/opinion/nocera-unionized-college-athletes.html?_r=0.

Ultimately, unionization will help combat poverty and low living standards for students, and changing the legal status of students will give them worker’s compensation and fully subsidized health-care: all great things.

1.4 Negative

Financial Trade-offs: This will be, by far, the most important argument on the negative. For a while, I was convinced it would be the only strong argument (I’m also not sure if I have persuaded myself otherwise). It essentially says that paying NCAA athletes would intuitively drive up costs of colleges and athletics departments, causing trade- offs in other functions of univerisities. Let’s first go over how much costs increase. If over 460,000 student-athletes compete across 24 sports every year, even the minimum wage would cost schools millions of dollars every week. The Associated Press8 reports in 2011 that the fair market value of average D1 college football and basketball players is over $100,000, and to make matters even worse, a the ability to offer athletes additional money may create a bidding war for top prospects, driving up costs even more.

Critically, most schools cannot handle increased costs from their athletic departments. The NCAA9 clarifies,

Only 24 FBS schools generated more revenue than they spent in 2014, according to the NCAA Revenues and Expenses of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Report. That figure jumped from 20 schools in 2013, but it has remained relatively consistent through the past decade. Though the number of athletics departments reporting positive net generated revenues has increased slightly, the average of their net generated revenue has dipped in the past year. Those 24 schools, at the median, generated about $6 million in net revenue, compared to just over $8 million in 2013 and a little more than $2 million a decade ago. But those 24 schools are a minority. Many more schools saw their expenses exceed their revenue, requiring their colleges and universities to cover the shortfall. The median FBS school spent $14.7 million to help subsidize its athletics department in 2014, up from a

8Frommer, Fred. “Report: Top College Athletes Worth 6 Fig- ures.” The Associated Press, The Oregonian, 12 Sept. 2011, www.oregonlive.com/collegefootball/index.ssf/2011/09/report_top_college_athletes_wo.html. 9Burnsed, Brian. “Athletics Departments That Make More than They Spend Still a Minority.” NCAA, NCAA, 18 Sept. 2015, www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments- make-more-they-spend-still-minority.

little more than $11 million in 2013. That level of spending isn’t unique to FBS schools – median Football Championship Subdivision and non-football schools spent roughly $11 million to help fund athletics in 2014. “There is still a misperception that most schools are generating more money than they spend on college athletics,” said NCAA Chief Financial Officer Kathleen Mc- Neely. “These data show once again that the truth is just the opposite.

With some of the basics laid out, I want readers to know that there are a diversity of other reasons why operating costs for schools would increase I have not covered. Nonetheless, this is only the first half of the link chain; I have also included 4 types of trade-offs that could take place due to high costs.

Tuition: In order to finance the salaries of thousands of college athletes, universities may raise their tuitions. A 2014 article in the TIME Magazine10 indicated “Changes to how student-athletes are paid could lead some schools, stuck with nowhere else to turn, to raise other students’ fees.” Higher costs of attendance will undoubtedly discour- age many poor students from going to college, worsening nationwide poverty (perhaps along racial lines). Higher costs of attendance will also encourage students to drop out, as a majority of students claim ‘financial limitations’ as their reason for not completing a college education.

Scholarships: A similar warrant to tuition: because the affirmative’s play-for-pay model replaces the negative’s scholarship-model, fewer students altogether get scholarships that allow them to attend college. Krupnick argues,

The most likely outcome, Sperber says, would be for at least some of those universities to drop out of the big-time sports world by eliminating athletics scholarships or otherwise scaling back sports programs rather than risking protests by paying athletes and charging students more.

Just like tuition, impacts related to scholarships should be weighed on scope and time- frame, as they affect more people than just athletes, and failure to get a degree can harm lifelong earnings and intergenerational prospects for upwards mobility.

Closing athletic departments: The claim here is that only some college sports are profitable. In order to continue fueling the profit-producing departments, profit-draining sports will be cut or defunded. Many authors have suggested this possibility, chiefly among

10Krupnick, Matt. “Would Your Tuition Bills Go Up If College Athletes Got Paid?” Time Money, 27 Nov. 2014, time.com/money/3605591/college-athletes-sports-costs-students/.

them, Villanova’s Michael A. Corgan11 He writes,

Ultimately, the pay-for-play model has a number of serious practical and legal consequences that prevent it from being a viable alternative to the NCAA’s current system. First, although a number of universities generate millions of dollars through football and basketball programs, schools utilize this revenue to fund other unprofitable sports. Consequently, although numerous schools would be able to afford to pay all student-athletes a monthly stipend, a large number of schools would be forced to cut other men’s sports to even consider paying stipends to both men and women student-athletes that could total millions of dollars. While scholarship cuts could help schools solve their potential financial woes, this proposed financial solution would eliminate opportunities for male athletes in sports such as wrestling and baseball, which have already been drastically reduced by schools to remain in compliance with Title IX.

By shutting down programs that operate on a loss, the benefits of entrepreneurship and unionization only flow to participants of certain sports, while other students lose the benefit of college education altogther. This argument is made additionally effective by an unfortunate profitability gap between men’s and women’s sports; many female students would be deprived of the equal opportunity they deserve. Corgan makes ex- plicit mention of Title IX, a federal law regarding institutional sex discrimination. The relationship between Title IX and FLSA recognition is promising, and I would not be surprised to hear arguments related to it in the coming month.

Harming Education: The final warrant of cost trade-offs is damaging the quality of education. Flashy and attention-drawing college football teams will draw funding from budget cuts to unexciting chemistry departments. The Association of the Governing Board12 details,

In sum, there is every reason to believe that the current direction of big-

11Corgan, Michael A. “Permitting Student-Athletes to Accept Endorsement Deals: A Solution to the Financial Corruption of College Athletics Created by Unethical Sports Agents and the NCAA’s RevenueGenerating Scheme.” Villanova Univer- sity Charles Widger School of Law, Jeffrey S. Moorad Sports Law Journal, 2012, digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://everydaydebate.blogspot.com/2017/11/pf- dec-2017-con.html&httpsredir=1&article=1009&context=mslj. 12Kirwan, William E., and R. Gerald Turner. “Changing the Game: Athletics Spending in an Academic Context.” Association of Governing Boards, Chancellor Emeritus, University System of Maryland, 2010, www.agb.org/trusteeship/2010/septemberoctober/changing-the-game-athletics- spending-in-an-academic-context.

time college sports is leading us to even greater imbalances of fiscal priority for athletics over academics. We worry about a scenario in which a college must use ever-growing amounts of general funds or increased student fees to maintain a Division I FBS football team instead of using those resources for teaching and research. In this era of declining state support for higher education, trustees, academic leaders, and stakeholders must think hard about how investing in athletics and academics will shape their institutions in the long term.

The impact of this warrant is clear– undermining education for all the students on campus is far more important than increasing the happiness for a select group of students. You can even terminalize this analysis by making arguments about teacher turnover, drop out rates, or financial/health literacy. Unionization Bad: Unionization seems to intuitively be a good thing, so an argument about why unions are bad seems confusing. However, putting too much power in the hands of students can be even worse than giving them none. Student unions with too much power can negotiate away academic standards, reduce the classes required to graduate, and create a hierarchy between scholarship athletes, nonscholarship athletes, and normal students. Lawyer Bradford Livingston13, testifying before the Commitee on Education and the Workforce, argues,

A student-athlete-employees’ union would likewise have the ability to negotiate over academic standards, ranging from minimum grade point averages, to class attendance requirements, the number and form of examinations or papers in any class, grievance procedures to challenge a poor grade from a professor, and even potentially graduation requirements. In addition to interfering with a college’s academic freedom, any “negotiation” and com- promise over these standard educational requirements potentially devalues any athlete’s degree from that institution.” in fact, unions arguably could bargain over whether employee-athletes even need to enroll at the university as a Student. All of these impacts serve to undermine the quality of education for everyone. While arguing against unionization can be a viable strategy, I happen to believe it would be just as effective in the rebuttal as in a case (perhaps exceedingly effective), thanks to its direct clash with the

13Kline, John, and Bradford L. Livingston. “Big Labor on College Campuses: Examining the Conse- quences of Unionizing Student Athletes.” House of Representatives, Committee on Education and the Workforce, Seyfarth Shaw, LLP in Chicago, Illinois, 2015, archive.org/stream/gov.gpo.fdsys.CHRG- 113hhrg87709/CHRG-113hhrg87709_djvu.txt.

affirmative version of the contention. That might be something to keep in mind while doing research and writing it up.

1.5 Concluding Remarks

Many consider the last weeks of 2017 to be the some of the most uneventful on the national circuit. With the recent downgrade of Dowling in Iowa, December has become the only month of the regular season without a single octofinals bid tournament. Many debaters choose to spend their time preparing for January to get ahead of the curve, rather than putting in work to win rounds in December. I would personally advise against this strategy. Tournaments like Alta, Dowling, GMU, Princeton, and La Costa Canyon are all great opportunities to find competitive success and build momentum going into, arguably, the most important stretch of the regular season.

If take away one thing from reading this topic analysis, I would hope for it to be the importance of the narrative. Focus on telling your judge a poignant story instead of spitting out overly technical sub-points with far-fetched impact scenarios and outlandish link chains. Don’t try turning this topic into something it isn’t. As the affirmative, your goal should be to portray the relationship between the NCAA and its athletes as one between the oppressor and the oppressed. Paint reality as an unacceptable system of exploitation and racial discrimination, and frame the affirmative as a necessary step in fixing this imbalance of power. The formula should be simple and effective; impacts should engage listeners both emotionally and pragmatically. “Risk of solvency” arguments, although lazy, will prove useful in furthering your story. Make it clear that nothing could be worse than the way athletes are treated now. On the negative, make it your duty to demonstrate that choosing the current system is choosing a lesser evil. Problems with the current scholarship-model may very well exist, but they are being done away with via ongoing initiatives and reforms. However, these same problems are worsened under the affirmative’s play-for-pay arrangement. Arguments about increases in tuition driving down access or decreases in academic funding hurting the quality of education should be presented as massive disadvantages that shatter a delicate and favorable status quo. Embracing the narrative will take you far in your debate career, and it will be particularly important in months with a narrow selection of arguments and impacts.

While I tried to cover a good range of viable contentions on both sides, it’s inevitable that a few major arguments slipped my mind. As such, I’m looking forward to hearing what kind of creative and unique ideas teams across the country come up with this month. I

hope this analysis has given you a clearer picture of the December 2017 Public Forum resolution. Make the most of your time off from school, enjoy your holidays, work hard, and go win some trophies!

Devon studies at New York University (’19) as a Politics major with a double minor in History and Philosophy. At NYU he was a Global Debate Semifinalist and currently serves as the VP of his school’s American Parliamentary Debate team. He debated for four years at Suncoast High School in Florida. During this time, he reached outrounds at a variety of state and national tournaments like Penn, Florida Blue Key, The Sunvita- tional, FFL States and The Crestian Invitational. Devon has been coaching for four years and currently serves as the head PF coach for Byram Hills High School where he helped qualify three teams to the TOC for the first time in school history. Throughout his career, the teams he’s coached for have made it to late outrounds at tournaments like NSDA Na- tionals, CFL Nationals, Princeton, Lexington, Columbia, The Sunvitational, and Ridge. This will be his second year working at VBI.

2.1 Introduction

Alrighty y’all, let’s get physical. Although the NSDA really missed out on a golden opportunity to release their college sports topic during March Madness, December is probably the second best month to debate this topic.

The way I see the month of December is sort of like the eye of a hurricane. Septober and November hit hard like the eye wall with lots of competitive bid tournaments every weekend, and tough, research-heavy topics. December tends to chill things out a bit (pun intended) as we pass through the eye of the storm with a domestic policy topic usually. Then January and February are the ruthless outer bands that finish off the regular season.

In December, college applications are winding down, the holidays are coming, and PF alumni start heading back home from college. Because of winter break, there aren’t as many tournaments to compete at, so if you can’t stand the idea of arguing about sports, you’re in luck. However, for the most part, judge pools will be pretty great due

to the high availability of alumni judges. Also, sports topics mean sports puns. You won’t even have to jump through hoops thinking of them, because there are tennis of thousands in this topic analysis alone!

2.2 The Resolution

Okay, now it’s time to getcha’ head in the game, we’re going over the topic: Resolved: NCAA student athletes ought to be recognized as employees under the Fair Labor Stan- dards Act.

First off, I’d like to extend a special thanks to the NSDA for making this topic the clearly preferable option and for wording the resolution so specifically. With that in mind, let’s define some terms. First, “NCAA student athletes.” It’s worth noting that this term is intentionally ambiguous and not clearly defined. In essence, it is the NCAA’s way of distinguishing college athletes from professional ones, thereby shielding the NCAA from any sort of legal or financial liability that may arise in the case of injury. In fact, the “student athlete” term has allowed the NCAA to compile “a string of victories in liability cases.” 1 Moreover, the NCAA writes that there are about 480,000 student athletes on about 19,000 teams over 3 divisions. 2 They also remind us that only about 2% of high school athletes receive an athletics scholarship, and less than 2% of college athletes go on to compete professionally.

Also, to contextualize the resolution a bit, the NCAA finds that DI schools have an average undergraduate student athlete population of 9,205, while it’s only 1,860 in DIII schools3. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but it’ll be important to keep this fact in mind when considering the financial burden that paying college athletes will have on some institutions as opposed to others.

Second, I’m going to break chronology and skip over “ought” really quick for the sake of narrative preferability in my topic analysis. Let’s look at what it means to be an “employee under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” The basics of the FLSA are that it establishes a minimum wage of $7.25/hour and a 40-hour work week with allowances for time and a half pay if working overtime. While the NCAA officially restricts student athletes’ in-season practice to 20 hours/week, some sports reported average commitments

1Branch, Taylor. “The Shame of College Sports.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 19 Feb. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/. 2NCAA Recruiting Facts. NCAA, July 2016, www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/Recruiting%20Fact%20Sheet%20WEB.pdf. 3Ibid.

of more than 40 hours, with a 2006 survey in particular finding that student-athletes spent an average of 45 hours per week on athletics.4 Also worth considering is the fact that the Equal Pay Act is part of the FLSA and that it prohibits sex-based wage discrimination between men and women that perform the same jobs.5 This will further complicate the debate about how to set salaries for players in high and low viewership sports.

Third is my absolute favorite part of the resolution, the word “ought.” While many balk at the term, afraid of abandoning their beloved consequentialist assumptions, “ought” is actually quite a versatile term. If you’re more comfortable with utilitarian frameworks, (as one should expect from neg teams) then one can refer to definitions of ought that liken it to the more familiar “should.” I anticipate it will be difficult for opposing teams to identify in what situations one “ought” do something that they “should” not, or vice versa. However, if one seeks to take advantage of the unique character of the word ought—as aff teams might find strategic—then it can open the door for a variety of moral frameworks. The difference between ought and should, in my opinion, is that ought more heavily emphasizes doing an action because it is “the right thing to do” while should refers to the “correct thing to do.” 6

For example, if a cat is stuck in a tree, I ought to save him, but perhaps I should call the fire department. In that instance, it wouldn’t make much sense to tell me that I ought to fly up to the top of the tree and pull the cat down myself because, contrary to popular belief, I cannot fly. One could say that I should do that, but even then they’d be wrong because it would be more appropriate for me to call a professional. So my moral obligation in that sense was to make an attempt to help, to do something that I can do. There is a wide base of literature that argues the term “ought” implies “can”—namely Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason7—which can open a few argumentative doors for neg teams to argue the infeasibility of paying college athletes. On the flip side, ought will help aff teams argue that on a moral level, it is only fair that college athletes receive compensation. This strategy is not without its pitfalls because in order to win a round like this, the affirmative team must both win their framework that ought implies

4Jacobs, Peter. “Here’s The Insane Amount Of Time Student-Athletes Spend On Practice.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 27 Jan. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/college-student-athletes-spend-40- hours-a-week-practicing-2015-1. 5“The Equal Pay Act of 1963.” The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/epa.cfm. 6“Must, Should, or Ought to?” OxfordWords Blog, Oxford University Press, 3 Jan. 2017, blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014/03/03/must-should-ought/. 7Gracyk, Theodore. “Ought Implies Can.” Gracyk Outline of ‘Ought’ Implies “Can’, 25 Mar. 2008, web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20318/ought-can_Outline.htm.

a moral obligation (so that they can prioritize moral duty over utilitarian outcomes) and that paying college athletes is the “right” thing to do. It might be strategic for neg teams that face such a strategy to accept the aff’s framework but then uphold a different moral obligation, like the obligation of universities to provide a quality education to all students, and argue that affirming violates that obligation.

2.3 Affirmative Arguments

In my opinion the affirmative is slightly weaker, but I doubt the difference will be as significant as the side bias in November, especially not later on in the month. Here are some strategies the aff can employ that I think will work really well.

First is the moral strategy. I think it will be relatively simple to establish a moral framework given the resolution’s deliberate inclusion of the term “ought.” Ought implies a moral obligation and it should be relatively easy for negative teams to really harp on the plight of the average everyday college athlete. Students face a high-risk of injury, large time and financial investments, and they earn revenue comparable to paid, professional athletes.

According to an article published in Sports Health and cited in Sports Illustrated, 67% of former DI athletes “sustained a major injury and 50% reported chronic injuries, a finding that was 2.5 times higher than that seen in non-athletes.”8 Not only are student athletes’ bodies on the line, but they spend plenty of hours practicing and playing games where they sometimes even have to miss class. In fact, Inside Higher Ed reports that Division III—the only member institution to not offer athletic scholarships—is the only division “in which athletes in all sports spent more time on academic activities than on athletic ones.”9 Not only that, college athletes have to start investing in themselves as an athlete from a young age through sports showcases or travel teams to get signed at a top competitive team. Then if they anticipate they’ll go pro, they’ll also have to pay for an agent. Moreover, the earnings that college sports can accrue is only slightly below professional sports. Forbes corroborates10 that the NBA generated $5.2 billion

8McMahan, Ian. “Playing College Sports Could Mean Chronic Injuries.” Sports Illustrated, 31 Oct. 2017, www.si.com/edge/2017/10/31/former-college-athletes-chronic-injuries-health-issues. 9Moltz, David. “How Athletes Spend Their Time.” Inside Higher Ed, 14 Feb. 2011, www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/14/ncaa_survey_details_athletes_missed_class_time. 10Communications, Forbes Corporate. “Forbes Releases 18th Annual NBA Team Valuations.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 20 Jan. 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/forbespr/2016/01/20/forbes-releases-18th- annual-nba-team-valuations/#941258c55c13.

in revenue last season, while The Washington Post confirms11 that “from 2004 to 2014, the combined income of the 48 [public universities in the five wealthiest collegiate conference] nearly doubled, from $2.67 billion to $4.49 billion.” If college sports can put up numbers in competition with professional sports, it stands to reason they should be compensated. Beyond desert claims, it’s important to remember some evidence that the VBI Card of the Day12 brought to light. Ramogi Huma and Ellen Staurowsky of the National College Players Association report13 that 85% of on-campus students (and 86% of off-campus ones) receiving “full-athletics scholarships” live below the poverty line. Each of these facets of being a student athlete should really paint the picture for the judge that playing sports is the same as working a non-athletic job in college, and thus, students should be compensated for their labor.

Second is the funding strategy. I’m predicting that school funding is going to be the most common internal link to the December topic, as it sidesteps the potentially sloppy moral framework debate, and links into the impact of education, which will likely become the consensus, stand-in “best impact” while “lives” takes a hiatus for a month or two. While the neg arguably links into the topic a tad better, it will still be strategic for affirmative teams to argue that by decreasing the profitability of college sports, schools are forced to allocate more money elsewhere in order to attract students. Marc Edel- man of CUNY studies this exact phenomena in a paper for the University of Michigan Journal of Law.14

In addition to increasing sports revenues, fielding winning teams has proven as an effective way for colleges to increase undergraduate application rate. [FN84] For example, at Georgetown, Patrick Ewing’s basketball performance during the 1982-83 NCAA season helped generate a 47% increase in undergraduate applications and a forty point rise in freshman SAT scores. [FN85] The same effect is illustrated in football, where Boston College’s Doug Flutie helped raise applications 25% and increase accepted

11Hobson, Will, and Steven Rich. “College Athletic Departments Are Taking in More Money than Ever – and Spending It Just as Fast.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 23 Nov. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-up-the-bills/. 12http://www.vbriefly.com/pf-card-day/ 13Ramogi Huma [President, National Collegiate Players Association], Ellen Staurowsky [Professor of Sports Management at Drexel University], “The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport,” Na- tional Collegiate Players Association, no date. Available at: http://assets.usw.org/ncpa/The-Price- of-Poverty-in-Big-Time-College-Sport.pdf 14Edelman, Marc, Reevaulating Amateurism Standards in Men’s College Basketball (Summer 2002). University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2002. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1292591

freshman SAT scores by 110 points in 1985-86, the year after Flutie won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s outstanding college football player. [FN86]

So the argument would proceed as such, the absence of a wage for college athletes fu- els the profitability of the college sports industry, which currently allows for schools to focus recruiting on improving their athletics rather than academics. The Washington Post article mentioned earlier talks all about how sports teams at competitive public universities are running deficits by investing in $100-million-dollar state of the art athletic facilities and other related sports expenses. Paying college athletes makes this strategy untenable, thus forcing colleges to re-focus their spending on academics by targeting high quality staff, offering a greater number of courses with smaller class sizes and issuing more student grants/financial aid. If you win this argument, you’ll likely win the round as the weighing is self evident, this argument affects entire undergraduate populations while others will be limited to the select few that play a college sport.

Third is the player strategy. This argument is a bit more simplistic, yet harder to defeat because the link chain is short. Simply put, paying college athletes generates a variety of benefits for them. First of which is that it decreases the pressure to leave school and immediately enter the draft. More and more students are less college and entering the draft sooner is rising. Marc Edelman furthers15, “The number of players selected in the first two rounds of the annual NBA Draft without a four-year college education has increased from three players (6.5 percent of the overall drafted pool) in 1980 to 25 players (43 percent of the overall drafted pool) in 2001.” Some of them make it and end up becoming well-salaried sports players, while others never make it out of the minor or development leagues, earning meager salaries until they are injured or cut from the team. That sort of liability can ruin someone’s life and is driven by the fact that players need to make money to live. Finishing a degree gives college students a back-up plan if athletics doesn’t work out after university, and it’s way more likely the average player will stay 4 years if they’re earning a salary. The second major benefit to players is the long-term role model effect. Professional athletes are idolized by children, however many of them are frequently cited for violence, drug use, and even drunk driving. Even worse is that “personal troubles are highest among NBA players without college degrees.”16 By normalizing the completion of school before going pro, paying

15Edelman, Marc, Reevaulating Amateurism Standards in Men’s College Basketball (Summer 2002). University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2002. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1292591 16Ibid.

college athletes helps improve the public image of professional athletics. This argument could be potentially linked to more general impact areas like youth education outcomes and improving the audience experience, as college sports are performative.

2.4 Negative Arguments

Here’s a gameplan for some neg strategies.

First, university funding. This argument relates to the feasibility of paying student athletes. The strategy hinges on its ability to suggest how exorbitant a fair wage for college athletes would actually be. There are a huge number of college sports that the NCAA offers, and if the players for each of them are earning at least minimum wage for hourly work, the financial strain on the NCAA and universities would be immense. According to the NCAA estimate from earlier, there are about 480,000 active student athletes, and at the FLSA’s minimum wage of $7.25, it would cost $3,480,000 an hour to pay college athletes. However, this figure assumes that there are no differences in pay for high-talent athletes or athletes playing more profitable sports, which would likely drive it even higher. According to the New Republic,17 the median amount a DI school spends on a scholarship football player as of 2013 is $156,647 while that number drops to $14,979 for a full-time student. They further that an “unavoidable by-product of the reduction in programs would be a corresponding drop-off in the number of athletic scholarships,” disproportionately damaging low-income students’ abilities to become professional athletes and get a college education. NCAA President Mark Emmert even warned18that paying college athletes would lead to many schools leaving Division I sports and “they would have to start cutting other, less popular sports to be able to afford the salaries.” The main issue with this argument is that there isn’t a clear way to know which scheme of payment the NCAA would adopt, which complicates some of the brink evidence about how college budgets would be affected.

Second, fairness. This argument is meant to directly interact with the aff’s moral obligation approach. I think you could go about arguing that paying college athletes is unfair in two ways. First is through the Equal Pay Act and Title IX. Viewership of

17Ross, Theodore. “Cracking the Cartel.” New Republic, 1 Sept. 2015, newrepublic.com/article/122686/dont-pay-college-athletes. 18Ganim, Sara. “NCAA Chief Mark Emmert: Paying College Athletes Would Hurt Traditions.” CNN, Cable News Network, 19 June 2014, www.cnn.com/2014/06/19/us/ncaa-obannon-lawsuit- trial/index.html.

women’s college sports is significantly lower than men’s, the Washington Post reports19 that while the 2015 NCAA men’s basketball championship game drew in 28.3 million viewers, the women’s basketball championship game drew in just about 3.1 million— 10% of the men’s crowd. The New York Times furthers20 that the NCAA earns $260,000 for each game a men’s team plays, while the total value of a tournament win for men is $1.56 billion. For women, a tournament win brings in zero dollars in revenue. This puts advocates of paying college athletes in a bind as they must either support subsidiz- ing women’s contracts with surplus revenue earnings from some more popular men’s sports, which seems a bit unfair. Or they must accept that women will not be paid equal amounts for equal work if salaries are tied to market value. The second way you can argue fairness is by arguing about unfair compensation between players. Does a first-string, All-American quarterback really deserve the same salary as a second-string kicker? Presumably the answer is no, but if that’s the case, then huge disparities in funding between high-value starters and role-players could majorly undermine the point of paying college athletes in the first place, especially if player salaries trades off with sports scholarships as the NCAA director evidence previously cited indicates.

Third, you can go the alternatives route. As I briefly mentioned before, this might be a tough tightrope to walk as there is no universally agreed upon plan to pay college athletes that is being discussed. However, one compensation allowance that breaks the “amateur tradition” of the NCAA—but doesn’t necessarily pay college athletes under the FLSA—is allowing college athletes to pursue and accept business opportunities. Marc Edelman previously cited argues in favor of this plan21 in his in-depth study of the topic. While it is usually necessary with negative alternatives (AKA faux counter- plans) to prove there is a tradeoff, or some degree of mutual exclusivity between the aff plan and your alternative, this is not the case with this argument. The reason why you generally need to do that is because your opponent could just argue that we should do both what the aff advocates for and what the neg advocates for. This is not the case with this argument because it is a strategy that competes with the strategy of the aff. While the two are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually competitive because letting college students earn money from business contracts to some degree obviates the need to

19Clarke, Liz. “Five Myths about Women’s Sports.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 June 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-womens-sports/2015/06/26/8dee2470- 1b5b-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html. 20Zimbalist, Andrew. “The N.C.A.A.’s Women Problem.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Mar. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/the-ncaas-women-problem.html. 21Edelman, Marc, Reevaulating Amateurism Standards in Men’s College Basketball (Summer 2002). University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2002. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1292591

recognize athletes under the FLSA. It proposes an alternative that steals the benefits of paying athletes, without the harm of overburdening college budgets. Because this alternative is revenue neutral, neg teams can argue that colleges will not need to cut education and extracurricular programs to pay athletes because businesses will be paying them instead. It also rewards both competition and the formation of positive role models as only the highest value athletes will receive branding and marketing opportunities. Allowing student athletes to become corporate sellouts will increase the popularity of college sports even further which can also be impacted in a bunch of different ways. The only main downside to this strategy is that it won’t affect a large number of college athletes who may be struggling to pay for basic necessities as it is.

2.5 Wrapping Up

I think that this topic will be incredibly interesting and will have a wide-ranging array of clash to compare in late-round speeches. So, even more than usual, weighing will be essential for this resolution. Teams are going to have to decide whether direct impacts to student athletes ought to be prioritized over general impacts to the school since the topic is specifically related to the players. I also predict there will likely be some debates about what the most probable form of implementation will be with regard to disparities in revenue output. Economic inequality, educational attainment, future earnings, the moral duties of higher education institutions, racism, and sexism will all be prevalent subjects that debaters should prepare themselves to weigh between. The best piece of general advice I can give you for this topic is to not go for everything. There is too much content on this topic to win every single argument, and there’s enough variety to prevent the popularization of a single, over-powering argument that everyone will read on both sides. It’s crucial to accept that your opponents will be winning some arguments on this topic, and that’s why you should prepare a wide variety of frontlines for your case to anticipate the weighing between your offense and theirs.

Good luck this month, stay frosty.

3.1 Overview of what the FLSA guarantees

US Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. “Compliance Assistance,” 8-1-2002, https://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/

The FLSA establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards affecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments. Covered nonexempt workers are entitled to a minimum wage of not less than $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. Overtime pay at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay is required after 40 hours of work in a workweek. FLSA Minimum Wage: The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009. Many states also have minimum wage laws. In cases where an employee is subject to both state and federal minimum wage laws, the employee is entitled to the higher minimum wage. FLSA Overtime: Covered nonexempt employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 per workweek (any fixed and regularly recurring period of 168 hours — seven consecutive 24-hour periods) at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay. There is no limit on the number of hours employees 16 years or older may work in any workweek. The FLSA does not require overtime pay for work on weekends, holidays, or regular days of rest, unless overtime is worked on such days.

Hours Worked (PDF) : Hours worked ordinarily include all the time during which an employee is required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty, or at a prescribed workplace. Recordkeeping (PDF) : Employers must display an official poster outlining the requirements of the FLSA. Employers must also keep employee time and pay records. Child Labor: These provisions are designed to protect the educational opportunities of minors and prohibit their employment in jobs and under conditions detrimental to their health or well-being.

3.2 More specifics on who qualifies in the status quo

Washington Office of Financial Management. “Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA),” 2017. https://ofm.wa.gov/state-human-resources/compensation-job-classes/compensation- administration/fair-labor-standards-act-flsa

What is the Fair Labor Standards Act? The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is a federal law which establishes minimum wage, overtime pay eligibility, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in federal, state, and local governments.

Who is affected by the Fair Labor Standards Act? All employees that hold positions determined to be covered under the mandatory overtime provisions of the FLSA are covered. Overtime-eligible employees must be compensated with overtime pay or compensatory time for all hours worked over 40 in a single workweek. All overtime-eligible employees must fill out a Time and Attendance Record in order to comply with FLSA standards. Visit Overtime Eligible - Documenting Hours Worked to find out more information on the state’s process.

Who determines if a position is overtime eligible? Each agency’s Human Resource Office determines the overtime eligibility status for all positions (Work Period Designation- WPD) based upon criteria established by the US Department of Labor. For more information, see WAC 357-28-240. The State Human Resources Division (HR) is available to review work period designations for positions in your agency. Send request to State HR Classification and Compensation .If your agency would like to change the work period designation from overtime eligible to overtime exempt or law enforcement you must request approval from State HR.

What are the Fair Labor Standards Act standards for overtime? For all hours worked in excess of 40 during each work week, employees will receive overtime at the rate of one and one-half times the employee’s regular rate (WAC 357-28-260). Paid leave does not count as time worked for non-represented employees. If you are represented, employers and employees should review collective bargaining agreements for specific requirements concerning work period designations and overtime eligibility. FLSA Exemptions Who qualifies for exemption from minimum wage and overtime pay? In order for an exemption to apply, an employee’s specific job duties and salary must meet all the requirements of the Department of Labor’s regulations. Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA provides an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for employees employed as bona fide executive, administrative, professional, computer and outside sales employ-

ees.

4.1 Student Exploitation

Everyone makes money on college athletics except the students

Tylt. [sports / culture blog]. “Should college athletes be paid?,” 2016, https://thetylt.com/sports/ncaa- pay-student-college-athletes

Jay Bilas, a sports analyst and advocate for college athlete compensation, told Complex the NCAA fundamentally operates like a business. It should own up to that and pay student-athletes, because students are the ones who are doing all the work. The NCAA profits off video games with players’ likenesses but won’t share any of the money. Meanwhile, coaches and other staff are making insane amounts of money. Everyone in college sports makes a lot of money but the students. “Well, college sports is a commercial enterprise. If they ran it the way Division III runs it, like Williams College or Amherst, where they don’t charge admission [it might not be a commercial enterprise]. The NCAA does not charge admission for tournaments in Division II and Division III. They charge in Division I. They charge big money. And they sell it, they sell it to television.

It’s a labor right’s issue—we don’t let walmart and target conspire to underpay their employees

Kai Ryssdal [host and senior editor of Marketplace, the most widely heard program on business and the economy — radio or television, commercial or public broadcasting — in the country. In addition, he joins forces with Marketplace Tech’s Molly Wood to connect the dots on the economy, tech and culture as co-host of the podcast Make Me Smart with Kai and Molly.]. “NCAA policy hits poor, minority neighborhoods hardest,” Mar- ketplace. 7-8-2013, https://www.marketplace.org/2013/07/08/wealth-poverty/ncaa- policy-hits-poor-minority-neighborhoods-hardest

Dr. Boyce Watkins, a finance professor at Syracuse University, has been an outspoken critic of the current compensation system, which consists entirely of scholarships. Ath- letes, says Watkins, should be paid for their services the same as any other worker in America – it’s a labor rights issue. “Imagine if we lived in a world where Walmart and Target and Kmart could all conspire and say, ‘OK, we’re all gonna agree to pay our employees $10 an hour.’ That would be entirely unacceptable,” points out Watkins. “But that’s what happens when Duke and North Carolina and Kentucky all agree that we’re not going to compensate the athletes. It just leads to a system that I would say is inherently unfair.” While many argue that scholarships should be enough for student- athletes, a 2010 study showed that the average NCAA athlete in the big-time sports, like football and basketball, actually ends up paying around $2,951 per year due to school- related costs. Watkins also says the system disproportionately hurts players from lower- income areas, and the African-American community. “I think that race does play a role in that at least a billion dollars in economic value is stripped from the black community every year,” he argues. He cites the example of Reggie Bush, a former USC football player who lost his Heisman trophy because his mother received money under the table. “When you look at USC – a school with an endowment that’s larger than every historically black college in the country combined – that this school made over $100 million from Reggie Bush’s play on the field – it’s hard to argue that some people should be outraged about that,” he adds. As a college professor, he’s encountered many players on campus that have struggled with issues of poverty. As these college athletes play for their schools and make millions, some hear that they’re mother is going to get evicted, or that a friend in the old neighborhood was shot. The term “scholar-athlete” makes no sense in a world where students are taken out of class during the week to go play in televised games, he points out.

Student athletes work more than 40 hours a week - this prevents them from getting another job and takes up so much of their time: they need to be compensated

Jared Walch [staff writer for the Daily Utah Chronicle]. “Should athletes be paid to play?,” USA TODAY College. 10-20-2016, http://college.usatoday.com/2016/10/20/should- athletes-be-paid-to-play/

College athletics is big business. In fact, the state of Utah’s highest paid public official is Kyle Whittingham. Millions of dollars are spent updating stadiums, training facilities and other areas of athletic departments, all for “amateur” athletes to compete. Money is flooding into these athletic departments and the athletes benefit in many ways, but

do athletes deserve to be paid for what they do? This is an argument that has been perpetuated for decades. Obviously, the idea of the student-athlete has been flipped to the athlete-student, and the NCAA regulation that 50 percent of student athletes have to graduate is very loose, but in order to keep the façade of a student-first mentality, college athletes are not “paid.” Stipends are starting to be circulated for food and other essentials, but athletes are not paid for what they do. They should be paid, and here’s why. Athletes work more than most students. The NCAA has a regulation that is intended to limit training for players to 20 hours per week. Would you be surprised to learn that very few athletes reported only practicing 20 hours per week? According to an NCAA survey conducted in 2011, Division I football players averaged 43 hours a week. Baseball came in second with 42.1 hours and men’s basketball came in third with 39.2. These are in-season numbers. This means that on top of class work and homework, athletes are working a full-time job. Sure, many of these athletes are on scholarship, which pays for their tuition and room and board in most cases, and we’ve covered the stipends, which average between $2,000 and $5,000 annually. Let’s get real. How many of us can live off of $2,000 a year? To put this in context, let’s say I work for a company that offers tuition assistance. Let’s say that this company offers to assist my whole tuition for being a full-time employee, but my paycheck every two weeks works out to be $77. Could I live off that? Even as a full-time employee with access to the employee cafeteria? I don’t think many of us could, yet we expect athletes to do so.

Scholarships aren’t adequate compensation - laundry list of reasons

Lauren Deutsch [journalist for the U Alabama crimson white]. “Student athletes should be paid,” Crimson White. 9-6-2016, http://www.cw.ua.edu/article/2016/09/student- athletes-should-be-paid

Some top recruits are compensated with scholarships, several of which cover the full cost of tuition and fees, room and board and books. However, student-athletes often receive a notoriously watered-down education, cheapening the true value of that scholarship. This happens at some of even the most highly regarded schools in the country. Examples that come to mind are Stanford, who provided an “easy class” list for athletes, and UNC, subject of 18 years of academic fraud that had athletes taking fake classes to boost their GPAs. Moreover, athletes can, and do, lose scholarships due to injury or other reasons that can affect their ability to play. Four-year athletic scholarships do not exist; instead, they are renewable annually. Thus, an athlete can contribute to his team for three years, find himself injured, and suddenly have no way to pay for his senior

year of college. He, of course, will have no sort of salary to fall back on, and he likely will not have had a chance to work a part-time job or internship, due to the intense time commitments during both the season and the off-season. He is essentially out of options. In these cases, conditional scholarships are simply not an adequate substitute for a traditional paycheck.

Scholarships are not sufficient —there are other costs to education

Tyson Hartnett. [Tyson Hartnett is a former professional athlete, writer and entrepreneur. After achieving his Business Management degree from Rowan University, he played professional basketball in Europe and South America.] “Why College Ath- letes Should be Paid,” HuffPost. 10-21-2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/tyson- hartnett/college-athletes-should-be-paid_b_4133847.html

There has been major discussion recently if college athletes should or shouldn’t be paid while they are in school. The first thing opponents say is, “They’re already getting a scholarship! That’s more than anybody else! Don’t be greedy!” Fine, let’s not be greedy and look at how much a scholarship is actually worth. On average, a full Division 1 scholarship is $25,000 per year. “That’s $100,000 over four years!” Yes it is, but most athletes don’t last at a school for the whole four years. Once you get a sport involved, there are politics, injuries, and a call to the office to tell the player, “Thanks, but we don’t need you on this team anymore.” Many players will get a scholarship for a year or two, then transfer to a different school which turns out to be a better situation. A $25,000 scholarship may seem like a lot of money, but it really only covers the basics. It covers thousands of dollars in mysterious, unknown university fees, tuition, housing, a meal-plan and multiple hundred-dollar textbooks. Some players, if they come from a low-income household, get a few hundred dollars each semester from Pell Grants which enables them to buy chicken soup instead of chicken-flavored ramen. […] The team gave us meal money (about $7 per meal) so we could get chips and condiments with our sandwiches, but anything else was considered an NCAA violation. The point of this is that a scholarship doesn’t equal cash in a player’s pocket. Even with any type of scholarship, college athletes are typically dead broke. But how much do the top NCAA executives make? About $1 million per year.

Student athletes only get 10% of the wealth they generate

Patrick Hruby [editor for Vice Sports]. “Four Years A Student-Athlete: The Racial Injus- tice of Big-Time College Sports,” Vice. 4-4-2016, https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/ezexjp/four- years-a-student-athlete-the-racial-injustice-of-big-time-college-sports

Now follow the money. The NCAA takes in roughly $700 million annually from CBS, Turner, and ESPN for the broadcast rights to March Madness—a sum that reportedly will jump to nearly $900 million per year from 2019 to 2024. ESPN is paying $7.3 billion over 12 years to televise the College Football Playoff and four other bowl games—about $470 million annually, or roughly $67 million per contest. Major football conferences are collecting hundreds of millions more through their own television deals and networks— the SEC made a NCAA record $455.8 million in 2014-15—and Yee says college sports merchandising and licensing revenue exceeds $4 billion annually. According to Institu- tional Investor, the 124 schools with major football teams brought in a combined $8.2 billion in athletic revenue in 2014, double what they made a decade earlier. Dan Rascher, a San Francisco-based economist and expert witness for the former athlete plaintiffs in the recent O’Bannon v. NCAA federal antitrust trial, estimates that Division I football and men’s basketball generate between $10 billion and $12 billion in yearly revenue. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of cash. Where does it go? Mostly not to the predominantly black athletes who play the games. NCAA rules restrict player compensation to athletic scholarships, small cost-of-living stipends—worth roughly $2,000- $5,000 per semester—and association hardship funds for things such as travel for family medical emergencies. (Oh, and athletes are also allowed to keep up to $1,350 worth of bowl game swag bags and gifts, like the XBox One video game consoles handed out at the Military Bowl.) The result, Rascher says, is that Division I college football and men’s basketball players only receive about 10 percent of the total revenue they help generate.

4.2 Corruption

The entire NCAA is corrupt and bribery is rampant – paying players solves

Ortiz, Erik. [Writer for NBC News]. “A Fix for NCAA ‘Cesspool’ After Bribe Scandal? Pay Players, Experts Say”. NBC News, September 2017.

An alleged bribery scheme uncovered by a federal investigation into men’s college basketball continued to widen Wednesday — exposing what college sports experts say is

a recruiting system plagued by problems and crying out for reform. But overhauling a wildly popular sports institution, one that has proven to be a consistent moneymaker for top-tier colleges and coaches, advertisers and bookmakers — bringing in millions upon millions a year — will require sweeping changes that such experts say must start with the NCAA. One fix that some say could help solve the problem? Pay the players. “There’s this underground network already going on of secret deals and corruption,” said Marc Edelman, a law professor focusing on sports and gambling at Baruch College in New York City. “The most reasonable way to resolve this matter would be to over- turn the NCAA principle of amateurism, which would force the compensation of college athletes into an open and above-board market,” he added, “one that would be observ- able and transparent.” B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sport administration at Ohio University, agreed that it’s time for colleges and universities to take a look at compensating student-athletes as a way to protect them from being exploited. “They’re kids who are essentially being pimped out by adults so that others can make money,” said Ridpath, author of the forthcoming book, “Alternative Models of Sports Develop- ment,” which examines the intersection of athletics and academics. Related: Louisville Coach Blames a ‘Few Bad Apples’ in Scandal Prosecutors say as much as $150,000 was pledged to at least three top high school recruits to attend two universities sponsored by Adidas. The money was allegedly supplied by the shoe company. None of the athletes were identified in court documents. An Adidas executive and four assistant basketball coaches — representing Auburn University, Oklahoma State University, the Univer- sity of Arizona and the University of Southern California — were among the 10 people charged on Tuesday. The colleges have said they were “shocked” and “appalled” by the allegations. And Adidas said Tuesday that it was “unaware of any misconduct and will fully cooperate with authorities to understand more.” On Wednesday afternoon the fallout deepend: The University of Louisville, which outed itself, said it was putting head coach Rick Pitino on an unpaid suspension and Athletic Director Tom Jurich on paid leave in response to the scandal, although neither was named in the criminal complaint. And Louisville said that one student who had enrolled after his family was allegedly paid bribes was removed from team activities. “It’s an absolute cesspool,” Ridpath said of the situation. “All of this has been an open secret. You know this stuff is going on, but it’s been very easy to hide, to look the other way.

Corruption is everywhere and everyone knows it – ending amateurism solves

Given, Karen, and Springer, Shira. [Staff at WBUR Radio]. “Is ‘The System’ Broken? Amateurism In The NCAA”. WBUR, October 2017. The news broke on a Tuesday morning, a little less than two weeks ago. It started with a few tweets. The details were broadcast through the rest of the day. The FBI is charging 10 people with fraud and corruption …” “The picture painted by the charges brought today is not a pretty one …” “It could be one of the biggest scandals we’ve ever seen in sports. … It’s a game changer.” College coaches were accused of taking bribes to funnel players to particular agents and financial advisers. Players’ families were also being paid. Adidas was involved. But what’s really interesting about how this story un- folded, is that almost immediately after the news broke, people said, “Hey, we shouldn’t be surprised about this totally unprecedented FBI investigation.” Amateurism: The NCAA’s ‘Bedrock Foundation’ Sports commentators started pointing a finger at “the system.” “We all know this system is corrupt. Every one of us knows it,” WFAN New York’s Mike Francesa said. Pretty soon, people were talking about the very thing that the NCAA calls the “bedrock foundation” of college sports. “If there’s going to be a death penalty, it needs to be to amateurism,” Fox Sports’ Jason Whitlock said. “Give amateurism the death penalty, then you have a chance at creating a system free of a lot of this corruption.” The college sports industry brings in about $10 billion in annual revenue, mostly through football and men’s basketball. What do college athletes get? Scholarships — that can be yanked after a year — and maybe, if they can balance academics with their jobs as athletes, an opportunity to get an education.

Corruption is everywhere – schools sell their souls to athletic companies like Nike in exchange for advertising – college basketball is an underground economy

Nocera, Joe. [Writer for Bloomberg View]. “It’s Business, NCAA. Pay the Players”. Bloomberg View, October 2017. There is a famous story about Sonny Vaccaro, the anti-NCAA crusader, that seems worth retelling. As a Nike marketer in the 1970s, Vaccaro invented the practice of having Nike pay a college coach to have his players wear the company’s shoes. Those sneaker deals eventually morphed into deals with athletic departments worth tens of millions of dollars, which athletic-wear companies happily paid to have all of a school’s teams wear their gear. In 2001, Vaccaro was invited to speak to the Knight Commission on Intercolle- giate Athletics, a do-gooder organization devoted to reducing commercialism in college

sports. Vaccaro, a pugnacious man then plying his trade for Adidas, had no patience for its pieties. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes,” he told the commission members, “and the best way to do that is to buy your school. Or buy your coach.” Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State University, responded in- dignantly. “Why should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?” he huffed. Vaccaro shot back: They shouldn’t, sir. You sold your souls and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir, but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it. On Wednesday, Mark Emmert, president of the National College Athletic Association, announced the formation of a committee to be led by former Secretary of State and Stanford University Provost Condoleezza Rice, that would make recommendations on how to clean up college sports. In response to the recent arrests of four college basketball coaches in a bribery scandal along with an Adidas marketing executive and five others, Emmert acknowledged that the NCAA “needs to make substantive changes in the way we operate.” He added, “This is not the time for half-measures or incremental changes.” The commission’s mandate includes looking into the role of apparel companies like Nike, Adidas and UnderArmour; examining agents, advisers and “nonscholastic basketball” (meaning Amateur Athletic Union travel teams and basketball camps for top high school players); and reexamining the NCAA’s relationship with the National Basketball Association, which prevents its teams from drafting athletes until they turn 19. It’s easy to understand why these areas would be Emmert’s focus. The NBA’s age limit, for example, has given rise to the phenomenon of basketball players who leave college after their freshman years and in so doing destroy the NCAA’s precious illusion that college athletes are students who just happen to be good at sports. As for those shoe companies, AAU coaches and unscrupulous agents, they drive much of the underground economy in college sports. One of the NCAA’s perennial goals has been to wipe out that underground economy, which it views as a desecration of its beloved “amateurism.”

Corruption is rampant and no one knows how deep it goes – the status quo will not solve

Bilas, Jay. [College Basketball analyst for ESPN]. “Why the college basketball scandal won’t get fixed until the NCAA pays athletes”. ESPN, September 2017.

It is an extraordinarily sad time in college sports. Ten people were arrested Tuesday and charged with fraud and corruption after a two-year FBI investigation. A Hall of

Fame coach was, as the attorney for Louisville’s Rick Pitino said, “essentially fired,” as was one of the most respected athletic directors in the country, Tom Jurich. A high- ranking Adidas employee was charged in a bribery scheme, as were assistant basketball coaches at Arizona, Oklahoma State, USC and Auburn. This is certainly not the end of this scandal, as its tentacles reach far and wide. This probe could extend to high- profile agents, other programs and others in the sports apparel industry and grassroots basketball industry. Right now, as the sky seems to be falling in college basketball, some are suggesting that things will really change going forward. Grassroots basketball is dead. Agents will no longer be able to get their hooks into players. Coaches will not be able to pay players. Now, thanks to federal law enforcement officials, college sports will be clean and moral. While this is horribly unpleasant and far from over, I don’t see meaningful change coming to college sports. The reason? Money. While this ugly scandal seems to be the NCAA’s worst ever, it is not. We have seen big scandals before, and as long as we maintain the current corrupt system and rules, we will be here again. We have implemented rules after each scandal to make ourselves feel better, but they don’t do any good. They can’t do any good. The reason? Money.

Lack of payment for players means all the money is funneled to coaches and facility upgrades – that income means coaches engage in fraud and push players to corrupt agents

Given, Karen, and Springer, Shira. [Staff at WBUR Radio]. “Is ‘The System’ Broken? Amateurism In The NCAA”. WBUR, October 2017.

Where Does The Money Go? Colleges and universities aren’t required to spend money on long-term medical care. They’re not required to provide four year scholarships. You might ask, where does all that money go? Well, if you’re a Clemson fan, you probably have a pretty good idea. The largest football-only weight room in the country. Xbox, ping pong, arcade games and a bowling alley. There’s also a barber shop and a nap room complete with Clemson bunk beds. And don’t forget the nine-hole mini-golf course. It’s all part of Clemson’s new, $55 million football facility. It’s also part of the arms race in college sports. And so is this: Dabo Swinney, Clemson’s head football coach, makes more than $7 million a year. “It’s not that coaching has gotten dramatically better in the last 15 years,” economist Andy Schwarz says. “It’s that revenue has gotten dramatically higher, so the schools chasing after revenue would normally funnel that money toward the talent. Instead, they funnel it toward the talent deliverers, the coaches.” Schwarz has spent the last couple decades looking at how college sports oper-

ate. To keep winning and bringing in revenue from TV deals, branding, ticket sales and donations, you’ve got to get the best players. “When someone’s in the living room with a recruit and they’re trying to sell them on School A versus School B, the normal way you would do it is, ‘We’re going to pay you more,’ ” Schwarz explains. But schools can’t pay players salaries. So, they offer recruits what Schwarz calls, “a whole bunch of inefficient second-bests” — great coaches, great locker rooms, a nine-hole mini golf course. Still, there’s more money left over and that’s where corruption comes in. Scandal And Corruption According to the FBI, there were two different schemes involved in the latest NCAA scandal. One involved bribery. The other has been classified as fraud. With the bribery, assistant coaches were allegedly paid up to $100,000 to push players toward corrupt and unqualified money managers and advisers. With the fraud scheme, Adi- das funneled money to young players and their families in exchange for commitments to schools sponsored by Adidas, which hoped they’d have a long relationship with the company. It makes sense for federal prosecutors to go after the assistant coaches for bribery. But with the fraud scheme, if it wasn’t for the NCAA’s strict commitment to amateurism, Adidas could have paid players and their families on the up and up, as- suming the recipients declared the income.

More evidence – status quo won’t solve, the profit incentive is too high

Bilas, Jay. [College Basketball analyst for ESPN]. “Why the college basketball scandal won’t get fixed until the NCAA pays athletes”. ESPN, September 2017.

Why do you suppose we don’t see such scandals in Division II or Division III sports? Money. In Divisions II and III, the salaries, revenues and expenditures are in line with the stated missions of the institutions. In Division I, no reasonable person could claim the same. Division I football and basketball are multibillion-dollar industries, paying coaches and administrators multimillion-dollar salaries while generating billions from media-rights deals and hundreds of millions from apparel deals with Adidas, Nike and Under Armour. Let’s not pretend that Ed McMahon knocked on the NCAA’s door and surprised the organization with a check for billions of dollars. The NCAA and its members carefully, thoughtfully and purposefully built a multibillion-dollar industry. This was no accident. It was planned. In the movie “Jurassic Park,” actor Jeff Goldblum’s character had a memorable line – “Life finds a way.” In my view, the same goes for money. In college sports, money will find a way. Money will always find a way, because the NCAA and its member institutions are addicted to money and will continue to chase it. That seems beyond reasonable dispute. This isn’t the first NCAA scandal.

And unless the NCAA changes, it won’t be the last. That is not to say that the NCAA’s corrupt system and rules are the reason that rules and laws were broken, or to excuse rule-breaking and lawbreaking. There is no legitimate excuse to break the rules or break the law. Instead, we should endeavor to change the rules to make them fair, reasonable and moral. Right now, they are none of those things. The current NCAA system and rules are largely responsible for creating the underground black-market economy for players. There are contradictions everywhere, to the point of hypocrisy, and business relationships with third parties that strain the imagination. The NCAA could act as The Masters and Augusta National Golf Club if it wished. The Masters does not allow commercialization of its product beyond its comfort level and has rules for its media partners. Augusta National could make far more money off that property if it wished, but it finds other things more important. Not the NCAA. If your decisions reveal your priorities, the NCAA’s first priority is money. Do you believe the shoe companies will go away based upon this scandal? No way. They are partners with the NCAA and its member institutions. NCAA institutions accept hundreds of millions of dollars annually to wear apparel and shoes and use the unpaid, amateur players as billboards. There is nothing inherently wrong with these apparel deals between a company and a school. But given the NCAA’s amateurism rules, it sure does create a contradiction. There is no question that NCAA schools could buy the apparel they need, but instead they choose to accept the revenue and profit from the relationship while using the players to do it. There is no way that the NCAA will adopt rules limiting the commercial opportunities of its members or its partners. Do you believe that the NCAA can stop the influence of grassroots basketball or the AAU scene? No way. There is nothing inherently wrong with players playing basketball at camps or in summer tournaments. Players will continue to play, and tournament operators will continue to make money off the players and college recruiters who come to watch the players. If the NCAA attempted to affect the grassroots culture, it would open itself up to legal action for anticompetitive practices. In addition, there is little chance that the NCAA can stop the flow of money in the grassroots scene. There are so many 501(c)(3) nonprofits out there through which money is funneled, and that will not stop even if the government was able to catch the dumb crooks. Do you believe that the NCAA will stop the influence of agents? No way. Because of NCAA rules that disallow a player from having an agreement with an agent, the ethical agents are on the sideline while the unethical and lesser-qualified agents have full access and open-field running to unpaid, amateur players and prospects. Un- intentionally, but predictably, the NCAA’s amateurism rules have helped create the black-market economy for players. The NCAA states that it protects players from being

exploited commercially. Does that ring true to anyone? The NCAA uses the players as billboards for apparel deals and uses their names and likenesses to sell the product, and to sell media-rights deals. The NCAA continues benefiting from this multibillion-dollar business, while the players get only a scholarship, and the only ones exploiting the athletes are the NCAA and the member institutions. When you use a person to make money while at the same time limiting that person from making money, you exploit. Players are certainly not mistreated, but they are exploited.

Coaches make bank because players aren’t paid

Armour, Nancy. [Writer for USA Today News]. “It’s creativity, not money, that stands in way of paying NCAA athletes”. USA Today, May 2017.

There are two, very simple truths in college athletics: Athletes are not being fairly compensated for the value they bring to their schools and conferences or the revenue that follows, and there is more than enough money to correct that. The question is how to bridge that divide. Given the obscene amounts of money being paid to some conference commissioners and coaches, it’s no longer a question that can go unanswered. Cutting checks to the players is a non-starter, for reasons too numerous to mention, and that stance is unlikely to change anytime soon. But there are other ways to compensate these athletes in a way everyone can find agreeable, largely by expanding benefits they already get. Pay for athletes’ families to accompany them on recruiting visits. Provide health care beyond graduation. Open a 15-year window during which athletes can return to finish their degrees or earn additional ones, be it at the bachelor or advanced level. Pay bonuses upon graduation, the highest going to those who complete their degrees within the six-year span the NCAA and federal government use to determine graduation rates. And, yes, let the players profit off their names, images and likenesses. Now, before anyone starts squawking, let’s dispense with the notion that Division I athletes are the amateurs of the quaint old days. They’re not. The NCAA limits in-season practice to 20 hours a week. But when you factor in time spent in the weight room, studying film, with trainers or doing anything else related to their sport, it is more like 32 hours or more, according to a 2011 NCAA survey. When Nick Saban can clear $11 million, as he will this year, or Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany gets a $20 million bonus, it’s not hard to do the math and realize those kind of payouts are only possible because the athletes are little more than indentured servants. Yes, they get an education for their trouble — though how much that education is worth varies greatly depending on the school, the sport, the self-interests of their coaches and, in fairness, the priorities

of some of the athletes themselves.

The status quo system is unfair and ensures everyone involved in college sports except the actual players make ridiculous sums – paying the players solves

Martin, Nick. [Writer for Deadspin]. “Kentucky Governor On NCAA Scandal: Pay The Players Already”. Deadspin, October 2017. With one of his state’s most well-known universities once again embroiled in a national recruiting scandal, Kentucky governor Matt Bevin took time in an interview with radio station WKYX to address Louisville’s latest missteps and, opposed to his hollow, bullshit statements on gun control, addressed the problem in an insightful, thoughtful manner, reportedly issuing an unsolicited call to the NCAA and its profitable college sports leagues to finally do away with the concept of amateurism and pay the players. Per Insider Louisville: “I think we should pay college athletes,” said Bevin. “I really do. This idea that they’re not professionals is nonsense.” “They’re not there like normal students and we shouldn’t pretend that they are. Some of them, yes, go to class, but most of them are students differently because they’re there for athletics and not academics.” As for how they should be paid, Bevin added, “I think we should maybe defer that comp — fair enough, they can defer it – but they and their families should be able to benefit from the sacrifices they make.” Bevin added that everyone else associated with college athletics is getting rich, except for the players who made all of this possible. “The coaches are making millions of dollars a year,” said Bevin. “Shoe contracts are dictating what happens on our college campuses. Athletics directors and others associated with it that are making exorbitant fees. I don’t begrudge people making a high living. Good for them, and I mean that sincerely. But if that comes at the expense of those that are deliv- ering the athletic prowess on the field, then maybe we should rethink the fact that this is really like the minor leagues for the professional sports associations, and they should be compensated and treated accordingly.”

Corruption is everywhere, athletics control the schools and there’s a huge profit incentive to break the law

Branch, Taylor. [Writer for The Atlantic, author of, among other works, America in the King Years, a three-volume history of the civil-rights movement, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award]. “The Shame of College Sports”. The Atlantic, 2011.

But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed South- eastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources— but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts. Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room. “There’s fear,” Friday told me when I visited him on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill last fall. As we spoke, two giant construction cranes towered nearby over the university’s Kenan Sta- dium, working on the latest $77 million renovation. (The University of Michigan spent almost four times that much to expand its Big House.) Friday insisted that for the networks, paying huge sums to universities was a bargain. “We do every little thing for them,” he said. “We furnish the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots. They bring the camera and turn it on.” Friday, a weathered idealist at 91, laments the control universities have ceded in pursuit of this money. If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night, he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.” He longed for a campus identity more centered in an academic mission. The United States is the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports at institutions of higher learning. This should not, in and of itself, be controversial. College athletics are rooted in the classical ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—and who would argue with that? College sports are deeply inscribed in the culture of our nation. Half a million young men and women play competitive intercollegiate sports each year. Millions of spectators flock into football stadiums each Saturday in the fall, and tens of millions more watch on television. The March Madness basketball tournament each spring has become a major national event, with upwards of 80 million watching it on television and talking about the games around the office water cooler. ESPN has spawned ESPNU, a channel dedicated to college sports, and Fox Sports and other cable outlets are developing channels exclusively to cover sports from specific regions or divisions. With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money

with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow. Scandal after scandal has rocked college sports. In 2010, the NCAA sanctioned the University of Southern Califor- nia after determining that star running back Reggie Bush and his family had received “improper benefits” while he played for the Trojans. (Among other charges, Bush and members of his family were alleged to have received free airfare and limousine rides, a car, and a rent-free home in San Diego, from sports agents who wanted Bush as a client.) The Bowl Championship Series stripped USC of its 2004 national title, and Bush returned the Heisman Trophy he had won in 2005. Last fall, as Auburn University football stormed its way to an undefeated season and a national championship, the team’s star quarterback, Cam Newton, was dogged by allegations that his father had used a recruiter to solicit up to $180,000 from Mississippi State in exchange for his son’s matric- ulation there after junior college in 2010. Jim Tressel, the highly successful head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, resigned last spring after the NCAA alleged he had feigned ignorance of rules violations by players on his team. At least 28 players over the course of the previous nine seasons, according to Sports Illustrated, had traded auto- graphs, jerseys, and other team memorabilia in exchange for tattoos or cash at a tattoo parlor in Columbus, in violation of NCAA rules. Late this summer, Yahoo Sports reported that the NCAA was investigating allegations that a University of Miami booster had given millions of dollars in illicit cash and services to more than 70 Hurricanes football players over eight years. The list of scandals goes on. With each revelation, there is much wringing of hands. Critics scold schools for breaking faith with their educational mission, and for failing to enforce the sanctity of “amateurism.” Sportswriters denounce the NCAA for both tyranny and impotence in its quest to “clean up” college sports. Observers on all sides express jumbled emotions about youth and innocence, venting against professional mores or greedy amateurs.

Lack of pay creates an illicit market ripe for corruption and bribery that is more widespread than anyone knows – paying players creates a free market which solves

Edelman, Marc. [Writer about legal issues in sports, Forbes contributor]. “Corruption Will Continue In NCAA College Basketball Until Schools Can Openly Pay Their Play- ers”. Forbes, September 2017.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced charges of fraud and corruption in what may amount to the biggest college sports scandal in U.S. history. At present, at least four NCAA Division I men’s

basketball coaches, one sports agent and an executive at Adidas have been charged in connection with funneling elite high school athletes to NCAA basketball programs affiliated with the German sportswear maker. Assistant coaches at the University of Arizona, Auburn University, Oklahoma State and the University of Southern Califor- nia ― as well as certain college athletes ― all purportedly accepted cash payments. For those Americans who continue to maintain a pristine view of big-time college sports, these latest allegations may seem puzzling. But for those with closer knowledge, the opportunities for corruption are widespread, arising from a system that makes colleges and their business partners billions of dollars while denying their athlete labor force the chance to earn any meaningful pay. College sports in the United States is an $11 billion industry, with almost all of the money derived from just a small collection of schools competing in two sports: football and men’s basketball. Despite the riches, NCAA rules continue to prevent member colleges from compensating athletes, under the guise of amateurism. In the absence of free markets for college athletes’ services, darker and more dubious markets emerge that are an ideal breeding ground for unscrupulous individuals to engage in schemes to defraud college athletes and exploit their labor. We’ve seen similar phenomena elsewhere around the world where free markets have been in- hibited by either private or public legislation. During the final years before the fall of the Soviet Union, organized crime maintained black markets for the purchase of luxury goods that Russian entrepreneurs could not sell openly. Similarly, in the United States, legislation that disallowed commercial gambling in most states led to the emergence of an underground gambling economy, led by racketeers associated with organized crime. The underlying cause for free market suppression in the college basketball labor market, however, is a bit different in the sense that the underlying restraint is more private than public. In the Russian business and U.S. gambling scenarios, the lack of free markets arises from specific government legislation that, at least according to the government, is intended for societal well-being. By contrast, in the case of college sports, laws such as the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act and the Uniform Athlete Agent Act only tangentially serve to inhibit college athlete pay. Rather, the absence of a free market for colleges to purchase elite athletes’ services derives most directly from the NCAA’s internal principle of amateurism ― a restraint of trade intended to keep revenue in the hands of a select few coaches, administrators and schools. While the recent federal charges against the men’s basketball coaches at certain elite NCAA colleges may lead to the punishment of some of the unseemly characters operating in the shadows of this underground economy, these charges are unlikely to bring down the full cast of bad actors. There are countless other examples of the NCAA’s no-pay rules inviting other

forms of black-market behavior, such as the scandal at Louisville University in which college athletes were paid under the table with sex. There are likely many other scandals awaiting discovery that no one has yet reported to the feds.

ONLY paying athletes gets rid of corruption – forces transparency

Bilas, Jay. [College Basketball analyst for ESPN]. “Why the college basketball scandal won’t get fixed until the NCAA pays athletes”. ESPN, September 2017.

Chris Spatola, a former college coach, Army veteran and point guard at West Point, has smartly analogized the current system of amateurism to Prohibition. Prohibition did not stop people from drinking; it just drove it underground and created a black-market economy. That is exactly what the NCAA is doing with players. These players are worth a ton of money, to schools, to agents and to shoe companies. And these players are worth far more than a scholarship. In fact, a scholarship is the LEAST they are worth. Schools do not have to offer scholarships, but do. They do not have to offer stipends, but do. If they didn’t, they would be hurt in the marketplace, even though there is a unilaterally imposed wage cap on athletes. When have you ever heard of a coach being steered to an agent? When have you ever heard of bribes to get a coach to accept a job? When have you ever heard of a bribe to get an athletic director to switch schools? You don’t hear such things because those people are allowed to be paid in a free market. It is an aboveboard business, and it works in an orderly fashion. There are contracts with contract remedies. That pesky free market works incredibly well and efficiently for everyone else; it is foolish to assert that it would not work just as well for college athletes. After all, these schools know exactly whom to recruit and whom to play the most minutes in the games. They know whom to pay and how much. But in the absence of meaningful change regarding amateurism, there will be no meaningful change at all. We will all shake our heads and our fingers at the current scandal, give our full-throated speeches, and the NCAA will say “threat to integrity” and “antithetical to what college sports is about” and act righteously indignant. Then, we will all go on to the next game, and the NCAA will go on to the next big contract. Money will find a way. In NCAA sports, it always does.

Paying the players is the only way to solve – all other reforms and investigations will inevitably fail to get rid of the informal economy

Nocera, Joe. [Writer for Bloomberg View]. “It’s Business, NCAA. Pay the Players”. Bloomberg View, October 2017.

What’s missing from Emmert’s agenda is the one substantive change that could truly end the underground economy: paying the players. Indeed, in an interview, the NCAA head made it plain that the commission would not be going down that road. “There’s really not any interest among university leaders to convert student-athletes into employees,” he told The Athletic, a new sports website. And yet any fix the commissions recommends that doesn’t accommodate the free market will ultimately be exactly the kind of “half-measure” and “incremental change” that Emmert says he doesn’t want. Plus, it won’t work. The crux of the issue is that college sports is a big business. Daniel Rascher, a sports economist at the University of San Francisco, has estimated that college sports generates $13 billion a year. That’s the same amount the National Football League took in last year. You could argue that it’s always been a business, and that’s true, but 30 or 40 years ago it was more cottage industry than Fortune 500 company. Television revenue was a pittance and coaches didn’t earn more than the college president. You could also argue that there’s always been an underground economy, and that’s true, too. But it hadn’t become systematized the way it is now — mostly it was wealthy team boosters giving players cash or use of a car. Now the stakes are much higher. Coaches need good players so they can hold onto their $3 million paychecks. Shoe companies need good players to go to “their” universities. Agents need to land good players to earn commissions on the contracts they negotiate once the player turns pro. Those pressures are not going to ease just because the Federal Bureau of Investiga- tion is sniffing around. And you can hardly expect the good players to ignore what’s going on. Historically, the NCAA has tried to stamp out the underground economy by instituting rule after rule — 400 pages worth — dictating what players can and can’t do. They can’t so much as talk to an agent, much less hire one, without losing their eligibility. They can’t have dinner at someone’s house more than a few times a year. They can’t accept royalties for a book. Until a few years ago, they couldn’t even take food from the dining table back to their room. And of course, they can’t take money from anyone besides their parents. But when you look at the mandate Emmert has given the commission, it’s hard to envision how yet more rules can solve any of these problems. Much of what the NCAA is trying to stamp out — shoe companies giving money to a high school athlete to steer him to a particular college, for instance — is already against

the rules. Tightening the rules won’t work — the only thing that will work is loosening them. And to do that, the NCAA has to give up the notion that amateurism is the sine qua non of college sports. College athletes should be able to hire agents while they are in school, and the NCAA could play a useful role by certifying them, just as the professional sports unions do. Athletes should be able to accept endorsements, which would instantly solve the shoe-company issue. Most of all, athletes should be able to realize their fair market value while they’re in school, just like anyone else. With all the money pouring into college sports, the athletes know how valuable they are, and what a raw deal they’re getting. So long as the NCAA deprives them of the ability to make money on their labors, they will seek it somewhere else. That’s what happens when you try to suppress the market. The best comparison I’ve seen to the NCAA’s refusal to pay the players is prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution 2 was supposed to prevent drinking in the U.S., but it did nothing of the sort. It just drove it underground. Eventually, even the prohibitionists gave in to reality. That’s what the NCAA needs to do now.

Informal economy is bad – drives income inequality

Bacchetta, Marc. [Counsellor in the Economics Research and Statistics Division of the World Trade Organization]. “Globalization and Informal Jobs in Developing Countries. Geneva: International Labour Organization”. Economic Research and Statistics Divi- sion World Trade Organization, 2009.

Nevertheless, such an aggregate picture masks differences among informal workers at the microeconomic level as the measured wage gap varies substantially between different segments and tiers of the informal economy (Bargain and Kwenda, 2009). Indeed, depending on the type of informal work – informal employer, self-employed, casual worker or home worker – informal employment is remunerated at vastly different levels, further contributing to distributional concerns (Carr and Chen, 2002). The correlation that may be drawn from these studies is, however, no proof of causality. Indeed, recent analyses demonstrate that the link between inequality and informality is running in both directions. A higher incidence of informal employment is raising the degree of income inequality through a composition effect. At the same time, a higher degree of income inequality is increasing the size of the informal economy as individuals are prevented from joining the formal economy, due to a lack of either human or financial wealth (Chong and Gradstein, 2007). In cross-country regressions an increase in the size of the informal economy by 3 percentage points can be shown to raise income in-

equality as measured by the Gini coefficient by as much as 8 percentage points. Chong and Gradstein (2007) also show that the strength of this link depends on institutional quality, such as the degree of corruption, the integrity of the rule of law, government stability and democratic accountability. This result is also confirmed by earlier studies which looked only at transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Rosser et al., 2000). Looking beyond the static picture of unequal income distribution, one can also draw inferences from studies analysing earnings mobility for workers transiting between different segments of the labor market

Decreases the need to go around the system

Malcolm Lemmons. [Malcolm Lemmons is a professional athlete turned entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. After graduating from Niagara University with a degree in business management, he went on to pursue a professional basketball career overseas. Now, he focuses helping athletes build their personal brands and prepare for life after sports. Malcolm has landed media coverage with outlets such as ABC 7 & TVOne. His articles have been featured in the Huffington Post, AthleteNetwork & other publications on topics that include entrepreneurship, career development, personal branding, and personal development. He recently published his first novel, Lessons From the Game, and he can be found at www.malcolmlemmons.com]. “Col- lege Athletes Getting Paid? Here Are Some Pros And Cons,” HuffPost. 3-29-2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/college-athletes-getting-paid-here-are-some- pros-cons_us_58cfcee0e4b07112b6472f9a Limits corruption from external influences ― Compensating athletes in college will limit the corruption involving agents, boosters and others. Over the years we have seen and heard scandals involving players taking money and even point-shaving. Wouldn’t paying them eliminate a lot of these issues?

The payment ban is the impetus for a bunch of scandals — schools find other less than desirable ways to compensate athletes

Ryan Swanson. [Ryan Swanson is associate professor of history in the honors college at the University of New Mexico and author of “When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation and Dreams of a National Pastime.”]. “Perspective,” Washington Post. Oct 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by- history/wp/2017/10/02/want-to-clean-up-college-athletics-pay-the-players/

The University of Louisville basketball program had just put Stripper-gate in the rearview mirror. Assistant Coach Andre McGee was fired; everyone agreed that the illicit sex parties in Billy Minardi Hall occurred without the knowledge of any higher-ups. Bullet dodged. Then came the FBI’s bribery and fraud investigation. The inquiry, which led to the arrests of 10 people last week connected to the world of college basketball, identified Louisville as having paid $100,000 to Brian Bowen, an incoming recruit. Last Wednesday, Louisville effectively fired legendary coach Rick Pitino and placed Athletic Director Tom Jurich on paid leave. Indications are that these arrests may be the tip of the iceberg. Given that both scandals emerged from attempts to work around the ban on paying players, and after decades of trying to police such behavior, will the NCAA finally conclude that only one step can truly clean up college athletics’ seedy underbelly? Paying players. After all, the cause of paying players had been gaining steam even before the Louisville fallout. Articles and opinion pieces trumpeting the cause have been published by the dozens over the past few years. Yet, that response would make the current scandal markedly different from countless past instances of illegal payments. In the 1980s, Southern Methodist University boosters illicitly paid dozens of football players. A University of Kentucky envelope mailed to the father of recruit Chris Mills in the late 1980s had $1,000 cash fall out in transit, sparking an NCAA investigation. The University of Colorado admitted in 2004 that it used sex and alcohol to lure prospective student athletes into signing with the school. Michigan’s Fab Five took under-the-table payments. None of these scandals led to a change in the NCAA’s amateur model. Instead, over the past century, protest against unpaid student athletes has been docile and inefficient, almost always a low-risk, low-commitment cause. Talk about compensation has rarely been accompanied by actual change, because a strange elixir exists in college athletics: a still-pervasive belief in amateurism by many university leaders is coupled with billions of dollars in annual revenue. This money pays the salaries of thousands of athletic coaches and administrators. Paying the college athletes who generate revenue (and most don’t) requires them to take money out of their own pockets — something that’s possible only if the movement for change is a lot less talk and a lot more action. The idea of paying college athletes is really old. In 1905, Harper’s Magazine published an editorial (subsequently reprinted in newspapers nationwide) addressing the “Pay of College Athletes.” Harper’s saw the issue as one of visible inequity. The popularity — and profitability — of college athletics made the problem of “how to make athletes work for nothing” — or to put it another way, “how to keep the athletes from drawing salaries” — increasingly difficult for university administrators to manage. Harper’s concluded

that unless a more transparent and fair compensation system arose, college athletes would continue to be paid “surreptitious wages.”

The NCAA is punishing what is not preventable — the current system just hurt innocent students

Ramogi Huma [NCPA president]. “The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport,” National College Players Association (NCPA). 2011. http://assets.usw.org/ncpa/The- Price-of-Poverty-in-Big-Time-College-Sport.pdf

The NCAA issues penalties in an attempt to impose justice to enforce its unjust system and to prevent actions that are unpreventable. In effect, while the market in one way or another offers examples that athletes are economically undervalued, they are punished, held up for ridicule, and accused of wrongdoing for engaging in modest explorations of what their real value is worth. Innocent athletes suffering NCAA punishments are collateral damage. Meanwhile, the NCAA remains free to exploit its athletes for every commercial dollar that it can while simultaneously pretending to protect them from such exploitation.

The NCAA policy is the cause of black markets—massive incentives to skirt the rules

DrexelNow [Drexel university publication]. “Study College Athletes Worth Six Figures Live Below Federal Poverty Line,” 9-13-2011, http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2011/September/Study- College-Athletes-Worth-Six-Figures-Live-Below-Federal-Poverty-Line/

Backed by the findings in the study and an Inside Higher Education report showing that almost half of FBS colleges were caught violating NCAA rules between 2001-10, the report implicates the NCAA as the entity primarily responsible for the scandals that have plagued college sports. The report says, “Through the NCAA, college presidents mandate impoverished conditions for young, valuable players and throw money around to all other college sports stakeholders when those players perform well, a formula that drives the powerful black market that thrives at so many universities nationwide.”

4.3 Race

The NCAA runs the modern plantation – black athletes are migrant labors, exploited for their work and disposable to the institutions that recruit them

Hawkins, Billy. [Ph.D in Health an Sport Studies and Professor in the Sport Manage- ment and Policy program in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Georgia, USA.] “The new plantation: Black athletes, college sports, and predominantly white NCAA institutions”. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

The opportunities of becoming socially mobile and providing for family are common goals for many Black athletes. A college education is one way Black athletes can assist their families and communities. Another opportunity for providing assistance would be to make it to the pros. The economically challenging conditions a significant percentage of Black athletes come from in some ways force them to use their athletic talents in hopes of improving their immediate conditions and the conditions of their families. Because most Black athletes must travel to colleges and universities to use their athletic abilities in exchange for an athletic scholarship (wages) and possibly an education, their relationship with these universities and colleges are similar to the rotation oscillating migrant laborers do between their residence and work locations. This section in- tends to situate the experiences of Black athletes with the pattern of oscillating migrant laborers to illustrate how this rotation between two distinctively different (socially and culturally) locations can contribute to some of the negative experiences (racial isolation, low graduation rates, exploitation, etc.) Black athletes encounter at PWIs. This process of migration further exacerbates the experiences of Black student athletes at these institutions. It is important to note that research examining Black athletes at PWIs has taken into consideration the different structural positions they occupy in relation to their counterparts. There are studies that include the stereotypical belief regarding their intellectual inferiority and athletic superiority; the differences in their demographic and academic background; overall college life experiences, mental health issues, and social support, and there are studies that illustrate how the academic performance of Black athletes is lower than that of White athletes once they are on campus.39 These studies allude to the social and cultural differences Black athletes encounter when they migrate to PWIs. Oscillating Migrant Laborers Oscillating migrant laborers are laborers who rotate for various periods of time from a work site residence to a family residence that have two dis- tinct cultural and social settings.40 Wilson explains that: Oscillating migration occurs when men’s [sic] homes are so far from their work that they cannot

commute daily and can not see their families weekly, monthly, yearly or even less frequently.41 Wilson further states that during the colonial period around the late 1800s in Kimberley, South Africa: The first diggers were oscillating migrants in that they came to the diamond fields for a limited period of time before returning home to Damara- land, Swaziland, the Transkei or wherever they had left their families.42 This pattern of oscillating migration was also established in the gold mines on the Witwaterand in South Africa.43 According to Stichter: As the colonial economy developed, forced and other indirect non- market pressures vastly increased the numbers who participated, voluntarily or involuntarily, in migrant labor.44 Taxation (e.g., Hut tax) was one obligation that involuntarily transformed many African people into oscillating migrant laborers.45 To provide for their families and fulfill different obligations set forth by colonial rule, African people oscillated from their villages to work locations to sell their labor. Philpott describes this as the pattern for migrant laborers where, “migration is perceived as a temporary state, mainly to gain money, which will ultimately result in a return to the home society.”46 Oscillating migrant laborers enter these work locations fully prepared for labor, that is, their communities have supplied the costs of reproduc- tion for this labor. Therefore, the work location is only responsible to the able working body. The community again assumes responsibility for laborers that are injured and too old to work. The dominant features that make up the pattern for oscillating migrant laborers are: the rotation between work site and home site, the notion of trying to better financial conditions (pay taxes, buy food and clothes) back at home, and the fact that this labor is cheap, that is, the villages assume the greater responsibility for the life of the laborer (bearing the cost of nurturing the skills) but not the benefits. Using this pattern will highlight the cultural and social challenges Black athletes encounter at predominantly White institutions. Both Stichter and Wilson explained that oscillating migrant laborers rotate from work sites to home residences that have different cultural and social settings. Predominantly White Division I institutions provide a similar situation for Black athletes in that they also experience the rotation between different social and cultural settings. They rotate from their communities’ cultural and social settings to those settings of colleges and universities for various periods of time throughout the year to use their athletic talents to receive a scholarship (form wages) with hopes of obtaining an education, and thus a greater chance to assist their families. For example, after viewing a football team roster of a predominantly White National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Midwestern university with a 2.4 percent Black enrollment in a state with a Black population of 2.3 percent there were 29 Black athletes on the roster (34 percent of the team) of which 2 were from the state this university was

located in, 6 were from other Midwestern states (Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois), 12 were from Southern states (Texas and Florida), 4 were from West Coast states (California mainly), and 5 were from East Coast states (New York and New Jersey); based on their hometown information, all were from urban environments vastly different from the city that housed this institution. Based on the media guides of the teams this institution competed against, this is a typical pattern for these PWIs. This practice is common and the list of predominantly White NCAA Division I institutions (also including Division II and III as they become more commercialized) that have a “pipeline” to the athletic labor pool in Black communities is extensive. Finally, according to Cicourel, oscillating migrant laborers’ experiences are organized around two cultures: their home sites, which include family and friends of similar social and cultural origins; and the work sites that involve social and cultural expression different and unfamiliar to them.47 Adler and Adler suggest that racial and socioeconomic barri- ers “leave Black athletes with little in common, culturally, with other students.”48 Therefore, both oscillating migrant laborers and Black athletes operate in this system of dualism best captured by Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” where there exists a “peculiar sensation…two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideas in one dark body.”49 Many Black athletes oscillate to these campuses trying to improve their economic conditions. They face challenges when they arrive at these institutions, similar to migrant laborers entering different cultural and social settings. Like Alvin Mack, they seek to enrich their lives and the lives of their family through athletic achievement that affords them the opportunity to play professional sports. Their route, especially in the case with football, will require migration to different social and cultural settings that will present social- ization and acculturation challenges; at least until these PWIs become more inclusive in their structural configurations. In summary, the interworking of the components of the internal colonial model creates unique experiences of Black student athletes. From the time of the initial contact between the PWIs and Black student athlete, to the purpose of their presence at these institutions, to finally how the relationship is maintained, we will see how this model can be effective in providing an alternative perspective to the experiences of Black student athletes at PWIs. Table 2.1 further summarizes the components of internal colonialism, highlighting the specific functions of each component. To conclude, relevant to this discussion is the pervasive assumption about Black athletes’ intellectual abilities is a racist postulation that requires sufficient attention. This scien- tific racism contributes to the ideological underpinning of the relationship between the colonized and colonizer, and thus, the internal colonial arrangement—the New Planta- tion. It is the ideology of the intellectually inferior and physically superior Black athlete

that cultivates opposing looks of adulation and “amused contempt and pity.”50

Black athletes are only valued for their physical, not intellectual traits – subject to a racist and economically exploitative environment, internalization of stereotypes is inevitable

Van Rheenen, Derek. [Associate Adjunct Professor Director, Cultural Studies of Sport in Education Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; Cultural Studies]. “Exploitation in college sports: Race, revenue, and educational reward.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48.5 (2013): 550-571.

In The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White In- stitutions, Hawkins (2010: 71) argues that There is an institutionalization of cultural and social racism coupled with economic and political exploitation … between [pre- dominately White institutions] and Black athletes … The dehumanization of Black athletes takes place when these institutions value Blacks more as athletes than as students, especially when output (athletic performance) does not equal input (educational opportunities). Sellers (2000: 146) notes that “universities, with a surplus of applicants for admission, seem to only show an interest in those individuals from poorer educational backgrounds who have skills that are unique and exploitive, such as the athlete.” The exploitation inherent to the admission of these recruited athletes has other negative consequences for these students. At many institutions, they are perceived as mere interlopers within the academic domain, emblematic of higher education’s am- bivalence and resentment towards college sports and the young men and women who embody the jock identity. This, in turn, leads to stereotypes and discrimination, experienced as microaggressions from faculty and fellow students (Franklin, 1999; Franklin and Boyd-Franklin, 2000; Simons et al., 2007; Sue et al., 2007). Such stigma and microaggressions may disproportionately impact Black students at predominantly White institutions (PWI’s), making these students feel less welcome or invisible (Franklin, 2006; Franklin and BoydFranklin, 2000; Steele, 1992). According to Franklin (1999: 118), Mi- croaggressions cause feelings of powerlessness because of the element of surprise and the person’s inability to control, much less eliminate, these experiences. They are embedded in the unconscious dynamics of cross-racial interactions, creating wariness and anxious anticipation. Their intention, in the conceptual wisdom of the African Ameri- can community, is to remind one of one’s unprivileged status, giving credence to feelings of being victimized. While a Marxist analysis would emphasize college athletes’ lack of control of their labor within the production process, Franklin’s discussion re-

veals a lack of psycho-social control within a highly racialized environment. These lived experiences among many Black college athletes both problematize and expand the concept of exploitation as a social phenomenon rather than simply an unfair economic and educational (as payment in kind) exchange. However, as Beamish (2009: 95) reminds us, while the alienation which occurs as a byproduct of commodification is indeed an economic relation, it also has significant social implications. The conditions of alienation are a set of real, objective social conditions that exist in societies where the means of production are owned and controlled by a minority within civil society. They are not a psychological state of mind—indeed, one might not even be consciously aware of the objective class antagonisms, the real and potential conflicts that alienated labor produces, or feel any unhappiness, anxiety or concern about producing under capitalist relations of production. For Black male athletes, their sense of racial invis- ibility is juxtaposed with a hypervisibility around their athletic identity, reaffirming that “schools value their athletic competency but not their academic potential” (Harris, 2000: 45). In this regard, “Black males are either rendered invisible or are viewed as helpless victims of a racist system” (Majors, 1998: 16). As perceived victims of a racist system, Black male college athletes are more likely than their non-Black peers to feel exploited even though, structurally speaking, the economic exploitation of college athletes, as measured by surplus values and marginal revenue product, would seem to take equal advantage of all races and ethnicities. However, Van Rheenen (2011) found that Black college athletes felt significantly more exploited than their non-Black peers across every category of college athlete. These racial differences were found for both revenue and non-revenue college athletes, suggesting that Black college athletes were far more sensitive to their physical commodification in sport, even when participating on intercollegiate athletic teams which earned no surplus revenue for their university’s athletic department. These findings suggest that race clearly underlies participants’ perceptions of feeling exploited by their colleges or universities. This sense of alienation and exploitation has led critics to draw parallels between modern American sports and the historical legacy and practices of slavery, focusing in particular on the physical commodification of the black body (Eitzen, 2000; Mahiri and Van Rheenen, 2010; Rhoden, 2006). In Forty Million Dollar Slaves, Rhoden (2006) argued that despite the fame, fortune, and tremendous achievements of Black athletes in the United States today, these participants have little to no power in the multi-billion dollar sports industry. Rhoden compared today’s African American athletes to indentured slaves of the past, arguing that the primary difference is that today’s Black athletes bear responsibility for their own enslavement. The persistent comparison of playing fields to plantations has led

some to caution against the overuse of loose language. As Branch (2011: 5) argues, Slav- ery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene – corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution – is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. At the collegiate level, where the principle of amateurism precludes the fortune to which Rhoden refers, a case could be made that revenue athletes who produce surplus value and merely receive a subsistence wage are far more exploited than their professional peers. The socio-political exploitation to which Hawkins and Rhoden refer could be similar for both college and professional athletes, in that neither possesses any real decision-making power vis-à-vis the NCAA and its member institutions or professional franchises and their owners, respectively. But while professional athletes may compare owners’ treatment of players to “modern-day slavery” (Fowler, 2011; see also Prior, 2006; Zirin, 2007), the NFL and NBA at least recognize players’ unions and rights to workers’ compensation; conversely, amateur college athletes have never successfully unionized and organized as a collective bargaining entity. In general, college athletes have few opportunities to exercise their rights nationally: “They have no union, no ar- bitration board, and rarely do they have representation on campus athletic committees” (Eitzen, 2009: 190). By celebrating and commodifying African American athletic performance in college and professional sports, institutions continue to support racial hierarchies of intellectual and physical superiority. These racial hierarchies are reproduced within a larger social discourse of division: the division of mind and body, of male and female, of Black and White, and of sport and school. Performative displays in sport both structure and police the boundaries of perception regarding the kinds of attributes that attend to one group versus another, such that even similar experiences can be charged with very different racial meanings (Andrews, 1996; Mahiri and Van Rheenen, 2010; Simons, 2003). Thus, the cultural archetype of the athletically gifted but academically suspect “dumb jock” reproduces artificial divisions of mind and body. When the so- called dumb jock is also Black, the ante is increased, adding to a cultural logic which in turn reinforces racial ideologies of Black physical superiority and intellectual weakness. As the stakes get higher, the losses can be calculated in real numbers and real lives. The alienation and exploitation of Black college athletes, then, is grounded both culturally and historically within an American race logic, attributing the notable athletic achieve-

ments of African Americans to natural, physical abilities and a biological advantage over other races (Coakley, 2009; Hoberman, 1997; St Louis, 2003, 2004). This logic or cultural ideology prevails in modern society despite a history of racial segregation and discrimination which has limited the opportunities for African Americans, particularly Black males, to achieve success in most spheres of social life other than sports (Edwards, 1985; Majors, 1998; Staples, 1982). Many Black youth internalize this logic, seeing a career in sports as their cultural and biological destiny (Coakley, 2009; Eitzen, 1999). But where sport appears to be one of the few avenues that provides true equal opportunity, it is more often a dead end for many young males drawn to athletic careers (Edwards, 1985; Majors, 1998). Thus, slavishly pursuing a career in sports can be about more than the commodification of one’s own athletic body for the production of surplus value. It can also mean feeling shackled and bound by cultural expectations of sport success and social mobility (Mahiri and Van Rheenen, 2010).

While coaches and schools make millions off their labor, athletes are robbed of profits they deserve

¶ As we examine the structure of intercollegiate athletics, a similar conclusion can be drawn where the athlete is not necessarily the property of the institutions, but its the rights to athletes’ labor and the profit off of their labor that makes the plantation model appropriate in examining the experiences of Black male athletes. Within the current new plantation model of intercollegiate athletics, the NCAA and its member institutions not only profit off of the labor of athletes, in general, and Black athletes, specifically, they also profit off of their images.31 For example, the sale of sports jerseys and championship T-shirts generates an estimated $6–7 million a year for the NCAA.¶ Furthermore, regarding the multiple streams of revenue in intercollegiate athletics, a debate about its profitability exists. Clearly, there are institutions that function at a deficit year after year, yet there are others that have operating budgets that have increased significantly in ten years and some have doubled. Thus, whether the athletic departments and institutions are breaking even or making a profit from the revenue sports of football and basketball is debatable, because if an athletic department had a budget of $50 million and it only makes $48 million, it still generated revenue. More specifically, the point of em-

phasis is that revenue is being generated and some members of the athletic department are reaping the benefits, while others may be operating at a deficit or simply breaking even. Many of the programs that are operating at a deficit are doing so because of their drive to keep up with schools that have larger economic resources (donors, endorsements, corporate sponsors, media rights, etc.). Therefore, they are simply operating beyond their means in attempts to compete in the athletic arms race.¶ An overview of the revenue generated by PWIs is outlined in the following tables. These tables are only economic snapshots of the revenue generated in big time college athletics: Table 4.2 illustrates the top NCAA athletic programs based on operating budgets—this table also includes overall expenses and football and basketball revenues and expenses; table 4.3 highlights the universities spending the most on recruiting budgets; table 4.4 illustrates the revenue generated by the 2007–2008 Associated Press Top 10 College Football programs; table 4.5 illustrates the revenue generated by the 2007–2008 Associated Press Top 10 College Basketball programs; Table 4.6 highlights highest paid football coaches; table 4.7 illustrates the highest paid basketball coaches; and finally, tables 4.8 and 4.9 illustrate the largest football stadiums and basketball arenas among NCAA athletic programs. You will notice some common themes regarding teams and conferences represented throughout the data listed within these tables. The main point is to inform of the amount of revenue involved with NCAA intercollegiate athletic programs, and how a significant percentage of revenue is generated by sports with a high percentage of Black male athletes. The sale of media rights is another significant stream of income that generates revenue for many NCAA athletic departments. For example, Michael Smith and John Ourand outline the details of one of the lucrative collegiate media rights deals between ESPN, CBS, and the Southeastern Conference (SEC).32 According to Smith and Ourand, ESPN will pay the SEC a staggering $2.25 billion over the next 15 years—about $150 million a year—for the conference’s TV rights, giving the network all of the SEC’s content that was not taken by CBS’s 15-year, $55 million a year contract. Furthermore, Smith and Ourand explained that this will provide an average of $205 million a year in media rights beginning in 2009–2010 and running through fiscal 2025. They concluded that the SEC’s total payout to its schools in 2007–2008 was $63.6 million after the conference’s cut, which was distributed among the 12 universities and each school received about $5.3 million this past fiscal year; however, this revised deal could increase annual revenue to $15 million per school.33¶ Other media deals worth noting are with Host Communication, CBS Collegiate Sports Properties, and ISP Sports and several NCAA institutions. For example, Host Communications has contracts at various rates with the following universities: University of Kentucky, a 10-year contract for $80.5 million,

University of Arizona, a 12-year, $80.4 million extension that runs from 2007–2019, and the University of Tennessee, a 10-year deal for $83.4 million, which started July 2007 and continues to June 2017.34 Both contracts with Host and University of Kentucky and Tennessee include guaranteed revenue: Kentucky is guaranteed $79 million and the University of Tennessee is guaranteed $68 million rights fees and $15.4 million in capital improvements. Additional media rights deals include the following: CBS Colle- giate signed a 10 year, $75 million deal with Louisiana State University; ISP Sport has a 10-year $66 million deal with FSU and a 9 year, $51.3 million deal with Auburn Uni- versity.¶ Apparel agreements with major athletic shoe corporations are other lucrative streams of revenue for several NCAA athletic programs. Some examples of these agreements include the following: Nike has an 8-year, $28.34 million deal with the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; Adidas has an 8-year $60 million deal with University of Michigan, a 10-year $60 million agreement with Notre Dame, a 8-year, $26.67 million agreement with Kansas University, and a 5-year, $19.3 million deal with the University of Tennessee; and Under Armour has a 5-year, $10.5 million agreement with Auburn University, and a 5-year, $17.5 million agreement with the University of Maryland.¶ Finally, stadium naming rights is another stream of revenue NCAA athletic programs is using to generate revenue. Table 4.10 highlights some of the lucrative deals made between universities and sponsors.¶ The above examples are a brief overview of the multiple streams of revenue generated by several PWIs athletic programs. It is also important to note that these institutions are able to attract this mainly because of the sports of football and men’s basketball, although the revenue benefits all of the varsity sports.¶ Regarding revenue generated by the NCAA, the CBS contract to broadcast the NCAA Men’s Final Four Basketball Tournament is the major source of NCAA revenue. The next section will examine the racial demographics of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and their contributions to the capital accumulation of the NCAA.¶

The relationship between college athletes and the NCAA is analogous to that of Jim Crow where they are exploited for a profit and left voiceless.

Starkey, Brando Simeo. [Associate editor at The Undefeated, author of In Defense of Un- cle Tom: Why Blacks Must Police Racial Loyalty].“College Sports Aren’t Like Slavery. They’re Like Jim Crow”. New Republic, October 2014.

The slavery analogy, however, is wrong: It overstates and misdiagnoses the problem. The NCAA’s rules don’t mirror slavery but rather the Jim Crow South’s legal restrictions on black laborers. In other words, college athletes are exploited like blacks after

slavery. In the decades following emancipation, blacks were denied the whole value of their labor and the opportunity to fully compete in the economic marketplace. Southern legislatures enacted laws that allowed former slave owners to limit the economic opportunities available to black workers and increase their own profits. This exploitation was allowed to continue because it harmed blacks, a politically and socially disfavored people. Racism, that is, allowed this labor-market cartel to remain. That bears a striking resemblance to college athletics today. So-called “student athletes” are likewise denied the whole value of their labor and the opportunity to fully compete in the economic marketplace. The NCAA enacted rules that allowed its member institutions to limit the economic opportunities available to college athletes and increase their own profits. This exploitation is allowed to continue because it supposedly benefits college athletes. The NCAA concocted the term “student-athlete” and wrapped this new phrase in a self-serving mythology that holds that college athletes who profit from their talent are distracted from what should be their first priority: getting a quality education. Many onlookers therefore accept the NCAA’s amateurism rules as proper. Paternalism toward “student athletes,” that is, allows this labor-market cartel to remain. The former slave owners, despite their constant attempts after the Civil War, could not enforce a cartel on their own. In spring of 1865, Virginia planters met at the Louisa County Courthouse to fix the price of black labor. They resolved not to pay more than $5 a month and rations, and blacks were to pay for their own clothing and healthcare. “We hope now that the scale of prices having been determined on,” the Richmond Repub- lic reported, “the negroes will go promptly to work.” Such efforts continuously failed because the market for black labor was far too competitive. Southern legislatures, therefore, had to do what planters couldn’t do for themselves. The market for college athletes is similarly competitive, thus the NCAA has to maintain the cartel. Whereas the South used anti-black bigotry to keep its cartel alive, the NCAA uses paternalism. Before exploitation could ensue, though, the targets had to be denied a role in governing. After the Civil War, in late 1865 and early 1866, newly formed Southern legislatures enacted Black Codes. These laws applied only to freedmen, and, among other things, installed a series of economic regulations to establish a labor-market cartel. During Radical Re- construction, when blacks voted and served in state legislatures, this cartel dismantled. But once Democrats recaptured the South, they reinstalled these economic regulations to exploit black labor. To keep blacks from voting by using the power of the state, South- ern states drafted new constitutions that disenfranchised blacks mainly through literacy tests. These tests generally required a potential voter to read and understand any section of the state constitution in order to register. “There was a general understanding,”

wrote historian Vernon Lane Wharton, “that the interpretation of the constitution by an illiterate white man would be acceptable to the registrars; that of a Negro would not.” The Fifteenth Amendment prevented Southern states from passing laws explicitly dis- enfranchising blacks. Unencumbered by such restraints—the Constitution affords no special protection to “student athletes”—the NCAA implemented a far cleaner solution to the same problem. The NCAA simply denies college athletes a voice in rulemaking, thereby leaving them, like blacks, without a role in the making and enforcement of rules. Voiceless, both groups had the value of their labor fleeced.

Like blacks during Jim Crow athletes are contractually tied down – change is not coming

Tampering rules in professional sports leagues are instituted pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement between owners and players. College athletes, however, had no such opportunity to bargain away such rights. This rule, therefore, prevents athletes from learning about better opportunities from competing institutions—perhaps more playing time or better coaching—information to which free laborers are entitled. Con- tract enforcement laws compelled laborers to fulfill their contract under the threat of punishment, typically a fine or imprisonment. Not only did these laws reduce competition for laborers, they helped curtail black laborers’ mobility by forcing them to work even if a better deal could be had elsewhere. The NCAA reproduces contract enforcement laws with its transfer rule policies. Division I football and basketball players seeking to transfer to another Division I school usually must first receive written permission from their current institution to speak to prospective schools. If granted that permission, after transferring, athletes must sit out a year before competing. If not granted permission, athletes can still transfer but must pay for school for a year before being eligible for an athletic scholarship. When blocking the transfer wishes of freshman women’s college basketball star Leticia Romero earlier this year, Kansas State sought to achieve the same ends as the drafters of contract enforcement laws: forcing performance. Romero couldn’t fund a year of school, saying that “that’s something I can’t do. My parents … the situation in Spain is really bad right now. They could lose their jobs.” Kansas State ultimately relented, allowing her to transfer to Florida State. The NCAA, nevertheless, by punishing those breaking a contract, provides schools weapons to compel perfor-

mance. Some will scoff at this comparison between the NCAA and Jim Crow South. Yet the NCAA, through its methods of exploitation, is actually far more effective at snatch- ing money out of its subjects’ pockets than even the former Confederacy. Indeed, when courts tossed out the most egregious disenfranchisement laws in the middle of the twen- tieth century, the NCAA took the Jim Crow South’s recipe and spent decades perfecting it. Now, college athletics need its own Civil Rights movement. Schools, coaches, television networks, and corporate sponsors have made a fortune off of college athletes’ hard work. It’s time those players were allowed to raise cotton for whomever they please.

Pay the athletes – the status quo is a neo-colonial project that traps athletes in poverty

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not. Don Curtis, a UNC trustee, told me that impoverished football players cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home. Curtis is a rarity among those in higher education today, in that he dares to violate the signal taboo: “I think we should pay these guys something.” Fans and educators alike recoil from this proposal as though from original sin. Amateurism is the whole point, they say. Paid athletes would destroy the integrity and appeal of college sports. Many former college athletes object that money would have spoiled the sanctity of the bond they enjoyed with their teammates. I, too, once shuddered instinctively at the notion of paid college athletes. But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes. Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs

of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes. The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel. Efforts to reform it—most notably by the three Knight Commissions over the course of 20 years—have, while making changes around the edges, been largely fruitless. The time has come for a major overhaul. And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

The amateurism clause creates a new plantation – all the NCAA’s money comes from black athletes who get paid nothing

The debates and commissions about reforming college sports nibble around the edges— trying to reduce corruption, to prevent the “contamination” of athletes by lucre, and to maintain at least a pretense of concern for academic integrity. Everything stands on the implicit presumption that preserving amateurism is necessary for the well-being of college athletes. But while amateurism—and the free labor it provides—may be necessary to the preservation of the NCAA, and perhaps to the profit margins of various interested corporations and educational institutions, what if it doesn’t benefit the athletes? What if it hurts them? “The Plantation Mentality”. “Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”— the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

Surveys prove it’s a race issue – white people want to make sure black players don’t make money

Given, Karen, and Springer, Shira. [Staff at WBUR Radio]. “Is ‘The System’ Broken? Amateurism In The NCAA”. WBUR, October 2017.

And there’s something else going on here, and it’s important. Because in the two sports that bring in virtually all of that money — big time college football and men’s basketball — more than half the players are black. And studies suggest whether you’re black or white affects how you see this issue. Because the majority of whites support the amateur model. They don’t want to see players get paid. And the majority of blacks oppose it. They think players should get a bigger piece of that $10 billion dollars. And anyone who tells you that amateur sports aren’t about money hasn’t been paying attention. Look at how sports commentators describe college athletes: “You get a good player at 12 and you know what he is? He’s a property. He’s money,” Francesa says. Players not getting paid while everyone around them profits. It’s how the NCAA’s always done it. But when you’re watching the big game on TV, and you see the color of most of the players out there, some say it sends a message. And the message is … “Black lives don’t matter,” says The Washington Post’s Kevin Blackistone. Blackistone’s been thinking about amateurism and black athletes a lot. He makes a strong argument that this is an issue that disproportionately affects black families. Not only that, but Blackistone says, the NCAA … “Sets it up as a sort of plantation system, where you have workers who work the crops — crops that bring in all the revenue to the overseers. It may be a strong commentary, but I think it’s an apt comparison.”

Most of the NCAA’s money is earned from black athletes who get nothing while white coaches make millions

Yee, Donald. [Lawyer and partner with Yee & Dubin Sports, contributor to the Wash- ington Post]. “College sports exploits unpaid black athletes. But they could force a change”. Washington Post, January 2016.

The NCAA, though, insists that all of its players are student-athletes motivated only by love of the game and of their alma maters. So on Monday, they’ll be working for free. Most fans of college football and basketball go along with the pretense, looking past the fact that the NCAA makes nearly $1 billion a year from unpaid labor. But after a year when Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, and at the end of a

season when the football team at the University of Missouri helped force the resigna- tion of the school’s top two administrators over how the campus handled race-related incidents, we need to stop ignoring the racial implications of the NCAA’s hypocrisy. After all, who is actually earning the billions of dollars flooding universities, athletic conferences, TV networks and their sponsors? To a large extent, it’s young black men, who are heavily overrepresented in football and men’s basketball, the two sports that bring in virtually all the revenue in college athletics. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that 57 percent of the football players and 64 percent of the men’s basketball players in the six biggest conferences were black; at the same schools, black men made up less than 3 percent of the overall student population. (In recent NFL drafts, five times as many black players were taken in the first two rounds, where the perceived best players are picked, as white players.) Athletics administrators and coaches, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly white. So by refusing to pay athletes, the NCAA isn’t just perpetuating a financial injustice. It’s also committing a racial one. The bargain the NCAA makes with football and basketball players is fairly simple: You play games, entertain fans and make us money, and we’ll give you a scholarship, experience, training and exposure you need to make it to the pros. For decades, a lot of that money has been earned by black athletes. College basketball was transformed in 1966 when Don Haskins’s all-black team from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) defeated Adolph Rupp’s all-white University of Kentucky squad in the NCAA championship game. It was a momentous achievement, widely credited for helping desegregate college basketball, particularly in the South.

More evidence – the people who make money are white and the athletes who don’t are mostly black – the status quo won’t solve, the NCAA historically does insincere reformism to appease people so they don’t demand real change

And for the most part, the people getting paid are white. Since 1951, when its first top executive was appointed, the head of the NCAA always has been a white man. Of the Power Five conferences, none — dating back to the 1920s — has ever had a nonwhite commissioner. A 2015 study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diver- sity and Ethics in Sport found that 86.7 percent of all athletic directors in the NCAA

were white. The demographics of head football and basketball coaches are similar. At the start of this college football season, 87.5 percent of head football coaches in the Foot- ball Bowl Subdivision were white. In the 2013-14 season, 76 percent of head basketball coaches in Division I were white. The money generated by football and men’s basketball also goes to subsidize “non-revenue” sports such as soccer, equestrian, field hockey, rowing, swimming, gymnastics and golf. Virtually all of those programs lose money, and most of the men and women playing those sports are white. But at least the subsidies are allowing other athletes to compete at a high level, not funding lavish salaries for executives. Why is this business model — unpaid labor, mostly by black athletes, generating riches for white administrators — still tolerated? Because most football and basketball players haven’t acted on the economic power they possess — and no one in the NCAA universe is eager to change that, either. Instead, the NCAA’s member schools are moving to distract them. The Post recently reported that Clemson’s new football facility will have a miniature-golf course, a sand volleyball pit and laser tag, as well as a barber shop, a movie theater and bowling lanes. The University of Oregon had so much money to spend on its football facility that it resorted to sourcing exotic building materials from all over the world. In some cases, officials have made small concessions to avoid bigger ones. When football players at Northwestern tried to unionize in March 2014, alarm bells went off in athletic directors’ offices nationwide. Suddenly, that June, USC committed to giving football players guaranteed four-year scholarships. Before then, scholarships were a year-to-year proposition, renewable at the discretion of the head coach. Some other schools quickly followed suit, lest they be put at a competitive disadvantage. When University of Connecticut basketball player Shabazz Napier complained in April 2014 of often going to bed hungry, the NCAA passed emergency legislation allowing for expanded year-round meals for athletes. The NCAA could have made these changes at any time — it didn’t have to wait for players to complain. Only when the free labor threatened to take action did the NCAA respond. Action is still needed, though. For talented football and basketball players, the NCAA’s bargain is increasingly a bad deal: They are making enormous sums of money for everyone but themselves.

Welcome to the new sharecropping – empirics prove denying athletes pay is really about not paying black people

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The

Root, March 2017.

One of the biggest bait and switches ever pulled on American citizens was the ruse of collectively shared farming. It was a simple but effective long con. Farmers and plantation owners convinced newly freed slaves and poor people to work a portion of their land in exchange for a share of the harvest. In theory, this plan incentivized the workers to produce the biggest crop possible, and the landowners could maximize the use of their land, sharing the profits with labor. This system of “sharecropping” seemed like a perfect plan. But this farm-tenancy system eventually went south. Landowners found ways to bilk the sharecroppers out of their portion of the profits by charging them for food, housing, the use of equipment, interest on loans and anything else they could conjure up. The workers eventually ended up as indentured servants—in debt to the landlords, giving their blood, sweat and tears for a payday they never received. Incredibly, sharecropping was never outlawed. The mechanization of farming made it impractical, and the people who had been tied to the land eventually realized the nature of the con. But to this very day, if you could convince people to give their blood, sweat and tears for no pay except the promise of fortune and success down the road, you could start your own sharecropping system. Fortunately, no company is arrogantly evil enough to convince poor people to work for free while the business rakes in billions in profit, refusing to compensate the workers who sacrifice their bodies and minds … … except for college athletics. Funded by the federal government (that means us), the National Collegiate Athletic Association is nominally a nonprofit organization. Tech- nically, however, the NFL (which made about $13.3 billion in 2016) is also a nonprofit because it distributes all the money it makes to its individual franchises. Calling them “not-for-profit” organizations is like saying Beyoncé and Jay Z are poor because Blue Ivy is going to end up with all the money anyway. The NCAA makes around $1 billion a year (figures for 2016 haven’t been released yet; it presumably takes quite a while to count the piles of money) on college athletics. Eighty percent of the NCAA’s revenue comes from the media rights to the NCAA tournament. If you add in the $3.4 billion for college football (the playoff championship is owned by the 125 Football Subdivision, or FBS, schools), the total revenue for college sports tops $4 billion—almost all of it from football and basketball. Four billion. Now guess how much players get. They get food, of course. They get to live in college dorms, so there’s free housing. Depending on which school you attend, there’s a $2,000-$5,000 stipend for the year (which amounts to $1-$2.50 per hour). There’s the free athletic gear. But the real allure of college athletics is the opportunity for fame, athletic glory, free education and more money than they could ever count. Welcome to the new sharecropping. Just as in sharecropping,

when you talk about the student-athletes in money-earning sports, you’re really talking about black people. In 2012, the latest year for which figures are available (pdf), black players made up 51.6 percent of FBS football players (far more than their 13 percent of the American population) and 57.2 percent of Division I basketball players. For years, colleges have made hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of these athletes with no regard for their future, and no one cares—simply because they’re black. That’s not supposition. That is what a recent study by UMass Amherst associate professor of political science Tatishe Nteta found. Nteta and researchers interviewed subjects on a number of topics and “devised a survey that weighed variables like age, sex and interest in college sports and negative attitudes towards African-Americans, a measure he calls racial resentment.” Nteta found that the subjects who held the most racial biases statistically opposed paying college athletes. Even white subjects who weren’t “racially resentful” leaned toward not paying college athletes when they were shown a picture of black athletes alongside the question.

The negative is driven by subconscious biases against black students

During this year’s NCAA tournament, there has been obvious speculation about college athletes and the significant amount of revenue they have been bringing to their schools and the NCAA. This isn’t something new. This is something that has been a growing issue in recent years. Not just a regular issue at that, but a structurally racial issue on many levels. African Americans make up the majority of college athletes at the top levels in three major sports: men’s and women’s basketball (Division I) and the upper FBS level of the NCAA’s Division I, according to Travis Walton’s HuffPost article “Black

Americans Support Paying College Athletes. White People? Not So Much.” These also happen to be the highest revenue-generating sports in college athletics. Race isn’t the only issue, but statistically it plays a huge part in the reason why many people oppose the fact that college athletes should be getting paid. According to the same article, “A majority ― 52% ― of black respondents are strongly or somewhat in favor of paying college athletes, while only 15% strongly or somewhat oppose the idea. Among whites, however, the numbers flip: Just 27% support paying those athletes, while 43% oppose it.” If a majority of these college athletes, who are bringing in staggering amounts of money to these schools were white, would this even be a conversation?

The beneficiaries of college sports are mostly white - but the people working for free for white enjoyment are almost exclusively black. It’s an apartheid system

The imbalance ate at the McCormicks: college sports were a multibillion-dollar business, and here was a top talent stuck with a dilapidated two-wheel. While standing on the field at the school’s Spartan Stadium during a football game, something else struck Robert, an image he couldn’t shake. The players were in uniform, covered in Michigan State’s green and white colors, but Robert could see their bare lower legs. “Almost all of them,” he says, “were black.” Just like Rogers. Meanwhile, everyone else—the coaches, the administrators, the faces in the crowd, and Robert himself—was overwhelmingly white. “I saw a small group of black faces in the stands, and they were [football] recruits,” Robert says. “It was incredible. I realized all of the people being paid or getting the pleasure out of the game were white, and the vast majority of the people playing and risking their health were black.” When the championship game of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s men’s basketball tournament between the University of North Carolina and Villanova University tips off tonight in Houston, the scene will be similar, a microcosm of major college revenue sports as a whole. Most of the players on the court—whose sweat and sacrifice make the whole show possible—will be African- American. Almost everybody else, from Tar Heels coach Roy Williams and Wildcats coach Jay Wright to the corporate glad-handers in the luxury boxes, will not. The game will be the culmination of another successful season for a cash-rich campus athletics industry—and thanks to the NCAA’s longstanding amateurism rules, which apply to college athletes and no one else in America, the lion’s share of that money will flow from

the former group to the latter. From the jerseys to the suits. From black to white. “You have two sets of legal rules that treat two different classifications of people differently, and it’s unjustified,” Amy McCormick says. “I would never say college sports are as bad as a system where people are jailed and killed, but it’s an Apartheid system.”

Amateurism is a racial injustice - it sucks wealth from the black poor and gives it to the white elite

Others agree. Sports agent Don Yee, whose firm represents NFL players including New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and retired linebacker Dhani Jones, calls the NCAA’s refusal to pay athletes a racial injustice. Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker described campus amateurism as a regressive wealth transfer from mostly poor African-American athletes and their families to mostly well-off white managers, non- revenue sport athletes and their families. Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch has written that Division I revenue sports exude “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation,” while former NCAA executive director Walter Byers—a man who ran the organization for decades and essentially built modern college sports as we know them—wrote in his Road to Damascus memoir that his creation was suffused with a “neo-plantation mentality” in which the economic rewards “belong to the overseers,” with “what trickles down after that” going to young men such as Rogers.

Black athletes are being deprived rights the rest of us take for granted - this is an equal protection violation and evidence of an aparthied

Except: the injustice in college sports isn’t just about the terms of the deal. It’s about the terms of the dealing. Amateurism deprives athletes—again, predominantly black athletes—of freedoms and rights the rest of us take for granted. The same antitrust laws that prevent schools from colluding to limit assistant basketball coach salaries don’t protect campus athletes, even when federal courts rule that the NCAA and its member

schools are violating those laws. Sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler, who is currently leading a bellwether case against the association, says athletes “don’t have any rights under federal labor laws. They don’t get to form a union, strike, collectively bargain, or file unfair labor practice complaints. That’s not available to college athletes.” Instead, they exist as second-class citizens, separate and unequal, just as the NCAA intended— according to former association director Byers, the term “student-athlete” was a legalistic ruse specifically created in the 1950s to prevent injured football players from collecting workers’ compensation. Throughout American history, exploitation has flowed from inequality. It flowed after blacks were deemed three-fifths of a person at the original Constitutional Convention, and when they were later denied due process under Jim Crow; it flowed when women were denied the right to vote. Under Apartheid, the Mc- Cormicks write, South African laws prevented black workers from striking—sapping whatever bargaining power they otherwise might have flexed—and also mandated specific wages and hours for many blacks. Meanwhile, whites were allowed unfettered access to a free market. Sound familiar?

Athletic leadership is SUPER white, and it’s getting worse

Richard Lapchick et. al [Eminent Scholar, Endowed Chair & Director, DeVos Sport Business Management; Vice President/CEO, NCAS; Director, The Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport] “Regression throughout Collegiate Athletic Lead- ership: Assessing Diversity among Campus and Conference Leaders for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Schools in the 2015-16 Academic Year,” UCF. Nov 11, 2015. http://nebula.wsimg.com/981af17829f7a5a304eaa2160bfeb884?AccessKeyId=DAC3A56D8FB782449D2A&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and principal author of the report, said, “This year’s increase is so discouraging. At a time when almost all college and universities say they emphasize diversity and inclusion as core values, the fact is that in the 2015-16 report, 89.8 percent of our presidents were white, 86.7 percent of our athletics directors were white, and 100 percent of our conference commissioners were white. In those positions, 78.9, 79.7, and 90 percent were white men, respectively. Overall, whiles held 342 (88.8 percent) of the 385 campus leadership positions reported in this study, which was an increase from 88.2 percent in 2014. Whose America do those statistics represent?

4.4 Injury Protection

Status quo court precedent doesn’t compensate players for life changing injuries because they aren’t paid by the school and thus aren’t employees

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.” “We crafted the term student-athlete,” Walter By- ers himself wrote, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.” The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitat- ing injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.” The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms. Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU

running back, carried the ball on a “Red Right 28” sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. “It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player,” Waldrep recalled. Wal- drep was paralyzed: he had lost all movement and feeling below his neck. After nine months of paying his medical bills, Texas Christian refused to pay any more, so the Waldrep family coped for years on dwindling charity. Through the 1990s, from his wheelchair, Waldrep pressed a lawsuit for workers’ compensation. (He also, through heroic rehabilitation efforts, recovered feeling in his arms, and eventually learned to drive a specially rigged van. “I can brush my teeth,” he told me last year, “but I still need help to bathe and dress.”) His attorneys haggled with TCU and the state worker- compensation fund over what constituted employment. Clearly, TCU had provided football players with equipment for the job, as a typical employer would—but did the university pay wages, withhold income taxes on his financial aid, or control work conditions and performance? The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football. (Waldrep told me school officials “said they recruited me as a student, not an athlete,” which he says was absurd.) The long saga vindicated the power of the NCAA’s “student-athlete” formulation as a shield, and the organization continues to invoke it as both a legalistic defense and a noble ideal. In- deed, such is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.

Amateurism was invented to prevent families of killed players from being compensated

Hinton, Matt. [Writer for Deadspin]. “The Origins Of Amateurism; Or, Why College Sports Are So Fucked Up”. Deadspin, April 2014.

By the time Byers retired, in 1988, college sports was awash in money, and small-time corruption was at a high. His response over the years to the inevitable professionalization of “amateur” sports had been to retreat further into a sort of willed innocence. When the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died in 1955 from a head injury sustained while playing football for Colorado’s Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workers’- compensation death benefits, Byers and the NCAA “crafted the term student-athlete,” as Byers himself would later write, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations,” the idea being that he was a student above all, not an school employee

who had suffered a work-related accident. (Remember that when you hear “student- athlete” tossed off casually today during broadcasts: The phrase was coined as a means of denying compensation to the widow of a man killed playing college football.) For all his efforts, Byers hadn’t kept “amateur” sports innocent of market forces. He’d only en- sured that the money flowed in one direction, away from the “student-athletes.” By the end of his tenure, Byers had turned apostate, angrily renouncing the NCAA’s pretense of amateurism. “Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue; it is an economic camou- flage for monopoly practice,” he wrote. His colleagues were aghast: “It was as if I had desecrated my sacred vows.”

Student athlete designation due to lack of pay has been used to deny death benefit compensation

Lemons, Robert. [MA in public policy, writer for Stanford’s Public Policy Program]. “Amateurism and College Athletics”. Stanford University, April 2014.

In a variety of ways, the NCAA has limited the collegiate athletes’ rights by way of the label “student-athlete.” This became painfully obvious in the 1950s when Ray Den- nison died from a traumatic brain injury from college football. Ray’s widow filed for worker’s compensation death benefits (Branch 2011). The case reached the Colorado Supreme Court where it ruled that colleges are “not in the football business” (Branch 2011, p. 88). Since the college was not in the business of football, the college did not need to cover Mr. Dennison’s death through workers compensation. College football players, like all college athletes, are student-athletes, not employees. These distinctions may suffice in the courtroom, but on the field, coaches seem identical to employers. Wa- ter Byers, former NCAA president, takes credit for coining the deliberately ambiguous term – student-athlete. When injured, the player is a student. When underperforming in the classroom, the player is an athlete.

College football injuries are fairly common, deaths are less common but they’re going up

Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention. [Organization that collects and translates injury and treatment data into more effective programs, policies, rules, and education aimed at preventing, mitigating, and treating sports injuries more effectively]. “Football Injuries”, Datalys Center, 2011.

The overall injury rate in NCAA football is 8.1 injuries per 1,000 athlete exposures (games and practices combined). There were more than 41,000 injuries and 25 million athlete exposures from 2004 to 2009. • Football players are nearly seven times more likely to be injured during a game than in practice. • Ligament sprains are the most common injury reported, accounting for more than 30 percent of all injuries, with the lateral ligaments of the ankle and medial collateral ligaments of the knee most commonly affected. • Concussions make up 7.4 percent of all injuries in college football players. • The preseason has the highest injury rate (9.7 per 1,000 athlete exposures) compared with in-season (7.5) and the postseason (4.2). (Note: does not include spring ball.) • The greatest incidence for adverse events such as fatalities, heat illness and collapse is more often during transitions such as the first and second day of preseason and after a break period from practice. Catastrophic Injuries* During this five-year time period, there were no fatalities from direct catastrophic injuries in NCAA football, but there were 23 non-fatal direct catastrophic injuries. There were 11 fatalities from indirect catastrophic injuries, however. Indirect fatalities, as defined by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, are those fatalities that are caused by systemic failure as a result of exertion while participating in a football activity or by a complication that was secondary to a nonfatal injury. Heart issues, heat illness, complications from sickle cell trait, and respiratory conditions rank among the top causes of death during physical exertion. Catastrophic spinal cord injuries are significant life-changing events and can sometimes result in death. From 2004 to 2009, there were three reported catastrophic spinal cord injuries in college football. The incidence of sudden cardiac death in the NCAA is roughly 1 in every 40,000 student-athletes per year. Although cardiac conditions are the leading medical cause of sudden death in all sports, complications due to sickle cell trait while participating in conditioning are the leading cause in football players. Heat Illness-Related Deaths* Heat illness is preventable and everyone, including administrators, coaches, athletes and health care professionals, should work diligently to prevent it. Nationwide, across all sport levels, there have been more deaths from heat stroke in the 2005-2009 time block than any other five-year block during the past 35 years.

There are 210k injuries per year across the NCAA, thousands require surgery or hospitalization

Kerr, Zachary. [PhD, MPH, Department of Exercise and Sport Science at UNC]. “College Sports–Related Injuries — United States, 2009–10 Through 2013–14 Academic

Years”. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, December 2015.

Among all 25 sports, an estimated 28,860,299 practice athlete-exposures and 6,472,952 competition athlete-exposures occurred each year. The 1,053,370 injuries estimated during the 5 academic years studied represented an average of 210,674 total injuries per year (Table 1), among which, 134,498 (63.8%) occurred during practices. Overall, 21.9% of all injuries required ≥7 days before return to full participation (competition: 24.6%; practice: 20.5%) (Figure 1). Among all injuries, those incurred during competition were somewhat more severe than those acquired during practice; overall, 4.0% of injuries required surgery (competition: 5.4%; practice: 3.1%), and 0.9% required emergency transport (competition: 1.4%; practice: 0.6%) (Table 2). These data equated to estimated annual averages of 46,231 injuries that required ≥7 days before the athlete could return to full participation; 8,367 that required surgery; and 1,904 that required emergency transport. Approximately half of all injuries were diagnosed as sprains or strains (competition: 45.9%; practice: 45.0%) (Table 1). Sprains (including anterior cruciate ligament tears) and strains also accounted for the largest proportions of injuries in competition and practice requiring ≥7 days before return to full participation, (52.1% and 47.8%, respectively) and the largest proportion of injuries requiring surgery (57.7% and 52.9%, respectively). In addition, sprains and strains accounted for the largest proportion of practice-related injuries requiring emergency transport (29.4%); however, during competition, the largest proportions of injuries requiring emergency transport were fractures, stress fractures, dislocations, and subluxations (25.8%), and concussions (22.0%).

NCAA systematically screws over injured athletes – forces families to pay for medical care and then their scholarships or contracts get cancelled

Strauss, Ben. [Journalist for the New York Times]. “A Fight to Keep College Athletes from the Pain of Injury Costs”. New York Times, April 2014.

Stanley Doughty sued the N.C.A.A. after his N.F.L. contract was canceled when his first physical revealed a cervical spine injury. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times Kyle Hardrick lost his basketball scholarship at Oklahoma after he tore his meniscus. Jason Whitehead nearly lost his football scholarship at Ohio University after he injured his neck. Stanley Doughty left South Carolina only to discover he had a serious spine injury that ended his N.F.L. career after his first physical. In the sprawling battle to reform the N.C.A.A., medical care for injured athletes has emerged as a key front, a particularly sensitive subject that has become more important with increased

awareness about head injuries. “It’s the most important thing,” said Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association. “We’re talking about taking care of the players.” It is unusual for an athlete to lose a scholarship after an injury, but those worst-case scenarios are part of the reason Huma has helped lead a recent push to unionize Northwestern’s scholarship football players. Under N.C.A.A. rules, players can still lose their scholarships after being hurt, often pay for their own insurance and are generally responsible for long-term health care for injuries sustained on the playing field. Huma’s goal is to ensure that current and former athletes never pay out of pocket for sports injuries. Some think a workers’ compensation model could fill the gaps. The N.C.A.A. previously placed limits on medical benefits, but it removed remaining restrictions on medical care last summer to give universities more freedom to provide care for athletes. Universities are required to certify that players have a primary health insurance policy, though the universities do not have to pay for it. The N.C.A.A. also has a catastrophic injury program that kicks in when expenses exceed $90,000. “The floor is relatively low for what has to be provided,” said John Infante, an N.C.A.A. compliance expert who runs the Bylaw Blog for AthleticScholarships.net. “You have a group that wants to raise it, and it comes down to whether schools, as the members of the N.C.A.A., want to do that.” Hardrick, a 6-foot-8 forward, committed to Oklahoma when he was 14. He arrived on campus in 2009, but at a practice that fall, a teammate, the nearly 300-pound Keith Gallon, fell on his right leg and injured his knee. Hardrick was told by team doctors that the injury was not serious, that with physical therapy he would be fine. He did not play in a game that year, and the pain continued the next season. In January 2011, Hardrick’s mother, Valerie, received the results of a magnetic resonance imaging test on her son’s knee. The test showed a torn meniscus. Oklahoma disputed the findings and would not authorize surgery, even though, Valerie Hardrick said, the university had arranged for the exam. Hardrick had the operation using his family’s insurance. Then, with his health in question, his scholarship was not renewed. Kenny Mossman, Oklahoma’s senior associate athletic director, wrote in a statement that Ok- lahoma relies on a “highly respected team of medical doctors” and that athletes who choose to seek an outside opinion do so, “by policy, at their own expense.” Hardrick’s attempt to play at a junior college failed, and he was recently hired by Halliburton to work on an oil field. He still has severe knee pain and is responsible for all of his medical costs. Hardrick is hardly the only athlete to fall through the cracks. Whitehead, a former safety at Ohio University, injured his neck when a teammate slammed him to the ground during a workout after the 2000 season. He and his teammate Jon Clark, who had sustained a knee injury, were deemed medically disqualified, meaning they would

continue on scholarship but not count against the university’s athletic limit. After the following school year, they were informed that their scholarships would not be renewed. “They said it was a budget issue,” Whitehead said. After public pressure and a news conference, Ohio agreed to reinstate the tuition portion of the aid. Doughty, a former defensive lineman at South Carolina, left the university in 2007, in his junior year, to pursue a professional career. He was not drafted but signed a contract with the Kansas City Chiefs. At his physical, he was told he had a cervical spine injury; one more big hit could lead to serious problems. Without surgical repair, the injury would affect him the rest of his life. His contract was canceled. Doughty contacted South Carolina seeking medical assistance. After coaches initially said they might be able to help, they stopped returning his calls, he said. Doughty has since sued the N.C.A.A., arguing it breached its duty to protect football players. A South Carolina spokesman wrote that Doughty was aware of his injury and that he was provided appropriate medical care while he was a student-athlete. A few universities grant multiple-year scholarships, which were instituted by the N.C.A.A. in 2012 to curb the practice of pulling scholarships. At the Final Four this year, the N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, expressed support for four- year scholarships while speaking out against the union effort. On Thursday, the Divi- sion I board of directors endorsed changes to the N.C.A.A.’s governance model giving wealthier conferences more autonomy. But a national mandate on health coverage, particularly long-term care, does not appear imminent. N.C.A.A. lawyers wrote in a recent court filing that the organization itself denied having “a legal duty to protect student- athletes, but affirmatively states that under the N.C.A.A. constitution, each member institution is responsible for protecting the health of its student-athletes.” Ellen J. Stau- rowsky, a professor at Drexel who is studying health care policy at universities in the five wealthiest conferences, said coverage varied widely. Some universities, she said, guarantee medical care only as long as an athlete is in school, while some provide it for an extra year. “It’s a completely patchwork system,” she said. California passed a law requiring universities that generate more than $10 million in media revenue from athletics to guarantee scholarships for players who are hurt, as well as assist athletes in premium payments and deductibles. It also requires those universities to provide medical care or insurance for athletic injuries for up to two years after an athlete leaves a university.

Paying the players solves – reclassifying as employees takes the burden away from athletes

Strauss, Ben. [Journalist for the New York Times]. “A Fight to Keep College Athletes from the Pain of Injury Costs”. New York Times, April 2014.

Some have suggested that the N.C.A.A. could start a fund for players with continuing medical issues, or that colleges could offer treatment at university-affiliated hospitals. When a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board last month deemed Northwestern’s scholarship football players to be employees, a new wrinkle was intro- duced: workers’ compensation. “We’re going to push ahead with the employee model and try to guarantee protections that way,” Huma said. Duke Niedringhaus, an insurance broker who has negotiated workers’ compensation coverage deals for N.F.L. teams, said workers’ compensation could be the only viable way to guarantee lifetime care for athletic injuries. Niedringhaus calculated the cost to cover 85 scholarship football players at Northwestern to be about $1.5 million annually, through Illinois’s assigned risk pool. The cost of the premium could change year to year based on the number and cost of claims, he said. The N.F.L. provides health insurance for five years after retirement for players who play three seasons, and workers’ compensation beyond that. The N.F.L. also recently agreed to create a $765 million fund for retired players dealing with the effects of head injuries, though a judge questioned whether that sum was sufficient. The N.C.A.A. is facing lawsuits over its handling of concussions as well. As Amy Perko, the executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said, “the question is how all the new money will be used and how it will be used to ensure fair treatment of athletes.”

Injury is inevitable due to intense schedules and schools have no legal obligation to pay for medical costs or guarantee scholarship renewal in the status quo. Only recognizing players as employees solves.

Walsh, Meghan. [Writer and editor for The Atlantic]. “ ‘I Trusted ’Em’: When NCAA Schools Abandon Their Injured Athletes”. The Atlantic, May 2013.

Stories like Doughty’s and Hardrick’s speak to the larger paradox of college sports, wherein players are treated like employees of their institutions—but don’t get paid or receive the same benefits as recognized workers. Let’s say the athletic director walks through the stands, slips on spilled soda and breaks his leg. Because he is considered

an employee of the university, worker’s compensation will cover any costs, short and long-term. But if a player 15 feet away breaks his leg on the field, running a play at the coach’s request, the school has no legal or financial obligations since he is considered a student-athlete, not an employee. In 1973, the NCAA passed legislation banning athletic scholarships that guaranteed more than one year, a prohibition that stayed on the books for almost 40 years. Although many schools renewed these one-year scholarships annually and thus kept their athletes on campus for four full years, this changed the athletic landscape drastically: Players became expendable. It wasn’t until 2011, despite a majority of schools protesting, that the governing board began allowing conferences to offer multi-year commitments. It remains to be seen whether commitments like those become standard practice. Meanwhile, administrators can choose not to renew one-year grants for any reason, from lackluster performance to an injury. The NCAA actually invented the concept of a student-athlete in the 1950s, when the wife of a player who died from a head injury received while playing football tried to sue for worker’s-compensation death benefits. The term was meant to distinguish the classes, so players wouldn’t receive the same benefits. “Whenever we have a labor force that goes unrecognized, the benefits that would ordinarily be accessible aren’t,” says Stau- rowsky, who also co-authored the College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth. Financial records from several of the top football Divi- sion I universities shows that, on average, they spend roughly $1 million on insurance premiums and health care for the entire athletic department. Take the University of South Carolina, which is comparable to most top-tier programs. Last year, athletics generated $83.9 million. The total spent on medical expenses was $1 million. Unlike college players, NFL employees are eligible for five years of post-career health coverage. How much teams annually pay for insurance isn’t known. But whatever amount that is, teams are additionally paying millions in workers’ compensation claims. Duke Niedringhaus, an agent with J.W. Terrill who brokers claims with NFL teams, says for any given policy year a team owner will pay roughly $3 million in claims. Because student-athletes aren’t considered employees though, they are not eligible for workers’ comp claims, which ensure lifetime medical coverage. Dan Rascher, who teaches sports economics at the University of San Francisco, says it’s a reflection of university priorities. “The number of athletes is so small relative to the cost of running a university or athletic department,” he says. “To provide healthcare for a couple of extra years, they could take a tiny bit out of coaches’ pay. A relatively small amount of money would make a big difference when it comes to making sure everyone is fully covered.” Some experts say the disparities won’t be resolved until the courts decide to acknowledge

student-athletes as employees—something they’ve been reluctant to do. Several sports lawyers say the reason there have been so few lawsuits regarding healthcare is because schools currently have no legal obligations to pay for athletic-related medical bills. Re- fusing to pay may be considered by some to be unethical, but it is not illegal. In cases of negligence, which could include when a player isn’t properly treated or is intentionally misdiagnosed, it can be hard to find a lawyer willing and capable of taking on such large institutions. Staurowsky is one of the many who argues that the best way to protect the well-being of student-athletes is to start recognizing them as employees. Otherwise, she says, “It’s like a Hobson’s choice, where there really is no choice.” John Collins, the lawyer who defended Kent Waldrop, a former Texas Christian University football player who suffered a paralyzing neck injury in the ’70s, argues there are three criteria that prove money-generating athletes are, in fact, employees. First, there is a contract between the two parties. Regular students, even those on academic scholarships, don’t usually have to sign a commitment to the school. Players do. Second, universities pay the players—tuition, room and board, stipends. And lastly, the school has the right of control. Coaches enforce curfews, require players to practice year-round and call the plays. If a player chooses not to follow these commands, the school can essentially fire him by revoking his scholarship. The problem will likely only get worse, given the es- calating demands being placed on student-athletes. It used to be that players practiced only several months outside of the regular season. These days, athletes are expected to train year-round. Some trainers say that added amount of time on the field puts extra strain on the body, making athletes more prone to injury. And while summer and spring practices are officially called “optional,” it’s common knowledge that in reality they aren’t. An NCAA study found D1 football players estimate spending 44.8 hours a week practicing, traveling and playing during the season. And spring practices start just a couple of months after the season ends.

Scholarships get withheld or cancelled due to injury and medical costs aren’t covered in the status quo

Cassilo, David. [Contributor to the Daily Caller]. “For college scholarship athletes, injury can spell financial disaster”. Daily Caller, November 2011.

Two years ago, a dream came true for Kyle Hardrick. It’s the same dream that hundreds of American college freshmen will experience this weekend: suiting up for their first NCAA basketball game. After committing to the University of Oklahoma as a ninth- grader, Hardrick finally took the court in 2009. But over the next two years, the 6-foot,

8-inch forward would play just six minutes. An injury to his knee has put his future — and his scholarship — on hold. As Hardrick tries to resume his career, he has been unable to obtain a medical hardship waiver, something he needs to regain a year of college eligibility. His family has been stuck with tuition bills since his scholarship was not renewed. And with those bills unpaid, he also can’t get his academic transcripts from Oklahoma to transfer to another school. “You believe that your child will be taken care of on and off that court throughout their college career,” said Valerie Hardrick, Kyle’s mother, at a congressional roundtable discussion last week. “My insurance does not cover all of Kyle’s medical bills.” With scholarships renewed on a year-to-year basis, stories like Hardrick’s emerge every year across the country. Valerie Hardrick was invited to Washington to take part in a discussion on the state of the NCAA, organized by Democratic Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush. The idea of paying student athletes and the length of athletic scholarships were on the agenda, but the rights of injured players was the early focus. “Coaches arbitrarily can withhold or withdraw scholarships, and there is very little an athlete can do to prevent that,” said ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap. While there is little injured athletes can do, they still have a few options. In many cases, family insurance policies can cover the injury — up to a certain point. And if that injury is severe enough, athletes can turn to the NCAA for help.

Recognizing players as employees solves – forces injury costs onto schools as worker compensation

Cassilo, David. [Contributor to the Daily Caller]. “For college scholarship athletes, injury can spell financial disaster”. Daily Caller, November 2011.

Unlike professionals, student athletes enjoy no guarantees because they are not paid and aren’t unionized. In this regard, collegiate athletics looks like Major League Baseball before Marvin Miller took over the players association in 1966. Then, baseball players’ contracts were renewed on a yearly basis, Pepe told TheDC, and there was very little compensation for players with career-threatening injuries. Once Miller renegotiated the collective bargaining agreement, MLB players started to receive health benefits and long-term contract guarantees became commonplace. Because student athletes are not paid, similar protections are out of their reach. If that changed, a college basketball player could also qualify for worker’s compensation in the state where he was injured.

Student athletes don’t get any protection from injuries in the status-quo

Jason Gurdus [lawyer]. “Protection Off of the Playing Field: Student Athletes Should be Considered University Employees for Purposes of Workers’ Compensation “ Hofstra Law Review, 2001. http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/hoflr29&div=31&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals

However, the student athletes that work to achieve each school’s success on the playing field are rarely protected if injured while playing their sport. Athletes are often discarded after they have been seriously injured.‘As a result, many college scholarship athletes have turned to workers’ compensation statutes in an attempt to receive the protection they deserve for the costs of their injuries. […] Finally, it is unjust and unfair to allow student athletes to take part in an employment relationship without having the protection that should be bestowed on all employees. If student athletes must submit themselves to the total control of their coaches and their universities,” ‘they, in return, should be able to expect that the universities will provide them with an appropriate form of compensation should they injure themselves. This compensation should be ob- tainable in the form of workers’ compensation.

Students need to get paid for injury protection—the scholarships don’t cover that if they don’t make the team

Armstrong Williams. [washington times staff writer]. “WILLIAMS: The exploitation of college athletes,” Washington Times. April 2014, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/6/williams- the-exploitation-of-college-athletes/

And what about all the injuries college athletes experience? Sure, they get medical coverage if they make the team, but many of these athletes experience season-ending injuries or suffer concussions that have long-term consequences after they graduate (or certainly after their playing eligibility is used up). College athletes must be provided medical care whether they make the team or not. Injuries sustained during the season must be taken care for as long as they remain an issue. Refusing to take care of the basic medical needs of college players should not be tolerated.

4.5 Economics

Athletes live below the poverty line, scholarships fall short, and coaches make millions – the market value for each athlete is way more than enough to lift them out of poverty, but the myth of the student athlete blocks access to market value

McKechnie, Alex. [Writer at Drexel News, works in communications at Drexel Uni- versity]. “Study College Athletes Worth Six Figures Live Below Federal Poverty Line”. Drexel News, September 2011.

The study, entitled “The Price of Poverty in Big Time College Sport,” shows that the average scholarship shortfall (out-of-pocket expenses) for each “full” scholarship athlete was approximately $3222 per player during the 2010-11 school year. The report also found that the room and board provisions in a full scholarship leave 85 percent of players living on campus and 86 percent of players living off campus living below the federal poverty line. The study estimates the fair market value of the average FBS football and basketball player to be $120,048 and $265,027. “We knew that big time football and basketball players receive much less than they are worth, but the disparity between players’ fair market value, what they receive, and the money that others receive highlighted by the numbers in this report is shocking,” stated NCPA President Ramogi Huma. According to Dr. Ellen J. Staurowsky, a sport management professor in Drexel’s Goodwin College and co-author of the study, “Our findings continue to unmask the pretense that big-time college sport is about ‘kids’ playing ‘games.’ Big-time college sport is about big-business. The mythology of the ‘student-athlete’ as promoted by the NCAA is revealed to cover up a system of inequities in compensation and treatment for the athletes who make the most sacrifices and contribute the most to the enterprise. Public policy makers, higher education officials, and athletes themselves have an opportunity in light of recent events to call for and implement reforms that will eliminate the exploitative college sport practices that bring no credit to higher education and have caused considerable pain and hardship to athletes over the years.” Men’s basketball head coaches whose teams competed during March Madness in 2010 earned, on average, approximately $1.4 million with the average head football coach compensation in major programs amounting to $1.3 million. The top paid 60 FBS football coaches averaged more than $2 million in total compensation with Alabama’s Nick Saban and Texas’ Mack Brown earning approximately $6 million and $5.1 million, respectively. The top 25 highest paid basketball coaches whose team played in the 2011 NCAA tournament averaged about $2.4 million with Louisville’s Rick Pitino earning $7.5 million in total

compensation. According to the study, University of Texas football players’ fair market value was $513,922 in 2010 but they lived $778 below the federal poverty line and had a $3,624 scholarship shortfall. Duke basketball players were valued at $1,025,656 while living just $732 above the poverty line and a scholarship shortfall of $1,995. The University of Florida had the highest combined football and basketball revenues while its football and basketball players’ scholarships left them living $2,250 below the federal poverty line and a $3190 scholarship shortfall. In former Florida football star Tim Tebow’s recently released autobiography entitled “Through My Eyes”, Tebow reveals his frustration with the NCAA. He writes, “The NCAA’s stance on paying players – or not paying them – seems unfair to me, with the preposterous amounts of money being made by the schools, television, coaches, and the like. And the players?”

NCAA rules against making money from TV ads and other commercial revenue forces 86% of athletes to live in poverty and lose $3k a year – their market value would 120-265k if they could access it

Nance-Nash, Sheryl. [Writer for AOL Finance]. “NCAA Rules Trap Many College Ath- letes in Poverty”. AOL Finance, September 2011.

The study, conducted by the National College Players Association and Drexel Univer- sity’s department of sport management, looked at football and basketball teams from Football Bowl Subdivision colleges and calculated athletes’ out-of-pocket education- related expenses (over and above their “full” scholarships), and compared the room- and-board portion of players’ scholarships to the federal poverty line – as well as to coaches’ and athletic administrators’ salaries. It then used NFL and NBA collecting bargaining agreements to estimate the fair market value of FBS football and basketball players. The results were none too favorable for athletes: The average scholarship shortfall – the student’s out-of-pocket expenses – for each “full scholarship” athlete was approximately $3,222 per player during the 2010-11 school year. The report also found that the room-and-board provisions in a full scholarship leave 85% of players living on campus and 86% of players living off campus living below the federal poverty line. And the estimated “fair market value” of those FBS football and basketball players to their institutions? $120,048 and $265,027, respectively. Poverty in sports “We all know that big time football and basketball players receive much less than they are worth, but the disparity between players’ fair market value, what they receive, and the money that others receive is shocking,” said NCPA President Ramogi Huma, who co-authored the study, in a prepared statement. “I was most surprised by the fair market value calcu-

lations for FBS football and basketball players,” Huma told DailyFinance. “I had seen estimates from the late ‘90s that were around $50,000 or so. But $120,000 and $265,000? The numbers jumped out immediately.” Sponsored Links And those are just averages: Some examples point to even more striking disparities. The University of Texas football players’ fair market value was $513,922 in 2010, but they lived $778 below the federal poverty line and had a $3,624 scholarship shortfall. Duke basketball players were valued at $1,025,656 while living just $732 above the poverty line and had scholarship shortfalls of $1,995. The University of Florida had the highest combined football and basketball revenues while its players’ scholarships left them living $2,250 below the federal poverty line and a $3,190 scholarship shortfall. The score: Players, zero; Schools, coaches and just about everybody else involved, millions. The 60 highest-paid FBS football coaches averaged more than $2 million in total compensation, according to the report, with big guns like Alabama’s Nick Saban and Texas’ Mack Brown earning an estimated $6 million and $5.1 million, respectively. The 25 highest-paid basketball coaches in the 2011 NCAA tournament averaged about $2.4 million, with Rick Pitino of Louisville taking home a compensation package of $7.5 million. Based on the findings in the study and an Inside Higher Education report showing that almost half of FBS colleges were caught violating NCAA rules between 2001 and 2010, the report implicates the NCAA itself as the chief culprit for the scandals that have plagued college sports.”Through the NCAA, college presidents mandate impoverished conditions for young, valuable players and throw money around to all other college sports stakeholders when those players perform well, a formula that drives the powerful black market that thrives at so many universities nationwide,” the report concludes.

Employers need consent from employees to use their likeness in ads/publicly and can employees sign away these rights in exchange for payment – means athletes under the resolution would control ads and get some of the revenue

FreeAdvice Staff. [FreeAdvice is a website that provides legal advice and explains legal provisions related to employment and labor]. “Use by Employers of Employees’ Photos in Ad Campaigns: Do They Have to Pay You?”. FreeAdvice, No Date.

People have a right to control their own images or likenesses. This comes up most often with celebrities, simply because their images and likenesses are the most valuable. However, the legal rule applies to everyone, famous or not. This means that no one may use your image or likeness without your permission, and you may withhold your permission for any reason. This rule even applies to your employer: your employer cannot

use your image or likeness on their website, in commercials, on product packaging, etc. without your permission. However, rights like this can be granted by contract. Often, this is in exchange for some consideration, or payment. Again, if you think in terms of celebrity endorsers, whether athletes or actors or other, they are almost always paid (and handsomely!) for allowing someone to use them in conjunction with a product, service, or company. Similarly, if your employer wants to use your image or likeness, they can pay you for it; and the payment doesn’t need to be cash on the barrelhead. Comp time or vacation time, for example, are perfectly good forms of payment for an employee.

Even though there’s no federal law, most states require consent by employees to use likeness for commercial purposes

Wu, James. [JD from Boston College Law School, contributes a monthly column on Social Media and Employment Law. For nearly 20 years, James has provided day-today counseling and advice to employers regarding compliance with employment laws and reducing the risks of employment-related claims and lawsuits]. “Do You Have Legal Consent to Post Employee Photos on Social Media?”. Maximize Social Business, 2016. Though they work for a company, employees do have privacy rights regarding their own image, photo, identity and voice, particularly when others (like an employer). While there is no federal law prohibiting employers in the United States from using employees for photos, videos, etc., there are many state laws restricting how an image/photo/video/voice can be used for commercial purposes. These state laws use various labels, including “Right to Privacy”, “Right of Publicity”, and “Personality Rights.” No matter what these laws are called, most provide that employee photos can be used once the employee consents to such use. For example, see California Civil Code Section 3344 and Revised Code of Washington 63.60.010.

There’s no federal law but most states require prior consent for using employee likenesses

Society for Human Resource Management. [World’s largest HR professional society, representing 285,000 members in more than 165 countries]. “Legal & Regulatory Issues: Can an employer use employees’ photographs for marketing purposes such as a company web site or promotional literature?”. SHRM, January 2014.

There is no federal regulation which specifically prohibits an employer from using employee photos for business purposes including marketing their products and services. There are however many states that restrict the use of an individual’s name, image, voice, photo or “likeness” for commercial purposes without the person’s prior consent. These statutes are commonly known as “Right of Publicity” or “Right of Privacy” laws. Some states, including Washington, address the topic under “Unfair Competition” or “Personality Rights.” Employers should review their applicable state laws and ensure compliance.

Reform solves graduation rates and poverty and allows athletes to access their market value

Nance-Nash, Sheryl. [Writer for AOL Finance]. “NCAA Rules Trap Many College Ath- letes in Poverty”. AOL Finance, September 2011.

The ramifications are huge for athletes. “If nothing changes, about half of football and basketball players will continue to not graduate and will continue to break NCAA rules. If reform takes place, graduation rates will increase dramatically, their financial desperation will be reduced, and they will finally receive their commercial free market value,” predicted Huma. “We have practical recommendations for a new amateur model that would increase graduation rates, minimize violations, and decrease the immoral financial disparity between the amount of money invested in athletes’ education and the lavish salaries paid to coaches and athletic administrators,” he said. ” With the college presidents admitting failure and a lack of power, only the federal government has the ability to bring forth reform.” The NCPA report recommends that the Justice De- partment and Congress enact comprehensive reform through NCAA deregulation and more educational support for college athletes. Among the report’s suggestions: 1. Alle- viate some of the athletes’ financial desperation by using new TV revenues to provide athletic scholarships that fully cover each school’s cost of attendance. 2. Adopt the Olympic amateur model by lifting restrictions on college athletes’ commercial opportunities such as endorsements and autograph signings. A portion of the funds could be placed in an educational lockbox (described below) to help increase graduation rates and decrease NCAA violations. 3. Allow revenue-producing athletes to receive a portion of new revenues that can be placed in an educational lockbox, a trust fund to be accessed to assist in or upon the completion of their college degree.

Lack of pay for licensing to companies like EA means athletes lose money per year and has created widespread poverty – $1B is stripped from the black community per year

Ryssdal, Kai. [Host and senior editor of Marketplace, the most widely heard program on business and the economy — radio or television, commercial or public broadcasting — in the country]. “NCAA policy hits poor, minority neighborhoods hardest”. Market- place, July 2013.

The main argument in the case comes down to an anti-trust issue – with the plaintiffs arguing that the NCAA, video-game maker Electronic Arts, and Collegiate Licensing Co. all conspired to fix athlete compensation at $0 for all of their work. Dr. Boyce Watkins, a finance professor at Syracuse University, has been an outspoken critic of the current compensation system, which consists entirely of scholarships. Athletes, says Watkins, should be paid for their services the same as any other worker in America – it’s a labor rights issue. “Imagine if we lived in a world where Walmart and Target and Kmart could all conspire and say, ‘OK, we’re all gonna agree to pay our employees $10 an hour.’ That would be entirely unacceptable,” points out Watkins. “But that’s what happens when Duke and North Carolina and Kentucky all agree that we’re not going to compensate the athletes. It just leads to a system that I would say is inherently unfair.” While many argue that scholarships should be enough for student-athletes, a 2010 study showed that the average NCAA athlete in the big-time sports, like football and basketball, actually ends up paying around $2,951 per year due to school-related costs. Watkins also says the system disproportionately hurts players from lower-income areas, and the African-American community. “I think that race does play a role in that at least a billion dollars in economic value is stripped from the black community every year,” he argues. He cites the example of Reggie Bush, a former USC football player who lost his Heisman trophy because his mother received money under the table. “When you look at USC – a school with an endowment that’s larger than every historically black college in the country combined – that this school made over $100 million from Reggie Bush’s play on the field – it’s hard to argue that some people should be outraged about that,” he adds. As a college professor, he’s encountered many players on campus that have struggled with issues of poverty. As these college athletes play for their schools and make millions, some hear that they’re mother is going to get evicted, or that a friend in the old neighborhood was shot. The term “scholar-athlete” makes no sense in a world where students are taken out of class during the week to go play in televised games, he points out.

Paying athletes means revenue from the billions in ads and licensing goes to players

Schwarz, Andy. [Antitrust economist and partner at OSKR, an economic consulting firm specializing in expert witness testimony]. “EXCUSES, NOT REASONS: 13 MYTHS ABOUT (NOT) PAYING COLLEGE ATHLETES”. Sportsgeekonomics, 2011.

When the myths are stripped away, what’s left? We could have a vibrant college athletics system where the elite programs pay competitive wages to their athletes and continue to dominate the sports as they do now. Other schools would pay less, get lesser talent, and win less often, just like they do now. Fans would still attend and watch on television. The government would not cut off schools for violating Title IX because they would comply as much or more than they do now. Costs would rise, but not as much as you might think because other costs would decline. Coaches would earn a little less, weight rooms would be a little less lavish. And some fairer portion of the billions in revenue would flow to the college athletes who generate them. And that’s no myth.

Not recognizing students as employees is the only way the NCAA avoids distributing money from TV ads, tickets, jerseys, etc

Johnson, Greg. [Sports editor at The Daily Targum, writer for The Nation]. “The NCAA Makes Billions and Student Athletes Get None of It”. The Nation, April 2014.

All television revenue, ticket and jersey sales, likeness promotions and other sources of income go to the NCAA, the schools, the coaches, the event staffs and everyone else involved in the business—except for the athletes creating the value. Last year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament generated $1.15 billion in television ads, well beyond the revenue generated by the NFL and NBA playoffs, according to ESPN. Despite devoting forty to sixty hours per week to their sport most of the year—more than many full-time jobs—Division I football players aren’t considered employees and lack basic economic rights under the NCAA’s cartel restrictions. That’s what former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter is pushing to change in his fight for unionization of the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA). He wants better medical insurance and academic support for players, and rightfully so. The NCAA’s exploitative marketing comes in exchange for a scholarship incidental to the industry, and it requires far more time spent playing a major sport than studying for classes. Colter testified that advisors kept him from pursuing a dream of becoming a doctor in favor of easier classes to cater to his football schedule. That’s not putting someone in a position to succeed academically if

they aren’t going professional athletically. Yet somehow, universities paint a picture of student athletes being primarily students. They find it appropriate to use them as a vehicle for institutional promotion during sporting events that have nothing to do with education. The reality is, they care almost exclusively about a football player’s talent and marketability—nothing more, nothing less.

Making athletes employees who can compete in the free market solves

Johnson, Greg. [Sports editor at The Daily Targum, writer for The Nation]. “The NCAA Makes Billions and Student Athletes Get None of It”. The Nation, April 2014.

The NCAA tags student athletes with the label of “amateur,” but it’s more of an excuse to control the distribution of billions of dollars than an institutional ideal. The notion that college athletes should play strictly for the love of the game is laughable. If so, why give them a scholarship at all? Oh, right, schools need athletes enrolled for revenue and institutional advancement. To be clear, student athletes do not need salaries or monthly paychecks, even though the NCAA runs just like any other professional sports league. They should simply be allowed to operate within the free market like anyone else in America. Schools can pay what they want, and athletes should be able to sign endorsements for their own likeness and image. It’s fairly simple.

Poor people have significantly higher marginal propensity to consume

Mian, Atif. [Economist, writer for House of Debt]. “Who Spends Extra Cash?”. House of Debt, April 2014.

Imagine we dropped cash on every household in the country. Who would spend it? Who would save it? The answer to this question matters a great deal given the rise in inequality before the Great Recession. It also matters because the economy is likely to be demand-constrained during severe downturns, especially if the economy hits the zero-lower bound on nominal interest rates. If all households reacted to a cash windfall the same, then the distribution of income or wealth wouldn’t matter much for cyclical policy. We argued in a previous post that lower income/wealth households have a much higher propensity to spend out of cash windfalls. Another study supporting this claim is the Jappelli and Pistaferri (2013) study forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. They used answers to a 2010 survey in Italy that asked con- sumers how much of an unexpected cash windfall they would spend. The first notable

result is that the average marginal propensity to consume out of a cash windfall shock was 48%. So 48% of the cash windfall would be spent on average. Even more interesting, the authors found that the MPC was much larger for households that had lower “cash on hand.” Cash on hand is measured as household disposable income plus financial assets minus debt. So more casually speaking, households with high “cash on hand” are rich and those with low “cash on hand” are poor. Here is the key chart: For the poorest households, the marginal propensity to consume was close to 70%. For the richest households, the MPC was only 35%. So even more evidence that lower income/wealth households spend a much larger fraction of cash windfalls. The abstract makes the following policy conclusions: “The results have important implications for the evaluation of fiscal policy, and for predicting household responses to tax reforms and redistribu- tive policies. In particular, we find that a debt-financed increase in transfers of 1 percent of national disposable income targeted to the bottom decile of the cash-on-hand distribution would increase aggregate consumption by 0.82 percent. Furthermore, we find that redistributing 1% of national disposable income from the top to the bottom decile of the income distribution would boost aggregate consumption by 0.33%.”

High MPC creates multiplier effect – cash infusions generate reverberating effects

Investopedia. [Investopedia, an economics and investing encyclopedia]. “The Multi- plier Effect”. Investopedia, No Date.

Suppose a large corporation decides to build a factory in a small town and that spending on the factory for the first year is $5 million. That $5 million will go to electricians, engi- neers and other various people building the factory. If MPC is equal to 0.8, those people will spend $4 million on various goods and services. The various business and individual receiving that $4 million will in turn spend $3.2 million and so on. If the marginal propensity to consume is equal to 0.8 (4 / 5), then the multiplier can be calculated as: Multiplier = 1 / (1 - MPC) = 1 / (1 - 0.8) = 1 / 0.2 = 5 As a result of the multiplier effect, small changes in investment or government spending can create much larger changes in total output. A positive aspect of the multiplier effect is that macroeconomic policy can effect substantial improvements with relatively small amounts of autonomous expenditures. A negative aspect is that a small decline in business investment can trigger a larger decline in business activity and, thereby, create instability.

It’s cyclic – giving money to poor people with a high marginal propensity to consume means they spend it on basic living conditions, which goes into the pockets of other people with high propensity to consume – structurally grows the economy

Koukoulas, Stephen. [Research Fellow at Per Capita, a progressive think tank]. “Eco- nomic growth more likely when wealth distributed to poor instead of rich”. The Guardian, June 2015.

Having money from economic growth flow to poor people rather than the rich feeds into a lift in the rate of economic growth and lower unemployment. Conversely, as income inequality increases, the potential for economic growth is constrained. The economic case for maintaining a progressive income tax structure and targeting welfare payments to those most in need is overwhelming. The issue can be illustrated through a simple stylised example which outlines how a higher cash flow to the poorest is growth enhancing while a higher cash flow to the rich boosts savings, but keeps economic growth lower. Business Today: sign up for a morning shot of financial news Read more Take a situation where there is a $1bn addition to the economy via growth. That $1bn can be distributed in many different ways but let’s initially assume the 10 richest people in Australia each receive all of that gain, with $100m going to each person. According to the BRW Rich list, the tenth richest person in Australia has wealth of $2.65bn while the richest, Gina Rinehart, has more than $14bn. Economic theory and research suggests that the extra $100m to each of these uber wealthy people would be almost totally be absorbed into their wealth and there would be only a very small increase in economic activity as a result. According to research from the Brookings Institution and the Re- serve Bank of Australia, the marginal propensity to consume of high-income earners is substantially less than for low-income earners. In other words, poorer people are likely to spend the bulk of any extra income while the wealthy are more likely to save it. Looked at another way, would Gina Rinehart, Anthony Pratt or Harry Triguboff increase their spending over and above their current consumption patterns if their income had a one off boost of $100m? The answer is an overwhelming no. More likely the extra $100m would merely find its way into their assets and wealth. Any impact on the macro-economy as a result would be small. An alternative is distributing the $1bn by allocating $1,000 to each of the poorest one million people via a $20 a week tax cut or benefit increase. In this scenario, there is a strong probability the vast bulk of the $1bn would be spent to improve their living standards. Low-income earners are unlikely to save or invest the extra income. Now think of how the different distribution

of the $1bn will affect the economy and jobs. If the money finds its way to those on low incomes, there will inevitably be higher aggregate spending, more jobs and quite simply a stronger economy. And if the income distribution continues to be skewed to those on low incomes, there will be a lift in the growth potential of the economy. Un- employment would be structurally lower and there would be a self-supporting cycle of stronger activity as a result.

Student athletes are poor and need the money to support their families

Support their families ― Players would be able to actually afford a decent meal and possibly send some money back home. Many of these athletes come from urban, low- class families and often leave school early because of the unimaginable pressure to be the main provider for their family at a young age.

Scholarships don’t cover all the costs of school—86% of the athletes are in poverty, but on average they would be making 6-figures under the resolution

1.College athletes on full scholarship do not receive a “free-ride.” For the 2009-2010 academic year, the average annual scholarship shortfall (out of pocket expenses) for Football Bowl Series (FBS) “full” scholarship athletes was $3,222. 2. The compensation

FBS athletes who are on “full scholarship” received for living expenses (room and board, other expenses) situates the vast majority at or below the poverty level. 3. The percentage of FBS schools whose “full” athletic scholarships leave their players in poverty is 85% for those athletes who live on campus; 86% for athletes who live off campus. 3. The average FBS “full” scholarship athlete earns less than the federal poverty line by $1874 on campus and $1794 off campus. 4. If allowed access to the fair market like the pros, the average FBS football and basketball player would be worth approximately $121,048 and $265,027 respectively (not counting individual commercial endorsement deals). 5. Football players with the top 10 highest estimated fair market values are worth between $345k-$514k in 2009-10. The top spot was held by University of Texas football players. While 100% of these players received scholarships that left them living below the federal poverty line and with an average scholarship shortfall of $2841 in 2010-11, their coaches were paid an average of over $3.5 million each in 2010 excluding bonuses. (See Table 1.) 6. Basketball players with the top 10 highest estimated fair market values are worth between $620k-$1 million in 2009-10. The top spot was held by Duke basketball players. While 80% of these players received scholarships that left them living below the federal poverty and with an average scholarship shortfall of $3098 in 2010-11, their coaches were paid an average of over $2.5 million in 2010 excluding bonuses. (See Table 2.)

Being an athlete is a full time job — and trades off with other paid work

Contrary to what all the opponents believe, being an athlete is a full-time job. On a typical day, a player will wake up before classes, get a lift or conditioning session in, go to class until 3 or 4 p.m., go to practice, go to mandatory study hall, and then finish homework or study for a test. For a little extra money to see a movie or go out to dinner once a week, my freshman roommate worked a job at the university, earning about $7/hour. He would work his butt off all day, with two or sometimes three basketball training sessions, plus classes and homework, and go to that job for a few hours late at night. He would come back exhausted, but he needed whatever money they would pay him. However, once the season started up, he couldn’t work that job anymore. We were

on the road all the time, even gone for two straight weeks at one point. The teachers let us do our work from the road, but the job wasn’t going to pay you just because you were playing basketball on a road trip.

Strains the social system unnecessarily—athletes are on welfare when they are worth millions

The report also points out that, despite athletic programs’ record revenues, salaries, and capital expenditures as well as prohibitions on countless sources of income for athletes, the NCAA explicitly allows taxpayers to fund food stamps and welfare benefits for college athletes. Huma stated, “Basically, the NCAA is forcing taxpayers to pay for expenses that players would be able to pay themselves if not for NCAA rules.”

The NCAA is literally acting as a cartel - that is economically inefficient

NCAA members, “employers” of student-athletes, compete with each other for the limited supply of talented labor inputs. The competition is often intense. Literally hundreds of schools court the top athletes. 42 Many people spend their money and time vying for the privilege of signing high school stars. Recruitment of student-athletes requires constant contact with the athletes and their high school coaches as well as carefully planned campus visits.4 3 In addition, prize prospects often receive calls (and sometimes improper promises) from famous or wealthy alumni .44 The NCAA’s amateurism rules seek to restrain this competition among its member institutions. In essence, the NCAA acts as a classic cartel, eliminating virtually all price competition among its members. 45 “Compensation” for student-athlete “employees” is set by agreement and is limited to tuition and fees, room and board, and required coursere- lated books. 46 The NCAA also has an extensive set of rules to ensure that members do not increase athlete “compensation” indirectly through awards, benefits or covered expenses. 47 Like most effective cartels, the NCAA maintains an elaborate enforcement

mechanism to monitor and punish noncomplying members.48 The expected and actual market consequences of the NCAA’s rules are a reduction in the wages of student- athletes, greater profits for colleges, a transfer of income from low-income athletes to higher income coaches, particularly talented recruiters, 49 inefficient forms of nonprice competition among member institutions,5 0 and a misallocation of resources that harms consumer welfare. 51

Colleges sit on their endowments and don’t spend – this means the money is just sitting there when it could be in students hands boosting the economy

Adele Peters [Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world’s largest problems, from climate change to homeless- ness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.]. “If Colleges Won’t Use Their Endow- ments To Pay For Education, It’s Time To Tax Them,” Fast Company. 4-13-2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3058648/if-colleges-wont-use-their-endowments-to- pay-for-education-its-time-to-tax-them

The long-running joke about Harvard–and other universities with hefty endowments–is that they have become hedge funds with universities attached. As of last June, the value of Harvard’s endowment was $37.6 billion. Yale had $25.6 billion; Princeton had $22.7 billion. In total, more than $500 billion sits in college endowments. Yale spends more on fund managers than on students. Unlike hedge funds, however, most universities are nonprofits, and they don’t have to pay taxes as their investments grow. And while the richest schools get richer–Harvard’s endowment grew more than a billion dollars last year–tuition and student fees keep going up. Because they’re not using this extra money to complete their mission of educating students, some politicians are considering forcing schools to start paying out more of their piles of cash in taxes instead.

Colleges spend less than 5% of their endowment per year — students would definitely spend a higher percentage of their money

Katie Lobosco. [Katie Lobosco is a writer for CNNMoney’s personal finance team. She covers student debt, the cost of college, and retirement.]. “Why colleges with big endowments still charge tuition,” CNNMoney. 11-4-2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/pf/college/endowments- financial-aid/index.html

The average school spends 4.6% of its endowment each year, according to NACUBO. The rates stay pretty consistent from year to year because colleges typically set the with- drawal rate and stick with it, no matter how good or poorly investments performed in the past year. Colleges typically set that rate between 4% and 5%, said Laura MacDon- ald, the founder of the fundraising consultancy firm Benefactor Group.

The average household has an MPC of 20-40%, much higher than the colleges

JB Maverick. [A former commodity futures broker and stock market analyst, J.B. Mav- erick has been an active trader since 2001. He began writing articles on forex trading in 2007, and has written extensively on trading, finance and business since then. In addition to authoring hundreds of articles on the stock, futures, and forex markets, as well as a book on futures trading, he is also the author of a novel, the psychological thriller “A Cross of Hearts.”]. “Wealth inequality and the marginal propensity to consume,” Equi- table Growth. 12-17-2014, http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablog/wealth-inequality- marginal-propensity-consume/

Carroll and his co-authors find an aggregate MPC, or average MPC for all households, ranging between 0.2 and 0.4. Their estimate is on the high end of other estimates. Their results mean, to return to the question posed above, if I gave you $10, you’d spend between $2 and $4.

Redistributing money to people with higher MPCs will boost the economy

Not everyone would spend these extra bucks the same way, of course, because not everyone has the same marginal propensity to consume. The authors find a wide disper- sion in the MPC across the wealth distribution. For the most part, less wealthy households have much higher MPCs than wealthier households. But the economists find that

the ratio between wealth and income is the key determinant of the MPC. There are actually quite a few households in their model that have a fair amount of wealth, but a low wealth-to-income ratio, which in turn results in a high marginal propensity to consume. These households may be the “wealthy hand-to-mouth” that economist Greg Kaplan and Justin Weidner, both of Princeton University, and Giovanni L. Violante, of New York University, have written about. In contrast, a household that has a lot of liquid assets, such as investments in the stock market they could easily withdraw, tend to have a much lower MPC. So what’s the actual real world importance of estimating marginal propensities to consume? Knowing which households are the most likely to spend an extra dollar can help make fiscal policy more effective. According to Carroll and his co-authors, any fiscal stimulus targeted toward individuals in the bottom half of the wealth distribution would be 2 to 3 times more effective than just a blanket stimulus. Given the high and rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States, this finding should give some guidance to policy makers. Ignoring the distribution of wealth can undermine their ability to get the economy back on track.

4.6 Academics

Across the board, lack of pay makes students feel exploited by their schools because they perceive it as an unfair exchange – decreases graduation rate

Van Rheenen, Derek. [Professor of Cultural studies at UC Berkeley]. “Exploitation in the American Academy: College Athletes and Self-perceptions of Value”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2012.

While exposés and editorials abound concerning the exploitation of college athletes, particularly Black college athletes, few studies have measured the actual perception of the student athletes themselves. The primary purpose of this study was to measure the relative level of resentment by college athletes towards their university and their perception of being exploited for their athletic abilities and potential. The initial finding in this study of Division I college athletes was that nearly one-third of all participants reported feeling exploited by their institution. While the revenue sport athletes who participated in football and men’s basketball were seven times more likely to feel taken advantage of by their institution than their non-revenue peers, a full one quarter of these Olympic or non-revenue college athletes also felt exploited. This finding is striking, given that only football and men’s basketball generate any revenue for their institution’s athletic

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department. While non-revenue college athletes may believe that their sports generate surplus revenues for their institutions, it is perhaps more likely that these participants feel taken advantage of for reasons others than those directly related to money. Their sense of resentment complicates a purely economic understanding of exploit ation in college sports; these college athletes may believe their athletic participation generates other kinds of value or social capital for the university, such as institutional and community pride or prestige. Non-revenue college athletes may also be aware of less direct financial rewards associated with their athletic participation, such as donations to the university. Current and potential donors may have emotional connections to sports teams other than football and basketball, as demonstrated by gifts and endowments to both athletic and nonathletic areas of campus. This sense of exploitation among non- revenue college athletes might likewise be based on their perceived understanding of an unfair educational exchange, whereby their commitment in time towards their sport has limited these students’ ability to take full advantage of their educational opportunities. This reported resentment may be more complex than simply whether or not these students graduate from the institution. For example, these college students may have been unable to enroll in certain courses, pursue possible majors or study abroad due to their athletic commitments. These students might also have been able to graduate earlier were they not expected to compete in a final season or year.

Exploitation can only be solved by pay – getting a degree for free due to scholarships doesn’t solve

This study seems to suggest that the perceived exploitation experienced among college athletes is more complicated than a simple financial or educational exchange. In short, earning a degree may not negate feelings of resentment towards the university and a sense of feeling exploited by the institution. That non-revenue college athletes also feel taken advantage of by their institution demonstrates that this sense of resentment is not only financial: many young men and women are on full athletic scholarships and on teams which earn no surplus revenue for the school still feel exploited.

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Athletes feel exploited and commodified – they resent the institution and have worse academic outcomes as ar esult

Where college athletes are not valued as students on their college or university campus, it is difficult to expect that these young people will develop a healthy academic identity. These students, who may already question their academic potential based upon their recruitment and admission to the university, reaffirm their primary value to the institution through their athletic performance. In turn, these college athletes conic to feel commodified and celebrated as athletes, while they feel invisible and/or demeaned as students. These experiences are often exaggerated for African American college athletes on predominantly White institutions. As such, many college athletes feel resentful towards their institution, exploited for their athletic talents and abilities. The outcome is problematic for the institution, as it leads to a combination of resentment by some faculty, staff and students in response to the university’s investment in college sports and a corresponding resentment from college athletes who feel valued as gifted athletes but not as promising students. Their sense of exploitation undermines these college students’ perceived promise of a meaningful education.

Scholarships fail and sports empirically destroy academic careers – comparatively less graduation than counterparts

Yes, the scholarships received by football and basketball players provide an economic benefit. However, they come with onerous restrictions and no promise of an education. The 2013 Penn study found that black male student athletes graduated at lower rates than other black men at 72 percent of institutions with big-time football and basketball programs — and lower than other undergraduates overall at 97 percent of them. At many schools, football and basketball players are forced into contrived majors in which they have no interest. Take a look at the football and basketball rosters of most Power Five schools, and you’ll find two or three majors that seem unusually popular among

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athletes — often interdisciplinary programs that make it easier for academic advisers to pick classes for athletes that fit the team’s schedule. Players are also often dissuaded from taking classes they’d prefer. One of my former clients, a fine student, once expressed interest in a class that happened to conflict — in an insignificant way — with a football matter. He was strongly discouraged from taking the class, and since coaches control playing time and scholarships, he didn’t want to risk angering them, so he didn’t enroll in it. If athletes want to transfer, NCAA rules often punish them by prohibiting their participation in their chosen sport for one year. The few players who go on to NFL or NBA careers give up years of potential earnings to play for free in college, risking injury in the process. Most athletes, of course, don’t make it to the pros. No other large-scale commercial enterprise in the United States treats its performers and labor this way.

There’s also a huge racial disparity in graduation rates within athletics

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The Root, March 2017.

The greatest argument is that college players basically get a degree for free, but every metric shows that it is the white players, not the black players, who end up with degrees. During the 2014-2015 academic school year, black men were 2.5 percent of undergraduate students but 56.3 percent of football teams and 60.8 percent of men’s-basketball teams. The average graduation success rate for college football players in 2016 was 68 percent. For white football players, it was 87 percent. College basketball is even worse— it graduated only 53 percent of its black ballers. If any other business in America had that much racial disparity in any of its industry practices, it would either be sued into oblivion or shut down by the government. But not on these special plantations, which get to do whatever they want. Only 18 percent of college basketball coaches (pdf) are black, while only 8 percent of FBS head coaches are African American. The billions of dollars earned by the black sweat dripping onto the beautifully manicured grass and waxed courts end up in the pockets of white coaches, white administrators and white network owners, and benefit white students at predominantly white schools.

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Graduation rates for athletes are empirically lower than average, especially people of color

New, Jake. [Writer and journalist for Inside Higher Ed, won the David W. Miller Award for Young Journalists]. “Racial Gaps in the Power 5”. Inside Higher Ed, March 2016.

In the past five years, the five wealthiest National Collegiate Athletic Association conferences have undergone some significant changes. Chasing more exposure and money, conferences have realigned and the 65 institutions making up the leagues known as the Power Five successfully fought for a greater level of autonomy, allowing them to vote on several rule changes without involving the other members of Division I. But at least one thing hasn’t changed: racial inequity in academic success among the powerhouse football and men’s basketball conferences. Just over half of black male athletes graduate within six years, compared to 68 percent of athletes overall and 75 percent of undergraduates overall, according to a new report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. The gaps are comparable to when the center conducted a similar study in 2012. “The landscape has changed in those years, but the trends are the same,” Shaun Harper, the center’s executive director, said. “There’s been a slight increase in graduation rates, about three percentage points, but it’s been across the board, so that doesn’t narrow the racial equity gaps. That increase is perhaps good news for universities, but the racial disparity still remains.” And the gaps remain even though many a university president or coach talks about athletics as a means of providing an education, not just a chance to play, and even though athletes have access to tutors and various programs to help them academically. The new study compared the federal graduation rates of black male college athletes, all athletes, black male undergraduates and all undergraduates. The study focuses only on the 65 institutions in the five wealthiest leagues: the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeast- ern Conferences. Two-thirds of those institutions graduated black male athletes at rates lower than black men who were not athletes. Just one institution – Northwestern Uni- versity – graduated black male athletes at a rate higher than or equal to undergraduate students overall. At Northwestern, black athletes had a 94 percent graduation rate, compared to 90 percent for all athletes and 88 percent for black men. It’s the same rate as the overall rate for undergraduates. Stanford University had similarly high graduation rates, but black athletes still lagged behind other athletes and undergraduates by six percentage points. The study found that Kansas State University had the lowest graduation rate for black male athletes in all 65 institutions. Only 26 percent of Kansas State’s black athletes graduate in six years, compared to 63 percent of all athletes. The rate,

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however, is the same as all black men on campus. At Michigan State University, 33 percent of black male athletes graduate in six years, compared to 70 percent of all athletes, 55 percent of all black men and 78 percent of all undergraduates. Neither institution replied to requests for comment.

College graduation is increasingly important for individual economic success

Pew Research Center. [Pew Research Center is a polling group that does data analysis]. “The Rising Cost of Not Going to College”. Pew Research Center, February 2014.

On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when today’s young adults are compared with previous generations, the disparity in economic outcomes between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling has never been greater in the modern era. These assessments are based on findings from a new nationally representative Pew Research Center survey of 2,002 adults supple- mented by a Pew Research analysis of economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The economic analysis finds that Millennial college graduates ages 25 to 321 who are working full time earn more annually—about $17,500 more—than employed young adults holding only a high school diploma. The pay gap was significantly smaller in previous generations.2 College-educated Millennials also are more likely to be employed full time than their less-educated counterparts (89% vs. 82%) and significantly less likely to be unemployed (3.8% vs. 12.2%).

Aggregate higher education boosts economic growth in the long run

Berger, Noah, and Fisher, Peter. [Berger is president of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, an independent research organization, Fisher is research director at the Iowa Policy Project. Fisher is a national expert on public finance and has served as a consultant to the Iowa Department of Economic Development]. “A Well-Educated Workforce Is Key to State Prosperity”. Economic Policy Institute, 2013.

What can state governments do to boost the economic well-being of their people? That is the central question of state economic policy. Incomes and wages can increase across an economy when productivity—production per capita—increases. States have many

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tools in their arsenal to increase productivity, including investments in public infras- tructure, in technological innovation at public universities and other institutions, and in workers through the education and training systems. But many states have been re- treating from their responsibility to ensure state economic growth that benefits all residents in favor of a short-sighted approach to economic development. In these states, the focus is on luring employers from other states with strategies that do not lead to rising incomes because they do not make the workforce more productive. Even worse, the focus drains resources from the most important, proven, path to increasing productivity: investments in education. Major findings of this report include the following: Overwhelmingly, high-wage states are states with a well-educated workforce. There is a clear and strong correlation between the educational attainment of a state’s workforce and median wages in the state. States can build a strong foundation for economic success and shared prosperity by investing in education. Providing expanded access to high quality education will not only expand economic opportunity for residents, but also likely do more to strengthen the overall state economy than anything else a state government can do. Cutting taxes to capture private investment from other states is a race-to-the-bottom state economic development strategy that undermines the ability to invest in education. States can increase the strength of their economies and their ability to grow and attract high-wage employers by investing in education and increasing the number of well-educated workers. Investing in education is also good for state budgets in the long run, since workers with higher incomes contribute more through taxes over the course of their lifetimes.

College graduation is key to joining the middle class, job security, and civic engagement

Dept of Education Press Office. [The Department of Education is a branch of the US Federal Government]. “FACT SHEET: A College Degree: Surest Pathway to Expanded Opportunity, Success for American Students”. Department of Education, September 2016.

Pursuing high-quality postsecondary education is one of the most important investments a student can make, and is the surest path to the middle class in our country. Americans with college degrees are more likely to live healthier lives, be more civically engaged in their communities, have good-paying jobs, and experience greater job security. America’s students, families, and economic strength depend on a higher education system that helps everyone succeed. Achieving this goal requires making college more

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accessible and affordable—especially for historically underserved students—and ensuring that students graduate in a timely way with a meaningful degree that sets them up to thrive in careers and life.

Now is key – graduates are getting jobs again and recovery from the recession is going well – there is a job market for graduates

Marks Jarvis, Gail. [Reporter for the Chicago Tribune]. “Column: Recent college grads now more likely to have good jobs, opportunity”. Chicago Tribune, February 2017.

The college graduate underemployment epidemic is easing. And the stereotypical image of young people stuck in parents’ basements, working as baristas at Starbucks and wondering why they burdened themselves with $30,000 in student loan debt is becoming outdated. There are still too many recent graduates in jobs that didn’t require them to go to college, but the situation is improving. A highly cited report several years ago found 53.6 percent of recent college graduates were out of work or underemployed in 2011. But recently released data from a separate source shows that in 2014 only about 33 percent of people fresh out of college didn’t have jobs that required college educa- tions and after age 22 their career paths were much improved. The latest figures were released by Stephen Rose of the Urban Institute, who analyzed the American Consumer Survey of 2014. That 33 percent number is clearly not reassuring for those who went to college and expected more, but the general trend into more opportunity for college graduates is encouraging. Generally, people straight out of college are most likely to have problems finding good jobs during a recession, but as they move through their 20s and 30s they get into jobs that are a better match for their educational background, Rose said.

4.7 Institutional Trust

The system breeds cynicism and distrust of the institutions

Joe Nocera. [Op-Ed columnist for the NYT Opinion pages]. “Let’s Start Paying College Athletes,” New York Times. 12-30-2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/lets- start-paying-college-athletes.html

This glaring, and increasingly untenable, discrepancy between what football and basketball players get and what everyone else in their food chain reaps has led to two things.

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First, it has bred a deep cynicism among the athletes themselves. Players aren’t stupid. They look around and see jerseys with their names on them being sold in the bookstores. They see 100,000 people in the stands on a Saturday afternoon. During the season, they can end up putting in 50-hour weeks at their sports, and they learn early on not to take any course that might require real effort or interfere with the primary reason they are on campus: to play football or basketball. The N.C.A.A. can piously define them as students first, but the players know better. They know they are making money for the athletic department. The N.C.A.A.’s often-stated contention that it is protecting the players from “excessive commercialism” is ludicrous; the only thing it’s protecting is everyone else’s revenue stream. (The N.C.A.A. itself takes in nearly $800 million a year, mostly from its March Madness TV contracts.) “Athletes in football and basketball feel unfairly treated,” Leigh Steinberg, a prominent sports agent, says. “The dominant atti- tude among players is that there is no moral or ethical reason not to take money, because the system is ripping them off.” It’s a system that enables misconduct to flourish. The abuse scandals that have swirled around Penn State football and Syracuse basketball. The revelation that a University of Miami booster — now in prison, convicted of running a Ponzi scheme — provided dozens of Miami football players with money, cars and even prostitutes. The Ohio State merchandise scandal that cost the coach, Jim Tres- sel, his job. The financial scandal at the Fiesta Bowl that led to the firing of its chief executive and the indictment of another top executive.

The absurdity of anti-payment laws undermines broader respect for the law and educational institutions

The NCAA’s amateurism rules are ripe for review. It is inequitable that student-athletes, who generate millions of dollars for the university, must scrounge for basic expenses and struggle through their classes. It is hypocritical for the NCAA to restrict payments to student-athletes when its member universities continue to seek new ways of increasing revenues, often at the expense of educational interests.11 The restrictions also are economically inefficient and result in resource misallocations. 12 Most serious, the technical and inflexible restrictions on amateurism have resulted in inevitable rules violations’ 3 which breed disrespect for educational institutions and damage societal values. There can be no mistake-NCAA rules violations are rampant. Fifty-seven percent of the

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106 NCAA division I-A football members were either censured, sanctioned or put on probation at least once during the last decade. 14 Many more schools are guilty of un- detected violations. The infractions range from providing athletic shoes or game tickets that are sold for cash,‘5 to the less subtle academic fraud or envelopes filled with money. 16 Not only are universities’ reputations sullied, 17 but the repeated violations create a climate of disrespect for rules generally. There has been an outbreak of reported criminal activity by student-athletes. 18 Whether this phenomenon represents an increase in crime or in its reporting, or evidences a correlation between flagrant rules violations and disregard for the law, 1 9 the fact remains that athletes are trained to view themselves ken. A recent survey revealed that sixty percent of division I basketball players “had no moral problem with taking money under the table.” 20 Is it any wonder that student-athletes similarly ignore societal rules? […] This Article argues that the NCAA operates as a classic cartel and its amateurism rules constitute antitrust violations. Ath- letes’ compensation should be governed by the free market system. They should be paid according to their fair market value.22 The elimination of the economically inefficient amateurism restraints, particularly if coupled with enhanced educational restrictions, 23 would lessen the inequity and hypocrisy that now exists in college athletics and thereby help restore societal values and respect for the rule of law.

Black students feel like “used goods”

Krystal K. Beamon [professor at the University of Texas-Arlington] “Used Goods”: For- mer African American College Student-Athletes Perception of Exploitation by Division I Universities The Journal of Negro Education, 1977. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25608704?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

Collegiate sports have opened many doors for African American males. However, serious involvement in athletics has hampered the development of the group in several areas such as academic and occupational achievement. It has been alleged that universities exploit athletes, especially African American male athletes in football and basketball This study uses in-depth ethnographic interviews of former Division I student-athletes who are African American in order to examine the extent to which they feel that universities emphasized their education as opposed to their athletic performance and prepared them for careers off the playing field. The former student athletes expressed feelings of being” used goods” and recount difficulties in choosing a major.

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College students (not just the athletes) want athletes to be paid

Raymond G Schneider [Bowling Green State University], “COLLEGE STUDENTS’ PER- CEPTIONS ON THE PAYMENT OF INTERCOLLEGIATE STUDENT-ATHLETES.” College Student Journal. Jun 2001, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/abstract?site=eds&scope=site&jrnl=01463934&AN=5010946&h=jWeDyXnF%2fEQE6zLxTLQnD5285xDZ6H3VSD8SRD05NdLKOwbPUBUsYGT2vsdMXR7f23hGkSh0HTIsFXp%2ffdxfPA%3d%3d&crl=c&resultLocal=ErrCrlNoResults&resultNs=Ehost&crlhashurl=login.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26profile%3dehost%26scope%3dsite%26authtype%3dcrawler%26jrnl%3d01463934%26AN%3d5010946

This investigation used the survey method to analyze college students’ (n = 458) perceptions on additional payments, beyond an athletic scholarship, to intercollegiate student- athletes. Four components of college students’ perceptions were examined: Whether student-athletes should be allowed to receive payment, proponents’ arguments, opponents’ arguments, and the revenue source that should provide the funding if the NCAA were to allow payment. Results revealed: (a) College students’ supported payment to college student-athletes, (b) College students’ perceived illegal payments would decline if payment was allowed, (c) Opponents’ of payment believed an athletic scholarship is adequate payment, and (d) The additional funding should come from the athletic department of the university. These findings suggest that for athletic conferences exhibit- ing high levels of “corporate athleticism” (Hart-Nibbring & Cottingham, 1986) college students’ support paying intercollegiate student-athletes.

4.8 Graduation rates

Paying athletes keeps them in school - it decreases the pressure to go pro

Paying athletes could actually keep them in school. College basketball allows players to declare themselves eligible for the NBA draft after their freshman season, if they so choose. In football you can declare for the NFL three years after graduating from high school, so essentially after your junior season of college. If college athletes were paid for the talents that they possess while in school, they might be more willing to finish their degree, just on the off chance that the sports path doesn’t work out for them. Many players cite financial hardship as the reason that they declare early for the draft, and who can blame them? For most athletes coming from low-income situations, college is just a time that they are a horse on a cart, all the while the carrot of a professional contract is being dangled in front of their face.

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Players will stay longer - they feel pressure to go pro to take care of their families

Malcolm Lemmons. [Malcolm Lemmons is a professional athlete turned entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. After graduating from Niagara University with a degree in business management, he went on to pursue a professional basketball career overseas. Now, he focuses helping athletes build their personal brands and prepare for life after sports. Malcolm has landed media coverage with outlets such as ABC 7 & TVOne. His articles have been featured in the Huffington Post, AthleteNetwork & other publications on topics that include entrepreneurship, career development, personal branding, and personal development. He recently published his first novel, Lessons From the Game, and he can be found at www.malcolmlemmons.com]. “Col- lege Athletes Getting Paid? Here Are Some Pros And Cons,” HuffPost. 3-29-2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/college-athletes-getting-paid-here-are-some- pros-cons_us_58cfcee0e4b07112b6472f9a Players may stay longer ― To back up the last point, players wouldn’t have to leave school early and would still be able to pursue an education while taking care of their family back home. This would possibly increase graduation rates, allow fans to see their favorite players mature through college, and ensure coaches are preparing athletes as much as possible for the next level.

Higher graduation rates and better education—students can use the payments to provide tuition, and payment can be tied to educational outcomes

Lee Goldman [Associate Professor of Law, University of Detroit]. “Sports and Antitrust: Should College Students Be Paid to Play,” Notre Dame Law Review, 1990. http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/tndl65&div=16&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals Besides furthering economic policies and respect for the law, and promoting fairness and ethical values, prohibiting the NCAA’s amateurism restrictions may improve educational interests. As suggested earlier, payments can fund continuing education, create additional incentives to maintain academic eligibility, and be structured to encourage graduation or other desirable academic achievements.

Graduating college has causal relationship on earning — they earn 84% more

Jonathan Rothwell. [Jonathan Rothwell was a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. He now is a Senior Economist at Gallup]. “The Economic

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Value of Education,” Brookings. 11-12-2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the- avenue/2013/11/12/the-economic-value-of-education/

First of all, it is indisputable that workers with more education typically earn significantly higher wages and are far more likely to be employed than workers who have no post-secondary education. For example, the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that workers with only a high school education are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with at least a bachelor’s degree. Among the employed, the median college educated worker earns 84 percent more than the median worker with only a high school education. Even those with just some college and no degree or an associate’s degree earn 16 percent more. College educated workers are also much more likely to be in the labor force. A large body of economic literature shows that these differences are not the result of a special group of very smart people getting educated. An identical twin raised in the same family but with more education earns significantly more than his or her less educated sibling. This and other evidence prove that education has an important causal effect on earnings for all groups of people.

4.9 Entrepreneurship/Financial Literacy

Pro status encourages students to pursue monetization of their careers - teaches them about supply and demand, marketing, and ad deals, key to financial literacy

Michael Wilbon [featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN and appears on the “NBA Sunday Countdown” pregame show on ABC in addition to ESPN. Wilbon joined ESPN.com after three decades with The Washington Post, where he earned a reputation as one of the nation’s most respected sports journalists.] “College athletes deserve to be paid,” ESPN, July 18, 2011. http://www.espn.com/college- sports/story/_/id/6778847/college-athletes-deserve-paid

In the meantime, if they cannot be paid outright, surely the scholarship athletes should be able to engage in entrepreneurial pursuits that currently leads to costly NCAA investigations that have proven to be mostly a waste of time since, one, such activities historically haven’t been checked and, two, the kids who commit the “infractions” aren’t effectively punished. Their revelations, short of Heisman Trophy winners having to return their statues, wind up penalizing only the kids and coaches who remain on the team and in the vast majority of cases have done nothing to merit a penalty themselves.

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If somebody is willing to give A.J. Green $750 or $1,000 or even $2,500 for his Georgia Bulldogs jersey, fine, good. If one of his teammates, a tackle, can fetch only $50 for his jersey, then it’ll be a good marketing lesson for both of them. It’s called supply and demand, and if both men are fortunate enough to reach the NFL it’ll be a lesson worth learning because that dynamic will exist their entire careers. If a soccer player can’t get a dime for his jersey, well, there’s a realization in that, too. The question from the opponents of paying college athletes inevitably comes back, “What would stop a star player from agreeing to shake hands at a local car dealership for $50,000?” The answer is, nothing. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? Who even knows? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal. Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can. If the student as athlete can find a way, he/she should be able to endorse products, to have paid-speaking gigs, to sell memorabilia, as Allen Sack, the author and professor at the college of business at the University of New Haven has suggested in recent years. The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions. Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students – employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.

Paying college athletes encourages financial literacy

Tiffany Patterson [writer for SmartAsset, financial advice group]. “Should College Ath- letes Be Paid?,” 2-3-2017, https://smartasset.com/retirement/should-student-athletes- be-paid

Pro #3: Paying college athletes would help to begin creating a sense of financial awareness. One aspect I find lacking in this topic discussion is the ignoring of the very real fact that a lot of athletes are very financially irresponsible. The ESPN documentary Broke gave an inside view of the financial woes of many professional athletes, noting that around 60% of NBA players are broke within five years of retirement. Many of these players blamed poor investments, trusting unethical financial advisors and lavish spending habits as the reason for their money troubles. If schools were to begin pay-

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ing players, they could also help these students build a foundation of financial literacy. This would allow them to introduce these students to financial investors who had their best interests in mind. Whether or not these college athletes went on to play professionally, they would at least, have some type of financial literacy to carry with them into whatever career they choose. This would (hopefully) set them up a better financial future.

4.10 Sports bad

Paying student athletes will cause schools to cut some sports

Allison Schrager. [Allison Schrager is an economist, writer, and pension geek. She writes about retirement and how to hedge risk in more unconventional situations]. “Paying college athletes won’t solve the big problem with US college sports,” Quartz. 3-21-2016, https://qz.com/625014/paying-college-athletes-wont-solve-the- big-problem-with-us-college-sports/

The rest of the money subsidizes other men’s sports (lacrosse, soccer, fencing) and all women’s sports. Paying student athletes in high-revenue sports would therefore mean eliminating some other sports scholarships or programs. And even if those were cut (probably impossible because of title IX, which ensures no gender discrimination) and coaches were paid more like professors, the money still needs to be split among a university’s average of 118 football players and 16 basketball players. It doesn’t add up to the lavish salaries professional athletes are paid.

Colleges face pressure from students, parents, and alumni to balance their budgets — this results in the cutting of non-revenue sports

Ken Belson [Ken Belson covers the N.F.L. for the New York Times, a job that includes writing about teams, stadiums, medical issues, lawsuits and many other elements of the country’s biggest and most popular league]. “With Revenue Down, Colleges Cut Teams Along With Budgets,” New York Times. 5-3-2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/sports/04colleges.html

After three decades of steady growth in the number of teams and student-athletes, colleges and universities large and small, private and public, east and west, are slashing

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millions of dollars from their sports budgets. Colleges have dismissed athletic staff, reduced hours for pools and practice courts, and increased equipment and facility fees. Some have also cut the size of their travel squads, eliminated trips requiring air travel and done away with housing teams in hotels the night before home games. Institutions facing fat deficits have risked the wrath of students, parents and alumni and cut scholarships and teams. The University of Cincinnati wiped out scholarships for three men’s sports: track, cross-country and swimming. Stanford University told its fencing teams to look for other financing. The University of Massachusetts dropped its ski teams, and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania eliminated its men’s soccer and men’s swimming teams. On Friday, the University of Washington said it would cut its swimming teams to save as much as $1.2 million, less than half of the spending that the athletic department needs to reduce. “We just couldn’t make cuts across the board anymore,” said Blake James, the athletic director at the University of Maine, explaining why his department cut its men’s soccer and women’s volleyball programs. “We were bleeding our programs to death.” Even the wealthiest universities are pinched. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it was cutting eight teams — Alpine skiing, competitive pistol, golf, wrestling and men’s and women’s ice hockey and gymnastics — as a way to trim $1.5 million from its athletic budget.

Injuries are common — Out of 380k students, 12.5k injuries are reported per year

Jim Thomas. [Jim Thomas has been a freelance writer since 1978. He wrote a book about professional golfers and has written magazine articles about sports, politics, legal issues, travel and business for national and Northwest publications. He received a Juris Doctor from Duke Law School and a Bachelor of Science in political science from Whitman College.]. “Frequency of Injury Among College Athletes,” LIVESTRONG. xx-xx-xxxx, https://www.livestrong.com/article/513231-frequency-of-injury-among- college-athletes/

Two entities that compile injury statistics for the roughly 380,000 male and female college athletes. The NCAA and the National Athletic Trainers’ Association have an injury surveillance system that collects injury reports submitted by trainers. It has been in operation since 1988. Through 2004, there were 200,000 injury reports – filed when an athlete misses a day or more of practice or competition – which works out to about 12,500 injuries per year. That number has been relatively consistent over the years. The National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research in North Carolina has kept statistics on

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college sports injuries since 1982. Both organizations aim to reduce the number of injuries in college sports.

Sports have a large and rising injury risk — many are permanent and life threatening b/c the lack of exercise later in life increases the risk of diabetes and heart problems

Dan Childs [ABC News Managing Editor, Medical Unit], “Dangerous Games: College Athletes at Risk of Injury,” ABC News. May 2007. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Exercise/story?id=3206483&page=1

But certain types of injury are still on the rise. And as young athletes train harder, becoming ever more competitive, some worry that the injuries they sustain could have lifelong implications. Are Sports More Dangerous Today? Numbers aside, it is hard to dispute the notion that youth and collegiate sports today are more competitive than ever. “Sports have changed,” said Dr. Edward Wojtys, chief of sports medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the sports kids are playing now are not the sports they were playing 20 years ago.” This added intensity may be leading to young athletes who hit harder, turn faster, and push themselves farther than those of generations past, leading to increases in certain types of injuries. “One of the things that stood out was the fact that injuries of the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, across all sports appeared to be on the rise,” Dick said. “It was the same with concussions.” And this intensity isn’t exclusive to the collegiate level. Wojtys says he only used to see ACL injuries in adults. Today, he says, girls as young as 12 and boys ages 13 and 14 are showing up in his clinic with this type of injury, and he says he’s probably treated more than a dozen such cases so far this year. “I think that 20 years ago, we saw some things that then were rare, but now are quite regular.” Dr. C.T. Moor- man, director of sports medicine at Duke University, says that in college sports, female athletes seem to be markedly prone to debilitating ACL episodes. “Women have been particularly hit with these injuries, especially in field sports and basketball,” Moorman said. “The rate is almost double that seen in men, and in some sports, like basketball, it is almost five times higher.” Moorman says he believes proper training, in some cases, has not kept up with the influx of participants in college sports, which could lead to these injuries. As for concussions, part of the apparent increase could be due to better detection methods for these injuries, compared to 16 years ago, Dick says. But, citing soccer and basketball as two examples, Dick added, “There are a lot of sports that are not traditionally looked at as contact sports where the mechanism of injury is primarily player contact.” A Painful Passion Part of the problem may also be the increasingly

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competitive mentality that has come to typify the pursuits of young athletes. “The competitive level keeps getting higher and higher,” Ingersoll said, adding that year-round training without seasonal breaks could lead to a rise in injuries due to overtraining without sufficient downtime. “I don’t know that these data reflect that phenomenon, and I’m very concerned about that,” he said. “I think we’re going to see some more overtraining injuries.” And injuries can have dire consequences for young athletes. “A lot of people look at this stuff and say, ‘no big deal.’ But that’s not true.” Ingersoll says in the U.S. every year, there are 400,000 ACL injuries. Even with successful treatment, he says, the average time to early onset of osteoarthritis in these patients is seven years. If teenage and college-age athletes are getting these injuries now, he says, this means that they will likely begin to experience osteoarthritis as early as in their 20s. “What are the chances they will be able to exercise and take care of themselves in their 40s, 50s and 60s in order to prevent diabetes, heart disease and other diseases?” he asked. “We’re creating a whole generation of kids who might not be able to do this. We’re starting to see the huge public health issue that this is.”

Athletic programs are bad for schools — bad educational climate, negative culture, trade-off with more meaningful endeavors

Anthony DiMaggio [Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy Af- ter 9/11 (Paperback: 2015)]. “Why Higher Education Should Rid Itself of College Athlet- ics,” counterpunch.org. 4-22-2014, https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/22/why- higher-education-should-rid-itself-of-college-athletics/

College athletics are not essential (and often antithetical) to the primary missions of higher education: promoting critical thought and the developing of occupational skills. The groupthink and diversion from studying and on-campus political engagement that often comes with sports boosterism and sports-related partying (“tailgating”) works at the expense of student achievement within the classroom and regarding social activism. When the college experience is about sports and partying, little time is left for real world social engagement. Furthermore, on the most instrumental level, these sports having nothing to do with the primary reason students attend college: pursuit of an occupational skill-set. Students at University of Illinois may enjoy rooting for the “Illini,” but the dismantlement of college sports will have nothing to do with their pursuit of a degree in medicine or engineering. The largest problem I have with college sports is not

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instrumental, but pedagogical. As a teacher at a major state university in Illinois for years, I had many experiences with student athletes. These experiences were typical, by what I’ve heard from other professors. Student athletes were almost never the highest achieving in my classes. Most did just enough to “get by.” They often registered for the earliest classes possible (8 AM being very common), seldom contributed anything of interest or relevance to class discussions, and received mediocre to poor grades compared to their classmates. The reason why was obvious – as a student on a partial or full scholarship, they felt obligated (usually pressured by coaches and teammates) to put all their time into their “real” occupation – sports. They usually walled themselves off in special sports-related student housing, spent much (if not most of their day) on sports-related activities, and did little to develop critical thought by participating in student groups or by excelling in coursework. In other words, most of them were students in name only. The problems are much worse at more elite schools. In those settings, student athletes often do not even attend class, and benefit from an army of tutors hired to assist them in passing their classes. Professors are often intimidated or pressured into giving them decent enough grades to pass without going on academic probation. I think most directly of my experiences with an immediate family member and former student athlete (on a sports scholarship). He excelled at skipping class, only to plead with professors at semester’s end for a passing grade that he didn’t deserve. As a soccer player, he thought sports was his life, but like the vast majority of college athletes, never made it into professional sports and was forced to enter the job market like other college graduates. Without having developed much by way of professional skills (he majored in “communication” as a default), his occupational prospects were limited. The fixation on sports among so many students is quite sad in light of the likely outcome. Most-all student athletes will never become professionals, but instead will have to fall back on their college degrees to find employment once they graduate. With little time spent on developing critical thinking and occupational skillsets, these students are in a poor position to succeed once they leave higher ed. Consider some of the recent statistics: just 1.7 percent of college football players play professionally (and those that do play only average of a couple years professionally playing time, typically earning league minimum salaries that will require them to find a new career once they wash out). Only 11.6 percent of college baseball athletes enter Major League Baseball; just 1.3 percent of hockey players make it into the NHL; and only 1.2 percent of basketball players enter the NBA. Rather than skating through on partial or full scholarships, many of students would be far better off earning a vocational degree at a low-cost community college, or using that community college as a spring-board into a more affordable four-year de-

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gree, to be paid for with a combination of student loans and (ideally) parental tuition assistance. […] The macho, larger-than-life culture associated with college sports, and celebrity athletes and coaches needs to be demolished in favor of a pedagogical system that values student civic engagement, critical thought, and commitment to academic ex- cellence. College sports often get in the way of these achievements. Professional sports (especially those posting record profits such as the NFL and MLB) should bear the responsibility of recruiting and preparing prospective professional athletes. This can be done through private athletic associations, clubs, and recruiting, rather than at the expense of student tuition or taxpayers. The private gains of these professional sports should no longer be enhanced by public subsidies that will be better spent elsewhere.

The bad culture of athletics discourages students from trying hard in school – even at small division 3 schools

Zócalo Public Square [a magazine of ideas from Arizona State University Knowl- edge Enterprise]. “Why Student Athletes Continue To Fail,” Time. 4-20-2015, http://time.com/3827196/why-student-athletes-fail/

And what about the student athletes themselves? Student-athletes tend to take easier classes and get lower grades than non-athletes. This is not only true for schools from power conferences in big-money sports, it has been observed in Division III liberal arts colleges and Ivy League schools, neither of which even offer athletic scholarships. It’s tempting to believe that student athletes care only about their sport, and not about their schoolwork, as many popular commentators have suggested – and as Ohio State’s Jones once tweeted — except that in the dozen years that I’ve been teaching in university settings, that hasn’t been my experience at all. I’ve taught hundreds of Division 1 student athletes at several different schools, and they have been among the hardest working students I’ve encountered. The student athletes I’ve worked with have viewed their sport as a complement to, not a replacement for, their studies. My observations were hardly unique. One of my students, Josh Levine, ran a youth hockey clinic and was upset by the widespread perception that the students he worked with did not care about school. After several conversations about the issue, we decided that the only way to find out the truth was to run a study. And so we did, surveying 147 student athletes (including some still in high school) involved in various team sports from football and basketball to lacrosse and golf about how much both they and their teammates cared about sports and academics.” Here’s what we found: When student athletes were asked how much they care about athletics, they rated their interest a healthy 8.5 on average, on a scale

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of 1 to 10. But when asked the value they place on academics, the result was higher than 9 on average. If anything, the average student athlete cares more about his studies than his sport. #StudentBeforeAthlete indeed. So why do they underperform in their classes? One possible and intriguing reason suggested by our study is that student athletes don’t think their teammates take academics as seriously as they do. When asked to assess how much their teammates cared about athletics, the athletes were close, guessing 8.8. However, when asked to evaluate how much their teammates cared about academics, those same athletes guessed only 7.8 – far below the 9+ average. Why is this important? Because when an athlete thinks that the rest of the team doesn’t care about academics, that athlete tries to fit in by pretending not to care either. In a perverse form of peer pressure, Cardale Jones’s tweet about classes being worthless may be what student athletes tell each other in an effort to fit in, based on the mistaken belief that if they care about academics, they are in an uncool minority. All of this creates a distressing and self-perpetuating cycle. Tight-knit student athletes will seek ways of fitting into a culture that they perceive as neglecting academics (by defaulting into majors of dubious merit and spending less time doing homework), knowing that their habits are observed by teammates. When their teammates observe those habits, it reaffirms the (false) con- viction that caring about academics is an unfortunate aberration, best suppressed. One of my co-authors on this project, Sara Etchison, has described this process particularly well: “There are student athletes who want to excel in the classroom, but think their teammates would judge them for it, so they study a little less, or take an easier major. And it turns out, that’s how virtually everyone on the team feels, but there’s never an opportunity to realize, ‘Oh wait, all of us really care about what’s happening on the academic side.’ ” This is a phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” – when private preferences differ from perceptions of group norms. It leads people to engage in public behaviors that align more with the perceived norms than with their true preferences. The tragedy is that the norms are false – in reality, everybody would be happier if they just behaved in line with their true preferences.

Sports decrease graduation rates - especially among black students

SHAUN R. HARPER [American scholar and racial equity expert, professor at USC], COLLIN D. WILLIAMS JR., AND HORATIO W. BLACKMAN []. “Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division,” U Penn, 2013. https://www.gse.upenn.edu/equity/sites/gse.upenn.edu.equity/files/publications/Harper_Williams_and_Blackman_%282013%29.pdf

Between 2007 and 2010, Black men were 2.8% of full-time, degree-seeking undergrad-

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uate students, but 57.1% of football teams and 64.3% of basketball teams. Across four cohorts, 50.2% of Black male student-athletes graduated within six years, compared to 66.9% of student athletes overall, 72.8% of undergraduate students overall, and 55.5% of Black undergraduate men overall. U96.1% of these NCAA Division I colleges and universities graduated Black male student-athletes at rates lower than student-athletes overall. U97.4% of institutions graduated Black male student-athletes at rates lower than undergraduate students overall. On no campus were rates exactly comparable for these two comparison groups. UAt one university, Black male student-athletes graduated at a comparable rate to Black undergraduate men overall. On 72.4% of the other campuses, graduation rates for Black male student-athletes were lower than rates for Black undergraduate men overall.

4.11 AT: Costs too much

No it doesn’t – money could be redirected from other areas easily and people wouldn’t backlash

Paying players would cost money, of course, but with billions in TV revenue coming in, it shouldn’t be impossible to find a way to spend some of it on labor instead of on exotic woods for new training facilities. Fans would get over the end of the NCAA’s “amateur” status, just as they have accepted pro basketball, hockey and soccer players competing in the Olympics.

4.12 AT: Turns college into professional sports

Non-unique – it’s already pro sports for the litany of positions making money

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The Root, March 2017.

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Of course, there are arguments against paying college players. Some people say that it turns college athletics into professional sports (even though teams, coaches, sponsors, television networks and everyone else involved with college sports make millions; it is already professional sports). Others argue that the players get a free college education (they don’t; athletic scholarships are one-year, renewable offers, and are only good as long as you can play) and kids are given a chance to play professional sports (less than 2 percent of players ever play professionally). The greatest argument is that college players basically get a degree for free, but every metric shows that it is the white players, not the black players, who end up with degrees.

4.13 AT: Athletes get a free education

No they don’t – scholarships last one year and get cut when you’re injured

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The Root, March 2017.

4.14 AT: Ruins the student experience

Non-unique: college athletics is already a business

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College athletics are no longer concerned with just winning and losing, but are now also concerned with making a profit. College athletics has become very profitable,’ and thus, a business relationship has evolved between colleges and student athletes.2 Both television contracts and ticket sales from college sporting events generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually for universities.3 Many courts now even consider university athletic programs to be products that are marketed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”).4 Besides making millions of dollars for their schools, student athletes are also utilized as a means to increase student enrollment and enhance the school’s national reputation.

Non-unique: sports are already a priority over education and cause students to miss class

Marc Edelman. [Associate Professor of Law at the Zicklin School of Business (City University of New York), where I focus on sports, antitrust, gaming, and intellectual property law. I also teach the only course in the country on fantasy sports law and provide legal consulting in the industry.]. “21 Reasons Why Student- Athletes Are Employees And Should Be Allowed To Unionize,” Forbes. 1-30-2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcedelman/2014/01/30/21-reasons-why-student- athletes-are-employees-and-should-be-allowed-to-unionize/

2.Although the NCAA claims college athletes are just students, the NCAA’s own tournament schedules require college athletes to miss classes for nationally televised games that bring in revenue. 3. Currently, the NCAA Division I football championship is played on a Monday night. This year, the national football championship game required Florida State football players to miss the first day of spring classes. 4. Meanwhile, the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament affects more than six days of classes (truly “Madness” if the players aren’t “employees”). 5. At some schools, the road to the NCAA men’s basketball championship may require student-athletes to miss up to a quarter of all class days during their Spring semester.

Non-unique: A majority of students have jobs on campus

State University, “A Look at the Spending Habits of College Students,” Nov 2013, http://www.stateuniversity.com/blog/permalink/The-Spending-Habits-of-College- Students.html

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The typical college student gets an average of $757 a month from jobs, parents or other sources. Most money comes from work. 75% of students maintain jobs while attending school, earning $645 per month on average. 20% have secured an on-campus job and 42% are spending school breaks working. Parents contribute too, contributing an average of $154 to a students monthly income. A student spends more than $13,000 per year on average, 19% of which is discretionary. That adds up to a substantial $211 per month of discretionary spending.

Payment is not the link to being a “true student” - other students get paid for their extracurriculars (eg: I get paid to cut debate cards)

The question from the opponents of paying college athletes inevitably comes back, “What would stop a star player from agreeing to shake hands at a local car dealership for $50,000?” The answer is, nothing. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? Who even knows? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal. Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can.

Non-unique: student athletes are already not having a ‘normal’ student experience, and money already has a pervasive influence in society

Tylt. [sports / culture blog]. “Should college athletes be paid?,” 2016, https://thetylt.com/sports/ncaa- pay-student-college-athletes

It is intellectually dishonest to say paying student-athletes will somehow ruin the game or their school experience. Student-athletes are already getting an experience vastly different from the average student. The NCAA is actively exploiting the student-athletes

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to generate revenue. Then the organization turns around and says not paying the students is for their own good. It doesn’t make sense. If money is so corrupting, shouldn’t the NCAA give up its profits? “So everything teeters on the athlete? Every responsibility is on the athlete? Nobody ever said, ‘If we start paying these coaches hundreds of millions of dollars the game is going to crumble.’ Nobody says that. Nobody says, ‘If we start putting these things on TV and we start having billion-dollar television contracts the game is going to go to hell.’ Nobody says that. ‘If we start charging hundreds and hundreds of dollars for tickets, nobody is going to come to the games anymore.’ Nobody says that. And, ‘If we start selling jerseys with the player’s number on them, that ain’t right, that’s going to ruin the game.’ Nobody says that.

De-amateurism is inevitable - paid summer leagues

Rick Maese. [WashPo reporter]. “New summer pro football league aims to offer paid alternative to college football,” Washington Post, Jan 11, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/new- summer-pro-football-league-aims-to-offer-paid-alternative-to-college-football/2017/01/10/6b7d33a8- d753-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html

A group of organizers with deep NFL ties plans to launch a new professional football league, with the ambition of giving promising young players an alternative to college football that offers a salary and instruction they feel is lacking in the college game. Pa- cific Pro Football aims to begin play in 2018 with four teams based in Southern Califor- nia. Unlike many other start-up leagues, its talent pool will be limited to athletes who are less than four years removed from high school graduation. The goal is to give young prospects a professional outlet to prepare for the NFL, said Don Yee, the league’s CEO. The league launches in the midst of a growing debate about amateurism and a college model that rewards student-athletes with scholarships but not salaries. Labor lawyers have challenged the NCAA, and the battle is being waged in several court rooms across the country. Yee has been an outspoken critic of the college model and says his league will treat young athletes as employees, like any other pro sports outfit. “As I’ve thought about this and studied it for years, I felt that it would be terrific if these emerging football players had a choice in determining how they wanted to get better at their craft,” said Yee, the longtime agent of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Along with Yee, the league is co-founded by Ed McCaffrey, a former NFL wide receiver, and Jeff Husvar, a former Fox Sports executive. Its advisory board includes former NFL coach Mike Shanahan; Mike Pereira, the league’s former officiating czar; ESPN reporter Adam Schefter; Jim Steeg, a longtime NFL executive; and veteran political strategist

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Steve Schmidt. Organizers hope to eventually expand beyond California. All teams will be owned by the league, and the average player salary will be $50,000, Yee said. The league initially will play a six- to eight-game season that runs through July and August, concluding just before the NFL and college seasons begin. While NFL officials have expressed an interest in forming a developmental league of their own, Pacific Pro Football has no relationship with the NFL. But the upstart league will be focused on preparing them for the NFL, focusing on technique and systems required at the next level. “I think this is a unique experience for these young men,” Shanahan said. “Maybe we’re talking about a guy who for some reason didn’t make grades or maybe he was at a position with competition and rather than transfer to another school and sit out a year, he now has this option. Or maybe a guy just wants to spend more time with football than he’s currently allowed.” Shanahan explained that the new league will serve as a training ground for coaches, officials and executives as well. While college football long has served as the NFL’s de facto feeder system, organizers hope that prospects will gravitate toward an alternative that pays a salary and doesn’t have academic requirements. (Players will be offered tuition and books at a community college, organizers say.) “It’s never been done before, and I’m not sure why not,” said McCaffrey, who played 13 years in the NFL and is now a radio analyst for the Denver Broncos. “There’s so many players now that can be identified at early ages as having a unique skill set that allows them to be successful football players.” Troy Vincent, the NFL’s head of football operations, has been outspoken in recent years about the need for a developmental league to better prepare young players and has initiated discussions about the NFL starting one of its own. “It’s pretty clear, given some of the public comments that we’ve heard recently from professional football coaches and executives, that the new talent coming into the professional football ranks isn’t quite as developed as it needs to be,” Yee said. “It appears the gulf between the professional style of play and the amateur game is wider than it’s ever been.” Other professional football leagues have been short-lived. The much-hyped XFL, backed by pro wrestling titan Vince McMahon, lasted one season (2001). The Stars Football League also made it just a single year (2011), the Fall Experimental Football League two (2014- 15) and the United Football League four (2009-12). While financing has usually been an issue, fans were also indifferent to the product. “When you talk about all these leagues, they were working with players who were cut from the NFL,” Shanahan said. “Who really wants to watch a league filled with guys who’ve been cut?” While the new league hopes to eventually attract the most talented high school graduates possible, officials expect to initially rely heavily on junior college players or those with a year or two of college seasoning under their belt. They know long-term viability hinges on the type

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of athletes it fields. “I think everything is driven by the players, driven by the talent,” said the league’s chief operating officer, Bradley Edwards, a former executive at both the NFL and ESPN. “Who can we get? Who’s going to play in this league? I think that’s going to be the driver of a lot of this.” Rosters could be filled with players who don’t academically qualify for four-year schools, who have played a bit of college ball and want a change, who have competed in junior college, or who want to get a jump-start on preparing for the NFL draft. The collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association prohibits any player from entering the draft who is not at least three years removed from high school graduation. Pacific Pro Football wants to provide an outlet for the players in the interim with a focus on the same rules, systems and style as the NFL. The league will rely on coaches with NFL experience but also will help young coaches and officials hone their craft. The Pacific Pro Football league has completed an initial round of fundraising and is in talks with potential sponsors, as well as venues from Ventura to San Diego counties. Officials say they’ll have some form of broadcast agreement in place, but rather than a traditional television rights deal, organizers say they might utilize a direct-to-consumer approach that might help the league connect with a younger audience. Yee hopes Pacific Pro Football provides an option for athletes who don’t want to wait to earn a paycheck. “It was pretty evident to me that in almost every sport, you could see a trend where athletes were starting to specialize at younger and younger ages and almost all of them had access to an earlier professional path,” he said. “The only outlier, frankly, was American football. So in conceiving this idea, it felt like this was the right time to try this venture and to give a lot of developing talent a different option, if that’s what they would like to do.”

Schools won’t flunk disappointing students—that incentive exists in the squo, and teachers wouldn’t agree to do it

The fear that schools would deliberately fail disappointing student athletes gives too little credit to teachers and administrators. Most act scrupulously. Moreover, the normal litigation possibilities exist to protect against this abuse. 329 In any event, schools now have an incentive to flunk nonproductive players. Athletic scholarships are limited and a student-athlete’s scholarship cannot be revoked for poor performance or injury.330 Thus, flunking the nonproductive student-athlete, or encouraging the student

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to drop athletics voluntarily, can open a scholarship opportunity for a -more promising prospect.33 1 Payments to athletes should not significantly increase the prevalence of this type of abuse. Additionally, it would be absurd to allow schools tojustify their restraints by claiming that without them they would act unscrupulously.

4.15 AT: This is unfair to non-athletes

Other students don’t produce revenue for the college, that’s a fair distinction

Several colleagues have objected that payments to student-athletes cannot be justified if academic superstars are not similarly rewarded. Not only is the treatment inequitable, but it makes a troubling statement about our society’s priorities. There is no inequity in treatment between superstar athletes and academicians. Each is rewarded according to their value in the free market system. Superstar athletes attract huge revenues to the university. Exceptional students, as a rule, do not. It is sad that society seems to value athletes more than academicians. This author would certainly prefer Bo Jackson’s salary to his own. Nevertheless, our capitalist system does not provide rankings of occupations’ intrinsic worth. Many might wish to reward special education teachers or social workers more than Sylvester Stallone or Brian Bosworth. Those judgments, however, are left to the operation of the free market. Student-athletes should not be treated disparately.

4.16 AT: Spillover to high school

High school is different - players allocated by zoning laws, and less revenue potential

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A decisionmaker may fear that finding the NCAA restraints on payments to athletes illegal will similarly require payments to high school students or at least create the same abuses in high schools that now exist in colleges. Finding the NCAA members to be in violation of the antitrust laws would not require a similar finding for high schools. Al- though there is a National Federation of State High School Associations, it is an informal organization that lacks the powers and revenues of the NCAA. 2 81 There is no national agreement prohibiting payments to athletes that is policed by an elaborate investiga- tive and enforcement mechanism. Moreover, at least for public schools, agreement is not necessary. Zoning laws allocate student-athletes; there is no bidding for their services. High schools, as a rule, neither award scholarships nor make “illegal payments.” Public high schools, of course, should also be immune from suit under the state action doctrine.282 The fear that the professionalization of college sports will create abuses in high schools analogous to those now plaguing colleges has some basis in reality. There is already a trend toward the commercialization of high school athletics.283 Neverthe- less, the problems for high schools should not approach those of colleges. The revenue potential of high school sports is much less than that of college sports and there is almost no national, and significantly less local, “recruiting” of studentathletes. Moreover, it is unclear why recruitment of college athletes through price, rather than nonprice, competition should exacerbate the trend toward commercialization in high schools. Profes- sional baseball has recruited athletes directly out of high school, and, despite substantial signing bonuses to baseball stars, high school baseball appears no more commercialized than prep football or basketball. In any event, what problems do develop are properly handled by state legislators or school boards, not the NCAA.

4.17 AT: Non-revenue sports will be cut

Non-revenue sports won’t be cut—schools want to remain D1 and alt funding sources solve

The athletic departments of many universities subsidize “minor” sports such as skiing, volleyball, or golf with the revenues produced by their basketball and football programs. It might be feared that payments to basketball and football players will jeopardize the

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support for the nonrevenue producing sports. Allowing the free market to determine college athletes’ compensation may have only a limited effect on nonrevenue producing sports. Under NCAA rules, a university must offer a designated minimum number of varsity sports to be eligible for division I classification. 2 8 Such classification is necessary to participate in the NCAA division I basketball tournament and the major college bowl games. In short, it will be necessary to maintain the minimum number of varsity sports if the university wishes to continue receiving its substantial revenues from the “major” sports. 28 9 In any event, this objection to operation of the free market merely represents a revenue concern. There is no reason student-athletes should be the ones to provide the subsidies necessary to operate the nonrevenue producing sports. Rather, the revenues should be raised by donations from those who are interested in the sport, alumni contributions, increases in tuition or taxpayer assessments. This does raise, however, the more general objection that payments to athletes will increase costs to the university and its constituency.

There’s enough money to go around—proved by the fact that coaches are so overpaid

Dr. Boyce Watkins, a finance professor at Syracuse University, has been an outspoken critic of the current compensation system, which consists entirely of scholarships. […] Meanwhile, the NCAA defends its practices, arguing that by collecting money from big-ticket games like the men’s basketball finals, they can help fund other lesser-known or lesser-watched sports like women’s volleyball. But Watkins doesn’t buy it.“I think that’s kind of an interesting argument,” Watkins says, “because when you talk about the coaches, no one ever says, when you pay the basketball coach $5 million, you’ve only got $100,000 to pay the volleyball coach. But for some reason when it comes to the athletes, we expect this subsidization model to apply.”

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4.18 AT: Too expensive for colleges

Universities costs won’t go up very much — money that the colleges funnel into nice facilities and top-tier coaches to attract athletes will just be redirected to athletes

There is little question that universities’ costs will be increased if the antitrust laws are enforced. Nevertheless, the amount of increase may not be as large as some would imagine and should not jeopardize the schools’ educational mission. 290 First, many schools, will, as the Ivy League has already done, choose not to bid for student-athletes’ services. They will reorder their priorities or find it impossible to compete with the major university programs. Remember, the antitrust laws do not require payments to athletes. Section 1 only prohibits agreements among competitors affecting price. Sec- ond, for those schools wishing to bid for student-athletes, payments will not approach the salary obligations of professional teams. Revenues from collegiate sport are generally not as great as from professional competitions. Consequently, star players do not have the same value to schools that they have to professional teams. Salaries of student- athletes should also be significantly lower than that of professional athletes because they do not have as much talent as professionals, their salaries must incorporate the greater risk involved in the evaluation of less well-developed abilities, and they have a “useful life” of a maximum of four years. 29’ For many student-athletes, their free market value will not exceed the value of their scholarship. Third, “bidding” schools may be able to fund their wage offers through cost savings from a reduction in nonprice competition expenses. If players are paid, it may not be necessary to incur the same recruitment costs, exorbitant salaries for coaches, or stadium or workout room expenditures that are now used to distinguish schools and attract top athletes. In short, there will be no reason to “cheat” on the cartel agreement through nonprice competition if no agreement restricting price competition exists. In any event, any resulting increase in costs should not harm the schools’ educational mission. At most major universities, “virtually all” funds from the revenue producing sports go to athletic departments rather than academic budgets. 292 Athletic departments should be expected to operate within their budgets in a free market just like every other business.

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No impact: the money they make doesn’t go back into education

7.The NCAA currently produces nearly $11 Billion in annual revenue from college sports – more than the estimated total league revenues of both the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. 8. This year, the University of Alabama reported $143.3 Million in athletic revenues – more than all 30 NHL teams and 25 of the 30 NBA teams. 9. Much of the huge revenues collected from college athletics do not go directly back into the classroom. 10. Instead, a substantial share of college sports’ revenues stay “in the hands of a select few administrators, athletic directors, and coaches.”

4.19 AT: Costs too much

No it doesn’t – money could be redirected from other areas easily and people wouldn’t backlash

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4.20 AT: Turns college into professional sports

Non-unique – it’s already pro sports for the litany of positions making money

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The Root, March 2017.

4.21 AT: Athletes get a free education

No they don’t – scholarships last one year and get cut when you’re injured

Harriot, Michael. [Staff writer at The Root, host of “The Black One” podcast]. “Just a Reminder: The NCAA Is a Plantation, and the Players Are the Sharecroppers”. The Root, March 2017.

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4.22 Generic non-unique to a lot of neg arguments

College athletes are already being paid: the question is just how much they should be paid

Ramogi Huma. [National College Player’s Association president]. “Let’s Compen- sate College Athletes By Making Sure They Graduate,” Business Insider. 4-9-2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/lets-compensate-college-athletes-by-ensuring-that- they-graduate-2012-4

An NCAA study revealed that college athletes spend about 40 hours per week just playing their sport. In return, college athletes receive payment in the form of a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars, a portion of which the IRS taxes as income. Ath- letes who fail to participate in mandatory practices or games have their scholarships terminated. So college athletes are already paid to play. So why all the fuss over this topic? Walter Byers, who served as NCAA President for over 35 years, confessed in his book that the NCAA sought to convince the public that such payments were not actually payments so that its member colleges could avoid paying workers compensation. The NCAA literally invented the word “student-athlete,” referred to payments as scholarships, and hired publicists to promote its propaganda to ensure the ability of its membership to maximize profits. “The NCAA and its colleges have no problem paying players. They’ve done so for almost 60 years.” To have an honest discussion, we first need to realize that the NCAA and its colleges have no problem paying players. They’ve done so for almost 60 years. The real issue is that the NCAA and its colleges don’t want to increase payments to college athletes. The real question is whether or not some or all college athletes should be paid more.

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5.1 Title IX

Title IX requires equal treatment across the athletic spectrum, which means even athletes in programs that don’t generate revenue would be paid.

Cork Gains [Business Insider Sports Editor], “Paying College Athletes Would Cost $200 Million Each Year,” Business Insider, August 20 2011. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/paying-college-athletes-would-cost-200-million- each-year-2011-8

If the NCAA and the participating schools are going to pay the football and men’s basketball players, they are also going to have to pay the women’s volleyball and soccer players, and every other athlete at these institutions. It doesn’t matter that in most athletic programs, it is the football and men’s basketball teams that are the only sports making money and are actually supporting the other teams. TITLE IX says that schools receiving federal aid, must provide equal opportunities to men and women. And income is an opportunity that cannot be bestowed only on some of the men.

Proportionality under Title IX means money cannot be earmarked for specific sports

Kristi Dosh [Founder, Business of College Sports], “How Title IX Relates to Paying Play- ers,” Business of College Sports, June 9 2011. Available at: http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/06/09/how- title-ix-relates-to-paying-players/

What if players are paid in some other fashion outside of their scholarship? In the eyes of Title IX, it’s all really the same. The Office of Civil Rights has previously offered this interpretation with regards to boosters or other donors who donate funds for specified sports: a school cannot use earmarked funds as an economic justification for discrimination. The school can honor the sport-specific designation for such donated funds, but it still must comply with the proportionality requirement. It cannot dedicate those funds

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to say football, throwing the proportionality out of whack, and then say they had to do so because the funds were earmarked. The excess funds that cannot be applied simply have to be put aside for the future.

5.2 Cost

Players in the free market would be extremely expensive

Mark Koba [reporter, CNBC], “What a college athlete is worth on the open market,” CNBC, April 12 2014. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/12/whats-a- college-athlete-worth-in-pay-on-the-open-market.html

With the attempt to unionize football players at Northwestern University, and antitrust lawsuits being fought against the governing board of college athletics—the NCAA— experts say the day when student athletes are classified as workers and get paid may not be far off. But how much money could a player get on the open market? According to one report, it would likely mean salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. “The bidding war for athletes would likely be in the millions,” said Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sports management at Drexel University and co-author of the report. “However, I think it all depends on whether or not a players’ association ends up representing the teams and players,”

Projected fair market values are very high

Staurowsky told CNBC by phone. “The salaries could be effectively bargained to have some sort of minimum guaranteed salary for all.” The March survey, from the National College Players Association and Drexel University, said that the projected fair market value of the average college football player is $178,000 per year from 2011 to 2015, while the projected market value for the average college basketball player for the same time is $375,000.

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5.3 Legal Considerations

The judicial branch retain the sole power to interpret law in the United States

No Author, “The Judicial Branch,” The White House, No Date. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/judicial-branch

Federal courts enjoy the sole power to interpret the law, determine the constitutional- ity of the law, and apply it to individual cases. The courts, like Congress, can compel the production of evidence and testimony through the use of a subpoena. The inferior courts are constrained by the decisions of the Supreme Court — once the Supreme Court interprets a law, inferior courts must apply the Supreme Court’s interpretation to the facts of a particular case.

Courts do not consider amateur sports work

Allen Smith [Manager, Workplace Law Content at Society for Human Resource Man- agement], “Student-Athletes Aren’t Employees,” Society for Human Resource Manage- ment, March 11 2016. Available at: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal- and-compliance/employment-law/pages/student-athletes-aren%E2%80%99t-employees.aspx

They may break a sweat more often than many workers, but student-athletes are not employees for purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana has ruled. Three members of the women’s track team at the University of Pennsylvania sued the National Collegiate Athletic Associa- tion (NCAA), alleging that they are employees of the university and seeking at least minimum wage for the work they perform as student-athletes. But the court rejected their argument on Feb. 16. Randi Kochman, an attorney with Cole Schotz in Hacken- sack, N.J., summed up the court’s ruling: “Tradition of amateurism in college sports— without student thought of compensation—and the fact that thousands of amateur athletes have been around college campuses for years and the DOL [Department of Labor] has not taken any steps to apply the FLSA to them.” “To the contrary,” the court stated, “the DOL has expressly taken the position that ‘as part of their overall educational program, public or private schools and institutions of higher learning may permit or require students to engage in activities in connection with dramatics, student publications, glee clubs, bands, choirs, debating teams, radio stations, intramural and interscholastic athletics and other similar endeavors. Activities of students in such programs, conducted

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Courts denied to even hear the Northwestern case because this is a complex legal matter with different implications for public and private schools.

Unlike the Northwestern University football players who sought employee status under the National Labor Relations Act in a case before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last year, the members of the Penn track team did not have athletic scholarships. The NLRB declined to exercise its jurisdiction in the Northwestern case, and did not decide whether they were employees. “It did this because Northwestern was one of only 17 private schools in NCAA Division 1 FBS [Football Bowl Subdivision] football, and the NLRB does not have jurisdiction over the other 108 state-run football teams,” said Joseph Kroeger, an attorney with Snell & Wilmer in Tucson, Ariz. Neither case “obtained the desired ruling that student-athletes are ‘employees,’ ” Kroeger said. “If either effort had been successful, it would have fundamentally undermined the concept of amateurism in college sports and caused a seismic change in the NCAA student- athlete experience.”

Courts have rule directly against the resolution

Robert Zielinski [Principal Lawyer, Miller Canfield], “Student Athletes Are Not Employees, Seventh Circuit Rules,” Miller Canfield, December 6 2016. Avail- able at: https://www.millercanfield.com/resources-Student-Athletes-Are-Not- Employees.html

Yesterday, the Seventh Circuit released a decision broadly ruling that student-athletes are not employees for purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In Berger v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, two women track and field athletes who ran

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at the University of Pennsylvania sued Penn, the NCAA and 120 other colleges claiming that they were employees entitled to minimum wage for all hours spent in track and field activities. Each received a scholarship, but consistent with Ivy League rules, their scholarships were not dependent on athletic participation. The court ruled that the plaintiffs were not employees of Penn because student-athletes are not employees under the FLSA as a matter of law. Rather than engage in any particularized review of the specifics of the plaintiffs’ participation and financial arrangements, the court re- lied on the NCAA tradition of amateurism and the terms of the Department of Labor (DOL) Field Operations Handbook to broadly conclude that what the athletes did was not “work” within the meaning of the FLSA. Specifically, the court rejected the application of any of the multi-factor tests recently developed regarding intern vs. employee, or longer-standing independent contractor vs. employee tests, and held that the very nature of the relationship precluded employee status. Relying on the DOL Field Opera- tions Handbook, the court ruled that the nature of what the athletes did was not “work” for purposes of the Act because it was an extracurricular activity offered by the school to enhance the educational experience.

Courts have held that there is a possiblity for athlete employment status but not for all athletes

In a concurring opinion, Judge Hamilton sought to preserve the possibility that some student athletes in big revenue sports and/or who received athletic scholarships might properly be considered employees at some future point. He pointed out that the school involved did not provide “athletic scholarships” and that women’s track and field was not a revenue sport. He thus suggested that the economic reality of football or men’s basketball might lead to a different result for those athletes.

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5.4 Benefits of Amateurism

Amateurism is key to college sports culture

Zachary Stauffer [staff reporter, producer, and director of photography at the In- vestigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism], “NCAA President Defends Amateurism in College Sports,” PBS Frontline, June 19 2014. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/ncaa-president-defends- amateurism-in-college-sports/

As he told FRONTLINE three years ago in Money and March Madness, Emmert rejects the idea of paying college athletes, arguing that it goes against one of the NCAA’s core values: that athletes are regular students. “The most fundamental notion is that student- athletes are not paid professionals,” he said today in court. “They are students who are playing for their school. They are not there because they’re being paid.” In his testimony, Emmert explained that part of the rationale for the NCAA’s creation was to prohibit professionals from taking the field for various schools. Amateurism is part of the appeal of college athletics, he maintained, noting that the Louisiana State University Tigers can fill a bigger stadium than the New Orleans Saints.

Amateurism is key to relationships between students and student-athletes

Throughout the trial, now nearing the end of its second week, the NCAA has argued that there are “pro-competitive benefits” for having rules in place that prohibit the compensation of athletes, including high-level football and basketball players who bring revenue to their schools and the NCAA through lucrative television contracts. Paying athletes — whether through a salary for individual performances on the field, or revenues from sales of athletes’ names, images and likenesses — would fundamentally alter the nature of college sport, fan interest, and the ability of athletes and non-athletes to commingle on campus, the NCAA argues.

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Discarding amateurism deprives students of college education

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2014/04/21/Opinion/Ben- Sutton.aspx

What you see is a consensual, symbiotic relationship between schools and student athletes in which everyone benefits. Students who want a salary for their athletic prowess, or who simply do not appreciate or want a college education, should be allowed to take a separate path and play professional sports. College sports were never intended to be a minor league feeder system for professional sports and, based on the fact that less than 1 percent of all student athletes ever play their sport professionally, college sports clearly are not that. The vast majority of student athletes do not wind up on magazine covers. They will, on average, graduate at a higher rate than students who don’t play sports and will go on to a different career often based on their academic field of study. Discarding this amateurism model will trigger a powerful chain reaction, unintended consequences sure to affect schools’ Olympic and non-revenue-producing sports and roll back Title IX gains, depriving thousands of young people a college education. (Rev- enue from college sports is our country’s single greatest source of college scholarships next to the federal government).

Discarding amateurism leads to a slippery slope

Ben Sutton [President, IMG College], “A case for amateurism in college sports,” Sports Business Daily, April 21 2014. Available at: http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2014/04/21/Opinion/Ben- Sutton.aspx

If the amateur model is blown up, other vexing questions come into play, including the virtual impossibility of determining who gets paid what. Is it by performance? Posi- tion? Recruit versus walk-on? How does women’s field hockey compare to football? And where does it stop? Do we start paying kids playing in the televised Little League World Series? What about increased exposure for high school sports? The fact is, the vast majority of NCAA Division I football and basketball programs operate in the red, subsidized by funds from outside athletics. It would be a travesty to see non-revenue programs, which support the dreams and ambitions of thousands of student athletes, denied funding and shut down.s

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Killing Amateurism would undermine traditions, fanhood

Sara Ganim [Staff reporter, CNN], “Paying college athletes would hurt traditions, NCAA chief Emmert testifies,” CNN, June 19 2014. Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/19/us/ncaa- obannon-lawsuit-trial/index.html

Emmert said he believes the customs that most college sports fans hold most dear – the camaraderie of game day, the tailgating, the atmosphere of a stadium packed with nearly 100,000 fans and the pride of cheering for a university team – are at stake. “Tra- ditions and keeping them are very important to universities,” Emmert said. “These individuals are not professionals. They are representing their universities as part of a university community.”People come to watch … because it’s college sports, with college athletes,” he said. Those beloved traditions go hand in hand with the model of amateurism, and if amateurism goes away, so will the games as we know them now, he said. Many schools lose money on Division I athletics but keep them for the “social cohesion” and the boost to their profiles, Emmert said.

5.5 Competitive Balance/Intercollegiate Inequities

Star players would be prohibitively expensive

The March survey, from the National College Players Association and Drexel Univer- sity, said that the projected fair market value of the average college football player is $178,000 per year from 2011 to 2015, while the projected market value for the average college basketball player for the same time is $375,000. The report also said that football players with the top 10 highest estimated fair market values, like Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, might be worth as much as $547,000, during the year 2011 to 2012. Basketball players with the top 10 highest estimated fair market values, such as Kansas Jayhawk forward Andrew Wiggins, for instance, might be worth more than $1.6 million for the same year. The report states that the fair market value was calculated using the revenue sharing percentages defined in the NFL and NBA collective bargaining agreements and team revenues as reported by each school to the federal government. The

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NCPA is headed by Romagi Huma, who is leading the effort to unionize the Northwest- ern football players.

Profitable programs would chase awards. This introduces antitrust issues.

Cork Gains [editor, Business Insider Sports Page], “Why The NCAA Can’t Allow Pay Athletes Even If It Wants To,” Business Insider, October 15 2010. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-ncaa-cant-allow-schools-to-pay-athletes- even-if-they-want-to-2010-10

Of the nearly 250 Division I-A and Division I-AA football programs (I loathe the FBS and FCS designations) how many actually have athletic programs that generate large revenue streams? Most of the schools in the BCS conferences? Possibly. Does North- western make a ton of money off their football team? Maybe. What about schools from non-BCS conferences? What about Akron or Florida Atlantic or Arkansas State? Are those teams going to be able to pay their players? And if they can’t pay their players, how many good players can they recruit? Sure, the big BCS schools are already getting all of the top high school football players. But schools like Boise State thrive off the next wave of talent. That group of players that will choose Boise State over USC because they have a better chance of getting playing time or because of the scholarship limits instituted by the NCAA for competitive balance. What you will get is a situation where the NCAA would be sanctioning yet another competitive advantage for the big schools and it would mark the end of upstart programs like Boise State. And really, who wants to live in a world where Notre Dame can once again hog all the top players and compete for national titles every year? But more importantly, with so much money on the line with the BCS and the bowl games, no court system is ever going to allow a system in which a few select schools have access to the big prizes. Major League Baseball has an anti-trust exemption. Congress is never going to give one to the NCAA.

5.6 Tuition Increases

Tuition pays for athletics

Will Hobson and Stephen Rich [reporters, Washington Post], “Why students foot the bill for college sports, and how some are fighting back,” Washington Post, November

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30 2015. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot- the-bill-for-college-sports-and-how-some-are-fighting-back/2015/11/30/7ca47476- 8d3e-11e5-ae1f-af46b7df8483_story.html?utm_term=.70baf88f2885

In 2014, students at 32 schools paid a combined $125.5 million in athletic fees, according to a Washington Post examination of financial records at 52 public universities in the “Power Five,” the five wealthiest conferences in college sports. To rich athletic departments, these fees represent guaranteed revenue streams that, unlike ticket sales or booster donations, are unaffected by on-field success. To less flush departments, increasing student fees is one way to keep up. Athletic directors defend fees as well worth what their programs give back to schools. “Athletics is a common good, bringing people together, developing relationships, unifying the institution, bringing fantastic exposure,” said Virginia Athletic Director Craig Littlepage, whose department charges undergraduates $657 annually. To advocates fighting to keep college affordable, however, athletic departments that continue to charge mandatory student fees as their income rises are making America’s student debt problem worse.

Athletes pay could come out of student fees

Matt Krupnick [contributing writer, Time Magazine], “Would Your Tuition Bills Go Up If College Athletes Got Paid?,” Time Magazine, November 29 2014. Available at: http://time.com/money/3605591/college-athletes-sports-costs-students/

Wins by college athletes in courtrooms and boardrooms could end up in losses for their non-athlete classmates. High-profile legal cases and NCAA policy changes are likely to boost the cost of fielding big-time athletics programs. And students—even those who never attend a single college basketball or football game—may have to foot the bill, higher-education finance experts say. How the Game Is Changing The most sweeping changes to college sports could come from an antitrust suit against the NCAA pending in New Jersey, in which attorney Jeffrey Kessler contends that college athletes should be paid as much as the market dictates—a salary, essentially. A win for Kessler, who filed the suit on behalf of former Clemson football player Martin Jenkins, likely would spark bidding wars among universities for top recruits by eliminating limits on such payments. The case is likely to go to trial next fall. “I do believe that if the Kessler case wins, that could break the bank for the NCAA as we know it today,” says William Kir- wan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system and co-chairman of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. “This would become like a mini NFL draft.

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It would become a free market.” Other factors also promise to change the rules of the game. A federal judge in August ruled in favor of former college athletes, led by UCLA star basketball player Ed O’Bannon, in an antitrust suit against the NCAA that could lead to back payments for as many as 100,000 former athletes and additional scholarship money for future ones. The ruling came less than five months after the National Labor Relations Board concluded Northwestern University football players were, essentially, university employees, and could unionize. Some schools have already hinted they would pay athletes thousands of dollars more per year after NCAA officials— independent of any lawsuits—said they might allow universities to cover athletes’ entire cost of attendance. Who Will Foot a Bigger Bill? Only a handful of NCAA Division I schools have self-sustaining athletics programs—just 20 of the nearly 130 schools in the top-flight Football Bowl Subdivision, for example—so most universities subsidize those departments, even in a pre-Kessler, pre-O’Bannon world. At public institutions in particular, part of that subsidy is drawn from student fees.

Paying athletes could mean higher student fees

According to the Knight Commission, growth in athletics funding at Division I schools outpaced academic spending from 2005 to 2012. Students at some schools pay $1,000 in athletics fees alone. Changes to how student-athletes are paid could lead some schools, stuck with nowhere else to turn, to raise other students’ fees. Universities and colleges could also scale back their athletics programs to cut costs. That “would be the rational approach,” Kirwan said. “But when it comes to college athletics, rationality doesn’t often prevail,” he said. “There are so many societal pressures.”

When polled, students are unwilling to pay for college athletics

Research shows that some students don’t even know their fees are already paying for athletics. At Ohio University, for instance, 41% of revenue from the general fee of $531

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per quarter for full-time students in 2010 went to intercollegiate athletics, but 54% of students didn’t know it, according to a survey by the nonprofit Center for College Af- fordability and Productivity, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Dividing the $765 per year they paid for athletics through the fee by the number of games the average Ohio Univer- sity student attended, the center calculated that students were paying the equivalent of more than $130 per athletic event they actually watched in person. Eighty-one percent said they opposed raising the amount of their fees that went to the athletics program, or wanted it reduced.

Tuition pays a portion of college athletics

Phillip Yeagle [former Interim Chancellor and Dean at Rutgers University], “The High Cost of College Athletics and Your Tuition,” Huffington Post, June 4 2015. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-philip-l-yeagle/may-you-get-what-you-pay- _b_7503068.html

The next question is how do most athletics departments fill the gap between revenues and expenses? Students pay the athletics budget directly through special student fees (separate from tuition). Students also pay indirectly through higher tuition. Why? Some form of transfer must occur at most of these institutions from tuition revenues to athletics departments to fund those deficits in the athletics departments. Those particular tuition revenues cannot then be used to hire teachers or support student services or fix classrooms. Or other revenues are used that might otherwise support student services and educational expenses, and thus students end up paying indirectly again. In either case, students support part of the costs of the athletics department budget through their tuition and fees. The greater the deficits of those athletics departments, the higher the tuition and fees must rise.

5.7 Tuition Rising Impact

Tuition rising means more debt

Mezza, Alvaro, Daniel R. Ringo, Shane M. Sherlund, and Kamila Sommer (2016). “On the Effect of Student Loans on Access to Homeownership,” Finance and Economics Dis- cussion Series 2016-010. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Sys- tem, http://dx.doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2016.010.

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As mentioned in Section 3, we construct the instrument as the log of yearly in-state tuition at public 4-year universities, weighted by the number of days each academic year the subject spent attending school. We additionally control for the log of the number of days spent attending school, so the identifying variation comes entirely from the change in price. First stage results from regressing log student debt on the instrument and other controls are presented in Table 4. Across specifications, a one percent increase in the tuition measure is associated with an approximately 1.3 percent increase in student loan debt. The estimates are strongly statistically significant

Student debt affects the macroeconomy

Allesandra Lanza [contributor, USNews], “Study: Student Loan Borrowers Delaying Other Life Decisions,” US News and World Report, January 20 2016. Available at: https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-ranger/articles/2016-01- 20/study-student-loan-borrowers-delaying-other-life-decisions

So what does all this tell us about the state of student debt in the U.S. today, and what can we do about it? First, while higher education is still a great investment, we should recognize that there are downsides if a more highly educated generation becomes a more indebted one. The impact of student debt goes far beyond whether individual borrowers can keep up with their student loan payments; there are ramifications for borrowers’ short-term personal finance decisions and long-term financial security – which in turn broadly affects our consumer-based economy. Second, just as student debt affects us all, solving the student debt challenge will require input from all walks of life. The study puts forth a number of solutions, from colleges doing more to control costs and providing better financial education during and after school, to state governments investing more in higher education, to the federal government lowering student loan interest rates, and to employers stepping up to help employees pay down their education debt.

Student debt prevents people from being able to access daily necessities

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Student loan debt is having a profound impact on the daily lives and spending habits of young Americans, regardless of the type of institution they attended or the level of credential they earned, according to the latest “Life Delayed” report from American Stu- dent Assistance, the organization that writes the Student Loan Ranger blog. According to the survey, 62 percent of respondents said their student debt posed a hardship on their personal budget when combined with all other household spending. Specifically, 35 percent said they found it difficult to buy daily necessities because of their student loans; 52 percent said their debt affected their ability to make larger purchases such as a car; and 55 percent indicated that student loan debt affected their decision or ability to purchase a home.

Tuition rising means less access

John Schoen [CNBC Economics Reporter], “Why does a college degree cost so much?,” CNBC, June 16 2015. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college- costs-are-so-high-and-rising.html

Faced with rising costs—and widespread debate about the economic returns of a college degree—the pace of education borrowing peaked in 2010 and has been falling since. Part of the reason is a tapering off of enrollments in many parts of the country. But the widening gap between the cost of higher education and the growth of household income is also putting a damper on the college aspirations of millions of American families. Between 2000 and 2013, the average level of tuition and fees at a four-year public college rose by 87 percent (in 2014 dollars); during that same period, the median income for the middle fifth of American households advanced just 24 percent. That’s a trend that education researchers warn just isn’t sustainable. “It’s hard to see it continuing that much longer because you’re getting to a point where it’s getting too difficult for families to afford college,” said Kelchen. “Students can access loans. But for how long are they willing to take on more and more debt?”

Access to higher education is already embarassing

No Author, “College Affordability and Completion: Ensuring a Pathway to Opportu- nity,” Department of Education, No Date. Available at: https://www.ed.gov/college

Too many recent college graduates feel the weight of their student loan payments holding them back from fulfilling their full potential. And far too many prospective college

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students feel as though they are simply priced out of the education they need to set themselves up for future success. There is a significant opportunity gap as well. While half of Americans from high-income families hold a bachelor’s degree by age 25, just 1 in 10 people from low-income families attain that level of education. Moreover, regardless of income status, high-school graduates who enroll in college too often fail to finish: barely half will complete their degree in a reasonable time at four-year institutions; and at two-year schools it’s only about a third.

Access to higher education for low income families, quantified in 2002 (well before tuition became astronomically expensive)

Albert Crenshaw [reporter, Washington Post], “Colleges Out of Reach for Low-Income Students,” Washington Post, June 30 2002. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2002/06/30/colleges- out-of-reach-for-low-income-students/f6c62974-ec43-4330-8067-07c590ec5faa/?utm_term=.e0ec2ae1aa20

While the middle class struggles with college costs, an increasing number of lower- income parents are defeated by them, a congressionally appointed panel has found. Children from families that are primarily immigrants and minorities will be shut out of college by a combination of rising tuition and stagnant aid programs, the panel found. About 170,000 college-qualified high school graduates won’t be able to afford even a two-year college this year, according to the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. About 4.4 million qualified students will be unable to attend a four-year college in the next 10 years, the panel said.

83% of Americans say they cannot afford college

No Author, “83% of Americans Say They Can’t Afford College: Edward Jones Poll,” ThinkAdvisor, May 13 2015. Available at: http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2015/05/13/83- of-americans-say-they-cant-afford-college-edwar?slreturn=1510538386

College costs continue to rise, and an Edward Jones survey finds that 83% of Ameri- cans say they cannot afford the expense of a college education. It’s the fourth year that Edward Jones has surveyed Americans about college savings. And this year’s poll also finds that just 34% can identify 529 plans, down from 37% in 2012, but up from 30% in 2014. The survey results, released early Wednesday, show that only 17% of Americans overall believe they can cover the expense of college for themselves or a family member.

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Male respondents are nearly twice as likely to indicate “yes” than their female counterparts, 21% vs. 11%. Among those with higher incomes, $100,000 a year or more per household, only 37% say they can afford the cost.

5.8 Academic Cuts

Akron cut millions from academics and hired a talented football coach. Schools are not scare to cut academics to make room for athletics

Cathaleen Chen [Staff writer, CSMonitor], “Are college athletic programs responsible for tuition hikes?,” Christian Science Monitor, October 13 2015. Available at: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/1013/Are-college-athletic- programs-responsible-for-tuition-hikes

The top schools do have profitable sports programs, Ms. Baden Kelly says, but after the top 20 or 30, people forget about the thousands of schools with football teams that aren’t making money. Especially compared to the dismal work climate for adjunct professors, the money poured into sports can seem egregious. In an opinion piece for the Huffington Post, Brave New Foundation filmmaker Robert Greenwald explains that in order to fund expensive athletic programs, schools must rebudget elsewhere. “At many universities, this means cutting faculty and entire degree programs,” Greenwald writes. “University of Akron recently cut 215 jobs and $40 million dollars from their budget. But their tuition did not go down. Instead, they signed Terry Bowden, head coach of their football program, to a $2 million dollar contract.”

Schools already have a propensity to prioritize sports over education

No Author, “Division I schools spend more on athletes than education,” USA Today, January 15 2013. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2013/01/15/division- i-colleges-spend-more-on-athletes-than-education/1837721/

Public universities competing in NCAA Division I sports spend as much as six times more per athlete than they spend to educate students, and likely for the first time per- athlete spending at schools in each of the six highest-profile football conferences topped $100,000 in 2010, an analysis of federal and school data finds. Between 2005 and 2010, spending by athletic departments rose more than twice as fast as academic spending

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on a per-student basis. Median per-athlete spending by 97 public institutions that compete in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision increased the most: 51%, to $92,000, between 2005 and 2010, while median spending on education increased 23%, to just under $14,000 per full-time student. Meanwhile, tuition at four-year public universities increased an average of 38% and state and local funding rose just 2%, research shows.

States have slashed university budgets. Schools are in no position to significantly increase athletic funding

Michael Mitchell [Senior Policy Analyst Program Director, State Policy Fellowship Program CBPP], Michael Leachman [Director of State Fiscal Research, CBPP], Kath- leen Masterson [Research Associate, CBPP], “A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding,” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, August 23 2017. Available at: https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-decade-in-higher- education-funding#_ftn1

As states have slashed higher education funding, the price of attending public colleges has risen significantly faster than what families can afford. For the average student, increases in federal student aid and the availability of tax credits have not kept up, jeop- ardizing the ability of many to afford the college education that is key to their long-term financial success. With many states facing revenue shortfalls in the current or upcoming fiscal year, state lawmakers must renew their commitment to high-quality, affordable public higher education by increasing the revenue these schools receive.[2] By doing so, they can help build a stronger middle class and develop the entrepreneurs and skilled workers needed for a strong state economy. After adjusting for inflation:[3] Of the 49 states (all except Wisconsin)[4] analyzed over the full 2008-2017 period, 44 spent less per student in the 2017 school year than in 2008.[5] The only states spending more than in 2008 were Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. States cut funding deeply after the recession hit. The average state spent $1,448, or 16 percent, less per student in 2017 than in 2008.

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5.9 Scholarship Cuts

Payment trades off with scholarships

Allison Schrager [reporter, Quartz], “Paying college athletes won’t solve the big problem with US college sports,” Quartz, March 21 2016. Available at: https://qz.com/625014/paying- college-athletes-wont-solve-the-big-problem-with-us-college-sports/

The largest share of the budget goes to paying employees—mostly the coaches for the high-revenue sports. The median coaching salary budget is $4.5 million for football (there are normally several coaches) and $1.8 million for basketball. The rest of the money subsidizes other men’s sports (lacrosse, soccer, fencing) and all women’s sports. Paying student athletes in high-revenue sports would therefore mean eliminating some other sports scholarships or programs. And even if those were cut (probably impossible because of title IX, which ensures no gender discrimination) and coaches were paid more like professors, the money still needs to be split among a university’s average of 118 football players and 16 basketball players. It doesn’t add up to the lavish salaries professional athletes are paid.

NCAA has said payment trades off with scholarships even in revenue-generating sports

Jon Solomon [reporter, CBS Sports], “NCAA, conferences: Scholarships would be cut if players are paid,” CBS Sports, May 1 2015. Available at: https://www.cbssports.com/college- football/news/ncaa-conferences-scholarships-would-be-cut-if-players-are-paid/

The NCAA and 11 major conferences say that if college athletes are allowed to be paid, the development would “likely lead many – if not most – Division I institutions” to reduce the number of scholarships for less-renowned football and men’s and women’s basketball players. That’s one of several arguments the NCAA and the conferences made in court documents filed late Thursday night opposing a pair of scholarship lawsuits from becoming class actions. The consolidated Shawne Alston and Martin Jenkins lawsuits are challenging the NCAA’s cap on compensation at the value of a scholarship. The Jenkins case, led by prominent sports labor attorney Jeffrey Kessler, essentially seeks a free market for football and men’s basketball players.

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Scholarships prevent students from graduating with debt

Larry Scott [PAC-12 Commissioner], “Pac-12 commissioner: Why we won’t pay or unionize college athletes,” USA Today, Spetember 29 2017. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2017/09/29/pac-12-pay-college- athletes-mistake/704866001/

While many students work throughout college to scrape up living expenses and still accrue significant debt, students who play sports on scholarship graduate debt-free, giving them a huge head start on life. Many students now receive stipends for living expenses based on their “full cost of attendance.” Today’s students on scholarship don’t pay for tuition, fees, room, board, books, transportation or many other personal expenses. Special funds from the NCAA help those with needs to afford transportation to funerals, or for winter coats or even eye glasses.

Scholarships are better than payment

College athletes get scholarships, which means they are, at least in theory, paid in education. That’s far more valuable than whatever salary they might earn as a minor-league professional. Starting minor-league baseball players earn a maximum $1,100 a month for a five-month season, while a college degree increases your earnings by more than $1 million, on average, over your lifetime.

Scholarships provide those who miss out on the Pros with a backup plan

The student-athlete model also avoids a potentially bad market outcome. Many Ameri- can college football and basketball players aspire to a multi-million-dollar professional career. But fewer than 2% will go pro. Paying student athletes in education means hopeful 17-year-olds have a built-in back-up plan; if they don’t attain fame and fortune, they still have a sensible degree and a path to another career. Finally, student athletics gives

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scholarships to people who might not otherwise have the money or the grades to go to college.

5.10 Program Cutting

Program Cutting Explained

Sara Ganim [reporter CNN], “Paying college athletes would hurt traditions, NCAA chief Emmert testifies,” CNN, June 19 2014. Available at: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/19/us/ncaa- obannon-lawsuit-trial/index.html

If college athletes were to start being paid, many schools would leave Division I sports, NCAA President Mark Emmert said Thursday. And the universities that stayed in Divi- sion I sports would have to start cutting other, less popular sports to be able to afford the salaries. There would be less competition and no more national championship games — at least not in their current form, Emmert said.

In general, college athletics are not money makers

Brian Burnsed [Associate Editor at Sports Illustrated], “Athletics departments that make more than they spend still a minority,” NCAA, September 18 2015. Available at: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments- make-more-they-spend-still-minority

The expenses generated by operating athletics programs continued to exceed the revenue they produce at the vast majority of Football Bowl Subdivision schools in 2014, continuing a trend seen in recent years, according to a new NCAA Study. Only 24 FBS schools generated more revenue than they spent in 2014, according to the NCAA Rev- enues and Expenses of Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Report. That figure jumped from 20 schools in 2013, but it has remained relatively consistent through the past decade. Though the number of athletics departments reporting positive net generated revenues has increased slightly, the average of their net generated revenue has dipped in the past year. Those 24 schools, at the median, generated about $6 million in net revenue, compared to just over $8 million in 2013 and a little more than $2 million a decade ago. But those 24 schools are a minority. Many more schools saw their expenses exceed their revenue, requiring their colleges and universities to cover the shortfall.

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Universities heavily subsidize athletic departments in the status quo

The median FBS school spent $14.7 million to help subsidize its athletics department in 2014, up from a little more than $11 million in 2013. That level of spending isn’t unique to FBS schools – median Football Championship Subdivision and non-football schools spent roughly $11 million to help fund athletics in 2014. “There is still a misperception that most schools are generating more money than they spend on college athletics,” said NCAA Chief Financial Officer Kathleen McNeely. “These data show once again that the truth is just the opposite.”The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the NCAA across all three divisions subsidize part or all of athletics. The reason they invest is because sports provide educational value to student-athletes while enhancing overall campus life and building life-long connections with alumni and other supporters. Those are all important outcomes from athletic programs that are worth celebrating, sharing and investing in wisely.”

Colleges react to costs by cutting programs, Title IX reaction proves

Katie Thomas [reporter, New York Times], “Colleges Cut Men’s Programs to Satisfy Ti- tle IX,” New York Times, May 1 2011. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/sports/02gender.html

Universities can comply with Title IX in one of three ways: by showing that the number of female athletes is proportionate to the share of overall female enrollment, by demon- strating a continuing history of expanding sports for women, or by proving that the athletic interests and abilities of the female student body are being met. Rather than spend money on expanding sports for women, many universities have instead cut men’s teams in order to comply with the proportionality method. The practice is frowned upon by the Office for Civil Rights, but it is not prohibited.

Delaware cut programs to comply with Title IX because of costs

Katie Thomas [reporter, New York Times], “Colleges Cut Men’s Programs to Satisfy Ti- tle IX,” New York Times, May 1 2011. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/sports/02gender.html

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Tom Rogers, a former captain of the Delaware track team who graduated in 1989, said universities like Delaware were distorting the intent of Title IX. “How did we ever get to a place where a program that is supposed to be about creating opportunities for women is now being used in a way to create no opportunities for women and to cut men?” he said. Delaware officials declined to comment. But in a January statement announcing the decision, they said they had no alternative. “Continued expansion of our athletics program is not feasible in this financial climate, and given that reality, the university made the only decision it could,” Bernard Muir, Delaware’s athletic director, said in the statement. Kasic said many colleges used the proportionality method to comply with Title IX because it was seen as a permanent fix; the other two methods require continuing efforts to expand sports for women or to monitor interest on campus. By adding women’s golf, the university may be in compliance now, but “it’s still a short- term solution,” she said.

Schools would leave Division I due to costs

Emmert said officials at several member schools have told him that if athletes were to start getting paid beyond the cost of attendance, institutions would ditch Division I sports and opt for Division II or III, in which coach’s salaries, stadiums, hype and scholarships are much smaller.

Whole sports would go extinct

Paying students a salary to play sports or allowing them to join a union would fundamentally change college sports as we know it. It would push many sports that don’t generate revenue toward extinction. Paying students who compete in the few programs that do generate money, such as football and basketball, would have dire consequences for the majority of the sports that don’t generate revenue. Such a drastic departure from

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what has been the core principle of college athletics would potentially take away opportunities for thousands of students who play other sports, from tennis and lacrosse to track and soccer. It would also fundamentally change higher education and the core purpose of college athletics, which is to give more than 175,000 young men and women who play sports in Division I a chance to earn college degrees while launching them toward successful lives and careers.

5.11 Impact to Program Cutting

College athletics significantly benefits athletes

Students can go to college because of athletics. Cuts mean fewer bright futures.

Earl Scott Jr [Master’s Candidate, Wake Forest University], “IMPROVING OPPORTU- NITIES FOR TODAY’S STUDENT-ATHLETES WITHIN THE NCAA,” Masters Thesis for Wake Forest University, May 2015. Available at: https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/57114/ScottJr_wfu_0248M_10693.pdf

Student athletes receiving a free education, state-of- the-art training facilities and per- mitted entry to cafeterias around campus, gives people the impression that athletes have no financial struggles. However, a majority of athletes on campus who are unable to make money from working legitimate jobs come from backgrounds where their families are unable to afford college. A large portion of today’s Division I college football and basketball players would not be able to attend college without their full scholarship. This makes them unlike most of their peers, whose families can afford to pay their full tuition each year.

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College sports teach leadership

In addition, women business executives disproportionately were college athletes. Ac- cording to a study by the EY Women Athletes Business Network and espnW, more than half of all C-suite women executives played college sports. More work must be done to ensure generations of future men and women have the same opportunity to earn degrees and learn the lessons athletics can teach. While our love of the game and loyalty to our institutions make all of us fans of college sports, we must remember it is more than a game. College sports is about making dreams come true for thousands of young men and women, including many who are the first in their family to attend college. Those are the wins we should be cheering about this season.

5.12 Short-changing

Paying student athletes means that Universities can treat them as employees instead of very special students.

Placing a higher value on education and guaranteeing student athletes an extra year over the four-year norm for a US college course means they can focus on getting a good degree if a pro career doesn’t materialize. Paying student athletes would make them into employees. That undermines the very concept of student athletics and also gives universities permission to short-change the players. It’s better to fully embrace the concept of student athlete, and hold universities accountable for the education they promised to provide.

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The NCAA could argue that scholarships are compensation under the FLSA

Brown, M. Tyler. “College Athletics Internships: The Case for Academic Credit in College Athletics.” American University Law Review 63, no.6 (2014): 1855-1899. http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1934&context=aulr

Despite NCAA policies proscribing financial compensation for athletic participation, many athletes nevertheless receive scholarships or so-called grants-in-aid.234 This being a form of compensation,235 the question then is whether the compensation complies with the minimum requirements of the FLSA.

These scholarships still leave students living under the poverty line. This significantly restricts AFF’s impacts. It is true that these are problems in the status quo, but if the NCAA moves to a compensation-based model (where scholarships are provided to everyone), it could have external harms with minimal benefits

Brown, M. Tyler. “College Athletics Internships: The Case for Academic Credit in Col- lege Athletics.” American University Law Review 63, no.6 (2014): 1855-1899. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1934&context=aulr

Although the cost of attending both of the aforementioned institutions is greater than the compensation due to athletes at the respective universities, other reasons dictate that these athletes should be entitled to some form of compensation. First, Division III athletes cannot receive scholarships for athletic participation, and only 2% of all college athletes receive a college athletics scholarship;250 therefore, the vast majority of college athletes are completely denied their compensation rights under the FLSA.251 Second, many athletes, especially those generating the most revenue for their college or university, gain little or no educational benefit from their “free” education.252 Thus, the value of the education actually received is less than the value of the education measured by cost of attendance. Third, scholarships do not fully support college athletes because many scholarship athletes live below the poverty line.253

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5.13 Distraction

Paying students for their athletic work discourages them from focusing on their studies and puts perverse financial pressures on them

Universities’ mission is to educate young men and women so they can be successful. But when it comes to students who play sports, powerful critics and trial lawyers view them as potential hires. If universities paid student-athletes for athletic performance, education would risk becoming a second priority to these teenagers with large paychecks. As salaried employees, they would be subject to market-based financial pressures and could even be fired or have their salaries cut for poor sports performance. Is this what we want the student-athlete experience to be? We believe in reform and have made great strides in modernizing college athletics, but paying students or unionizing them would be a serious mistake.

Student-athletes should not consider sports their number 1 priority since almost none will go pro

Craig Thompson and Tom Burnett [contributors Denver Post], “College athletes are students, not employees,” Denver Post, September 8 2017. Available at: http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/08/college-athletes-are-students-not- employees/

The truth is less than 2 percent of students who will play college football this fall will be drafted into the NFL. Even fewer will ever play a single down. The numbers are similar in college basketball. Put another way, about 98 percent of the college students who play football or basketball will go pro in something other than sports. That is why the vast majority of student-athletes we see are serious about academics and sports. They know college athletics is preparing them for successful lives and careers because of the experiences they enjoy and the education they receive.

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5.14 Own your name

UCF Kicker was ruled ineligable for competition because he made money off of his Youtube channel

Dan Gartland [staff writer, Sports Illustrated], “UCF Kicker Ruled Ineligible After YouTube Channel Gets Him in Trouble with NCAA,” Sports Illustrated, July 31 2017. Available at: https://www.si.com/college-football/2017/07/31/ucf-kicker-donald- de-la-haye-ineligible-ncaa-youtube-videos

UCF kicker Donald De La Haye has been ruled ineligible after he refused to give in to the NCAA’s demand for him to stop monetizing his popular YouTube channel. De La Haye, a junior kickoff specialist, has a YouTube channel with over 90,000 subscribers that has amassed nearly five million total views. The NCAA took issue with the fact that the videos bring in advertising revenue and said he was no longer allowed to make money off his athletics-related videos if he wanted to continue playing college football. UCF lobbied the NCAA to allow De La Haye to continue to profit off his channel provided he did not collect any revenue from videos related to athletics. The NCAA approved those conditions but De La Haye declined to move his sports-related videos to a non- monetized account and the school suspended him to avoid a conflict with the NCAA.

Student-Athlete Statements prevent students from being able to use their likeness to generate revenue during college. This is an issue the AFF does not solve

Jeremy Bernfield [former staff, WBUR], “Who Can Profit Off A College Athlete’s Image? Not The Athlete,” WBUR, May 24 2014. Available at: http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2014/05/24/image- ncaa-athlete-profit

In order to be eligible for NCAA competition, athletes have to sign what’s called the Student-Athlete Statement. Within that document, there’s a section that grants permission for the NCAA, member schools, conferences and “a third party acting on behalf of the NCAA” to use an athlete’s name or image for promotions. It also says that the athletes themselves can’t profit from their own name or image. By signing the Student- Athlete Statement, college athletes agree to a series of NCAA rules, according to Robert Givens, a law student who recently wrote an article about what he calls the “economic exploitation of student athletes” by the NCAA in the UMKC Law Review. Athletes effectively transfer the right to profit off their own image to the NCAA. “Essentially, for

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as long as you want to play for this school at the Division 1 level, you cannot make any money for anything that is directly tied to your athletic achievements,” Givens said. “And any other scenario that involves using your face, your reputation, your athletic achievements in exchange to gain something of value to yourself. All of these possibilities go away with your signing this agreement.” The NCAA wouldn’t comment on why these rules exist, but many collegiate athletes find themselves stuck against them.

NCAA takes the Student-Athlete Statements very seriously

Because of restrictions on promotions and endorsements, the NCAA ended the college football career of Olympic skier Jeremy Bloom. Highly touted baseball recruit Aaron Adair wasn’t allowed to play in college because he used his name and image to promote an inspirational book he authored about surviving cancer. Jenny Pinkston, a heptathlete on the track team at Wichita State University in Kansas, thought that she might be able to earn some walking around money by modeling for an athletic wear company. Like many college athletes, after practicing for four hours a day, working with athletic trainers, attending a full load of classes and studying, she has little time for a job. But after consulting with her coach, she was told she had to choose between modeling and competition. “It’s very frustrating when another door opens because of your hard work and then you can’t do anything about it,” Pinkston said. “You just have to close it because of certain rules that are in place.” She would lose her scholarship and her eligibility if she took a modeling job, despite the fact that she receives just $7,000 in scholarship money per year. And it’s highly unlikely that anyone would recognize a fairly anonymous track athlete and connect her to an NCAA track program.

Strict requirements on outside earning create an underbelly economy, especially in basketball, and the athlete hardly profits. Employee status gets us further from solving this problem

Brian Rosenburg [contributor, New York Times], “How the N.C.A.A. Cheats Student Athletes,” New York Times, October 3 2017. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/opinion/how- the-ncaa-cheats-student-athletes.html?_r=0

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The N.C.A.A. is embroiled in scandal yet again. Last week, federal prosecutors charged several coaches, an agent and a sports apparel executive with, essentially, illegally profiting off branding opportunities for basketball players. That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. This scandal isn’t truly about corrupt coaches and shoe salesmen. It’s about the lengths to which the N.C.A.A. goes to control every dollar and branding opportunity associated with college athletics. An illegal economy has operated behind high-level college athletics for a long time. Its root cause is that universities with powerhouse sports teams like U.C.L.A., Ohio State and Texas receive nearly $20 million a year from brands like Adidas or Nike, while the athletes wearing the Adidas or Nike apparel are expected to compete purely for the love of the game. College basketball players are worth a lot of money, but they aren’t legally allowed to make it. So the schools, coaches, agents and shoe companies make the money instead — all in the name of “amateurism.” It’s clearly time to revise the rules of the N.C.A.A. in favor of the students. But as simply paying the players seems to be a non-starter, let’s begin by reforming the association’s bylaw that prevents college athletes from promoting any personal creative endeavor if they even mention that they participate in a sport.

NCAA will go to great lengths to ensure that students do not profit off their name

Most people not associated with the N.C.A.A. would consider this an impressive di- versification of skills and interests. But N.C.A.A. bylaw 12.5.1.3, otherwise denoted as “Modeling and Other Nonathletically Related Promotional Activities,” specifies that, in promoting the book, no reference can be made to the individual’s “involvement in intercollegiate athletics.” What does this mean in practice? It means that the author’s book biography cannot state that he participates in a college-level sport. It means that, in publicizing the book to students or alumni, the college cannot mention that the author is a student athlete. It even means that the student cannot mention the book on his Face- book page because his Facebook profile shows photos of him engaging in the unspeci- fied sport. Presumably this rule was written to prevent a college athlete, whether from a Division I sports juggernaut or a Division III college like Macalester, from making piles of money after revealing he is an intercollegiate athlete. The N.C.A.A. wants to prevent some Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback or some one-and-done power forward at the University of Kentucky from writing a book or modeling a sweater in order to profit

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from his collegiate athletic celebrity. Of course, the reasonable response to this concern is: What’s wrong with a person profiting from his own accomplishments and celebrity? Isn’t that more or less the way it’s supposed to work? But the N.C.A.A., not content with the billions in TV and merchandising revenue it already takes in, is determined to leave no spare change under the couch cushions. Lest you think I exaggerate, look up the case of the two athletes at the University of Iowa who started a T-shirt screening business and were threatened with ineligibility by the N.C.A.A. because their website mentioned that they met because they were both — brace yourself — swimmers. Or the more recent case of a cross-country runner at Texas A&M who was threatened with ineligibility for posting a YouTube video about a water bottle company he started.

Court challenges against NCAA have prevented schools from using student-athlete likeness. This shows the courts are at least willing to consider arguments on this issue.

Dan Wolken and Steve Berkowitz [reporters USA Today], “NCAA removes name- likeness release from student-athlete forms,” USA Today, July 18 2014. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2014/07/18/ncaa-name-and- likeness-release-student-athlete-statement-form/12840997/

With a federal judge deliberating about how to rule in a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA concerning the use of college athletes’ names and likenesses, the association has eliminated a much-debated name-and-likeness release from the set of forms Divi- sion I athletes sign annually, USA TODAY Sports has learned. Athletes who signed the release had granted permission for the NCAA or an associated third party, such as a school or conference, to use his or her name or picture to promote NCAA championships or other events without being compensated. The NCAA’s removal of that component from what is known as the Student-Athlete Statement, which includes a series of other releases on disclosure of personal information and eligibility, is yet another indication that the NCAA is trying to distance itself from legal entanglements that have arisen as a result of growing questions about who owns college athletes’ names and likenesses.

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5.15 Internship Model

Schools could classify students as unpaid interns

Providing academic credit to college athletes simply for academic participation would violate NCAA policies against providing special benefits to athletes based on athlete status.263 Section 16.02.3 of the NCAA Division I Manual requires any benefit provided to studentathletes by their academic institution also be “generally available to the institution’s students.”264 Thus, providing a class solely available to athletes, such as Kansas State’s Varsity Football class, would presumptively violate NCAA rules.265 However, one simple way to resolve this issue would be to create an internship seminar class, in which all students of the general student body participating in internships must enroll. The internship seminar would be taught by regular university professors, not coaches,266 and it would teach valuable topics generally applicable to all types of work, such as building a network, maintaining basic personal finances, and managing workplace relationships.267 In this sense, the class would function as a practical work- skills course sponsored by the school, and students would receive academic credit for enrolling in the class, not for the internship itself.268 This type of classroom setting would render all internships extensions of the students’ academic programs, thereby qualifying those students for the DOL unpaid internship exception.269

Schools could provide academic credit to student-athletes

Providing academic credit in connection with college athletics participation would effectively change the model of college athletics, thereby causing the DOL intern exception to apply to college athletes. “[W]here certain work activities are performed by students that are but an extension of their academic programs,” no employment relationship generally exists under the FLSA.255 An internship providing a student with academic credit likely qualifies for the DOL internship exception and thus creates no employment

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relationship and no compensation requirement under the FLSA.256 The DOL Wage and Hour Division stated in an opinion letter that [i]n situations where students receive college credits applicable toward graduation when they . . . perform internships under a college program, and the program involves the students in real life situations and provides the students with educational experiences unobtainable in a classroom setting, we do not believe that an employment relationship exists between the students and the facility providing the instruction.257

Benefit: Academic credit model increases the probability of graduation while making the athletics environment more about lesson teaching

Providing academic credit through internship seminars would ensure the applicabil- ity of the DOL internship exception to college athletes.282 First, the training would more closely resemble an educational environment283 because college athletes would be learning work-related skills in the classroom that they could apply in their athletic internship.284 Second, college athletes would receive a greater benefit from the train- ing285 because it would further their progress toward degree completion. The DOL Wage and Hour opinion letters stress that awarding academic credit in connection with an internship, especially when the internship is schoolsponsored, generally does not lead to an employment relationship.286 Finally, although some argue that awarding academic credit in relation to college athletics would degrade the academic standards of the educational institution,287 if administered properly to ensure reasonable academic standards, internship seminars would actually promote the student-athlete model that the NCAA so unwaveringly touts.288 It would actually further college athletes’ graduation progress, making them more likely to graduate.289

5.16 Reform

Improve student life instead of paying players

Craig Thompson and Tom Burnett [contributors Denver Post], “College athletes are students, not employees,” Denver Post, September 8 2017. Available

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at: http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/08/college-athletes-are-students-not- employees/

While we oppose paying students and allowing them to form unions because of the ir- reparable damage it would do to college sports, we believe in reform. The real story of reform is not the kind of story that goes viral. But these reforms are having a real impact on the day-to-day lives of thousands of college athletes. Our students receive more benefits than ever before. On top of scholarships that fund tuition, room and board, they now receive stipends for living expenses based on the full “cost of attendance.” Many enjoy unlimited meals and can get help if they need it with everything from winter coats and eye exams to transportation to and from home in case of family emergencies. Starting this fall, athletes will have more time off from their sports to study, work internships or rest. They can practice and compete knowing their scholarships will never be taken away if they are injured or are not performing to the level they had hoped. All of those positive changes are a result of reform over the past three years. In the debate over intercollegiate athletics, we should never lose sight of the value of a college degree. College graduates will earn up to $800,000 more over their careers than those who only have high school diplomas. Think of the impact that can have on first-generation college students and their families.

5.17 AT: Student Athletes Deserve to be Paid for What They Do

Student athletes are paid in education.

Herrara, Max. [Staff Writer for the Aragon Outlook]. “Student-athletes are students, not professionals,” The Aragon Outlook. April 24, 2014.

NCAA athletes are paid in education. It may be the simple, unoriginal answer, but it proves true. As a graduating senior attending college next fall, I am fully aware of the cost of education. I am paying to attend college when athletes want to be paid for going to college? For most athletes, the opportunity to play on a scholarship can save up to $250,000 in tuition costs. The money saved is money earned. “I am being paid in that I am on scholarship. I’m getting paid in that I don’t have to pay as much for my college education,” says Stanford University rower Simone Jacobs, who graduated from Aragon in 2012. Athletes are being compensated in the sense that they do not have to spend thousands of dollars in tuition as a regular student does.

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A college degree is very valuable.

Rose, Stephen. [Research Professor at the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce]. “The Value of a College Degree,” Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. 2013.

Most people want to obtain a baccalaureate degree because of the added earnings associated with the degree. A commonly cited figure is that they earn $1 million more than those with just a high school diploma during their careers (Carnevale and Rose, 2011). This premium is based on two factors: 1) Those with bachelor’s degrees are more likely to be in high-paying managerial and professional jobs, and 2) within in each occupation, those with four-year degrees earn more than those without them.

US Census data shows that earning a college degree typically means 66% higher earnings than the average high school graduate.

“Lifetime Earnings by Education Level,” College Board. 2010.

Lifetime Earnings by Education Level: The typical bachelor’s degree recipient can expect to earn about 66% more during a 40-year working life than the typical high school graduate earns over the same period. Notes & Sources Note: Based on the sum of median 2008 earnings for full-time year-round workers at each age from 25 to 64 for each education level. No allowance is made for the shorter work life resulting from time spent in college or out of the labor force for other reasons. Future earnings are dis- counted at a 3% annual rate to account for the reality that, because of forgone interest, dollars received in the future are not worth as much as those received today. This represents real interest, as all earnings are in 2008 dollars. Discounting does not have a large impact on the lifetime earnings ratios. Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2009; calculations by the authors. Key Points The calculations in Figure 1.2 are based on earnings of individuals working full-time year-round. Because the proportion of adults working full-time year-round increases with education level (for example, 67% of college graduates and 55% of high school graduates between the ages of 45 and 54 worked full-time in 2008), the lifetime earnings differentials would be larger if all adults — or all adult workers — were included in these calculations. As Figure 1.1 reports, higher earnings correspond to higher tax payments. If after-tax earnings were used in this calculation, the ratio of lifetime earnings for individuals with more than a high school diploma to lifetime earnings for high school graduates would decline slightly.

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Student athletes are compensated in non-monetary ways as well.

Hadaway, Leigh. [Writer; from Berry College]. “Why College Athletes Should Not Be Paid,” Odyssey. May 24, 2016.

On top of these thousands of dollars’ athletes receive for their education, student athletes are compensated in other ways. The Wall Street Journal mentions that athletes are treated like campus royalty, and are given priorities above other students. Furthermore, athletes take advantage of the most elite coaching, medical care, trainers, equipment, and attire. Travel and expenses are paid for, and the experiences student-athletes gain are priceless. Athletes also learn valuable skills such as leadership, time management, and team work which are all beneficial in the work place. The intrinsic value of being a student-athlete compensates for the lack of traditional salary. So even if it were feasible and fair to pay college athletes, it’s not necessary, because athletes are being paid in other ways.

Student athletes learn important skills that help them be successful beyond the playing field or court.

Scott, Larry. [Guest reporter for USA Today]. “Pac-12 commissioner: Why we won’t pay or unionize college athletes,” USA Today. September 19, 2017.

A national survey conducted by Gallup shows students who play sports thrive after college compared to their non-athlete peers. College athletes graduate at higher levels. They are more likely to get a job. They are healthier, happier and more fulfilled. In addition, women business executives disproportionately were college athletes. According to a study by the EY Women Athletes Business Network and espnW, more than half of all C-suite women executives played college sports. More work must be done to ensure generations of future men and women have the same opportunity to earn degrees and learn the lessons athletics can teach. While our love of the game and loyalty to our institutions make all of us fans of college sports, we must remember it is more than a game. College sports is about making dreams come true for thousands of young men and women, including many who are the first in their family to attend college. Those are the wins we should be cheering about this season.

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If student athletes want to be paid, they can join a money-paying league. Instead, they choose to play for a college and get an education.

Herrara, Max. [Staff Writer for the Aragon Outlook]. “Student-athletes are students, not professionals,” The Aragon Outlook. April 24, 2014. Moreover, if a player feels that he or she should be compensated for their work, they can join a money-paying league. Every sport offers an opportunity to make money without going to college. Baseball has the minor leagues, basketball has the development league, and even football has the arena league. A player cannot argue that they should be paid in college when they had the option to go make money by playing sports after graduating high school. The fact that almost all top high school athletes choose to go to college first proves that an education is worth something to them.

Student athletes are students, first and foremost, because their voluntary participation in sports is part of their overall education program.

Smith, Allen. [Society for Human Resource Management Manager and Workplace Law Content writer. J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law]. “Student- Athletes Aren’t Employees,” Society for Human Resource Management. March 11, 2016. They may break a sweat more often than many workers, but student-athletes are not employees for purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana has ruled. Three members of the women’s track team at the University of Pennsylvania sued the National Collegiate Athletic Associa- tion (NCAA), alleging that they are employees of the university and seeking at least minimum wage for the work they perform as student-athletes. But the court rejected their argument on Feb. 16. Randi Kochman, an attorney with Cole Schotz in Hacken- sack, N.J., summed up the court’s ruling: “Tradition of amateurism in college sports— without student thought of compensation—and the fact that thousands of amateur athletes have been around college campuses for years and the DOL [Department of Labor] has not taken any steps to apply the FLSA to them.” “To the contrary,” the court stated, “the DOL has expressly taken the position that ‘as part of their overall educational program, public or private schools and institutions of higher learning may permit or require students to engage in activities in connection with dramatics, student publications, glee clubs, bands, choirs, debating teams, radio stations, intramural and interscholastic athletics and other similar endeavors. Activities of students in such programs, conducted

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primarily for the benefit of the participants as part of the educational opportunities provided to the students by the school or institution, are not ‘work’ under the FLSA and do not result in an employee-employer relationship between the student and the school or institution.”’ The determination of whether someone is an “employee” for FLSA purposes involves the flexible application of a broad standard, according to Gary Lieber, an attorney with FordHarrison in Washington, D.C. But student-athletes voluntarily participate in sports deemed to be for their own benefit. Northwestern Football Case: Unlike the Northwestern University football players who sought employee status under the National Labor Relations Act in a case before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last year, the members of the Penn track team did not have athletic scholarships. The NLRB declined to exercise its jurisdiction in the Northwestern case, and did not decide whether they were employees.

Treating student athletes as employees would only increase the focus on sports and decrease the time spent on education.

Harker, Patrick. [President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; previously served as the President of University of Delaware and dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania]. “Student Athletes Shouldn’t Unionize,” The New York Times. April 1, 2014.

Without question, some big schools have lost their way. On some campuses the pursuit of athletic dominance has eroded the ideal of the student athlete. Players at these schools have every right to complain, particularly when the demands of competition effectively prevent them from being students. But the answer is not to organize and essentially turn pro. This would only further lessen the priority on learning. If scholarship athletes already find it hard to balance schoolwork with team commitments, under arrangements that obligate educational opportunity, think how much harder it would be if they were being paid to play.

5.18 AT: Student Athletes are Exploited for Money

Most collegiate teams are not revenue-generating for schools.

Fulks, Daniel L. [Ph.D., CPA, Accounting Program Director from Transylvania Univer- sity]. “Revenues & Expenses: NCAA Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Re-

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port,” National Collegiate Athletic Association. 2010.

The median net generated revenues for those surplus programs was $3,867,000 in 2008 and $4,360,000 in 2009, while the median net deficit for the remaining programs was $9,870,000 in 2008 and $11,267,000 in 2009. The gap between the financially successful programs and others continues to broaden but not at a rapid pace. (3.5) • Between 50 and 60 percent of football and men’s basketball programs have reported net generated revenues (surpluses) for each of the five years reported. This percentage has been relatively stable. (3.6) • Ticket sales and contributions from alumni and others continue to carry the load for revenues. The former account for approximately 30 percent of generated revenues and 24 percent of total revenue, while the latter account for approximately 25 percent of generated and 20 percent total. Together, these two line items account for over one half of generated revenues. (3.14)

Student athletes on full scholarship earn more than those in professional development leagues.

Thelin, John. [Professor of higher education and public policy at the University of Ken- tucky]. “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Pay College Athletes,” TIME Magazine. March 1, 2016.

In following all the “pay for play” contests, the skilled players will be dueling accoun- tants and agents. There’s crucial a human dimension to the “numbers game.” Star high school athletes are talented. Coaches and sports journalists reinforce this perception. But players and their families often overestimate a player’s market worth. They fail to recognize how many equally talented players are competing for a salary. Many All- State players may be surprised that college coaches are not willing to pay them $100,000 or even $50,000. High school and college players understandably use the National Football League and the National Basketball Association salaries as the gold standard. Multimillion-dollar contracts make professional sports part of the American Dream. But since the NFL and NBA are the pinnacle, it’s good to add the full range of professional sports leagues when a college player plans his financial future. Former college stars on professional indoor football squads make about $225 per game—with a $25 bonus if the team wins. Outside the NBA, players in the professional developmental league—one step from making a NBA squad—make about $43,000 per year. The college scholarship model may not be so bad for student-athletes after all.

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Most student athletes have a positive assessment of their times as student athletes; they do not feel exploited.

Potuto, Josephine R., and James O’Hanlon. [Potuto is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the Nebraska College of Law; O’Hanlon is a Professor at the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln]. “National study of student- athletes regarding their experiences as college students (1).” College Student Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4. December 2007, p. 947+.

There is a received wisdom that the student experiences of student-athletes are deficient and that student-athletes are, and are treated as, athletes first and students second. We surveyed student-athletes at 18 Division IA (major football programs) schools to learn from them what they experience as students and how they assess those experiences. Student-athlete responses showed a generally positive picture of college life. While they regret that their participation in varsity athletics means that they miss out on some aspects of college life, both curricular and co-curricular, they value their athletics participation and believe that it both instills values independent of those derived from other aspects of college life and enhances particular skills and their overall college experience. They also report that the trade-offs they make in order to compete are acceptable, or more than acceptable. This generally positive assessment also held true for different cohorts of student-athletes–male/female; African-American/white; athletically more successful/athletically less successful; team sports/individual sports, revenue/non revenue sports. Based on these findings, it appears that those who believe that Division IA student-athletes are receiving an inferior overall college education experience need to re-assess their conclusions, or at least to consider how the student-athletes themselves evaluate that experience.

A recent Gallup poll shows student athletes are more likely to do well after they graduate than non-student athletes.

Mulhere, Kaitlin. [TIME Money Magazine Journalist]. Student Athletes More Likely to Thrive After College Than Non-Athletes, Survey Says,” TIME Money. February 17, 2016.

Former student athletes are more likely to be engaged at work, involved in their community, and driven to meet goals, according to a survey released today. And even though collegiate athletes have considerable time demands due to training and competitions,

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they also were more likely than non-athletes to report participating in a club or joining a Greek organization, the survey found. The survey polled 1,670 former NCAA athletes ranging in age from 22 to 71 and compared their responses with more than 22,000 non-athletes. Sixty percent of student athlete participants were male and nearly half competed in Division I athletics, the most competitive division. The National Collegiate Athletic Association partnered with Gallup to track the long-term effects of participating in intercollegiate athletics and, for the first time, compare those outcomes to other students, says Todd Petr, managing director of research at the NCAA. Former student athletes are more likely to be engaged at work, involved in their community, and driven to meet goals, according to a survey released today. And even though collegiate athletes have considerable time demands due to training and competitions, they also were more likely than non-athletes to report participating in a club or joining a Greek organization, the survey found. The survey polled 1,670 former NCAA athletes ranging in age from 22 to 71 and compared their responses with more than 22,000 non-athletes. Sixty percent of student athlete participants were male and nearly half competed in Division I athletics, the most competitive division. The National Collegiate Athletic Association partnered with Gallup to track the long-term effects of participating in intercollegiate athletics and, for the first time, compare those outcomes to other students, says Todd Petr, managing director of research at the NCAA.

Athletic programs’ real source of revenue are the brand value of their sports programs, not individual athletes.

Kraft, Nicole. [Assistant Professor at the School of Communication at Ohio State Uni- versity]. “Should College Athletes be Paid?,” Sports and Society Initiative. August 24, 2017.

Big money and the value of college athletes. The most common argument is that universities reap millions of dollars in revenue on the backs of unpaid and overworked athletes. Coaches are paid millions of dollars and are often the highest paid employees at many universities with big-time sports programs. A common analysis is to calcu- late the “fair market value” of college football players. Business Insider did an analysis calculating the value of each player by allocating 47% of annual football revenue over the 85 scholarship athletes. The University of Texas had the highest value $671,000, at OSU that value was $462,000 and the NCAA Division I-A (FBS) average was $164,000. The implication, although not often stated in these types of analyses, is that these universities are able to attract ticket buyers and ancillary revenue because of the notoriety

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and brand value of the athletes. Were it not for Ezekiel Elliott, no one would show up for the games on Saturday. This analysis is flawed- wrongfully attributing the brand value to the athletes rather than the University sports programs. This argument was addressed in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which rightfully points out that the brand value is Ohio State football and not the individual players (not to negate how exciting a player Ezekiel Elliott was). If Ezekiel Elliott was injured early in the season, would 100,000+ people still show up for the games on Saturday. The answer is of course-yes. A perfect example of this was the spring game last April which was held the day after the panel discussion. OSU had sent a record number of athletes to the NFL following the prior season and, in fact, returned only a small handful of starters. So, in a practice game in which most of the participants were not at all well known, over 100,000 people still attended. Certainly they came in anticipation of seeing the next Ezekiel El- liott, but undeniably the brand value accrues to the OSU football program built up over 100 years and not any particular athlete.

5.19 AT: Students Would Receive Employee Benefits

Student athletes do not qualify as employees or interns when the totality of their circumstances are considered.

Strickland, Vernon and Santeusanio, David. [Vernon Strickland and David Santeusanio are members of Holland & Knight’s Education Team, as well as its Collegiate Athletics Team, which advises clients on these and other matters related to collegiate athletic programs]. “Court Rules That Student-Athletes Are Not Employees Under the FLSA,” Holland and Knight LLP. March 1, 2016.

The putative class action was brought by three individuals who are or were members of the women’s track and field team at Penn. They did not receive, and were not eligible for, athletic scholarships because Penn and Ivy League schools do not offer athletic scholarships. The student-athletes argued that they were employees under the FLSA and therefore were entitled to at least the federal minimum wage for all hours spent performing as a student-athlete. The student-athletes argued that the 2010 U.S. De- partment of Labor’s “Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under the Fair Labor Stan- dards Act” (Intern Fact Sheet) – setting forth a test and criteria to determine whether interns are employees – should be applied to determine whether student-athletes are employees. The court analyzed the Intern Fact Sheet, the U.S. Supreme Court opinion

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in Walling v. Portland Terminal Co., 330 U.S. 148 (1947), and more recent opinions from appellate courts. The court concluded that: 1) the Intern Fact Sheet is not intended to apply to student-athletes, 2) the courts have determined that the Intern Fact Sheet, though perhaps persuasive in some instances, did not apply to all interns in all situations, and 3) there is no test that applies equally to interns and student-athletes. The court reasoned that the test for determining who is an employee requires a more flexible approach than the approach announced by the Intern Fact Sheet. The correct approach, the court concluded, considers the totality of the circumstances. And the proper inquiry in making such a determination for student-athletes must consider the true nature of the relationship between student-athletes and the university. Examining the nature of that relationship, the court noted important facts of: the country’s “revered tradition of amateurism in college sports,” as recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in NCAA v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Oklahoma (1984) – a tradition that the court noted was an “essential part” of the economic reality between student-athletes and Penn the generations of students who have vied to be a part of the athletics tradition with no thought of any compensation the Department of Labor has never taken any action to apply the FLSA to student-athletes, though there are thousands of such unpaid athletes on college campuses each year the Department of Labor has expressly taken the position that a student’s participation in interscholastic athletics, even though he or she may receive minimal payment for participation in such activities, does not create an employment relationship What the Ruling Means In the midst of student-athlete litigation, the Berger decision is an important win for the NCAA and colleges, which have consistently argued that student-athletes should not be compensated. The decision is particularly helpful to the NCAA and colleges because the court expressly recognized the principle of amateurism in college sports, which has been a key litigation argument in defending student-athlete claims for compensation and other employee rights.

If student athletes were paid as employees, they would have to pay taxes.

Thelin, John. [Professor of higher education and public policy at the University of Ken- tucky]. “Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Pay College Athletes,” TIME Magazine. March 1, 2016.

That’s the old model. In the new era, a coach could offer a recruit a salary instead of a scholarship. Does a $100,000 salary give the student-athlete a better deal than the $65,000 scholarship? The $100,000 salary is impressive. A future Heisman Trophy winner might command more, but $100,000 is not bad for an 18-year-old high school recruit.

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But since it’s a salary, not a scholarship, it is subject to federal and state income taxes. Tu- ition and college expenses would not be deductible because the income level surpasses the IRS eligibility limit. So, a student-athlete paid a salary would owe $23,800 in federal income tax and $6,700 in state taxes, a total of $30,500. In cities that levy an employee payroll tax, the salaried student’s taxes go up about $2,400 per year. Income taxes then are $32,900. And, as an employee, the player would have to pay at least $2,000 in other taxes, such as Social Security, for a total of $34,900. This leaves the college player with $65,100. Since college bills come to $65,000, the player has $100 left.

Tort liabilities for universities would also expand significantly, possibly forcing schools to reduce their liability by discontinuing their dangerous sports, or even all athletics.

Litchfield. “Putting the “Student” Back in “Student Athlete”,” Kent Law School. 2014.

Classifying student athletes as employees will significantly expand tort liability for universities: Currently, universities have escaped liability for many of their student athletes’ missteps. Because student athletes are not employees of the university, the universities are not liable under the theory of respondeat superior. Kavanagh v. Trustees of Boston University, 795 N.E.2d 1170 (Mass.2003) supports this proposition. A Boston University player punched Kavanagh, an opposing basketball player, in the face and broke his nose during a game. Kavanagh sued on the theory that the Boston student athlete, a senior on scholarship, was an agent of the university. The Supreme Judi- cial Court of Massachusetts firmly rejected Kavanagh’s logic. The student is a buyer of education rather than an agent…. [A] student retains the benefit of that education for himself rather than for the university.” Hanson v. Kynast, 24 Ohio St.3d 171, 174, 494 N.E.2d 1091 (1986) (member of university lacrosse team not “agent” of university). While schools may benefit in various ways from the presence of a particular student, or may benefit in the future from a former student’s later success, the student does not attend school to do the school’s bidding. Kavanagh has cited no authority for the proposition that the relationship between school and student is that of principal and agent, master and servant, or employer and employee.81 The court stated that scholarships do not change the situation; while a scholarship is a form of payment, it is not a wage. 82 The court cites numerous cases across many jurisdictions that support the conclusion that the relationship between universities and students is primarily academic, and not economic, in nature. Up to this point, universities have been immune from judgments that other employers would typically have to pay. Kavanagh and Rensing are both

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premised on the fact that NCAA student athletes do not receive wages and therefore are not employees. For this reason only, workers compensation and tort claims have not held up in court. Should the schools begin to pay their student athletes, however, this relationship will change; the universities’ primary defense to these claims will disappear. This change will bring catastrophic results to universities which will result in significantly higher litigation and settlement expenses and possibly the elimination of collegiate athletics altogether. Cases with factual scenarios similar to Kavanagh, Rens- ing, and Waldrep will be re-litigated and possibly decided differently Future workers compensation and tort cases will weigh in favor of the students and against the university. What was once a frivolous lawsuit because students were not employees will become a valid cause of action. Universities can no longer file a motion to dismiss the case early on based on Kavanagh. This will significantly increase the legal costs of universities in addition to increasing their liability exposure. Universities could be liable for any athletic related injury. Universities will be forced to pay for the ongoing medical expenses from any injury, possibly even something as extreme as Kent Waldrep’s ongoing medical expenses. Most athletic departments already operate at a deficit. These additional expenses might force schools to reduce their liability by discontinuing their dangerous sports, or possibly even all athletics. What started as a crusade for ensuring fairness for student athletes would result in the cancelling of their only route into a four year university.

5.20 AT: Athletes and Schools Have a Primarily Economic Relationship

Most student athletes do not receive full scholarships.

Ziff, Deborah. [Freelance Education Reporter for US News]. “4 Myths About Athletic Scholarships,” US News. October 4, 2017.

Only some sports offer full-ride scholarships. These are called “head count” sports, Leccesi says. In the NCAA, these include only football for Division I-A and basketball for Division I. For instance, an NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision team is allowed 85 scholarships per year for 85 athletes. These cannot be divided among more athletes, Leccesi says. For women, basketball, volleyball, tennis and gymnastics offer full-ride scholarships. All other sports are called “equivalency” sports, which means the available scholarships for each team can be divided among players. There are no

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restrictions on how many athletes can be on scholarship, and the allotted number of awards can be divided in whichever way the coach chooses, says Leccesi. This includes all other Division I sports and all NCAA Division II sports, NAIA sports and junior colleges.

Many NCAA student athletes do not currently receive scholarships, much less full scholarships.

“NCAA RECRUITING FACTS,” National Collegiate Athletic Association. July 2016.

DIVISION I Division I schools, on average, enroll the most students, manage the largest athletics budgets, offer a wide array of academic programs and provide the most athletics scholarships. PARTICIPATION • 176,000 student-athletes • 346 colleges and universities ATHLETICS SCHOLARSHIPS 56 percent of all student-athletes receive some level of athletics aid ACADEMICS 2014 Graduation Success Rate: 83 percent* OTHER STATS Median Undergraduate Enrollment: 9,205 Average Number of Teams per School: 19 Average Percentage of Student Body Participating in Sports: 4 percent Division I National Championships: 26 (1 out of every 8.5 student-athletes participates). DIVISION II Division II provides growth opportunities through academic achievement, high-level athletics competition and community engagement. Many participants are first-generation college students. PARTICIPATION • 118,800 student-athletes • 307 colleges and universities ATHLETICS SCHOLARSHIPS 61 percent of all student-athletes receive some level of athletics aid ACADEMICS 2014 Academic Success Rate: 71 percent* OTHER STATS Median Undergraduate Enrollment: 2,530 Average Number of Teams per School: 15 Average Percentage of Student Body Participating in Sports: 10 percent Division II National Championships: 25 (1 out of every 7 student-athletes participates). DIVISION III The Division III experience provides an integrated environment that focuses on academic success while offering competitive athletics and meaningful non-athletics opportunities. PARTICIPATION • 187,800 student-athletes • 439 colleges and universities FINANCIAL AID 82 percent of all student-athletes receive some form of academic grant or need-based scholarship; institutional gift aid totals $17,000 on average ACADEMICS 2014 Academic Success Rate: 87 percent* OTHER STATS Median Undergraduate Enrollment: 1,860 Average Number of Teams per School: 18 Average Percentage of Student Body Participating in Sports: 21 percent Division III National Championships: 28 (1 out of every 10 student-athletes participates)

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Most student athletes do not go on to play professionally.

“Estimated Probability of Competing in Athletics Beyond the High School Interscholas- tic Level,” NCAA Research. September 27, 2011.

Men’s Basketball: Less than one in 35, or approximately 3.1 percent, of high school senior boys playing interscholastic basketball will go on to play men’s basketball at a NCAA member institution. About one in 75, or approximately 1.2 percent, of NCAA male senior basketball players will get drafted by a National Basketball Association (NBA) team. Three in 10,000, or approximately 0.03 percent of high school senior boys playing interscholastic basketball will eventually be drafted by an NBA team. Women’s Basketball: Approximately three in 100, or 3.5 percent, of high school senior girls interscholastic basketball players will go on to play women’s basketball at a NCAA member institution. Less than one in 100, or approximately 0.9 percent, of NCAA female senior basketball players will get drafted by a Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) team. One in 5,000, or approximately 0.03 percent of high school senior girls playing interscholastic basketball will eventually be drafted by a WNBA team. Foot- ball: About 6.0 percent, or less than one in 16, of all high school senior boys playing interscholastic football will go on to play football at a NCAA member institution. Ap- proximately one in 50, or 1.7 percent, of NCAA male senior football players will get drafted by a National Football League (NFL) team. Eight in 10,000, or approximately 0.08 percent of high school senior boys playing interscholastic football will eventually be drafted by an NFL team. Baseball: About three in 50, or about 6.4 percent, of high school senior boys playing interscholastic baseball will go on to play men’s baseball at a NCAA member institution. About nine in 100, or 8.9%, of NCAA senior male baseball players will get drafted by a Major League Baseball (MLB) team. Approximately one in 200, or 0.44 percent of high school senior boys playing interscholastic baseball will eventually be drafted by an MLB team. Men’s Ice Hockey: Approximately 11 in 100, or about 10.8 percent, of high school senior boys interscholastic ice hockey players will go on to play men’s ice hockey at a NCAA member institution. One in 26, or about 3.8 percent, of NCAA senior male ice hockey players will get drafted by a National Hockey League (NHL) team. Less than one in 300, or approximately 0.32 percent of high school senior boys playing interscholastic ice hockey will eventually be drafted by an NHL team. Men’s Soccer: Less than three in 50, or about 5.6 percent, of high school senior boys interscholastic soccer players will go on to play men’s soccer at a NCAA member institution. Less than one in 50, or about 1.6 percent, of NCAA senior male soccer players will be drafted by a Major League Soccer (MLS) team. Approximately one in 1,250,

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or approximately 0.07 percent of high school senior boys playing interscholastic soccer will eventually be drafted by an MLS team.

Student athletes might believe they might play professionally, but less than 1% actually will. Academics should realistically be their focus.

Piquero, Alex and Beron, Kurt. [Alex R. Piquero is Ashbel Smith Professor of Crimi- nology and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Kurt Beron is Professor of Eco- nomics at The University of Texas at Dallas and UT Dallas’s NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative. The opinions expressed here may not represent the views of the offi- cers, staff, or membership of the NCAA.]. “UTD study confirms that student-athletes should be students first,” Dallas Morning News. January 17, 2017.

As student athletes look to the championships as their ticket to play professionally, we urge them to be students first. The reality is that the majority will never play professionally or compete in the Olympics, and as a result their focus should be squarely on the pursuit of an education, knowledge and acquisition of skills and experiences. But perils and speed bumps lie in the path of these student athletes as they progress in their educational careers. To investigate this issue, we set out to examine how various factors impact academic performance (GPAs) in a sample of 19,000 male and female student athletes at more than 1,100 colleges and universities across all three NCAA divisions. Our research results, published in the academic journal Social Science Quarterly, were both hopeful yet worrisome. On the one hand, most student athletes had acceptable, and even impressive, GPAs and were well on their way to earning an academic degree. Moreover, we also found that these findings played out across the various NCAA divisions and among male and female student athletes. On the other hand, some of our findings were cause for pause. We found that students with the lowest average grades reported that they viewed themselves as athletes more than students, thought about their sport more than academics and expected a professional or Olympic career–even though the great majority of them (over 95 percent) will never turn professional or compete in the Olympics. There is a true disconnect between the dream and the reality. For example, recent research by the NCAA found that almost three-fourths of male Divi- sion I basketball players - and even one-fourth of Division III players - thought it was at least somewhat likely they would become an NBA professional or Olympian. However, there were over 18,000 NCAA basketball players in 2015, with roughly 4,200 estimated as eligible to be drafted. Of these, only 46 were drafted–just over 1 percent.

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Even if a few top NCAA players resemble employees, this is not true for the vast majority of NCAA student athletes.

Neither case “obtained the desired ruling that student-athletes are ‘employees,’ ” Kroeger said. “If either effort had been successful, it would have fundamentally undermined the concept of amateurism in college sports and caused a seismic change in the NCAA student-athlete experience.” He said the issue is not going away, though. While student-athletes without scholarships may not resemble employees, “There are a small number of athletes at major schools, primarily men’s basketball and football, that generate billions of dollars in revenue for their schools. It is hard for the average person to consider these individuals to be more students than revenue-generating athletes. As to these individuals, the case for compensating them for their efforts certainly becomes stronger and harder to reconcile with the amateurism concept.”

5.21 AT: Universities Can Afford to Pay Student Athletes

Recognizing student athletes as employees would require universities to pay all student athletes minimum wage, regardless of their current levels (or lack of) scholarships.

“Fair Labor Standards Act Advisor,” United States Department of Labor. 2017.

The Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) basic requirements are: Payment of the minimum wage; Overtime pay for time worked over 40 hours in a workweek; Restrictions on the employment of children; and Recordkeeping. The FLSA has been amended on many occasions since 1938. Currently, workers covered by the FLSA are entitled to the minimum wage and overtime pay at a rate of not less than one and one-half times their regular rate of pay after 40 hours of work in a workweek. Various minimum wage excep- tions apply under specific circumstances to workers with disabilities, full-time students, youth under age 20 in their first 90 days of employment, tipped employees and student- learners. Special rules apply to state and local government employment involving fire protection and law enforcement activities, volunteer services, and compensatory time

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off (instead of cash overtime pay). Employers are required to keep records on wages, hours, and other items which are generally maintained as an ordinary business practice.

There are almost 500,000 NCAA student athletes, all of whom would have to be paid.

Jenkins, Sally. [American sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She was previously a senior writer for Sports Illustrated]. “College athletics have many problems, but a union is the wrong way to try and fix them,” Wall Street Journal. April 15, 2014.

All of this leads to a larger question: Does this small number of high-profile athletes really represent the best interest of all? Colter is the headliner for an advocacy group named College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), which claims about 17,000 Divi- sion I members. But more than 150,000 athletes compete in more than 20 sports, at hundreds of schools, each with different requirements, budgets and standards. Almost none of these athletes generate revenue; almost all of them have extremely strong connections to academics. All told, there are 460,000 athletes competing at various levels in the NCAA.

Student athletes having to pay taxes would cost both the student and the school more.

“Student-Athlete/Athlete-Employee: Tax Consequences, For Sure,” Anderson Tax. 2014.

Section 117 of the Internal Revenue Code governs all scholarships — academic or athletic. Students do not typically need to declare scholarships as income provided that the school grants the scholarships with “no strings attached.” The school cannot expect quid pro quo from the students in return for the scholarship. Unfortunately for student athletes everywhere, the tax code leaves no room for interpretation on this issue. Any form of compensation that the student-athletes may receive in return for playing would invalidate the tax exempt nature of their scholarships. Because many Division I athletes receive scholarships for full tuition and housing, the additional income they would need to report to IRS as employees could be $50,000 or more each year. Even at the lowest 2014 taxes rates, the tax on that income would be over $10,000 annually, or $40,000 for a

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four year degree. The financial burden of that tax could be more than many of the athletes could afford. In this scenario, schools could find themselves obliged to increase the size of the scholarships such that the recipients would have enough cash left over after tuition and housing to pay the tax bills. Given the annual volume of athletic scholarships around the country (over $1.4 billion according to US News and World Report), schools could have to spend hundreds of millions just to cover the new taxes.

A more professional model of college sports could jeopardize the nonprofit status and funding of universities.

Loh, Stefanie. [Contact Reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune]. “Student Athlete Unions Raise Myriad Issues,” The San Diego Union-Tribune. April 1, 2014.

Hogshead-Makar even projects that universities could jeopardize their nonprofit status if the move toward student-athlete unions spiraled into a situation where athletes accept full employee status, and college sports morphs into a professional model in which schools vie for recruits with competing price tags. If that were to happen, Hogshead- Makar theorizes athletic departments would lose the donations, institutional support and student fees that currently keep most of them afloat.

Universities rely on donations to support their athletic programs.

Herrara, Max. [Staff Writer for the Aragon Outlook]. “Student-athletes are students, not professionals,” The Aragon Outlook. April 24, 2014.

Many universities have come to rely on donations to support their athletic programs. By promoting “amateur sports,” these donation make the donors eligible for a tax deduction. Often coming from alumni looking for a tax deduction, donations account for roughly 27 percent of revenue, more than ticket sales. If a school were to pay its players, they would lose the eligibility of a tax deduction for donations and in effect lose what one Chief Financial Officer at a FBS school estimated to be half of their donations. And don’t forget the mountain of taxes that would come out of a player’s salary.

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Large donations, in particular, would decrease because they would be subject to a gift tax.

“Student-Athlete/Athlete-Employee: Tax Consequences, For Sure,” Anderson Tax. 2014.

But paying UBIT is only the tip of the iceberg. The most severe consequence for athletic departments would stem from the elimination of tax-deductible contributions. Con- tributions are by the far the largest source of income for athletic departments. Without their tax-deductible status, those donations would not be tax-exempt by the donor. This may not deter most small donations, but it could make the larger donors think twice before making a substantial commitment. Furthermore, any gift over $14,000 would be subject to the gift tax. Not only would substantial donors no longer be able to deduct their donations, they would also have to pay IRS up to 45% of the value of any gift over the $14,000 threshold. It is not a stretch to think that this might effectively end large contributions to athletic departments. If this were the case, athletic departments would likely need to restructure the way they receive funding. The drain on schools’ resources in that situation could be enormous, perhaps too much to handle.

Athletic departments would likely have to start paying substantial taxes: up to 35 percent at the federal level alone.

“Student-Athlete/Athlete-Employee: Tax Consequences, For Sure,” Anderson Tax. 2014.

A second potential consequence of granting student-athletes the status of employee could have grave repercussions for the school’s athletic department. Athletic departments enjoy a tax-exempt status because of their close relationship to the central educational mission of the school. The decision to treat student-athletes as employees could fundamentally invalidate that relationship. If the NLRB and other courts ultimately grant student-athletes employee status, a key factor in that decision will likely involve the fact that those activities have more to do with the entertainment industry than with education. Therefore, it is also likely that IRS will cease to acknowledge the tax-exempt status of athletic departments. The subsequent tax hit from Unrelated Business Income Tax (“UBIT“) could be substantial—15-35% at the federal level alone.

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Athletic departments would no longer be eligible to issue tax-exempt bonds.

“Student-Athlete/Athlete-Employee: Tax Consequences, For Sure,” Anderson Tax. 2014.

Last, but not least, issuance of tax-exempt bonds may no longer be possible. Tax-exempt bonds in the past have helped to support the construction of major facilities, fields, and stadiums. Issuing bonds at commercial loan rates would serve to further drain the resources of the department. In short, granting student-athletes employee status could be bad for students but catastrophic for athletic departments.

Even many men’s basketball and football teams (over 40 percent) spend more money than they bring in.

Fulks, Daniel L. [Ph.D., CPA, Accounting Program Director from Transylvania Univer- sity]. “Revenues & Expenses: NCAA Division I Intercollegiate Athletics Programs Re- port,” National Collegiate Athletic Association. 2010.

Most varsity sports would be endangered since only about 10% of Division I college sports earn a profit.

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Turning student athletes into salaried employees would endanger the existence of varsity sports on many college campuses. Only about 10 percent of Division I college sports programs turn a profit, and most of them, like our $28 million athletic program at the University of Delaware, lose money. Changing scholarship dollars into salary would almost certainly increase the amount schools have to spend on sports, since earnings are taxed and scholarships are not. In order just to match the value of a scholarship, the university would have to spend more. We are among the many schools that have already had to trim varsity sports in recent years. Should costs increase, we and many other schools would face pressure to cut back further.

Many programs would go bankrupt trying to compensate athletes.

Herrara, Max. [Staff Writer for the Aragon Outlook]. “Student-athletes are students, not professionals,” The Aragon Outlook. April 24, 2014.

Paying athletes would inevitably squander money. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen predicts “wholesale bankruptcies” over the next decade if a school were to compensate their athletes. Thomas suggests that schools only compensate those who generate money, stating, “If push came to shove, a resolution would come to fruition regarding finding a system that paid college athletes accordingly.” However, schools would have to comply with Title IX, which requires equality between men’s and women’s sports. With revenue-generating sports often being men’s teams, schools might have to pay the equal amount to a likely non-revenue-generating women’s team.

Recognizing student athletes as employees would result in costly Title IX challenges.

Loh, Stefanie. [Contact Reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune]. “Student Athlete Unions Raise Myriad Issues,” The San Diego Union-Tribune. April 1, 2014.

Since federal Title IX rules mandate that schools have to provide equal treatment for male and female athletes, “if a school would like to keep under the umbrella of a nonprofit university status, it would need to treat male and female athletes the same,” said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy at the Women’s Sports Founda- tion. San Francisco-based labor law expert David Murphy concurs. “It doesn’t matter how much money the women’s sports are making,” Murphy said. “If the Northwestern

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football players are employees, the women’s lacrosse players are employees too.” Still, the issue is not black-and-white. “What happens to the women’s basketball team if the men’s basketball team unionizes, gets a $2,500 per month stipend and medical insurance? Does that mean the women’s team gets it automatically too?” Murphy said. “I tend to think ‘no,’ because that’s a unique, collectively bargained result for the men’s basketball team. But I guarantee the Title IX people will say it does.”

Athletics departments cannot afford to pay male and female student-athletes beyond their scholarships equally.

Jessop, Alicia. [Attorney who currently teaches Sports Law and Sports Governance at the University of Miami.]. “The Elephant In The Room In Student-Athletes’ Unioniza- tion Attempt: Title IX,” Forbes. January 31, 2014.

Title IX is a piece of federal legislation that was passed in 1972. The law was initially enacted to eliminate gender discrimination in educational programs and activities and did not directly address athletics. In 1975, Title IX was applied to athletics through a federal regulation which required athletics programs receiving federal funding to provide equal opportunities to male and female athletes alike. That regulation defined “equal opportunities” as requiring that male and female athletes alike be provided with equal accommodations and equal treatment. The Northwestern student-athletes indicate that their attempt to unionize is driven by their desire to seek better health benefits and full cost of attendance scholarships. One has to believe, though, that should they gain the right to unionize, the players will seek compensation beyond full cost of attendance scholarships. This is where the potential Title IX issues lies. How can athletics departments afford to pay male and female student-athletes beyond their scholarships in a way that treats the genders equally? Take the University of Texas, for example. For the 2012- 13 reporting year, the University of Texas’ athletics program brought in total revenues of $165,691,486. Of that revenue, $132,765,064 was brought in by men’s sports programs, while $5,603,325 was contributed from women’s sports programs. $27,323,097 of the revenue was not allocated by gender. Given these numbers and seeing how much of Texas’ revenue is driven by each gender, how would union leaders suggest that Texas’ athletics department share that revenue with its student-athletes? If student-athletes are unionized, the likely next step for them to follow is to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with their university athletics department employer. Would these unions follow in step with other athletics unions in the United States, like the NFLPA and NBPA, and seek a compensation method based upon revenue sharing with the ath-

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letics department? In professional sports, salary caps are driven by the revenue sharing plans that are set forth in collective bargaining agreements. Those salary caps limit what teams can spend on signing athletes, with the top-performing athletes command- ing the highest percentage of the available salary cap space and the lower-level athletes generally settling for a stipulated minimum salary. Should student-athletes’ unions follow this course, how would their leaders suggest a revenue sharing plan be distributed across genders? Based upon the University of Texas example above, an argument can be made that its athletics department’s top performers are its football team and men’s basketball team, as those sports bring in the greatest revenues. Under a typical salary cap scheme, these players would arguably receive the highest percentage of the cap and be paid more that lower revenue generating players. The difference with these professional sports unions and their respective leagues and the college sports space, though, is professional leagues are not subject to Title IX. Thus, the question becomes, how can a union composed of student-athlete members obtain the best deal financially with their university athletics department employers, while also complying with Title IX? Should student-athletes be successful in their unionization attempt, it is this elephant in the room that will need to be addressed.

Division I athletic programs would only be able to afford to pay their athletes annual salaries of $25,000.

Warren, Nicholas. [From Texas Christian University]. “The Economic Feasibility of Paying College Athletes,” Department of Finance, Texas Christian University. May 8, 2017.

The purpose of this thesis is to look at the financial ability of Division 1 athletic programs to pay their college athletes an annual salary. It has long been debated whether or not college athletes should be paid for the revenues that they bring in for their schools from ticket and apparel sales, but most of this debate comes in the form of subjective and opinion based articles and sources. This paper will take that highly ethical question and look at it through an objective financial lens in order to determine if athletes could receive salaries based off of the profits of their respective institutions, similar to that of a business. One of my findings is that most Division 1 programs are not sufficiently profitable, as only 6 of the 106 teams from the sample observed would be able to pay their athletes an annual salary of $25,000 a year.

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Non-athletes will likely have to foot the bill.

Krupnick, Matt. [Krupnick works with the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University]. “Would Your Tuition Bills Go Up If College Athletes Got Paid?,” TIME Money Magazine. November 27, 2014.

Changes to how student-athletes are paid could lead some schools, stuck with nowhere else to turn, to raise other students’ fees. Universities and colleges could also scale back their athletics programs to cut costs. That “would be the rational approach,” Kirwan said. “But when it comes to college athletics, rationality doesn’t often prevail,” he said. “There are so many societal pressures.” Research shows that some students don’t even know their fees are already paying for athletics. At Ohio University, for instance, 41% of revenue from the general fee of $531 per quarter for full-time students in 2010 went to intercollegiate athletics, but 54% of students didn’t know it, according to a survey by the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Dividing the $765 per year they paid for athletics through the fee by the number of games the average Ohio University student attended, the center calculated that students were paying the equivalent of more than $130 per athletic event they actually watched in person. Eighty-one percent said they opposed raising the amount of their fees that went to the athletics program, or wanted it reduced. If the Kessler lawsuit succeeds, “The institutions that rely primarily on student fees are going to have to make a decision about whether they’re going to try to keep up,” says Amy Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission. “When you have schools with $5 million for their entire athletic budget trying to compete with schools that have $5 million coaches, it’s going to strain at some point.” The Pressure to Stay in the Game: Even some schools in the “Big 5” conferences—the SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, and Pac-12—where football and basketball bring in big bucks will have trouble maintaining their programs if bidding for athletes takes off, experts said. Schools on the fringes of big-time sports success, such as UC Berkeley, Rutgers, Northwestern, and Indiana, would have tough decisions to make about whether to pass on costs to students, says Murray Sperber, a UC Berkeley professor who has written several books about the role of college sports. The most likely outcome, Sperber says, would be for at least some of those universities to drop out of the big-time sports world by eliminating athletics scholarships or otherwise scaling back sports programs rather than risking protests by paying athletes and charging students more. But some colleges in mid-tier conferences will probably choose to stay in the bidding game, he says. “You think of it as a big poker game where the stakes keep going

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up,” Sperber says. “The students in trouble potentially are those at schools beyond the Big 5, because they’ll have to decide whether to stay in the poker game.” No Price Tag on School Spirit Students at some big-time Division I schools said athletic success is important not just for the campus but also for the community. The University of Kentucky basketball program, for example, is part of the school’s and the state’s identity, says Jacob Ingram, president of that university’s student body.

5.22 AT: Improve the Quality of College Athletics Programs

Allowing players to unionize could lead to competitive imbalances between schools.

Tarm, Michael. [Reporter with The Associated Press]. “Board dismisses ruling to allow college athletes to unionize,” The Associated Press. August 17, 2015.

The unanimous ruling by the five-member National Labor Relations Board concludes that letting Northwestern football players unionize could lead to different standards at different schools — from the amount of money players receive to the amount of time they can practice. That would, it says, create the competitive imbalances. “The National Labor Relations Board’s decision to reject jurisdiction and dismiss the union petition in this case is appropriate. In its ruling, the NLRB recognized the NCAA con- tinually evolves to better support college athletes. In recent years we have provided college athletes with multi-year scholarships, free education for former college athletes and unlimited meals,” NCAA chief legal officer Donald Remysaid in a statement. “Fur- ther, college athletes helped Division I change rules in January to provide guaranteed, full cost of attendance scholarships and improve student wellbeing. The NCAA and its member schools are committed to providing the best support possible for all college athletes and will continue to do so in the future. This ruling allows us to continue to make progress for the college athlete without risking the instability to college sports that the NLRB recognized might occur under the labor petition.”

This would ruin the intra-team dynamic.

Jennings, Scott. [Scott Jennings is a former adviser to President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations.]. “Don’t unionize college athletes: Column,” USA Today. April 2, 2014.

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Unionizing college athletes could ruin the camaraderie. What would stop an All- American from demanding first class airfare and penthouse suites, as opposed to other scholarship athletes that fly coach and share a regular hotel room? After all, they could argue they are more valuable “employees” than the third stringers.

Performance based compensation would inevitably create conflicts between teammates.

Kraft, Nicole. [Assistant Professor at the School of Communication at Ohio State Uni- versity]. “Should College Athletes be Paid?,” Sports and Society Initiative. August 24, 2017.

Managing the locker room. This was an issue raised by the athlete’s panel. Since some of the other panel members had recommended compensation based on performance, the athletes were rightly concerned about the resulting inherent conflicts and disruption and the almost intractable challenges that it would create for coaches in maintaining team cohesion. The preponderance of the arguments here, as well as the general sentiment of the panels, was that, regardless of the issues, paying athletes was not necessarily the right solution.

Recognizing student athletes as employees would drive a wedge between athletes of different sports.

Unionization could well pit different sports against one another. Football and basketball generate the biggest revenues, so what’s stopping them from joining forces to demand better “working conditions” than the rowing team? Do we really want union reps on college campuses organizing student athletes against each other? Probably not. Nor do we want players going on strike the night before the Rose Bowl or the Final Four, holding college athletics hostage until demands are met.

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5.23 AT: College Sports Would Remain Just as Popular

The prime reason most people support college athletics is personal loyalty, which paying student athletes would harm.

Novak, Jake. [CNBC Senior Columnist]. “Paying college players will ruin the game,” CNBC News. April 6th, 2015.

The latest CNBCAll-America Economic Survey proves it. The poll shows that in the crucial demographic of wealthier males aged 50 and over, a whopping 32% would be less likely to watch college sports if the players were paid. And I actually think the real number is much higher and will grow more and more over time. The reason is because loyalty to Alma Mater and the personal connection fans have with their school’s sports teams is still the prime source of support for major college athletics. Without that, college sports will probably survive, but they will suffer a major drop to the level of support, interest and publicity that minor league sports leagues deal with right now.

Thirty-two percent of people who currently watch college games would be less likely to watch if the players were paid.

Liesman, Steve. [CNBC Senior Economics Reporter]. “For NCAA fans, paying players would spoil the game,” CBNC News. April 5, 2015.

On the eve of the NCAA mens’ basketball title game a new CNBC polls find that about a third of college hoop fans would think twice about tuning in if players were paid. The CNBC All-America Economic Survey, a national poll of 800 Americans nationwide with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent, found that 35 percent of respondents report watching at least some of the March Madness tournament. Of this group, 32 percent say they would be “less likely” to watch if the players were paid. Among those most likely to turn off the games are the wealthiest and most educated Americans and men over 50, the same demographics who are most likely to be watching. As the issue has come to the fore, several recent polls have found that more than 60 percent of the public oppose paying college players, including a recent Washington Post/ABC Poll. But the CNBC poll found that a substantial 61 percent majority of those who watch would still tune in if players were paid. Yet in the big-money business of college hoops, the poll points to high stakes for the NCAA in possibly alienating up to a third of its most loyal viewership.

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Most Americans oppose paying college basketball and football players.

Durkheimer, Michael. [Corporate finance and securities lawyer from UCLA Law]. “Avid Sports Fans Are More Likely To Favor A Radical Change To The Collegiate Sports Industry,” Forbes. September 15, 2017.

One might not have guessed that avid sports fans are most likely to favor a radical change to the collegiate sports industry. Yet, the results of a new Washington Post / University of Massachusetts Lowell poll reveal a clear trend. While only 25% of non- fans support paying college athletes, 45% of avid fans are now on board. While a slight majority of Americans (52%) still oppose paying college basketball and football players based on the revenue they generate for universities, that number has decreased in recent years. A poll from just four years ago, in 2013, revealed that 69% of Americans opposed paying college athletes at the time. The more recent poll results show that public opinion is moving on this issue, and avid sports fans appear to be leading the change.

5.24 AT: Unionization

Unionization is not a feasible option for student athletes to pursue.

Bivens, George J. [J.D. Candidate, The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University]. “NCAA Student Athlete Unionization: NLRB Punts on Northwestern University Football Team,” Penn State Law Review. May 14, 2017.

At this point, unionization is no longer a realistic option for college athletes.281 As explained in the Board’s decision, creating a patchwork of different rules across college sports will not benefit the system.282 Additionally, because of the discrepancies in state labor laws,283 getting lawmakers throughout the country to agree on collective bargaining rights for student athletes would be nearly impossible.2

No union can bargain with the NCAA; it’s not an employer.

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The inequities in college athletics are complex and nuanced; no one solution fits all. First of all, a union wouldn’t have the right to collectively bargain anything with the NCAA. No one ever mentions that. The NCAA is not an employer. It’s just a flawed bureacracy, the kind that makes stupid rules that send Shabazz Napier to bed hungry. The real issue is this: A relatively small number of high-profile athletes, isolated in football and men’s basketball, help generate immense revenues for their schools, without getting fair treatment or full value from their scholarships because of the cultures of their sports, which have weak connections to classrooms.

Unionization would benefit a few high profile student athletes and sports at the expense of other student athletes.

Lots of people want to give CAPA and Colter an A for this argument, and for taking their classroom education on labor relations into the real world. They aren’t after money, Colter says, but justice on issues such as medical care and academic fraud. But I give them a D, because despite the good intentions, there is an inherent, buried selfishness at the heart of the argument. The cold fact is, any collective bargaining gains for football players would come at the expense of non-revenue athletes, a fact they either don’t grasp or totally fail to acknowledge. As commentator George Leef remarked in a recent analysis in Forbes, “Whatever marginal gains collective bargaining might bring for the players must come at the expense of other parts of the university community.” What this means is, the likely effect of a union on your local campus would be: take from one set of deserving, hard-working athletes and students, and redistribute their resources to another set. It would mean de-funding sports such as track, tennis, swimming, women’s basketball, rowing. So, let’s ask again: Is the quest to unionize really for the mutual benefit and broader interest of all college athletes? The answer — the awk- ward, uncomfortable answer — is no. In fact, football players are already economically subsidized better than most of their athlete peers. Their lack of consciousness of this, and their unstated assumption that they somehow work harder and are more deserving than, say, Olympic-caliber wrestlers or softball players, borders on offensive.

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Unionizing would result in a pay-based hierarchy of college athletics, pulling some students’ focus away from education.

Cianfichi, Michael P. [Cianfichi is from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law]. “Varsity Blues: Student Athlete Unionization Is the Wrong Way For- ward to Reform Collegiate Athletics,” Maryland Law Review. Volume 75, Issue 3, Arti- cle 5. 2015.

The future of collegiate athletics looks more uncertain than ever.241 If the Board mistak- enly upholds the RD’s NWU decision, collegiate athletics will evolve into a two-tiered hierarchy, with unionized-employee student athletes who increasingly receive benefits that pull them away from education into the economic realm of employment at the top level. Below that, a second tier of all other student athletes will emerge whose existence will be increasingly eroded as financial resources transition to the employed athletes due to collective bargaining. O’Bannon, if upheld, will only affect revenue-generating athletes at the top schools, but if more fully embraced, will provide student athletes with a valuable trust fund upon graduation with which to begin their careers and invest in their future. Those that see collegiate sports purely as a “moneybag” (a category that must include some university, NCAA, and now union officials) have stretched the rubber band encircling higher education to its breaking point. If student athletes are deemed employees, the band will snap, releasing them into the land of labor and employment, destined to become just a line on a balance sheet. The tension must be relaxed, allowing student athletes to return their focus to education, lest we forget the true meaning and purpose of being a university student.

The real benefits of unionization would accrue to union organizers, not student athletes.

It’s nice to fantasize that unionization would force schools to do away with overpaid deputy athletic directors, instead of cutting women’s golf. Or that it would force them to wrench away part of a coach’s $3 million salary and use it for MRI exams of players’ ankles. Or better yet seize NCAA President Mark Emmert’s $1.7 million salary and use it

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to extend football scholarships for life. But the more probable result is that unionization would kill scholarships, open athletes to taxation, and other forms of collateral damage. The real gains would go to United Steelworkers, the backers of this argument, in the form of dues from college kids.

5.25 AT: New NLRB Memo Recognizes Student Athletes as Employees

The NLRB memo is only the opinion of one lawyer; it is not legally binding

Strauss, Ben. [Sports Journalist for The New York Times, author of the book Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, and winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing]. “N.L.R.B. Lawyer Sees Some College Football Play- ers as Employees, With Rights,” The New York Times. February, 1. 2017.

Top-level college football players at private universities are employees entitled to request improved working conditions and even to seek pay for their efforts, according to a memorandum issued by the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board and made public on Tuesday. The determination, which was included in a letter from the counsel, Robert F. Griffin, and addressed to regional board directors nationwide, found that scholarship football players at private colleges like Northwestern, Stanford and Notre Dame have employment rights and are protected by law should they seek to bargain for a safer work environment, or request pay. The memo was revealed more than a year and a half after the N.L.R.B. in Washington declined to exert jurisdiction over the Northwestern football team’s union petition, which effectively denied players the right to unionize and collectively bargain. Griffin’s memo does not affect that ruling. It does not give players at private universities the right to collectively bargain, nor does it carry the force of law like a full board finding, muting its impact. Supporters of athletes’ rights called it a clear signal that the question of whether college football players are employees remains unsettled.

New Trump appointees are likely to reverse recent NLRB decisions in favor of student athletes.

Strauss, Ben. [Sports Journalist for The New York Times, author of the book Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, and winner of the PEN/ESPN

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Award for Literary Sports Writing]. “N.L.R.B. Lawyer Sees Some College Football Play- ers as Employees, With Rights,” The New York Times. February, 1. 2017.

Any legal machinations, however, could soon be moot. The term of Griffin, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ends in November, and President Trump will appoint the N.L.R.B.’s next general counsel. The five-member board will also flip from a Democratic majority to Republican under the new administration, and the remade body is expected to be less sympathetic to organized labor. Wilma B. Liebman, a former chairwoman of the N.L.R.B., said a new board could seek to clarify the employment status of college football players through a ruling on a case involving graduate teaching assistants. “A new board has the potential to look at this issue very differently,” she said. “And that would limit any long-term implications.”

5.26 AT: Recognizing Student Athletes as Employees is the Only Solution

Many reforms can be achieved without recognizing student athletes as employees.

Kraft, Nicole. [Assistant Professor at the School of Communication at Ohio State Uni- versity]. “Should College Athletes be Paid?,” Sports and Society Initiative. August 24, 2017.

In fact, the athlete’s panel in particular, posited a number of remedies that were quite sensible and addressed a number of the issues. Among these were using total cost of attendance in calculating scholarship award levels (which has already been widely implemented), continuing tuition support for athletes once they are done competing (which OSU already provides), continuing medical support, improved academic support as well as more substantive academic programs, limitations on practice and participation hours and additional training in managing finances and other life skills. There are other actions that could be considered, including deferred compensation and eliminating the NBA and NFL rules limiting entry to the professional ranks for a period of time. These more drastic changes have their own issues.

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The status quo is solving. Universities such as UConn are voluntarily offering better benefits to student athletes.

Wilson, Jennifer. [Contact Reporter for The Hartford Courant]. “College Athletes As Employees? That Raises Questions In Connecticut,” The Hartford Courant. February 7, 2015.

The NCAA, athletic conferences and member institutions have been exploring ways to address some of these concerns without having to do so at the bargaining table. In recent months, some schools, including UConn, have announced that they will start offering full cost of attendance scholarships that provide a stipend to athletes on a full ride. The purpose of these enhanced scholarships is to compensate for money that students cannot earn on their own because the time requirements of college sports prevent them from holding a part-time job. In the 2015-16 school year, UConn will start offering full cost of attendance scholarships to athletes in all sports who are on a full scholarship. The policy will cost an estimated $1.5 million a year in increased aid to nearly 200 UConn athletes. The UConn athletic department has declined to comment on the proposed union legislation.

The NCAA recently announced new rules granting major conferences the autonomy to increase benefits for student athletes.

Wilson, Jennifer. [Contact Reporter for The Hartford Courant]. “College Athletes As Employees? That Raises Questions In Connecticut,” The Hartford Courant. February 7, 2015.

Their new scholarship policy follows a decision by the Power Five conferences to offer full cost of attendance scholarships. Under new NCAA rules, Power Five conferences have the authority to self-govern on student athlete welfare issues. Schools in smaller conferences, like UConn, may adopt the changes passed by the Power Five but are not required to do so. In addition to granting the major conferences autonomy to provide increased benefits to student athletes, the NCAA last year ruled that all college athletes, including walk-ons, are allowed to receive unlimited meals and snacks from universities. The NCAA decision came shortly after Napier told reporters that he often went to bed hungry, but the policy change had been in the works before Napier’s comments.

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The NCAA is best placed to enact reforms.

Instead of unions or the Board inserting themselves into the issue, the NCAA is the proper body to remedy the current situation.240 With the influence of courts, public opinion, and universities themselves, the NCAA should initiate reforms to address student athlete exploitation and the disdainful college “education” through which some student athletes are shepherded. Keeping in mind that hardly any student athletes will play professionally, the NCAA should rein back athletic time commitments so that students can appropriately focus on success in the classroom that will benefit them for the remainder of their lives. Rediscovering the student in student athlete will realize the true purpose for which institutions of higher learning exist.

Professional sports leagues, not the NCAA, are to blame.

The answer for young athletes who want to be paid to play is not to target universities, which have a different mission, but professional sports leagues like the National Basket- ball Association and the National Football League, which still bar high school athletes from turning pro. If players are good enough to earn a living at that age, I say, let them. Very few, however, are that good. At the college level, even the highest-ranked teams field relatively few players who will ever play a day of professional sports.

A potential solution is a “royalties-and-escrow system.”

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How to compensate college athletes is a trickier question. Author Samuel Freedman argued on ESPN.com for a “royalties-and-escrow system” that would compensate players similarly to how “songwriters, producers and musicians are compensated in popular music.” Players would get some money up front but most would go in to an escrow account available once the players earned a college degree. Freedman’s plan solves the immediate problem of putting living expense money in the pockets of athletes and carries the added bonus of incentivizing graduation. Freedman points out that just 2% of basketball and football players make a professional roster, so most athletes would be interested in a post-degree escrow account. Bilas, on the other hand, wonders why money should be held back and that players should be compensated immediately based on their personal value to the free marketplace. Regardless of how it gets done (certainly details matter when you are talking about this much money), it is time to compensate athletes for the massive revenues made from their talents and likenesses. Surely a solution can be reached that is fair to the kids who make our Marches so special without involving union bosses who would love to dip into the till.

Performance-based scholarships are an alternative that would compensate athletes without making students subject to income taxes.

Gross, Chaz. [Michigan State University College of Law]. “Modifying Amateurism: A Performance-Based Solution to Compensating Student–Athletes for Licensing Their Names, Images, and Likenesses,” Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property. Vol- ume 16, Issue 2. April 2017

The O’Bannon decision was a major event in collegiate athletics.266 As a result of this decision, student–athletes are finally able to reap the benefits of their labor on the playing field.267 In order to satisfy the holding in O’Bannon, the NCAA must allow Division I men’s basketball and FBS football student–athletes to receive compensation for the use of their names, images, and likenesses in live game broadcasts, video games, highlight clips, and other archival footage.268 However, in order to comply with Title IX, it is necessary for the NCAA also to provide an equal amount of funds to women student– athletes, which means doubling the amount of compensation.269 Although compensating both men and women may cause colleges and universities to offer less money to Division I men’s basketball and FBS football student–athletes, it is the only way for the NCAA to comply with both the Sherman Antitrust Act and Title IX.270 With regard to the possible tax implications, if the NCAA compensates student–athletes through performance-based scholarships for academic and athletic achievements, then it would

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prevent the income tax that students would face as employees.271

An antitrust lawsuit is the way to go.

Athletes deserve a cut, and a voice, and the NCAA won’t grant them those without being forced. But there is a better form of leverage than unionization. You want to cap coaching and athletic director salaries, so member schools have more money to devote to athlete welfare? That’s going to take an antitrust lawsuit, not a union. The Ed O’Bannon class action case is a promising example: It would end NCAA restrictions on athletes profiting on their likeness and images, and force schools to redistribute that merchandising income. A union is a great tool for fighting for living wages and decent, safe working conditions. But it’s the wrong tool to get at the NCAA.

A stipend system is one reform that can improve the current system.

Herrara, Max. [Staff Writer for the Aragon Outlook]. “Student-athletes are students, not professionals,” The Aragon Outlook. April 24, 2014.

One of the biggest improvements that can be formed is a stipend system. Rather than a salary, athletes can have a small amount of extra money strictly for things such as flying home to see their families or going out with friends (currently not included in a scholarship). With no time to work, athletes have no chance of acquiring money needed for these activities. While a salary is impractical and unnecessary to solve this, a small stipend can. The NCAA has started this as of last week when the Legislative Coun- cil deemed that there shall be no bans on any food amounts for its Division I member schools and their student-athletes. However, it’s doubtful that 385-pound Alabama offensive tackle Brandon Hill ever had a problem finding a meal before the rule change.

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Another alternative is the Olympic model of amateurism, which would open up opportunities for endorsements and other “commercial opportunities” without paying student athletes salaries.

Staples, Andy. [Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated]. “It’s time for the NCAA to make sweeping changes,” Sports Illustrated. January 24, 2013.

The best solution remains something similar to what has long been advocated by ESPN basketball analyst – and attorney and former student-athlete – Jay Bilas. Embrace the same model as the Olympics. In 2011, I offered a truncated rewrite of the NCAA rule- book that would incorporate the Olympic model. Don’t allow schools to pay more – this takes care of the tax and Title IX issues – but allow anyone else to pay any athlete they choose. Yahoo! columnist Dan Wetzel proposed a similar system on Wednesday. This would provide a more just system with far fewer headaches, but the public and people who run college athletics have been beaten about the head for so long with the notion that any remuneration beyond a scholarship is immoral that they can’t abide common sense. Every time a major conference signs a new television rights deal, the dollar figures grow, yet the people in charge cling to rules written for a time when revenue was scarce and costs had to be carefully controlled. At some point, probably when members of a younger generation have taken charge, this notion of immorality will disappear. Just as people in the 1800s thought women would never be allowed to vote and people now can’t imagine a time when women couldn’t vote, opinions will shift. Besides, there are few sensible arguments against such reforms. The chief knock on the Olympic model is that the boosters at the wealthiest schools will pay so much that the top recruits will choose only those schools. Perhaps the defenders of the status quo don’t read Ri- vals.com very often. According to the site, the top seven recruiting classes in 2013 as of Thursday morning are as follows: 1. Florida 2. Notre Dame 3. Alabama 4. Ohio State 5. LSU 6. Michigan 7. USC Improve RA Symptoms - Experiencing Joint Pain? Find A Doc- tor & A Way To Treat Rheumatoid Arthritis Related Joint Pain. www.ratreatment.com Rivals100: Class of 2013 recruiting rankings Now let’s take a look at top seven football- revenue producing schools for the 2011-12 school year, according to data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. 1. Texas 2. Michigan 3. Alabama 4. Auburn 5. Geor- gia 6. Florida 7. Notre Dame Those lists look awfully similar. In fact, 13 of the top 20 revenue producers are ranked in the top 20 of Rivals.com’s class of 2013 team rankings. The wealthiest schools already get the top recruits. Allowing boosters or companies to pay players wouldn’t change anything with regard to competitive equity. The playing field would remain as tilted as ever, because some fan bases will always care more about

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football than other fan bases.

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