[Peter Ohr, the regional NLRB director,] ruled that Northwestern’s scholarship football players should be eligible to form a union based on a number of factors, including the time they devote to football (as many as 50 hours some weeks), the control exerted by coaches and their scholarships, which Mr. Ohr deemed a contract for compensation.The decision started a firestorm of debate.
“It cannot be said that the employer’s scholarship players are ‘primarily students,’ ” the decision said.
A common sentiment is that NCAA players have an easy ride and that they don't deserve monetary compensation or unionization. The NCAA sells a fiction that amateur "student athletes" should play for the love of the game while delivering professional levels of performance. Meanwhile, their "non-profit" monopoly pays no taxes on the tens of billions of dollars it hauls in TV contracts and licensing fees. The NCAA's president Jack Emmert makes almost $2 million annually. In 2012 66 NCAA Division I football coaches made more than $1 million (13 made more than $3 million, with a top salary of $5.47 million). In 40 states the highest-paid public employee is a football coach.
Why do so many highly paid individuals insist that the players who do all the real work get nothing for their efforts? And just how easy do these players have it?
For 20 years I've had a peripheral connection to NCAA women's volleyball, and I've seen firsthand the demands of an NCAA sport. For the most part, volleyball players are like regular college students: most of them have real majors (nursing, engineering, speech pathology, etc.), though some have typical "sports" majors like sports marketing, communications or kinesiology. Unlike football and basketball players, most volleyball players have no false expectations of a professional sports career. They therefore take their classes seriously and most get decent grades despite having real majors.
So, the NCAA's fairy tale about student athletes might be true for volleyball, and many other "minor" NCAA sports like wrestling, track and field, soccer, gymnastics, softball, swimming, and so on. But it's a joke when it comes to the "major" sports.
NCAA football and basketball programs are notorious for phony majors, phony classes, grade rigging, "tutoring" and outright cheating. This is because the only reason these players are enrolled in college is to play sports; the degree is just annoying requirement that keeps getting in the way. In basketball this is completely obvious, with many kids ditching college after a year or two to go pro, or jumping into the NBA directly from high school.
What's it like to play an NCAA sport? College athletes have very little control over their lives for four full years -- often five years for redshirts. Their entire lives revolve around training, practices, travel and matches. The NCAA and coaches step directly into the personal lives of recruits and players, often while they're still in middle school. The NCAA imposes restrictions on who athletes can associate with and how they can interact. Coaches monitor players' Facebook and Twitter accounts. At many colleges players can't even choose what they eat: their diet is dictated by the coaching staff, sometimes all year round. Coaches dictate what time players get up, when they go to bed, how much they should weigh, how fast they should run, how much they should be able to lift, and literally how high they should jump.
Many football players are told to put on weight simply to increase their inertia so that when they tackle opponents they do more damage. The amount of lean muscle you can gain quickly is extremely limited, which means many players are encouraged to pack on the pounds in fat. This kind of weight gain is not easily shed after a football career is over, and has serious consequences for long-term health.
Players are subjected to hazardous training and practice regimes that push their endurance and strength to the limit. Injuries are expected: sprained ankles, broken wrists and fingers, torn rotator cuffs and ripped ACLs are common in volleyball; football players suffer those and far worse injuries, including frequent concussions and spinal injuries. Worse, players are expected to continue playing while injured. Many injured players lose their scholarships. Over a five-year period ending in 2009 NCAA football players suffered 318 ACL tears. That means every weekend four or five NCAA football players were out for at least the season, and for many their careers are ended.
These injuries stay with the players, often causing pain and disability for the rest of their lives. Football players in their 20s and 30s have the arthritic knees of a 70-year-old. Some football players have hidden injuries that could suddenly paralyze them if they get hit the wrong way. Some volleyball players and baseball pitchers can barely lift their arms above their heads. And many football and hockey players suffer brain trauma that can cause debilitating cognitive diseases later in life.
Then there are the coaches. Some of them are are great guys, but too many of them are thugs and crooks. Coaches regularly assault players without repercussions.
So, yes: playing an NCAA sport isn't a job. It's four years of boot camp.
Those who are argue that NCAA athletes aren't employees note that they don't receive monetary compensation. They do, however, receive college tuition, room and board. For some schools this can be worth several hundred thousand dollars over the course of a four-year career. Most NCAA programs also have non-scholarship players, called walk-ons, who don't get their tuition paid but who go through all the same rigors of training as the rest of the team.
All players receive training, coaching and medical care, the exact value of which is difficult to calculate: a small percentage of players go on to professional careers in major league football, baseball or basketball where they can make millions of dollars a year. Even in the case of volleyball, there are European and Asian leagues that pay anywhere from a few thousand to a million dollars a season, or lead to a handful of spots on the national team, which could mean a medal at the Olympics.
But the vast majority of NCAA athletes will have no career in professional sports. There are far more college players than there are positions in professional leagues and national teams.
If, despite the compensation that athletes receive, they aren't employees, what are they? Dedicated amateurs? Well-trained volunteers? Indentured servants? Slaves?
NCAA sports is a multibillion dollar industry that pumps up the profits of television networks like CBS and Fox, cable companies like Comcast, satellite TV companies like Dish Network, apparel and shoe companies like Nike and Reebok, sports equipment companies like Wilson and Spalding, bookmakers and betting parlors in Las Vegas. A hel of a lot of money is made off the blood, sweat and tears of these kids.
NCAA conferences are essentially farm teams for the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB. A very good argument could be made for spinning them out of colleges into local semi-pro club teams, which is how it's done in Europe. Club teams are already where the real action is in many high-school sports. But the thought of all that money drying up makes administrators at Division I schools heartsick.
The best thing that could come from the NLRB decision would be medical pensions for all NCAA players (including walkons) -- the NCAA's cost of business shouldn't be offloaded onto our already overburdened health care system. Too many athletes are stuck with huge medical bills ten years down the road for injuries they suffered playing in games the NCAA got paid billions in broadcast rights for.
A minimum standard of professionalism for coaching staff should also be guaranteed, to protect players from abusive coaches.
The American system of collegiate sports makes no sense whatsoever: college is where you should go for an degree in economics, medicine or engineering, not train for the NFL. But this is the system we're stuck with; the NCAA should do right by the kids who are making them bucketloads of money.
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