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**DECEMBER 8, 2023**
On the Prospect website
On Drug Prices, Biden Opts for Talk Over Action
The administration says it has the ability to employ march-in rights to
lower drug prices. When will it actually use them? BY DAVID DAYEN
The Life-and-Death Cost of Conservative Power
New research shows widening gaps between red and blue states in life
expectancy. BY PAUL STARR
What Good Were the Video Game Console Wars?
Our
writing fellow pines for times when the video game industry wasn't so
consolidated and littered with junk fees galore. BY JAROD FACUNDO
A Gaming Company's Workers Unionized. But the Union Busting Didn't
End There.
TCGplayer, a subsidiary of eBay, has stalled negotiations on a first
contract, despite the union winning an election in March. BY RAMENDA
CYRUS
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Farce of Big-Time College Sports
One more face of the creeping commercialism of higher education
This week, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, bowed to the
inevitable and proposed that Division I teams compensate their "student"
athletes
to the tune of at least $30,000 a year. As college sports have become
ever more commercialized, Baker didn't have much choice.
The top 22 Division I schools make over $150 million a year
in sports revenue. Coaches can make more than $10 million a year. Texas
A&M is paying its fired football coach, Jimbo Fisher, $75 million in a
contract buyout. Until recently, the only people left out of this
bonanza were the players.
The NCAA hoped that Baker could get an antitrust exemption from
Congress, on the model of the one enjoyed by Major League Baseball. But
there is little support for that.
The courts are also unfriendly to the NCAA's view. Pending litigation
would grant college players employee status, allow them to unionize, and
give them back pay for branding deals (known as "name, image, and
likeness," or NIL) made by universities trading on the appeal of the
players.
The hostility to the one-sided commercialism of college sports cuts
across the usual ideological lines. In the 2021 case of NCAA v. Alston
, a
unanimous Supreme Court struck down the NCAA's attempt to have
colleges collude on what level of scholarships they offered players, to
hold down the cost of bidding wars. In an invitation for more lawsuits,
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a scathing concurring 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 ... [I]t is not
evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not
above the law.
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As student athletes are finally in line to get their share of this
massive windfall, many commentators have taken this as a victory for
fairness
.
I'm not so sure. The entire premise that these players are students is
a sham. They are obligated to spend 30 to 40 hours a week on their sport
and encouraged to take the lightest possible academic load.
For the top sports universities, thanks to TV and endorsement revenues,
athletics is a big profit center. But one level down, other universities
that try to compete lose a fortune that would be better spent on
academics.
Ohio State booked $252 million in sports revenue last year, while nearby
Ohio University competed for the same championships on just over $29
million in revenue. UConn, famed for women's basketball, spends $82.3
million on athletics, but $40 million of that is a subsidy
from the university's general budget.
Meanwhile, the NFL is spared the expense of needing a minor league farm
system. College football does it for them-for free.
It would be far better to abandon the pretense that players at Division
I schools are bona fide students. The NFL could adopt and help finance
"university" teams, players could wear their colors, and fans could
continue to root for good old Ohio State or good old Texas. Other
colleges, lower on the food chain, could opt for a genuine student
sports program without bankrupting the college in the process.
In 2009, Northeastern University in Boston dropped its 74-year-old
football program. Since then, the university has become one of the most
popular schools, rising in the
**U.S. News** rankings from 96th to 40th.
Oberlin, where I went, set the all-time record for the most consecutive
losses of a college football team (44). The college didn't go broke
bidding for high school athletes and there was no TV revenue. I still
got a pretty good education.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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