Juneteenth commemorates the news Union soldiers delivered to enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas, of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed them two and a half years later. But if you think that was belated, what do you make of it taking another 156 years for the US Supreme Court to tell colleges they can’t treat student-athletes like indentured servants?
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously affirmed a ruling Monday that provides for an incremental increase in how college athletes can be compensated and also opens the door for future legal challenges that could deal a much more significant blow to the NCAA’s current business model.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the court’s opinion, which upheld a district court judge’s decision that the NCAA was violating antitrust law by placing limits on the education-related benefits that schools can provide to athletes. The decision allows schools to provide their athletes with unlimited compensation as long as it is some way connected to their education.
(ESPN, June 21, 2021)
When you think of sweatshops, you probably think of child labor in factories across Asia, where Nike and other Western companies manufacture their expensive athletic shoes.
Bu
t sweatshops abound on football fields across America, where colleges exploit mostly poor and uneducated players to generate billions. This, in exchange for an educational degree that, for 99.9 percent of them, is not even worth the paper it’s written on.
For those of us who have been championing this cause for years, today’s Court ruling is not only too belated, but too piecemeal. Ironically, here, courtesy of CNN, is how no less a person than Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the Court’s most conservative justices, vented our frustration in a concurrent opinion:
Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate. … And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.
In other words, it still reeks of market adhesion for a college to use students to generate millions and think it’s treating those students fairly because it pays for their computers, tutoring, and other student-related expenses.
Yet nothing betrays the bad faith of colleges in this respect quite like the millions it pays college coaches. And, again, I’ve been decrying this for years in commentaries like
- “Reggie Bush Forfeits Heisman Trophy,” September 16, 2010;
- “Student-Athletes Make Billions (for Colleges) but Most Graduate Poor … and Dumb,” January 16, 2014;
- “Cardale Jones, Ohio’s Superstar QB, Shows Why Colleges Should Pay Student-Athletes,” March 4, 2016; and
- “Salaries of College Coaches Reflect Enduring Master-Slave Relationships,” October 28, 2016.
I also covered this topic rather comprehensively in a recent podcast episode titled, “End Indentured Servitude. Pay College Athletes.” January 16, 2021. But members of the Supreme Court could have spared their clerks a lot of research, and themselves a lot of deliberation, if they had simply read the following excerpt from “Salaries of College Coaches Reflect Enduring Master-Slave Relationships,” October 28, 2016:
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I can’t imagine any student-athlete reading the following without feeling like an indentured servant having salt slathered in open wounds:
Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh is making $9 million this year, overtaking Alabama coach Nick Saban at $6.9 million…
Rounding out the top five are Ohio State’s Urban Meyer at $6 million, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops at $5.5 million and Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher at $5.25 million…
Thirty-six FBS coaches are earning at least $3 million this year, up from just nine in 2011.
(ESPN Sports, October 27, 2016)
I’ve been decrying this injustice for years in such commentaries as “The Categorical Imperative to Pay Student-Athletes Just Got Stronger,” March 28, 2014. These salaries only validate my longstanding contention that college coaches are using the free labor of student-athletes to live like plantation owners. The only precedent for this is the Founding Framers, many of whom were in fact plantation owners, preaching about all men being created equal while owning slaves.
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There’s nothing amateur about college football. It’s a multibillion-dollar business for Christ’s sake!
More to the point, the people generating its revenues are not the university presidents, athletics directors, or coaches who, incidentally, make millions of dollars in salary and endorsement deals. Instead, they are the poor, mostly black athletes whose raw talent colleges exploit to pack 100,000 fans into their stadiums on game day.
I have always felt that it’s tantamount to modern-day slavery for colleges to recruit poor and, all too often, uneducated athletes just to play Football and not compensate them for their services, especially considering they rarely get an education.
But this indentured servitude is made much worse by branding these poor players – who generate tens of millions for their respective universities – as cheaters for accepting a little cash on the side. Mind you, those offering the cash are often boosters just trying to make life easier for players to enable them to perform better. Not to mention that, if the NCAA were to penalize all college players who accept such gifts, there would be no college football (or basketball) worth watching.
The hypocrisy inherent in this exploitation is beyond shameful.
Colleges should compensate student-athletes in direct proportion to the way NFL teams compensate their players. They could then reallocate the scholarship money they spend recruiting jocks to fund financial aid for poor (black) students who aspire to be more than professional athletes.
(“Reggie Bush Forfeits Heisman Trophy,” The iPINIONS Journal, September 16, 2010)
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And so, alas, the fight continues – until student-athletes are compensated accordingly. Because, as I argued in “In First Step Act, NCAA Emancipates Student-Athletes” October 30, 2019, even with today’s ruling, student-athletes are still little more than the modern-day equivalent of emancipated slaves still shackled by Jim-Crow laws. This, because the NCAA can still place too many restrictions on the ability of student-athletes to get a fair share of the revenues their labors generate.
In the meantime, student-athletes would be wise to extract as much extra-curricular compensation as possible from any college they attend. But states like California – that allow students to also profit from their likeness (viz endorsements) – are bound to attract the best athletes.
In any event, I cannot overstate that college sports is not about education. It’s a friggin’ multibillion-dollar racket!
Related commentaries:
podcast …indentured servitude… first step act…