The NCAA Is Gaslighting You
October 17, 2018 11:46 AM   Subscribe

In a longform piece for Deadspin, Andy Schwarz talks about how the argument at the core of the NCAA's justification for not allowing players to be paid - "the fans demand it" - not only doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny, but also how the NCAA works to make people buy into their view even with all the evidence against it. (SLDeadspin)
posted by NoxAeternum (19 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
That the NCAA reversed its punishment for Penn State looking the other way while one of its top people diddled countless children should be proof enough that the NCAA has nobody’s best interests at heart, except for their own.
posted by SansPoint at 11:52 AM on October 17, 2018 [13 favorites]


Anyone who has followed UNC's completely unpunished decade+ of academic fraud knows that the NCAA is 100% full of it.
posted by MengerSponge at 12:00 PM on October 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Given that the NCAA seems unable to enforce any of its rules other than those related to compensating athletes, it's hard to see it as anything other than a cartel whose whole purpose is to suppress wages.
posted by HiddenInput at 12:45 PM on October 17, 2018 [16 favorites]


I 1000% agree that not paying players when the schools rake in so much money is completely ridiculous, but I have also been to some half empty minor league ball parks and minor league hockey arenas. There is somehow a value proposition to college athletics that is different from "is a development level for young athletes below the major leagues." Is it the affiliation with the colleges alone that adds that value? I'm not sure, because lots of people who have never been to college -- or who went to a completely different college -- are loyal to particular college hoops or football teams. As a person who is not from the United States, I've always found the fierce loyalty to college athletics slightly baffling and hard to understand.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:15 PM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


College athletes shouldn’t make money, the NCAA argued, because if players were paid above some magical line, consumer demand for the product would plummet and the golden goose would stop laying its billion-dollar eggs.

The fact that college sport sports are laying billion-dollar eggs is at the root of the problem. It is just another professional sports org, it has nothing to do with education. Either abolish the NCAA or pay the players market rate and forfeit the fiction of their studenthood, because once they rake in lots of dough they will be entirely unconcerned with their studies.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:18 PM on October 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


There is somehow a value proposition to college athletics that is different from "is a development level for young athletes below the major leagues." Is it the affiliation with the colleges alone that adds that value? I'm not sure, because lots of people who have never been to college -- or who went to a completely different college -- are loyal to particular college hoops or football teams.

In many areas, the college teams are basically the local pro team. This is part of why the NFL has struggled with getting traction in Los Angeles - by the time you had a pro team in LA, you had two strong college programs with dedicated fan bases there.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:23 PM on October 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Frank Deford did a series of stories about this for NPR years ago and won me over to the side of "it's a cartel to rob students of worker protection". He also brought up that the racism of forcing minorities to play for free was problematic at best, if not in fact a new form of slavery.
Unfortunately Deford died before the NCAA.

Say you still believe that amateurs shouldn't be paid because of whatever reason you fancy. How would it still be right that the NCAA and/or the university they play for gets ALL the profits for their image in video games or that they make nothing off jerseys and apparel with their freaking names on them?

I agree that college sports largely take a significant portion of available eyes/attention. There's hundreds of decent college teams of any variety of pro team of comparable geographic pull. The DH and I remember back in the day that college sports were the only sports thing to watch on TV besides Braves games on TBS.
posted by fiercekitten at 4:22 PM on October 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


it's hard to see it as anything other than a cartel whose whole purpose is to suppress wages

And an extremely effective one too!
posted by PMdixon at 4:25 PM on October 17, 2018


In many areas, the college teams are basically the local pro team. This is part of why the NFL has struggled with getting traction in Los Angeles - by the time you had a pro team in LA, you had two strong college programs with dedicated fan bases there.

Also the weather in the winter is nice enough people just want to go outside to the park or beach or something and not be cooped up in a stadium watching other people play sports.
posted by jmauro at 8:52 PM on October 17, 2018


The University of Maryland Football program killed a player recently - medical staff did not administer treatment for a simple heat stroke in time, McNair had a seizure, and he died. Apart from an obvious failure by the medical staff, players and staff who were off the record indicate that this may have also been a byproduct of the toxic coaching culture at the program, where the head coach (D.J. Durkin) used a strength training coach as his bagman to intimidate and humiliate players into desired behavior. After that, the University admin covered as much as they could about the death up - not releasing to the media the details about how McNair's death was absolutely preventable, and a direct result of university staff negligence. As this finally started to come to light, the football program did a half-ass job "investigating", doing things like putting up a sign-up sheet right next to the main coaching office to meet and discuss concerns over coaching practices, meaning that all coaches and all players would know exactly who had met to file a complaint. This is after Maryland fired their last football coach (Randy Edsall) for having an awful personality, creating a prison-like atmosphere among his players, and then losing spectacularly apart from all of that. Edsall was let go early, and paid out something to the tune of 10 million dollars for unpaid work.

I would be absolutely unsurprised to learn that this exact same thing goes on at most Division 1 programs across the country on a daily basis, just with enough dumb luck that it never comes to life. The NCAA abets this at every single fucking step, because it treats labor as noble sacrifice, and thus robs student workers of actual protections. More than serving as a price fixing cartel (as rightly argued by the FPP article), the NCAA also serves as a union buster.

The NCAA is a deeply evil institution, and needs to be purged, its members jailed accordingly, and then reconstituted as a player/student focused union. If this kills college athletics as they currently are, then that's wonderful - two birds with one stone.
posted by codacorolla at 9:25 PM on October 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


I would love to learn more of the backstory that has lead to this issue being tackled (sorry) on Ballers, of all things. Seeing The Rock take on the NCAA seems all kinds of strange.
posted by jimw at 9:35 PM on October 17, 2018


The NFL is also complicit in this by refusing to allow players into the draft until they are three years out of high school.
posted by PenDevil at 2:33 AM on October 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


I believe the draft eligibility rules were collectively bargained between the NFL and the NFLPA.
posted by mmascolino at 9:41 AM on October 23, 2018


Furthermore, there are legitimate physiological issues with letting high school players into the NFL directly - they're just not developed enough physically to compete. Of course, the actual answer to this would be for the NFL to have their own developmental league, and not this bullshit with the NCAA.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:22 AM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


And I've seen rumblings of a semipro league to handle the role of the NCAA, and I think association football has something like this already?
posted by rhizome at 10:27 AM on October 23, 2018


rhizome: No idea about Association Football, but the NCAA should just divorce itself from the higher education entirely and just become a farm league for the majors. College athletics ruins the role of colleges as educational systems.
posted by SansPoint at 2:32 PM on October 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


And in Maryland followup, Durkin has been fired...after he was reinstated, pissing off players, the family of the player he killed, the student body, and local politicians.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:46 PM on October 31, 2018


Yep. Even Maryland's shitstain of a Governor gets to look reasonable by calling out the Board of Regents. It's an incredibly awful situation - especially for McNair's family, who have had to relive the worst day of their lives since May as this has played out in the press. Maryland's football program should be disbanded, Loh should be fired (none of this 'retiring' shit), and the Board of Regents should be sacked and invetigated for fraud. A lot of people should go to jail.
posted by codacorolla at 3:56 PM on October 31, 2018


It's worth pointing out that almost all of the board was appointed by none other than Larry Hogan.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:16 PM on October 31, 2018


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