‘March Madness’ isn’t amateur, it’s big league exploitation

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In 2006, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas, sent a letter to NCAA President, Myles Brand. In this letter, Thomas had this to say:

“The annual return also states that one of the NCAA’s purposes is to ‘retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports.’ Corporate sponsorships, multimillion dollar television deals, highly paid coaches with no academic duties, and the dedication of inordinate amounts of time by athletes to training lead many to believe that major college football and men’s basketball more closely resemble professional sports than amateur sports.”

In this letter, Thomas makes a very clear point that is also being mentioned by academics, coaches, former athletes, students, attorneys and fair-minded Americans throughout the country: the NCAA is a professional sports league. To call collegiate athletes in revenue-generating sports “amateur” is like calling Barack Obama a part-time politician in training.

Companies pay CBS Sports $100,000 dollars for a 30-second ad during the early rounds of March Madness. This cost jumps to $1 million dollars for a 30-second spot during the Final Four. The NCAA’s contract with CBS is an 11-year, $6.1 billion dollar TV rights deal, with the NCAA hauling in over half a billion per year in revenue. The amount of money made during March Madness exceeds that which is earned in the playoffs for the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball. The average coach in March Madness earns roughly $1 million dollars per year and schools typically hire their basketball coaches without giving a “you-know-what” about the academic standards of the coach they’ve chosen to hire (you hear that Kentucky)?

Now, who said that any of this could be defined as “amateur”?

The NCAA, in order to make the cash cow even larger, is proposing to expand March Madness from 65 teams to 96. This move has nothing to do with academics, since athletes don’t benefit academically by having even more reasons to miss class in exchange for tournament games. It’s all about the money, and perhaps even an opportunity for the NCAA to strengthen the monopoly it’s been allowed to maintain without any meaningful Congressional oversight. Our lawmakers sleep on the job while a significant number of American families (many of them poor) are having their labor rights consistently violated, all for the sake of our entertainment. College sport is no different from unregulated cockfighting, where the value of fan enjoyment overwhelms our desire to check on the well-being of those affected by the activity. We don’t care what happens to athletes after they’ve had their scholarships stripped and the NCAA has no use for them. They just ship them right back to the projects.

The NCAA’s $11 billion dollar deal with CBS is set to expire before this year’s college freshmen use up their eligibility (notice I didn’t say “graduate), and you should prepare for your eyes to bleed when you see the economic magnitude of the next contract. I would not be surprised if it ends up being the largest financial deal in professional sports history. Yes, I said “professional.” I expect the deal to be in the $10 – $20 billion dollar range, netting the NCAA at least $1 billion per year in revenue, with all of this revenue being tax exempt. In fact, when the NCAA signed its current contact with CBS, their new pact more than doubled their annual revenue in comparison with the previous deal.

If we simply took the $548 million the NCAA earned during March Madness last year and divided those funds among the 12 players on each of the 65 teams, each player would go home with $670,000 dollars for their work during the month of March. This doesn’t include the money earned from ticket sales, concessions, merchandising and regular season games. Given that a nice scholarship nets the athlete roughly $50,000 dollars per year, it’s not hard to see why the NCAA creates a long list of regulations to keep the families of college athletes away from the money pot. So, while little “Tyrone” is earning millions to feed the children of his coach, his own mother is at home wondering how she will pay the rent. If Tyrone earns money from his own image or requests payment for his labor like the rest of us, he loses his scholarship. Given that our nation loves to vilify China for its lack of human and labor rights, it’s amazing that we’ve decided that the families of college athletes should have almost no rights at all.

Some would say the NCAA is a sham. Some would say it is a billion dollar sweatshop. Personally, I would say that the NCAA represents unregulated capitalism at its finest, since we are getting the chance to see what a lack of government intervention can do to an industry. The NCAA has sold its academic soul, and so have many of our campuses.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the initiator of the National Conversation on Race. For more information, please visit BoyceWatkins.com>