Big time college sports dodged a bullet but did it hit high schools?

 

 

Should college athletes be paid? That’s been the central question surrounding the NCAA for decades. But the question is vague and can’t be answered without some clarity.

In general, the term “college athletes” refers to all student-athletes, but advocates for paying college players aren’t referring to all student-athletes. “Paying college athletes” refers to paying the male athletes in revenue-generating sports, i.e., big-time college football and basketball featured on major television networks. (That’s less than 10 percent of all student-athletes.)

It’s easy to see the initial problem here.

The majority of student-athletes were never considered in this payment plan. Now, suppose all the athletes were paid for participating in sports. Does anyone actually believe women athletes would receive the same amount as men? In theory, the male athlete receives a scholarship and the female athlete receives a scholarship creating parity between the sexes, but if the athletes were paid, the inequities would lead to major lawsuits.

Now, the term “paid” means: To give money that is due for work done, but college sports were always classified as amateur athletics. By definition, “amateur” means: A person that engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid rather than professional basis. These definitions clarify a lot. College athletes aren’t paid because they are amateurs and paying them professionalizes activities that weren’t organized to be professional.

Here’s the contention, advocates for paying “college athletes” reject the “amateur” classification and insist big-time football and basketball players are being exploited as unpaid laborers.

Of course, that raised another question—are “college athletes” employees of their schools?

In 2014 the football players at Northwestern University decided to answer that question for themselves and made the historic effort to unionize as employees of the school. The National Labor Relations Board rejected the player’s claim. Huffington Post reporters wrote, “The precedent-setting decision will make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for college athletes to formally join labor unions in the future … The five-member board decided unanimously that it should not assert the agency’s jurisdiction in the case, essentially dodging the complex question at its core – whether schools exert enough control over scholarship athletes for them to be considered employees.”

This year many states passed legislation that forced the NCAA to change its rules that prevented college players from selling the rights to their name, image, and likenesses (NIL). The new rules allow college players to accept money from businesses that want to feature them in advertisements. Allowing college players to profit from deals with third parties is admirable, but the rule change also circumvented the matter of paying college athletes as employees of the school. ESPN reported that the new NIL opportunities for college athletes are abundant, but they can quickly become murky due to complex and confusing guidelines that set the types of deals college athletes can strike and the types of products they can endorse.

It’s going to get murky for high schools too.

According to ESPN, all Americans have the right to sell their NIL. Before the NCAA changed their rules, college athletes forfeited these rights as part of the terms of receiving a scholarship. However, Quinn Ewers, top quarterback prospect, decided to skip his senior year in high school in order to enroll at Ohio State for the upcoming semester in order to cash in on a 1.4 million NIL deal. Ewers is 18-years-old with only one class to complete to earn his high school diploma, and his decision was based on the fact that Texas law grants college athletes NIL rights but doesn’t extend NIL rights to high school athletes.

The law of unintended consequences states: Sometimes the solution to a problem is worse than the problem itself. But NIL wasn’t a solution, it dodged a problem that has hovered over big-time college sports for decades.

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 9/15/21