With this being the last full week of classes of the 2013-14 academic year, I want to bring attention one last time to a heated discussion that surfaced again in the wake of March Madness: Should college athletes get paid?
The culmination of every basketball and football season seems to awaken this sleeping giant, which has once again claimed the stage.
Last week, a National Labor Relations Board official in Chicago made an important decision to characterize Northwestern University’s scholarship football players as employees.
There is a remedy to this plaguing problem, but this classification is not one of them. The ruling currently only applies to private universities, but it’s the wrong type of thinking and could leak into large public universities across the country.
Student athletes have been searching for a way to fight back, and unionization is the first step toward exposing the hypocrisy of how the NCAA does business, but it’s still not the right way. Hopefully the action from students will force the NCAA to acknowledge some of its wrongdoings and work on changing certain regulations regarding student athletes without forcing the students to officially unionize.
Student athletes need increased academic support, improved student-athlete healthcare and enhanced athletic scholarships to cover the full cost of attendance at their respective institutions. Power conferences throughout the country have been pushing the NCAA to act on some of these issues, according to Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott, and lawsuits are continuing to surface and expose the shortcomings of NCAA regulations.
Among the most controversial issues is the awarding of scholarships based on performance, coach or the health of the athlete. Another problem is that the NCAA limits “countable athletically related activities” to 20 hours per week, but the recent labor case for Northwestern found athletes spending up to 50 hours per week.
The NCAA doesn’t count travel, mandatory meetings, medical check-ins, training-tape reviews and “voluntary” weight training, falsely reducing the official number of hours. Increasing attention will lead to continued exposure of the NCAA’s regulations and will risk serious action by proactive students.
The core of the problem is deciding what to do with the increasing revenues generated by the popularity of college sports such as football and basketball. The decision by the NLRB is the equivalent of a small surrender by characterizing students as employees. This could reduce the resources for other sports, primarily women’s sports, if students who play revenue-generating sports unionize and demand compensation.
In a great number of universities, revenue from basketball and football supports the rest of the athletic department. Siphoning more money generated by football and basketball back into football and basketball would exterminate other sports’ budgets.
“The challenge collegiate sports faces in an era of expanding popularity is … to ensure that the paramount role of ‘student’ in ‘student-athlete’ is not obscured,” Scott said.
Unfortunately, that role has diminished as some student-athlete graduation rates have plummeted.
Florida State University graduated less than half of its football players compared with a 75 percent overall graduation rate, and University of Connecticut had a graduation rate of zero for men’s basketball players, according to USA Today. Not all graduation rates are as glaringly poor as the two highlighted, but they make a point.
The football players had a right to take action against the NCAA because of the poor regulations inside the hypocritical organization, but hopefully it stops there.
Northwestern was simply the first to formally stand up, but if the NCAA issues continue to go unnoticed, more student athletes will fight back. Student athletes should continue to be unpaid, but they need better treatment from the NCAA, and classifying them as employees is not a step in the right direction.
