Somewhere on the hard drive of one of my old, now inaccessible laptops is an Excel file with the 2012 US Senate breakdown. It was explained, among other things, where they went to college and how they could vote on proposed legislation to end the tuition exemption for big-time football and basketball.
I created a spreadsheet as part of a plan to assess the possibilities of what I considered to be a possible, if not impossible, outcome of the current turmoil in college athletics, during another troubled time that included not only the ever-increasing trades and regular recruiting scandals but also the child abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse. In an Within Higher Ed headline in January 2012, I predicted,
“A few universities, tired of being constrained in their ambitions and spending by the wealthiest members of this organization, could create a few ‘senior conferences,’ create their own national football playoff system, and perhaps eliminate the NCAA and create their own basketball tournament, destroying the NCAA’s gold-rich assets.”
At the time, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference had only 12 members, the NCAA had not yet revamped its governing structure to give more freedom to what were known as the “Power Five” conferences, and we did not yet have a college football league.
But after covering college athletics since 1986, I had seen money and power become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and I dismissed the situation at hand:
“It’s 2013, and after a period of calm, the conference will resume in earnest again. This time, four superconferences of 16 teams each are emerging, and the leagues, frustrated by the restrictions imposed by the NCAA regarding football courses and the length of the season, create their own playoff schedule that … excludes all the others.
“Even at that stage—short of a complete withdrawal from the NCAA—more than a dozen senators from many states in the West and Northeast that do not have universities in one of the four conferences are very upset and have raised calls…
I have not yet seen that some members of the parliament are angry. (This is where my long-lost spreadsheet came in.)
“Although the list of those institutions included and excluded from such a large conference program is always open to debate, it is not difficult to imagine a US Senator with roots in South Texas who is upset about the University of Houston and Baylor University being left behind, or a California Senator who is not happy about many members of the University of California system being left in the dust by Berkeley and UCLA in North Carolina and the North Carolina System. State). It is also possible that a university like Rutgers or the University of Connecticut could be left out of the conference mix, giving the chiefs of New Jersey and Connecticut reason to be angry.”
This image could be strengthened, I put it, “if greed were to go further, superconference members thinking about their basketball championships and putting billions of dollars from the existing NCAA tournament that flow to the organization’s 1,000-plus members at risk.”
At that time, I argued, “an army of Congressmen and women whose colleges and universities saw their financial and athletic futures threatened would grow to include all the lawmakers who represented historically black institutions (as they would all be left behind) and colleges that almost ignored football but had high-octane basketball programs, like Georgetown, Gonzaga and Villanova.”
I concluded, “In a reorganized college sports world where the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ are clearly and legally separated, it’s not easy to imagine a group of angry members of Congress looking much different than they have historically on the question of whether big-time sports is really a neophyte business that warrants being taxed like education.
“And the answer is ‘No’ to that question—forcing colleges to pay taxes on sports revenue, market athlete salaries and workers’ compensation, etc.—would really change college sports in a way that nothing else can do now.”
In other words, I was envisioning—and, I can admit now, secretly hoping for—legislation that would burn down the collapsing structure of college sports and force a bunch of selfish universities to turn their backs on their peers to use what they actually built: a bunch of professional teams.
The situation right now isn’t exactly what I saw 14 years ago, but the political climate surrounding big-time college sports is in the news now, and the complex analysis makes my spreadsheet look like a 5-year-old’s.
This one involves the Protect College Sports Act, which is a mirror image of the legislation I’ve seen. The bipartisan bill is a deliberate attempt and in some ways considered to do what may be impossible: “fix” college sports in a way that satisfies colleges, athletes and fans alike.
Smart commentators like Michael McCann and Kyle Saunders (a Colorado State political scientist and Substack writer whose name keeps popping up in my columns for a reason—he’s thoughtful and good on a lot of topics) have examined the law and its prospects more deeply than I have.
My summary is that although the law can do a lot of things that can alleviate the chaos and strengthen the rights of the athletes, it is still the preferred answer of the NCAA to use the antitrust rules to maintain its performance; prevent many if not most federal, state and local legal challenges; and do what colleges themselves have been unwilling to do: rein in unbridled spending and protect the eligibility of sports other than football and basketball.
(It also fails to address the important question of whether high-level football and basketball players are employees, which, to me, as a rule, they clearly are. And it is almost silent on the fact that payments to players for their names, images and likenesses, which I wholeheartedly support, have increased the extent to which the college supports athletics, such as women and the federal etaquit.)
The law is designed to do one more thing: stop, or at least slow, the steady (and inevitable) consolidation of money and power that I described at the beginning of this column. For decades, about half of the 120 to 140 universities that play football at the sport’s highest level (once called Division IA and now the Football Bowl Subdivision) have sought different ways to keep more of themselves and separate themselves from their lesser peers.
They did this by abandoning long-term integrity to join absurd conferences spanning 3,000 miles and consolidating their voting power in the NCAA to pass rules that favor others (or ban unfair ones), among other tactics. And to get what they want, over the decades those 50 to 75 schools have eliminated their biggest threat: that they might one day take their football away, disband the incredibly successful NCAA basketball championships and leave the other 1,200 NCAA members to fend for themselves without billions in television revenue.
The decision of a few greedy universities to give up everything else in search of more wealth, to me, would force a thought: the recognition of football and basketball as commercial enterprises, with paid employees, tax-free funds and all that comes with that, including unionization and workers’ compensation. I suspect the house of cards will fall.
I have been quietly seeking such an outcome, because I believe that big-time college football and basketball have long been too many professional enterprises that still pretend to function as higher education. The huge sums of money that a few institutions invest in those programs (especially football) are becoming increasingly unmanageable as player salaries rise, resulting in fewer funds for women’s and Olympic sports programs that have long been (somewhat) supported by football and basketball funds.
That is to say nothing of the ethical, academic and other compromises that many people (including many professors) turn a blind eye to as they focus their campus groups. (My age is The Chronicle again Within Higher Ed—including stories like the football corruption scandal that tore apart Southern Methodist University, the battle of wills between Jerry Tarkanian and Robert Maxson over who had more power at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and the growing evidence that many athletes in football, men’s basketball and other sports at the NCAA’s highest levels have not been able to get a real education—my man forever.
But I know I’m not good at eliminating decay, which is why efforts like the Protect College Sports Act want to try to wallpaper over the decay.
The complex scorecard that Saunders and co-author Darren Heitner regularly update to predict the bill’s chances of passing the Senate (and their weekly analysis of the latest developments) basically shows that the majority of higher education and sports leaders support the legislation because it may be their last, best hope to keep college sports intact.
The biggest rivals so far have been the two big league conferences, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. The position of these two leagues seems to be based mainly on giving carte blanche protection from federal and state antitrust claims and a number of other changes that would strengthen their hand.
To the extent that I want the federal effort to fail, it is not because I support the Big Ten and the SEC or share their goals. It’s because I’m confident, based on past performance, that they’ve left in their machines, that their thirst for more—more television money, more control—will lead them to prioritize their interests to the point where they end up killing the golden goose.
That will be bad for college athletics and higher education in the long run, but it may be the only way to ultimately get us to where a very small number of colleges openly play football and basketball (maybe baseball and hockey) and other athletic programs that complement education and give young people a chance for a better future.
