The latest buzz-phrase is "full-cost scholarship," meaning money over and above the "sticker price" of a college education, purported to be money for clothing, transportation extra course fees and other essentials. A full NCAA scholarship (and the scholarships in men’s basketball and football, the main sports under discussion, are required to be) covers tuition and fees, room and board and course-required books. Some other expenses, course fees, parking permits, student IDs, transportation and clothing are not covered.
But as you’ll see below, many of those incidentals — and more — are met through other means of funding already available to student-athletes.
Most of us, if we’re honest, are of two minds on this. We see the huge revenues generated by college sports, we see schools selling players’ jerseys and the NCAA selling their likenesses (whatever they want to say) for video games and cashing in, while the players who are doing the work get nothing for it above what other athletes get (athletes who do not generate that kind of money for the universities and in fact whose very scholarships are paid for by the funds generated by those revenues) and we see unfairness.
Particularly in commercial ventures like video games and merchandise sales, I have written about it. The obvious solution, for the NCAA and college sports in general not to give in to commercialization and commoditize their athletes, has long since left the station.
My big problem in all this is that the NCAA and its coaches are preaching to players to forgo the money when they themselves do nothing but scratch and claw for every red cent they can collect on the backs of these players who must take vows of (for some) poverty.
But I have just as big a problem with the notion of schools themselves paying players, or the NCAA codifying and sanctioning such a thing. As I’ll demonstrate here, there are too many logistical hurdles and too many ramifications for college sports for that to be enacted.
The reason this is coming to the forefront again now is clear from a glance at the Sports pages. Football players at Ohio State trading school memorabilia for tattoos and other items. Cam Newton’s father shopping him to colleges. Football players at North Carolina talking about the influence agents have in the game.
The reasoning is that if players had enough money in college, some of those issues would go away. It is a naive notion. The amounts of money the NCAA is talking about providing to players would in no way be a deterrent to the kinds of players it is trying to target (unless it wants to make sports cars a provision of the "full-cost scholarship.")
There’s big money in college sports. But as I’ll demonstrate, the pockets of these athletic programs and the NCAA itself aren’t deep enough to win bidding wars with the forces they’re fighting against.
There is a model that would allow star athletes to receive more compensation that would keep schools from being the sources of that revenue, while also addressing the inequality that comes from marketing these players for money. I’ll also discuss that here.
But first, I want to address this notion of the "full-cost scholarship" and why I think it’s a bad idea for college sports.
1). IT OFTEN IS NOT NECESSARY. The idea that college football and basketball players don’t have enough money to meet necessary expenses right now is false. Many of them live in special housing. They are well fed. And they’re not without spending money.
Flint Harris is a former academic adviser at two SEC schools who now writes the college football blog HolyTurf.com. His report on how much players receive above their tuition, fees and books is the most important piece produced this year on the issue of full-cost scholarships. Read it here. Recently, he demonstrated how football players actually can receive up to $17,000 per year above their basic cost of attendance. Summing up his report, money is already available to players in the form of:
- Pell Grants: Available to many players whose families fall below a certain income level, these are grants of up to $5,500 per year from the government that need not be repaid. Many players take advantage of these.
- Clothing allowance: Flint says if a player qualifies for a Pell Grant, he or she also qualifies for a $500 clothing allowance.
- Room and board. Don’t forget, this is covered in the scholarship, so any assertion that players need more meal money is ridiculous. Many players live on campus and have meal plans, including training tables with far better (and more plentiful) fare than is available to the average student. If they live off campus, they’re given the equivalent of what the on-campus housing would be, plus a monthly check for food money. For anyone who has ever paid on-campus prices, you know that those checks usually exceed what you’ll pay for housing or food off campus, so players are left with extra cash there. At Arkansas, for instance, Flint says players got $8,024 per year for room and board if they lived off campus. He said that the nicest apartment complex near campus cost $480 per month per person.
But there’s more money available:
- Special funds set up through NCAA bylaws to assist players who need money. Again, from Flint:
According to Bylaw 15.01.6.2 in the NCAA Manual, each athletic department can use the student-athlete opportunity fund money for anything but financing salaries, scholarships (though paying for summer school is allowed, but a football player’s scholarship covers summer school), capital improvements, stipends, and outside athletic development. The NCAA gives each school a chunk of money each year…roughly $200,000 to help student-athletes out with whatever needs they may have deemed fit by the senior staff member in the athletic department in charge of the money. This money is not just for football, but the entire athletic department. Regardless, if a football player needs money to pay for gas, more new clothes, or a plane ride home, they can legally get money for that.And that’s not all. He continues:
Football players also have access to a special assistance fund too. According to NCAA bylaw 16.12.2, money from the special assistance fund may be requested as additional financial aid (with no obligation to repay such aid) for special financial needs for student-athletes. I know one school used this fund to fly their basketball players home for the Christmas break. Completely within NCAA rules.- Free meals. And finally, he says players are allowed an occasional meal provided by boosters.
By his estimate, a typical non-freshman player at Arkansas received a little more than $17,000 above tuition, fees and course books. And this is standard practice.
The players are not hurting for essentials.
2). MOST SCHOOLS CANNOT AFFORD IT. By NCAA estimate, only 22 athletic departments in the Football Bowl Subdivision are operating without subsidy from their universities. Everyone looks at the big numbers being talked about in college sports — the NCAA’s contract from the men’s basketball tournament or the BCS bowl payouts — and assumes athletic departments are awash in cash. But while it’s true that they are spending like never before, they are not doing it independent of aid from their universities, most of whom are enacting budget cuts on the academic side.
There are entities getting rich off college sports, but they are not the schools themselves. To add the kind of number that is being talked about — $3,000 per student in the so-called "head-count" sports of football, men’s and women’s basketball and women’s gymnastics, women’s tennis and women’s volleyball — you’re talking about just under a half-million dollars per school — not counting the inevitable added bureaucratic costs of implementing the program. (The actual amount would vary by school, but this is a ballpark figure.)
To try to make this expense more palatable, those pushing the notion of the full-cost scholarship say it would not be mandatory. Of course, that would make the playing field even less level than it already is (a point I’ll discuss later.)
The next great crisis facing college sports isn’t the nickel-and-dime shenanigans of athletes being shopped to schools or selling bowl rings to get money, but the mega-millions being spent by the richest athletic programs, and the risky strategies being undertaken by those schools trying to keep up with them. We really don’t know yet about the long-term reliability of ventures like the Big Ten Network or whether the big-money being paid for college sports broadcasting rights is here to stay, or a function of temporary market forces. If the television business tells us anything, it’s that few things stay on top forever, and while sports have stood the test of time by and large, if the NCAA and its membership tinker too much with the college game they could puncture their own media rights balloon. Certainly, flirting with public disillusionment by creating an institutional lack of competition is one such way they could do such a thing.
Regardless, some say that the added expense on these few sports, particularly the moneymakers of men’s basketball and football, is fine, that the needed money can come from other sports that don’t carry their own financial weight. My question is, what sports? Where are you going to get a half-million in savings? Baseball is the obvious choice, but why go after one of your more popular sports? And women’s sports? That brings up another issue:
3). TITLE IX. IT’S THE LAW, REMEMBER. Even if you talk about just instituting full-cost scholarships for the head-count sports, you’re still offering 98 men those enhanced full rides, but only 51 women. Balancing gender equity already is a tenuous situation, but most schools overcome that imbalance in numbers by funding more women’s sports than they do men’s. This arrangement, however — a straight-up extra benefit for twice as many men as women — would not stand any serious legal test.
Title IX isn’t some kind of charity program. It’s a law that says if your school takes Federal money for any purpose, it will adhere to practices that guarantee equal opportunity for female students (athletes) with regard to proportionality in scholarships and equity in facilities and funding and other areas.
Despite all the other reasons for universities not to go down this road of paying athletes themselves, this is the most important. The practice would not stand even the first civil rights legal challenge from female athletes, a challenge, by the way, that should be brought the day it is enacted, unless the full-cost scholarship were offered to every athlete on campus — and that’s something few schools are in position to do financially.
4). THE LEGAL FINE PRINT: The full cost of attendance is a legal term and is an accepted part of life on the academic side of campus. (As of Oct. 29 of this year, Federal law will require every U.S. university that receives Federal aid to post its full-cost of attendance figure publicly.) Any legal challenges to universities on the grounds that giving such an enhanced scholarship to athletes makes players employees likely could be sidestepped because of this, and because the additional funds to athletes would be handled through the school’s financial aid offices and treated as scholarship funds.
The legal challenge would come if the NCAA were to allow a situation where some schools awarded these full-cost scholarships and some did not — with the only determining factor being the school’s ability to pay for them. In such a system, the NCAA would be acknowledging that such full-cost scholarships are not essential for student athletes, and opening the door to questions and perhaps legal challenges over whether it is an extra benefit and, in fact, amounts to pay legally in some sense.
In other words, the NCAA could have a problem arguing legally if that this is a necessary step if it doesn’t require all schools to take it. And it can’t require all schools to take it, because most simply can’t afford the expense.
In general, I’d say that the courts have been extremely (if not totally) reluctant to tell the NCAA how to conduct such business. But the climate is changing, and the skewing of the playing field has drawn the attention of a group you don’t want breathing down your neck, which is the subject of my next point . . .
5). THE EDGE OF THE ENVELOPE: Hanging over all of this is the tenuous assumption that university athletic departments do what they do as part of an educational mission. State courts have upheld any number of NCAA or school actions in defense of this. But it is under an increasing number of challenges, and the NCAA without question is on the U.S. Department of Justice radar, with any change in status being reviewed heavily.
Essentially, every step the NCAA and its members take now is a step closer to the line that separates educational enterprise from business enterprise, and each step could eventually be the step over it. And once that threshold is crossed, everything changes. Athletic revenue could be considered taxable. Arrangements such as this full-cost scholarship scheme could be challenged as collusion. Now, in this economic environment, with a government in need of revenue and a justice department already inquiring into NCAA antitrust matters, is no time to be pushing that envelope.
So then, is there a solution? Is there a way to compensate players?
There is a way. But it is one the NCAA and its members will resist, because it takes some degree of control out of their hands. Here is the way:If a player’s jersey generates a million dollars in sales in a given year (just a hypothetical number), give him a cut of it. Determine the percentage. Give each player whose likeness is used in a video game (a small percentage of skill players, to be sure) a percentage of the take. Allow players to make money from their notoriety in a limited way. Allow them to make public appearances for money under certain guidelines. Set up a system that allows them to work in the offseason for what the market will give them.
In the case of merchandise and video sales, let the money go into an account to be given to the player if certain educational goals are reached (or perhaps if they complete a certain period of eligibility at the school, say, three years.)
In the case of their own income, it is their own income.
Is it fair that a quarterback at Ohio State might get a high-paying job in the summer while a quarterback somewhere else can’t? No. But life isn’t fair. As long as the job falls within whatever guidelines the NCAA wants, that’s his business.
Great college musicians and computer code writers and performers and those with extraordinary talent do the same things all the time.
You still can’t play for money. And the schools themselves aren’t paying athletes.
This is the only way I can see that allowing compensation to athletes will work, because it is the only way that allows those star players who generate the income to be compensated while leaving the rest of the system in place.
Schools and the NCAA won’t like it because it will allow third parties influence over some players. At least, if a player has a good job making real money in the offseason, there’s a chance he won’t fall prey to agents who can lure him with money for nothing. An extra $3,000 on the top isn’t going to stop most players if they’re inclined to deal with agents.
It’s a thorny issue. And I’m not completely comfortable with letting third parties pay players. But if colleges cross the line of paying players, the game is altered, any sense of parity is gone, and a messy financial situation in college sports will grow a great deal worse in a short time.
Source http://blogs.courier-journal.com/
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