The NCAA took a major step this week toward loosening restrictions designed to protect college athletes’ so-called amateur status. It’s time for the authorities governing college sports to recognize that there’s nothing amateur about the exploitative, multibillion-dollar industry they oversee at athletes’ expense. Coaches rank far higher than university chancellors on the pay scale. Athletic divisions operate like major corporate enterprises. Everyone is raking in the cash — everyone, that is, but the athletes who make this entire money machine work.
In an ideal world, of course, college sports should remain purely amateur, just like it was back in the 1950s and ’60s. But those days are gone. Once the television networks and sports apparel and paraphernalia companies got involved, universities across the country recognized that their athletes were the ticket to financial good times. Salaries went up commensurately. Coaches, in particular, were able to demand top-dollar salaries that rivaled the incomes of major professional sports figures and movie stars.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Council, which advises the board of directors, on Monday recommended a suspension of the rules that prevented college athletes from profiting off their names, signatures, images and likenesses. If the relaxed rules go into effect, college athletes would no longer have to honor a virtual vow of poverty. No longer would they have to take all of the physical risks involved with meeting the demands of college athletics, knowing that an injury could bring a sudden end to their career prospects, and not earning a dime in the process while everyone else around them pockets boatloads of money.
The athletes would technically remain amateurs because they wouldn’t receive direct payment for their performance on the field. But they would be able to sign deals for personal logos and clothing lines, just like the pros do. They could produce and sell posters and videos, and potentially do endorsement deals.
NCAA officials aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They have resisted calls for years to relax the rules. But on June 22, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling overturning the NCAA’s long-standing prohibition against colleges furnishing student-athletes with anything more than a basic scholarship in exchange for what they do.
"Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing to not pay their workers a fair market rate on their theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion.
The ability of college athletes to market themselves and their personal brands offers at least a chance that they can share in the largesse that, until now, was the exclusive domain of an industry designed more to exploit them than help them.
