Today in the Noble Ideals of Amateurism (TM)

Tom Ley has the perfect response to Notre Dame’s president, who delivered some of the usual nonsense about how a system in which everybody is allowed to drive dumptrucks of money up to their house except for the people who provide most of the actual labor is needed to preserve the purity of the game and the educational enterprise:

The trouble with Jenkins is that it’s hard to tell if he’s just bullshitting, or if he really does believe a) that people watch and pump money into college sports because they are charmed by the noble ideal of amateurism and b) that getting paid fairly for the work you do is morally corrupting. If you got an SEC school’s president drunk enough, he’d probably morph into Boss Hogg and tell you that he just really likes being rich and he’s going to keep the scam running until he has to cut the kids in on it, at which point he’ll gladly do so. The Times piece, though, leaves you with the sense that Jenkins is a true believer in the idea that young people need to have the type and amount of compensation they can get for certain kinds of work set by a self-interested cartel.

Here’s a good way for Jenkins to prove his honesty: he can go right ahead and enact all of the hypotheticals he laid out to the Times. If he truly believes that football should not take precedence over education, that the university would be just fine without its TV contract and Under Armor sponsorship, and that money only cheapens college football, he can go right ahead and opt out of the machine. Nobody is stopping him from turning Notre Dame football into a club sport that doesn’t produce millions of dollars in revenue but does improve the educational experience of students who just want to get some physical activity while they learn about Aquinas and physics. If he doesn’t, it must be either because he doesn’t really want to, or he’s afraid to act on his convictions. Who can tell which it is?

Right. In addition, the idea that people would stop caring about college football if players were permitted market compensation is massively implausible, but if it’s true it’s beside the point. The idea that gross exploitation is justifiable as long as it provides aesthetic satisfaction to others is rather obviously indefensible.