Image via USA Today Sports
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If you wanted to attend the 2015 NCAA Men's Final Four in Indianapolis this past April (and didn't have any connections), according to CBS Detroit and TiqIQ you would've had to fork over $1,151.98. Per ticket. To sit among a Lucas Oil Stadium record-breaking crowd of 143,387.
The semifinals—broadcast exclusively through Turner Sports' family of networks including TBS, TNT, and truTV—grossed 16.4 million viewers total. Kentucky versus Wisconsin became the most-viewed college basketball game of all time on a cable network.
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Jay Bilas. Image via USA TODAY Sports / Rich Barnes.
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The championship game was viewed on CBS by a ridiculous 27 million people. The game was also broadcast internationally through ESPN to 170 countries. CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting alone paid more than $10.8 billion to the NCAA back in 2010 for 14 years of rights to do this, which makes sense considering CBS and Turner sold $1.13 billion in ads during the 2015 tournament alone. The head coaches of the teams in the championship game, Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Bo Ryan of Wisconsin, made a combined salary of $12,628,032 this year.
But this is amateur basketball, and regardless how many billions of dollars are passed around between the NCAA, its broadcast partners, and various sponsoring corporations, the players themselves still make zero. They're in a money wind machine but locked in a straight jacket.
Somehow this doesn't seem right.
Lucky for me this summer I was able to sit down with Jay Bilas, ESPN college basketball analyst, former college basketball player for Duke, attorney, Jeezy fan, and renowned supporter of college basketball compensation reform. I asked Mr. Bilas to explain in simple terms why college athletes deserve to be paid. This is what he told me.
4.It’s a multi-billion dollar business where the only people who are restricted in their earnings, in any way, are the athletes.
"In any facet of college life, only one class of people have any financial restriction on them at all and that’s athletes. So the idea that it's based on education is a lie. No other student is told what they can and cannot make, and if it affects their education, or scholarship, or anything.
"If you’re a music student, who's on a full music scholarship, you can apply your trade in any professional sense you want. You’re not kicked out of the band. Not kept from performing on campus. Doesn’t affect your academic status in any way. You’re celebrated for that.
"If you’re an athlete that happens to make the schools in the NCAA machine billions of dollars, then the athletes are told, 'You get only your expenses.' And one of the biggest components of the expenses you get, we pay to ourselves, and claim it cost us money."
5.Nobody would put up with this in any other walk of life.
"First of all, people will say, 'What’s next? Do you want to pay high school players next?' High school sports do not make billions of dollars. They are not marketing it as a professional sports as college sports is. I mean, it's pro sports in every way, except for the players.
"Look at it this way—child actors get paid. If the studios decided, together—if they colluded together—'Look, we aren’t going to pay these kids anymore. What we will do is we will give them their expenses and really nice accommodations on set. We will give them tutors and we will make it a good experience for them. But, we all agree we are not going to pay them anymore.'
"And so, for example, if your kid is the star of Home Alone, and they say 'Look, we are just going to pay for expenses. And if they do a really good job, maybe when they're older and they become an adult they can get paid then.' You would say, “No, no—this is not the school play. This is a multi-billion dollar business. Billions of dollars are being made and my kid is the star of the show. That’s not right. This is a commercial enterprise.'
Think about what the scholarship is...it’s the school paying itself. It’s like me paying myself for rent for my kids in my house. And then claiming I don’t have any money left because I paid myself rent for them.
"Well, college sports is a commercial enterprise. If they ran it the way Division III runs it, like Williams College or Amherst, where they don’t charge admission [it might not be a commercial enterprise]. The NCAA does not charge admission for tournaments in Division II and Division III. They charge in Division I. They charge big money. And they sell it, they sell it to television.
"I think it's actually immoral to restrict only one class of person from benefiting to their level of worth. Because it’s not like they're saying to the coaches, 'One hundred thousand dollars is enough for you guys.' They are making millions of millions of dollars. You have assistant coaches making millions of dollars now! And then you have the players that have been these 'amateurs' forever.
"Do you know what amateurism is? It’s whatever the NCAA says it is. So it can mean whatever they define at a given time. And the definition has changed over the year. And it's changing again, a little bit, because they’ve run into trouble legally. But, fundamentally it’s just one of these things that aren’t right. Maybe it was okay when the money was within the bounds of reason. But it’s not in the bounds of reason anymore.
"Licensing—I mean it goes on forever. And they set up a structure that makes it look like they don’t make any money. It’s like the NBA saying, 'You know, we don’t make any money. So the players should make less.' The players get 50% of basketball-related revenue. They don’t get anything in college.
"When they talk about all of the expenses. Think about what the scholarship is. The scholarship is a dollar amount that is transferred from the athletic department to the school. So it’s the school paying itself. It’s like me paying myself for rent for my kids in my house. And then claiming I don’t have any money left because I paid myself rent for them.
"That doesn’t make any sense."
6."It'll ruin the game" doomsday scenarios are ridiculous.
"So everything teeters on the athlete? Every responsibility is on the athlete? Nobody ever said, 'If we start paying these coaches hundreds of millions of dollars the game is going to crumble.' Nobody says that. Nobody says, 'If we start putting these things on TV and we start having billion-dollar television contracts the game is going to go to hell.' Nobody says that. 'If we start charging hundreds and hundreds of dollars for tickets, nobody is going to come to the games anymore.' Nobody says that. And, 'If we start selling jerseys with the player’s number on them, that ain’t right, that’s going to ruin the game.' Nobody says that.
"Everything we are doing, people are loving. And it’s the same old story. Like in baseball when the reserve clause was in place and when the players battled to get rid of that. And Curt Flood took MLB to the Supreme Court and lost. And then free agency came in the '70s when I was a kid. People said, 'Baseball is going to be ruined.' It’s doing just fine. It’s making more money than it ever made. More eyeballs are on it.
"Same thing about the Olympics. When we let pros play in the Olympics, people said 'It’s over.' And now it’s more popular than ever.
"And so those are just lame doomsday scenarios in order to keep the status quo. And what I hear most often—I understand fans saying, 'Don’t mess with it. I like it the way it is.' Or people [saying], 'Oh look, people called for the players to get paid and now we don’t have NCAA video games anymore, thanks a lot.'
"Okay so that’s the deal? Because you can’t play video games, the players don’t deserve it? What I hear is, 'You know I pay for school, screw those guys, I’d love to trade places with them.' Who else do you say that to? Do you say that to Wiz Khalifa? Like do you say, 'I’d love to trade places with a pop star/rapper, so they shouldn’t make money.' Or 'I play golf in the summer. I’d love to trade places with Tiger Woods, so Tiger shouldn’t make as much money. Because I’d trade places with him.'
"Why does that only apply to a college athlete? 'Boy, we pay the athletes and the game goes to hell.' It’s amazing that in our society we’ve allowed this to happen."
7.Other sports will not be canceled because some players are being paid.
“'Boy, we pay the athletes and all of a sudden everybody is going to drop every sport.' So that’s riding on the athletes too. 'I better take less, otherwise the rowing program is going to go away.' Or, 'Nobody will be able to wrestle in college anymore.'
"That’s a lie. It’s all a lie. They are not going to cancel these programs if it’s in their interest to have them. They will continue to do it.
"And then they’ll say, 'Well, we aren’t showing a profit.' You’re not showing a profit because you spend your money as a non-profit. And what other person in the system is paid based upon profit? Because otherwise the coaches shouldn’t be making money—because they don’t make any profit.
"And then they say, 'How could we possibly pay our professors because the English department is not making any profit?' Come on. You’re paid based on revenue and the value you provide. And why are the players the only one at the end of the line?
"They said this stuff back in the '80s when I was a player, when there were hundreds of million dollars being made. Now there’s billions. And they still don’t have enough money. So, there’s never going to be enough money.
"And then they say, 'Well, the players aren’t worth anything.' Okay, well if they’re not worth anything. Let them compete in the marketplace, and we’ll see.
"Then they claim the scholarship is enough. Well if the scholarship is enough, let’s test that out in the marketplace. If it’s enough, then the marketplace will confirm that. And they know it’s not true. The players are worth a ton. And schools would compete for them the same way they compete for any athlete of university life."
8.Implementing a new system is much easier than those in charge want you to believe.
"It would be really orderly and easy. It wouldn’t be that hard. Players would sign contracts, they’d be bound by those contracts. They’d perform per the terms of the contracts, as would the school.
"The complication of [a new system], those in charge are using it as a barrier of change. They’re saying, 'It’s too complicated, we can’t figure it out.' But boy, they can put together a college football playoff in two seconds and make a billion dollars.
They’re saying, 'It’s too complicated, we can’t figure it out.' But boy, they can put together a college football playoff in two seconds and make a billion dollars.
"All they need to do is say it’s an open system, you can pay what you like. The other rules: You’ve got four years of eligibility, you can play those four in five. You have to remain in good standing as a full-time student in your institution. You have to qualify academically the same way in order to be able to play. And then if I’m recruiting you—like if State U comes after you and says, 'We think you can be a great player for us. We will offer you a three year contract—$100,000 a year plus room, board, and books. A condition of the contract is you will have to remain in good academic standing all times. If you fall out of academic standing we have a right to terminate the contract. If you get arrested, or charged with a crime/misdemeanor we can terminate the contract. If you decide to leave, you can’t play anywhere else for a year. Can’t play the pros, can’t play in college. You can’t go and compete against us because we’ve made an investment in you. We can’t force you to play here but we can keep you from playing somewhere else.'
"And then your side would say, 'I think I’m good enough to leave in two years. So, I’ll take a two-year contract—even though it would probably be for less money—but I want the opportunity to leave or renegotiate after two years. On the grades, I want independent verification of my grades. I want to be independently audited so if I play crappy and then all of a sudden my grades magically slip and I flunk out, then I’m all of a sudden ineligible—I need independent verification for that. And I’m not going to have my contract reliant upon some false arrest so if I’m convicted of a crime, I’ll agree to that. But if I’m just arrested on something, then no.'
"You would negotiate it out, the way anyone else would. It’s easy, it’s not that hard. The rest of the world is able to operate in the free market, and college athletics—just the players, that is—can’t?"
9.It won't dramatically change the quality of the top teams.
"They are so powerful now. You couldn’t be more powerful. The way many economists look at this, the most reasonable ones, their opinion would be: In a market right now that is a restrictive market on labor, when everybody is allowed to pay the same thing, Kentucky, Duke, UCLA they have an incredible advantage. So the talents are all there, where the nice facilities are, the exposure, you know, the nice stuff.
"So if you’re a smaller school, say you're Wichita State. Wichita State does good no matter what, but Wichita State could not get the players that Kansas are recruiting. And they can’t afford to attract the top players Kansas are recruiting, but they could marshal their resources and pay more for Kansas’ third-best player than Kansas could pay. So, they would be able to afford more talent that way, and then they could make decisions such as 'You know, we don’t need to build these gigantic facilities, we can throw the money into the procurement of talent.'
"Now would Kansas be able to spend more money? Absolutely—they have more money. But the big schools are getting 95% of the Top 100 players right now. Maybe more than that. And they are getting 100% of the football players. So we aren’t going to see any difference in that. But we are going to see more of a difference if the smaller schools would be allowed to compete, because they are getting priced out anyways. They can’t afford the facilities or to pay their coaches that much. They don’t have the same amount of money."
10.Good players would stay in school longer.
"They might stay longer. Now, you’re not gonna get the top pick. Like Kentucky’s not gonna get Karl-Anthony Towns to stay longer, but they may get some of the other guys to stay longer. They may decide, 'You know what, I’m making money here.' When you start making money, then you can go when you’re ready. I think part of the culture has become: 'If you don’t want to be here, go.' Instead of: 'No, it’s good for you to be here.' If we really think it’s good for kids to stay in school, why shouldn’t we provide incentives for them to stay? It’s a good thing.
"Boy, I’ll tell you, nobody’s lamenting Jordan Spieth for leaving Texas early. They don’t care because they didn’t watch golf. They didn’t care when Tiger Woods left early, when John McEnroe left Stanford early. They don’t care whether Missy Ferguson stays at Cal. They don’t care. They care whether the football and basketball players stay, because those are the sports they watch. If men’s lacrosse players were leaving early, do think anybody would care? They wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t be worried about all the rich kids from Long Island."