Doane-Mastersreport-2019
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
DISCLAIMER: This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Running Head: EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 1 Exploitation in College Sports: The Amateurism Hoax and the True Value of an Education Bill Doane The University of Texas at Austin EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 2 Exploitation in College Sports The Amateurism Hoax and the True Value of an Education Introduction Racism and exploitation in intercollegiate athletics have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention over the last thirty years. As athletic departments’ revenues from ticket sales and from football and men’s basketball television contracts continue to grow, the critical discourse regarding the treatment of student-athletes mounts. Between 1996 and 2013, the TV contracts for major college football grew from $185 million to $725 million, and the 2017 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament generated $1.1 billion in television rights alone. However, the NCAA national office is not alone in such riches. Individual universities enjoy sizeable revenues from their successful football and men’s basketball teams with schools like the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving $6.5 million each for merely participating in the 1994 Rose Bowl Game, the post-season event dubbed “The Granddaddy of Them All” (Eitzen, 1996). Some of these bowl game revenues are passed along to college coaches in the form of incentive bonuses on top of their considerable salaries (the average salary for major college football head coach during the 2016-2017 academic year was in excess of $3.3 million) but most of these revenues are reinvested in the program or used to support other, non-revenue generating teams on campus. Furthermore, a successful football or men’s basketball program will help businesses in the surrounding community. During the early part of the 1990s, Eitzen (1996) estimated that the Louisiana State University athletic programs created $65 million in sales for Baton Rouge-area business and $25.5 million in additional household income and supported over 1,600 jobs. EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 3 Meanwhile college merchandising has grown into a $4.6 billion industry, with hundreds of millions of dollars paid out to universities annually (Eitzen, 1996; Meghamez, 2015). Thus, the economic impact of major college football and men’s basketball programs— which is mediated primarily through advertising and merchandising contracts—fill the universities’ coffers, finance rich contracts for coaches and administrators, stimulate economic growth in the community, and even support other athletic teams on campus, but the very athletes who compete at this level, who drive the demand for tickets, and who ultimately create the revenue are relegated to amateur status and precluded from receiving any cash considerations for the considerable monies they bring to the NCAA and its member institutions. Some regard this economic exploitation by which athletes in revenue-generating college sports of football and men’s basketball do not reap the financial gains for their considerable labors as a “new slavery.” In The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, Predominantly White Institutions, Hawkins (2013) claims that “the dehumanization of Black athletes takes place when these institutions value Blacks more as athletes than as students.” While slavery analogies in intercollegiate athletics trivialize the sufferings and injustices perpetrated against many Blacks during the 18th and 19th centuries, certain scholars defend this metaphor, claiming that the modern-day power imbalances in on-the-field and off-the-field dynamics are rooted in the physical bondage of slavery where slaveowners would hold annual harvest festivals, helping to diffuse latent thoughts of insurrection by allowing slaves to manifest their suppressed aggression and hostility through competition, thus preserving the institution of slavery for another year (Rhoden, 2006). Whether or not these references to slavery are warranted, the “legacy of using sports to stake a symbolic claim to humanity” has certainly marked Black history in the United States, and the contemporary enrichment of American EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 4 universities through the athletic accomplishments of disproportionately Black student-athletes builds on this tradition, with other scholars alternatively comparing the institution to colonialism (Branch, 2011). Over the last decade, there has been widespread support for allowing college athletes to receive compensation beyond the value of their scholarships. Former star players and members of the media have drawn attention to the injustice inherent to a system that enriches universities and high-ranking individuals with multi-million dollar contracts without providing fair compensation to the entertainers on the field or court. Some critics have dramatically referred to college athletes as “gladiators,” but the fact remains that many student-athletes who are featured on ESPN, ABC, or Fox every Saturday, struggle to fill up their cars with gasoline when it’s time to go home for the holidays (Meggyesy, 2000). On this point, the NCAA has acquiesced to a small degree by instituting a “cost of attendance” stipend intended to cover expenses not included in tuition, room and board, and books; typically this stipend amounts to approximately $800 per month during the school year, depending on the college or university. Even after the cost of attendance stipend is included, the exchange remains unbalanced because the NCAA employs an essentially cost-free—and disproportionately Black—labor force and offers the “mere pittance” of a scholarship in return (Meggyesy, 2000). While the value of free tuition should not be minimized, student-athletes often receive an inferior college education. Calls to “fairly compensate” athletes have been heard in the Supreme Court and in the chambers of Congress, with Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-CT) recently releasing a report criticizing the $14-billion-a-year intercollegiate athletics industry “for spending more on coach salaries than player scholarships,” arguing that the current system “enriches broadcasters, apparel companies, and athletic departments at the expense of athletes” (Hruby, 2019). EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 5 All of these criticisms and calls to action from former players, ex-administrators, columnists, and members of the general public are well-founded. The status quo is situated precariously within the legislative framework of the NCAA and amateur athletics. While there was a time when the NCAA was right to protect its athletes from malicious corporate interests, that was also a time when the NCAA earned only modest revenues and college sports was yet to become “big business.” In light of the ballooning of the sports entertainment industry in the last quarter-century, the NCAA should compensate athletes in proportion to the revenues they create for their respective institutions, holding the full amount in trust until the athletes have exhausted their collegiate eligibility. The Fallacy of Modern Amateurism The NCAA’s Historical Foundation At the turn of the 20th century, there was only one way to watch a college football game: Attend. Prior to the first mechanical representation of a football game in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911 and the first local and nationwide radio broadcasts in 1921 and 1922, respectively, if you did not attend the game then you waited to hear about it on the radio that evening or to read about it in the newspaper (St. John, 2011). College football existed in a vacuum—at least compared to how it is enjoyed today—but spectators and administrators had growing concerns. One hundred years ago, the game was tremendously violent: Runners could continue to push and crawl for extra yardage until they cried the proverbial “Uncle” when they shouted, “Down!” This convention led to massive scrums on the field where gouging of the eyes or genitals was common and death was sometimes “part of the game.” In addition to the rising death count, administrators also worried about the increasing “professionalism” of their teams, so on December 28, 1905, sixty-two institutions of higher education joined together to form the EXPLOITATION IN COLLEGE SPORTS 6 Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) with a shared goal: “To maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body” (Meggyesy, 2000). Although the IAAUS later changed its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the mission remained the same, and the organization enjoyed relative stability through the first half of the century, but in 1951 the organization faced serious threats and appointed Walter Byers its first executive director. Ironically, the major threat that prompted Byers’ appointment was the proliferation of the television. Studies indicated that attendance numbers (and thus ticket and concession sales) were falling precipitously as customers elected to watch the games for free in the comfort of their own homes. Prior to the 1950s, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pennsylvania were the only universities with national TV contracts, but the “television threat” led the NCAA to outlaw televised games, except for a specific few licensed by the national office (Branch, 2011). Notre Dame and Penn