Instead, it is found in one lawsuit filed in California by three star college athletes against the NCAA to prevent them from getting paid for their playing and in another lawsuit filed by several states over the NCAA’s transfer rules ( NCAA).
This follows NCAA President Charlie Baker’s suggestion on Tuesday that he wants to create a new group of the largest, richest and most influential college sports programs that can pay their players. (That morning, I had mentioned the deception of college athletics to NPR host Michel Martin as we wrapped up a conversation on “Morning Edition” about the uproar over whether undefeated Florida State had been wronged. “What’s there to be upset about?” I said. People of it?”, “It’s the fact that the players still won’t share in all the revenue generated by this tournament. That’s… the real problem.”)
And this, my long-standing lament, came on the heels of a remark most of us ignored by Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh to ESPN’s Reese Davis, who was interviewing Harbaugh about his team’s rise to the top seed in the Quad.
“It’s not about one person. It’s not about any coach. It’s about the players,” Harbaugh said. “I like that you’re talking about the players. This is the one everyone comes to see. These are people who put in the work. You hear a lot of debate about who should have been in it [the playoffs] And who shouldn’t be in it. . . . While you’re making these comments, I just hope you also remember that they’re the players, and don’t forget to give them a share of the revenue.
Then analyst Kirk Herbstreit joined the discussion and asked Harbaugh how good his team was a year ago, and Harbaugh’s plea for fair wages for college football’s underpaid workers evaporated into sports gossip.
However, this argument has never been louder and clearer than it is now. It is no longer far-fetched, absurd or impossible. College athletes are about to get their paychecks. There is no escape from this. very soon. I bet (especially since you can do it in college sports so easily and so much more now) by this time next year. It’s also when the college football playoffs expand again — something the game’s gatekeepers once said they’d never agree to until they found themselves unable to turn down bigger and bigger bags of money. The award will go to 12 of the four teams, down from four of two and two of none. It would generate more than three times the spoils that Michigan, Alabama, Washington and Texas would bring this season to crown a champion after two semifinal games and a tournament.
The moneybags are now so full of cash that some courts of law — if not the court of public opinion, evident in Capitol Hill proposals like the College Athletes’ Bill of Rights — will force or shame the masters of college sports into doing so. The ethical and moral thing is by dividing their stuffed pie into slices for the players.
NIL, the much-publicized acronym that allows college athletes to turn their name, image and likeness into money and gifts, has never been a cure for inequality in college sports. However, its promotion has confused many and made them believe just as much. But it’s just a court decision inspired by relief for athletes from the NCAA’s long-burdening control over their fame, which the league has turned into pieces of dough through marketing that has helped make millionaires out of coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners and NCAA superintendents. The movement underway now will force colleges and universities to hand over a share of the spoils they reap from the blood and sweat of these athletes, who are disproportionately black males in football and basketball. Just as professional sports leagues negotiate with their athletes. After all, it has been two generations since there was a clear difference between how the pros thrive and how major college sports operate.
In fact, the Knight Commission, the high-level watchdog for all things college sports, noted this year that within a few years, a 12-team College Football Playoff could generate $2 billion annually, or $1.4 billion more than now, For any major conferences that exist. then. This year, there were five such conferences — Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, Pac-12 and SEC — which included 69 schools. There will be four conferences next season, after the Pac-12 dissolves and absorbs all but two of its members — Oregon State and Washington State — into other conferences.
We should all understand by now that more money is what conference realignment has been aiming for since it has ramped up in the last few years. The Big Ten and the SEC in particular have been preparing for the day when the law says they, at the very least, treat revenue-producing sports athletes like cogs in the college athletics-industrial complex they have become. The SEC, with Texas and Oklahoma State joining forces next year to join Texas A&M, will house seven of the nation’s 10 richest athletic departments. The Big Ten, in major markets from New York to the Pacific Rim, landed a record-for-the-time-TV contract worth $7 billion. Former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren said the plan he sold to CBS was modeled on the $2 billion-a-year NFL Sunday package.
Not sharing this windfall with the players at this point is theft.
The lawsuit filed Thursday by the players, which includes two women as plaintiffs — Stanford football player Nia Harrison and TCU basketball player Sedona Prince — is not alone in the legal process. Two high school basketball stars filed a lawsuit against the NCAA last month to deny them their college eligibility because they took advantage of not having played at a private high school. There, most notably, Johnson v. NCAA, which requires athletes to be considered employees and therefore subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act. There are numerous complaints filed before the National Labor Relations Board demanding the same employment status for Pac-12 athletes and those at the Ivy League’s Dartmouth.
In short, the jig is up. Enjoy bowl season. But don’t miss the burning bush landscape.