For over 100 years, the NCAA and the member colleges that comprise it have successfully presented their product as an amateur alternative to professional sports.
That concept is being seriously challenged for the first time and the assault is coming, oddly enough, from within staged by the very people who make college athletics possible. The athletes, who have been largely muted in the past, are finding their voices and rising up against their overlords in a number of ways. We’ve talked previously about the class action lawsuit filed last year by former UCLA men’s basketball star Ed O’Bannon and others, charging that the NCAA and its corporate sponsors have used the likenesses of current and former players to sell video games, t-shirts and the like without compensation.
In late January, Kain Colter, a former quarterback at Northwestern, met with officials from the National Labor Relations Board. His goal: The formation of the first labor union for college athletes. With assistance from the United Steelworkers, the College Athletes Players Association would seek to insure financial coverage for sports-incurred medical expenses, insuring that independent concussions experts are on hand and establishing a trust fund to help former students graduate.
The latest salvo against the NCAA came last week when a former West Virginia football player sued the organization and five major conferences, alleging anti-trust violations. Former running back Shawne Alston, who played from 2009 to 2012, claims that for 57 years, the NCAA has placed a cap on the value of scholarships and reinforced that cap by taking out a stipend that bridged the cost of attendance in 1973.
Effectively, Alston maintains, those caps dramatically lessen the value of a scholarship below the actual cost of attending school and far below what a scholarship would be worth on the open market.
Alston’s suit gets to the heart of a fallacy that has permeated college sports for years. That is, that an athletic scholarship provides a full ride to the player receiving it and that said scholarship is for four years.
The truth is that there are gaps in what scholarships offer, and Alston said in his suit that he had to take out a loan to cover that gap. In addition, scholarships are one-year and renewable at the pleasure of the school, or more to the point, the coach, meaning a student-athlete that does not perform to expectations, can be terminated from that scholarship for academic or athletic reasons, though you would be hard pressed to find an All-American who was cut loose for poor grades.
Though Alston has sued the NCAA, he has also named the five biggest conferences, the Atlantic Coast, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-12 and Southeastern, as co-defendants, because, in truth, that’s where the money is in college sports. Those five big conferences are actually lobbying hard for a change in the structure of college sports so that they can address some of these very issues. That freedom may eventually lead to a system where the athletes at those schools, the best of the best in theory, would essentially be paid for their time and effort.
Given the billions that flow to those schools, it would be hard to argue against it.