American’s Two Favorite Pastimes: Sports and Money

Lots of sports news this week.  Baseball season opens!  Playoff berths just about set in professional basketball and hockey.  But the most dramatic sports news  came from America’s other favorite pastime besides sports – money, the money in sports.

The National Labor Relations Board in Chicago ruled for the first time that college football players at Northwestern are university employees and so they may organize into a union and negotiate for salary and benefits.

We have a sacred myth that our college athletes are amateurs.  They put in all those hours outside the classroom and wreck their bodies without any long term health insurance solely because of their love of the sport and how it builds character.  The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) has strict rules forbidding any payment or inducement or gift or bribe to those whom they love to call “student athletes” or to their families. 

But these young men and women’s thrill of victory and agony of defeat nets  millions of dollars for their coaches and schools.  Just the ever expanding TV coverage of games generates hundreds of millions of dollars: CBS/Turner Broadcasting pays the NCAA over $700 million a year for the TV rights to the basketball finals.  And now regional sport conferences are forming their own TV and cable networks with massive advertisement income.  

But the NLRB agreed with three Northwestern football players that their athletic scholarships were salary, based on the hours they work (up to 50 a week), and that the control exercised by coaches is akin to an employer.  “It cannot be said that the scholarship players are ‘primarily students,’” the ruling read.

The NCAA is being charged on several flanks with profiteering on the backs of unpaid players, corruption, exorbitant salaries, anti-trust -  just your basic good American business practice.

While this NLRB ruling may be overturned, it is widely seen as a historic beginning to the end of the NCAA’s monopoly and exploitation of slave, er student athletes.

In other sports news, this month (and a little of April) is called March Madness here in the US, the playoff season for college basketball.  Teams of so-called “student athletes,” compete all over the country in regional contests, from 64 teams to 32 to the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and the National Championship.  Even President Obama indulges in “bracketology” or as it’s called for him, “Barack – etology,” filling in his projected team winners (and in his case, sharing on national TV) on a blank grid of 64 lines telescoping down to two.  And then one.

This year, America’s 2^nd richest man Warren Buffet got into the bracket game, offering one billion dollars to anyone who correctly filled in each line. The fact that the odds of anyone winning were 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or 1 in 9 quintillion didn’t stop over fifteen million people from giving it a shot, as it were.  By the second round there were only 3 people out of 15 million that might have cashed Warren’s check, and by next round none.  That’s because of the “Cinderella” teams, the unknowns and upsets who foil the best predictors and guessers.  A great publicity stunt for his cosponsor, Quicken Loans.  But no payout required. 

But there will be, of course, a massive payout , not to athlete or bracketeer, but to the winning school, millions if not billions.  Accordingly to Forbes Magazine, a trip to the Final Four generates $9.5 million dollars for each team’s school, primarily from that precious TV contract, but also from happy alums.  No wonder many college basketball (and football) coaches make more money than the institution’s president.  Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski made $7.2 million last year.  (Too bad his team was eliminated in the first round.  I wonder if he’ll get a pay cut next year.)  His so-called boss, the university president, was paid $500,000.   Here’s a great graphic from Deadspin about the highest paid employee in each state.

Political cartoonist Joel Pett had a good take on the brackets and player’s unions this week.

Since sports fans love numbers so much, stats, ERAs and free throw percentage and shots on goal (pardon my sloppy conflating of so many different sports in this piece) – here’s one more disheartening number from the field of money ball, in this case, the unglamorous (no TV contract) sport of wrestling:

At Ohio State (where the football coach gets $4 million a year), the Athletic Director got a (measly?) $18,000 bonus this year, thanks to a 141 lb student athlete.  Buckeyes wrestler Logan Stieber won the NCAA championship in that weight class last week.  He didn’t get a dime.  But AD Gene Smith had an incentive clause in his contract that rewarded him for Logan’s hard work. 

Who says sports doesn’t develop character?

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter