Today in the Noble Ideals of Amateurism (TM)

Jon Chait’s blind spot about the NCAA has been longstanding. Yesterday’s minor league peonage football’s championship game and Joe Nocera’s recent column provided him with an occasion to reiterate these arguments, which remain wrong:

Nocera’s remedy is to channel a chunk of the revenue from college athletics into cash payments, with a salary cap. The only sports Nocera proposes to pay are football and men’s basketball. Nocera does not explain why men’s basketball players deserve payment but women’s players do not.

I assume he doesn’t explain it because the reason is obvious: these sports produce very large amounts of revenue, which other sports do not. For most NCAA athletes, scholarships are reasonable compensation. For players in high-revenue sports, they are not, and the artificial suppression of their market value is unjustifiable.

As I’ve said before, it’s inconceivable that Chait would make this argument in any other context. Labor markets, even those in countries more egalitarian than the United States, compensate some people more than others for doing similar amounts of work. Some of these disparities are more defensible than others, but in any case they’re not a reason to just refuse to compensate workers and only compensate bosses. (Note, too, that this illogic is only ever applied to players. Nobody argues that because Nick Saban makes far more than the Alabama woman’s volleyball coach that the only solution is for coaches to work for free, and nobody pretends not to understand why Saban gets a higher salary.)

“Is offering cash compensation really that much worse than the current system, in which universities build lavish facilities and spend absurd sums on their ‘programs’ to lure good players?” he argues. “Doesn’t it make more sense to give some of that money to the players? It would actually be less expensive.” But why would programs stop spending money on expensive facilities for their athletes? Wouldn’t they just continue to offer lavish facilities on top of cash payments?

Again, so what? The status quo, in which universities can spend immense amounts of money on anything associated with athletics, is simply indefensible. In any case, revenues are finite; presumably some of the money that went to players wouldn’t go to coaches or facilities arms races. (I note here as well that Chait just ignores the issue of the ban on players receiving compensation from third parties, restrictions that no other students face, presumably because it cannot possibly be defended.)

Approaching the very real problems of college athletics from a non-market-absolutist perspective yields a very different conclusion. John U. Bacon, an author and college-sports historian, has proposed a different set of changes designed to bring reforming the classic use of the term — reform meaning changes designed to restore the original animating purpose of an institution. The premise of Bacon’s reforms would be to make college athletics work for the vast majority of athletes who want to have the chance to gain a meaningful college degree while playing sports. He would establish minor leagues in football and basketball to create an avenue for the minority of athletes who have no interest in higher education to pursue athletic careers, which works perfectly well in baseball and hockey. You could additionally restore freshman ineligibility (as was the case in football until 1972) and guarantee a five-year scholarship, which would give student athletes a more plausible time-frame to combine studying with athletics. You could institute cost-of-living stipends for all athletes, but since you’d be sharing the money with players across all sports, male and female, the sums would be far lower than the mini-contracts Nocera proposes.

This system is potentially defensible, but in context it’s just an assume-a-can-opener diversion. If the NCAA just stops offering high-level football and basketball programs, we can deal with that then. In the meantime, NCAA is going to have football and basketball programs that generate huge amounts of revenue, and coaches and administrators are free to grab money with both hands while players can only be compensated with tiny stipends and educations they’re generally not given sufficient time to take advantage of. There is just no possible defense of this system, and the artificial suppression of player compensation must be ended. Once that’s done we can debate the merits of more radical reforms that aren’t going to happen.