The only shit that’s left behind.
Little known outside the confines of cushy athletic department offices, a trial that has the potential to rock the foundation of college athletics is set to be decided on June 1st. Former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, along with a few other former players, sued the NCAA four years ago for profiting upon their likenesses in a video game. You can’t do that, the plaintiffs argued. And, provided that this is still the capitalistic society I think it is, they were – and are – right. In any event, if the U.S. District Court in northern California thinks they are right, the entire financial edifice of collegiate athletics could come tumbling down.
Without question, the O’Bannon case could fail. It took more than a century for the “reserve system” in MLB to meet its demise. The owners constituted a powerful bloc, and as late as 1970 they managed against all better logic to defeat Curt Flood’s lawsuit challenging MLB’s pre-modern economic model that bound a player to a team – meaning employer – for as long as that team wanted. But in time the system did fall apart; the Flood Case, for all of its short-term failure, was merely a harbinger for things to come. And just like the Flood’s case in 1970, the O’Bannon case in 2013 promises that change, like it or not, is coming: at some point in the probably-not-so-distant future, athletic departments are going to have to cut their student athletes a piece of the billion-dollar pie – or abandon the pie altogether.
The problem for AD’s is that it doesn’t matter how big of a slice that is; any slice at all would be, for them, a disaster. “As soon as you pay someone $2,000,” Charles Pierce explained in a nice Grantland piece a year and a half ago, “you cannot make the argument that it is unethical to pay that person $5,000, or $10,000, or a million bucks a year, for all that. Amateurism is one of those rigid things that cannot bend, only shatter.” Put another way, in order for college athletics to continue as is, the NCAA must keep the split at 100/0. Even a 99/1 ratio spells doom for collegiate amateurism.
There have been scares before, but my suspicion that the O’Bannon case is different finds credibility in the visible panic being shown by NCAA bigwigs. B1G commissioner Jim Delany, as is his melodramatic wont, has gone so far to threaten that any outcome which allows college athletes to benefit from league television revenue would leave the schools – the schools of the Big Ten, at least – no choice but to de-emphasize athletics entirely. Ohio State and others would ”take steps to downsize the scope, breadth and activities of their athletic programs,” he wrote. “Several models exist … such as Division III.”
Delany has garnered considerable attention for his extremist (and obviously bullshit) rhetoric – and along with it, some well-deserved derision. But hidden beneath the idle threat to leave Division I is a very real threat Delany and his ilk are making against all non-major college athletes:
It’s also a way of saying that if funding drops, something tangible – scholarship opportunities and first-class travel and facilities, especially for women – might be lost.
While non-revenue teams could continue playing – providing competition and camaraderie – scholarships may no longer be offered. And travel could be reduced to mostly busing around within the state or region to schools of all sizes rather than jetting across in expansive conferences that were designed to maximize football television revenue, not make sense for soccer or softball.
What Delany and others revealed is that those opportunities and experiences are overpriced, at least to the point Big Ten schools won’t see reasonable value in using general funds to keep them going at current levels.
Delany, so to speak, is holding a gun to the head of women’s soccer and men’s wrestling and all the rest of the vast assortment of college athletics programs that are not men’s basketball and football. He’s saying “if you cut the latter in on the profits, I’ll shoot.” He’s implying, “Ed O’Bannon and his lawsuit imperils all non-major college athletics.” And he’s asking, “what kind of monsters would want to kill the swim team?!?”
Nonsense. This is all misdirection. Ed O’Bannon and his attorneys pose no actual threat to the swimming, gymnastics, or wrestling programs. Only Jim Delany does. Dan Wetzel writes:
The only people who can kill the swim team – or cut scholarships and travel budgets – are some of the very leaders who are writing these legal testimonials.
The University of Michigan, for instance, is a Big Ten member with an endowment of about $8 billion. If it wants a field hockey team, it can most certainly afford one. Cutting football players past and present in on some of the tens of millions that program generates or allowing them to profit off their own likeness or to put a percentage of jersey sales into a trust fund, isn’t going to bankrupt the school. And if Title IX can’t be reworked (and it almost assuredly can), then Michigan would do just that to comply with federal law.
What Delany is saying is that left to its own decision, Michigan won’t see field hockey as worth the money. He’s acknowledging that outside the myopic prism of the athletic department, gold-plated, non-revenue sports don’t make much sense.
Delany is essentially admitting that Denard Robinson pays for swimming because Michigan administrators don’t want to. And why would they? Swimming doesn’t generate much revenue; it doesn’t generate a profit. But of course this is not the reason we should want there to be swimming programs in the first place. Or wrestling programs. Or field hockey programs. Not everything should be about profit.
At the heart of Delany’s argument is the same kind of neoliberal thinking that threatens the merits of modern higher education. And that means, in a weird way, the defenders of college amateurism are not so pre-modern after all. Amateurism is simply the tool they have at their disposal to protect their broader interests, which are very much profit-driven. For if they actually cared about amateurism, they wouldn’t be holding the swim team hostage.
Make no mistake: there are potential solutions that men like Delaney could embrace, at least in the name controlling the fallout that will inevitably come when they finally lose in court. Yet they’re merely doubling down. That’s incredibly short-sighted. It’s also bad – bad for everyone involved, true, but especially for Delany and his ilk. After all, they’re the very people who will lose more from change wrought from without than from reform initiated from within.
Expect change, and expect a hard landing.
