College Athletes

[Phoebe]

This article is about California's recent move to allow college athletes to sign endorsement deals of various kinds. It flies in the face of what the NCAA wants. The NCAA has a major problem, because under the status quo many people or organizations are making millions off the work of athletes except the athletes themselves. Unfairness also results from applying the same rules unilaterally across all sports and colleges, when the college-to-pro pathway is radically different for young athletes depending on sport and type of school, not to mention that lifelong talent potential is possessed only by a smaller fraction of players.

Yet opening the door to endorsements and other means of profiting off athletic celebrity could easily lead to other abuses that would seriously damage college sports or colleges themselves (and probably not the ones making the most money from athletics), like bidding wars by proxy for recruits, schools forced to rely on private sponsorship deals instead of scholarship investment, or companies choosing to sponsor star athletes at the expense of supporting whole teams or academic endeavors. Most schools invest more in athletics than they ever earn from it; only a smaller number of programs are self-sustaining. Private sponsorships might also transform the landscape of which programs fall on that self-sustaining list, as places blessed by greater private investment options for athletes might find themselves recruiting far better relative to others who had been successful in the past.

At the end of the day, if we are going to have college sports as big business, athletes deserve compensation. But is there a better way of severing the negative aspects of that big business from universities, while maintaining college athletic programs? Should the major sports run their own minor leagues like baseball? College baseball still plays an important role and is still big business even with minor leagues, and I wonder if that's due to the specific nature and history of the sport? How can one model be viable for everything from lacrosse to football to softball, in D1 or D3? I think maybe no such single model exists, but then how is fairness achieved?