Schooled: The Price of College Sports is a must-see documentary for, really, anyone who watches college sports and especially anyone who has an opinion on whether college athletes should get paid. The ongoing debate appears in movies as early as Paramount’s 1932 film Horse Feathers. More and more, people, along with the premise of Schooled, side resoundingly in favor of the athletes.
In Schooled, both sides express their standpoints through interviews with current and former players and also a well-rounded bevy of experts and professionals, including journalists like sports broadcaster Bill Costas, Sports Illustrated and New York Times writers, and administrators like retired NCAA Vice President Wallace Renfro.
The debate over whether college athletes should be paid is all about the Benjamins—frankly, there’s a group of people who have them and are reluctant to give them up. To this end, Schooled rattles off a barrage of statistics to overwhelm you with just how much money is gained by college sporting events, and just how much of the pie athletes are missing out on.
College athletics is quite a stable industry. Annually the NCAA pulls in about $12 billion at a rate of growth that outpaces household name companies like McDonalds and Chevron. For schools, the money comes from ticket sales, donations, television contracts with networks, corporate sponsorship, royalties from licenses, merchandise, and apparel manufacturers. UCLA basketball and football made a combined $71 million in 2012. Schools also get elaborate facility renovations to entice new recruits to sign. What’s more, schools evade taxes and shareholders with their nonprofit statuses. Like schools, coaches also pocket huge sums. Alabama’s Nick Saban takes in a hefty $5.62 million salary.
In the opening sequences, we experience the mass consumption that is an integral part of each game day. Thousands upon thousands of fans visit campuses, tailgating and attending games but also buying hot dogs and T-shirts and renting hotel rooms.
Historical black and white footage of sports elicits nostalgia for the olden days when college sports were simply sports and not glorified ad campaigns. What little integrity remained was lost when the Peach Bowl became the Chick-Fil-A Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl renamed the Tostitos Bowl. Now, even the trophy presentations and the announcements of the player of the game need a sponsor as an escort.
In the origins of creating this monster of corporate sponsorship, it is a wonder whether the architects could predict the Pandora’s box they were opening. Former marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro gives insight on his role in linking brand sports apparel to schools, a seed that likely spurred the growth of the advertising underbrush.
The profitable partnership began when Vaccaro pitched this idea to Nike’s Phil Knight: Nike should pay college coaches to put their players in Nike shoes. Initially, Nike, and later other brands like Converse, paid coaches anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 USD to dictate what shoes their players wore and pass along the shoes given to them by the sports companies. Vaccaro recalled the 1985 men’s basketball Final Four games, where all four teams wore Nikes. By that time, the trend was firmly established and coaches began receiving checks for upwards of $100,000.
It was only a matter of time before companies inked all-school deals. The University of Miami became the first when Nike paid the institution $1 million “to put every athlete in every sport” in Nikes. Of course the reach of the shoe companies extended beyond just athletes to the fans, the bookstores, and no one else could get into that market.
Through all of these financial exploits, college athletics—here, of course we mean football and basketball and to be more specific, Division I men’s football and basketball—generates quite a bit of money and college athletes seem to be the only group not getting their cut. The schools get bonuses. The coaches get bonuses. And the athletes are pretty much left empty-handed.
Taylor Francis is the author of the e-book The Cartel upon which Schooled is based. The NCAA Cartel, as Francis describes, is a unity between separate business identities who band together and coordinate their actions, collaborating and not competing, to set a low price on their labor pool, college athletes. In other industries, such a union would be reprimanded for price-fixing, which is technically illegal, but in the nonprofit world of college sports, it is the rule.
This rule rests upon the mantra of amateurism.
Under the guise of amateurism, the vocal and well-financed opposition to student-athletes getting paid cite reasons such as they should be treated like students and not professionals and their primary concern should be education.
However, the paternalistic argument that the NCAA wants to protect athletes from commercialism and professionalism is patently false. In their current state, college athletes are not protected from either. These students are hardly novices, not in the eyes of sports broadcasters, coaches, other players, and especially fans. Rather than being amateurs, they are very visible celebrity figures. Jonathan Franklin, the UCLA Bruins all-time rushing leader and one of the most celebrated UCLA players, receives cheers on campus when he walks to class. Everything he does is perused under a microscope.
The rules for defining amateurism are also contradictory. If Nike, for example, wants a college athlete to appear in a television commercial, it would clearly be in violation of amateurism under NCAA regulations. Yet, the athletes frequently appear in nationally televised commercials for schools and the NCAA, which require the same amount of time at photo shoots, attending to hair and makeup, and result in the same exposure as professional athletes–except, of course, they are not paid and only the schools and the NCAA are allowed to profit from their likenesses.
The double standard makes it is OK for the NCAA or the schools to use the athletes’ images, voices, and likenesses in national television commercials to promote their brands, but not other brands. It is even permissible for this to happen without the athletes’ explicit consent. Many acknowledged their shock when they saw their images in video games or on advertisements. As one athlete said, “They never asked, they just put us in there.” Their likenesses are even sold without permission well after their playing days—even the rights of retired athletes, in this case, are under siege.
Jonathan Franklin, the UCLA standout, started playing football at age 10 in the fifth grade. It helped him get out of a rough neighborhood and into a college his mom couldn’t afford. But even as he describes his schedule as a college athlete, it becomes apparent that sports are a primary focus over school. Which brings us to the next topic of contention: athletes getting a valuable education.
The argument goes: their motivation to attend college should be education and not money. They are not employees, they are students.
Franklin said, “We’re college students, but we’re really working in my opinion.” He described a daily routine of waking up at 5am, 6-9am practice including weightlifting, then classes, 2-3pm team meeting, 4-6pm practice, 7-9pm working with a tutor and then homework.
“And if you don’t perform, you get fired. Just like in the real world.”
One would think that with his schedule, he would be paid overtime. But the reality is that athletes in college are not paid at all in monetary terms.
Oftentimes, these “student-athletes” miss months of classes. Basketball players, especially, with their three games per week schedules are often away from campus during their seasons more days in a given week than they are on campus. They also undergo annual contract renewals that depend on their performance on the field, not in the classroom.
Most athletes are held to minimal academic standards. Academic support programs at schools are designed to keep athletes eligible even if the athletes themselves are getting nothing out of the curriculum. Eligibility, rather than education, is the bottom line. Academic fraud is common.
So what happens to those who do not obtain a degree, graduate with low GPAs, or enroll in unmarketable majors?
