- 2 days ago
seems the NCAA disagrees now
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Twitter: AJMckenzie94847
IG: aj_mckenzie416
Twitter: AJMckenzie94847
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00:04Hi everybody, I'm Brian Kenney and welcome to ESPN Classics Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame.
00:09A series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities who are remembered largely for their mistakes, controversial moments or
00:15questionable decisions.
00:17Until 1972, college scholarship athletes received monthly stipends to cover some of their expenses.
00:23Then the NCAA decided not to allow them a penny.
00:26Despite its billion-dollar TV contracts, the governing body of college athletics has maintained its hard line against paying student
00:33athletes.
00:34Meanwhile, the clamor for a return to some sort of pay system is growing louder than a post-game booster
00:39party.
00:40Let's take a look now at the rising wave of discontent with the status quo.
00:50The value of a football scholarship today is probably worth less than it was when I first started coaching.
00:58McMahon all the way back in his own 46.
01:00My scholarship check paid for my rent, that was it.
01:04My wife paid off for all my food, my clothes.
01:07It's a full-time job.
01:09If you ever start paying, maybe I'll go back.
01:11I still haven't graduated.
01:12Let's go! Let's go!
01:15Let's go!
01:16Today's player sees jerseys with their number, sometimes with their name, being sold to fans.
01:26And they're saying, I can't even get a stipend for my laundry.
01:30That's another four pass.
01:32Cuts it back to the 20, comes back to the near side of the field.
01:34Reggie Bush is this tremendous player at USC.
01:39They are selling thousands upon thousands of number five jerseys.
01:44It's clear that you're profiting off Reggie Bush.
01:47Why not give him a dime to buy a burger?
01:50When you come from a family that doesn't have a lot of money,
01:53you know, you find yourself trying to get money any way you can.
01:57If college athletes were paid a little bit more, it doesn't have to be a lot more.
02:01It doesn't have to be thousands of dollars.
02:02You wouldn't find athletes getting in trouble for NCAA violations.
02:10Jordan Farmar, Aaron Ofalo, Ryan Collins.
02:16They don't get a cut.
02:17You've got 2.5 million that you can dig up someplace for a coach.
02:22And Farmar gets nothing.
02:24He gets free baby blue sweats.
02:27It's almost un-American that they don't get something.
02:32Clear left.
02:34Touchdown!
02:37In most big time college football programs, the players get less than 10% in the form of scholarships.
02:43For 2005-2006, the NCAA projected income of more than half a billion dollars.
02:51All of it, like the money gained by its 1,200 college sports programs, is tax-free.
02:57He's going for the corner! He's got it!
03:00The University of Texas reported $50 million in football revenue for 2004-05.
03:07The amount that was spent on player scholarships was $2 million.
03:13Now, where's the rest of that money going?
03:15These are student athletes, but they're generating a lot of money for a very rich and powerful institution in this
03:21country.
03:22And they're being exploited just like sweatshop workers.
03:26Unbelievable! That's incredible!
03:28While the NCAA gets richer, college athletes on scholarship are barely compensated beyond tuition, room, board, and books.
03:37The university makes millions and millions of dollars off college athletics.
03:43And I think they need to give something back to the athletes.
03:47Long pass to Ewing!
03:49You can get loans and Pell Grants and things like that. Those are all things I went through.
03:53But still, it wasn't quite enough for me to be able to buy things that I needed.
03:58Not what I wanted, but things I needed.
04:00I had 10, 12, 13 kids on a tee. They never got anything from home. Never.
04:05They didn't have no money at home. And then you couldn't work. I mean, give me a break.
04:10Every other student on campus can be an entrepreneur. They can bargain for more financial aid.
04:14If they're playing the tuba in the band, they can play an instrument on the weekend and make as much
04:20money as they want.
04:22We've interviewed athletes who have said they've incurred credit card debt because their scholarship doesn't pay what's known as the
04:31full cost of attendance.
04:32They look around. They see the sponsors. They look at all the advertisers.
04:36Players question when they go home, when they get their scholarship check, and they know it's not designed to cover
04:42toilet paper and soap.
04:43And facing necessities like laundry.
04:46We have enough money to pay our presidents. And we have enough money to pay the coaches.
04:51And we have enough money to pay everybody else who works here.
04:54But we've got to draw the line somewhere. Unfortunately for the athletes, it just happens to be right there, right
05:01before it gets to them.
05:03While many college officials staunchly defend the purity of the system, others view it as institutional exploitation, whereby everyone is
05:14handsomely rewarded except the athletes.
05:16I hear Miles Branch saying, we embrace commercialism. The more money we make, the better, as long as it's consistent
05:23with the educational goals of the institution.
05:26Please tell me, how is Charlie Weiss's $3 million salary consistent with the goals of education?
05:33When student athletes say, hey, what about us? They pat them on the head and say, you're an amateur. You
05:37can't do that.
05:38But really, it's a tool for the NCAA to maximize money.
05:41They're able to keep all the money for themselves. The players have no rights whatsoever. They can't transfer schools freely.
05:47They don't get any money.
05:48They can't do anything whatsoever to capitalize on their celebrity.
05:52It's almost in the form of enslavement. You get these kids, you get them in a program. You put them
05:57in a program where they don't have enough money to take care of themselves.
06:00I think this is just absolutely terrible.
06:04The arguments for a pay system look pretty cut and dry, right? Well, as you'll see over the next half
06:09hour, it's not that simple.
06:10Before we count down the top five reasons you can't blame the NCAA for not paying student athletes, here are
06:16a few reasons that didn't make the cut.
06:18We call them the best of the rest.
06:22Psychology 101. The mother load for academic diversity is the model for athletic departments.
06:29Intercollegiate athletics works just the way the rest of higher education works.
06:33Psych 101 is a big money maker for higher education.
06:39In order to have upper level classes, you have to take the revenue that you generate from Psych 101, from
06:46survey courses, from large lecture courses.
06:48There was no money in track and field for Jesse Owens.
06:56There was no money in golf for Jack Nicklaus.
06:59While people came to our football games or they came to our basketball games, that was property of the institution.
07:05The institution then distributed to provide educational assistance for lots of men and then for lots of women.
07:11If you're a smart coach, you understand that you've got to pull for football because they carry all of us.
07:17You want football to have sellouts, you want them to get great TV revenue, so your sport can have a
07:23little more leeway on recruiting budgets and travel budgets.
07:26This is the redistribution of revenue. That money is used to help support all kinds of other sports.
07:34So volleyball players and soccer players and tennis players and golf players can get a chance to play in NCAA
07:40tournaments.
07:43Our final best of the rest, President Theodore Roosevelt.
07:47His football intervention in 1905 set a high standard for college athletics.
07:52In 1905, 18 players were killed in college football, and there was a move afoot to abolish the game.
08:02President Theodore Roosevelt, he supported football, but he thought there needed to be rule changes.
08:08Out of his warnings came the NCAA, came the decision to have a national governing body for intercollegiate athletics, and
08:19it was something that needed to be done.
08:21The one thing that Teddy Roosevelt and the current NCAA share is a very strong reverence for competition.
08:32And the NCAA rules are intended to level the playing field.
08:38Using its power of mandate, the NCAA seeks to enforce rules of amateurism in order that the cradle of education
08:45isn't rocked by the forces of corruption.
08:48There isn't pay for play because it would completely violate the mission of intercollegiate athletics and of higher education.
09:00Richard Nixon. When the President signed Title IX into law January 23, 1972, he not only dramatically altered the face
09:10and form of collegiate sports,
09:11he also strengthened the argument against providing additional financial assistance to athletes.
09:18You know, it's amazing Title IX passed under the Nixon administration.
09:22It looked a little innocuous, and you can't discriminate on the basis of sex in any institution that receives federal
09:27funding.
09:28It's a federal law, Title IX, equal rights between men and women.
09:34You can't give a player $500 a month because he can run 4-6.
09:37You gotta give the woman lacrosse player $500 a month.
09:41So forget it, that ain't never gonna happen.
09:42I'm not sure how you get Title IX involved in paying these athletes.
09:49Joe Kim Noah has to get paid.
09:52So the Florida women's dive team have to get paid.
09:55Title IX is gonna be the ultimate.
09:57We just do it for the revenue producing sports has been put forward.
10:02But that would mean instant lawsuits from 5,000 different women's organizations, and they would have a legitimate point.
10:14There's not the money there to pay softball.
10:16It can't be free market.
10:18You can't just pay somebody whatever,
10:19because then you're gonna have 30 programs,
10:22and the rest of the programs are all gonna fall off the map.
10:25Three from Charlotte Smith.
10:27She hit it!
10:28She hit a three-point basket!
10:30The Tar Heels are national champions!
10:33It's really been years of modification,
10:37making certain that there are equitable opportunities for your daughter.
10:42So thank you, Richard Nixon.
10:46Are you starting to change your thinking?
10:48Maybe reason number four will help.
10:50The arms race.
10:52But it wasn't enforced when he was playing college football.
10:56So he had the opportunity if he was a starter.
11:00But he took that away from future players.
11:08Paying players would escalate the recruiting wars.
11:12Free agency would run rampant.
11:15It will result in the demise of college sports as we know it.
11:18The arms race in college athletics is one of the biggest recruiting tools out there.
11:23Everybody wants the biggest and the sleekest and the nicest weight room.
11:28They want the player's lounge hooked up with Xbox 360, high-def television.
11:33It's one of the things, I think, that keeps athletic departments from being more profitable.
11:38Their stipend levels would be just one more element of what some people would call an arms race.
11:45If you go to a true model of pay-for-play,
11:48who's going to be paid and how much they're going to be paid
11:51is going to become part of the competition.
11:55The result? The big-income schools would become even bigger fish in the talent pool.
12:05You're going to have the smaller schools who aren't going to be able to have the revenue that comes in
12:10versus the bigger schools whose students are going to get paid, you know, 50 grand.
12:14Then all of a sudden it becomes, well, what school pays more?
12:17It'll be a huge mess.
12:18You can take a school like a USC versus a Morehouse,
12:21and they may be able to give a kid $2,000 a month.
12:24When I say at Morehouse, we're going to give you $100.
12:27Well, who's going to get the athlete?
12:28When most people blame the NCAA, they make a fundamental flaw.
12:32They think we're all alike.
12:33And here are the Michigan Wolverines.
12:38The University of Hartford has 7,000 students.
12:41We wouldn't even fill a corner of Michigan Stadium.
12:45The truth is, of 350 schools that play Division I sports,
12:50maybe 25 break even.
12:54Everybody else loses a lot of money.
12:59The athletes have no fear.
13:02No, not that fear.
13:05Donald Fear.
13:06And obviously there would have to be continued negotiations.
13:09Donald Fear is one tough SOB.
13:12He's a tough guy to deal with.
13:15Major League Baseball's union boss, who rules with an iron fist,
13:19has leveraged unprecedented benefits for his clients.
13:23I was a member of that union for a long time.
13:25And when they said jump, you said how high?
13:28It's the strongest union in the world.
13:30In all business is a baseball union.
13:32Well, it never got to the point where we saw settlement as being close.
13:36If Donald Fear were in charge first,
13:38there wouldn't be any drug testing of the athletes.
13:40That's for sure.
13:41They'd all be getting paid.
13:43I could also see them striking if Donald Fear were in charge of college athletics.
13:47If this guy would cancel the World Series,
13:50he certainly would cancel the MicronPC.com Bowl if he wasn't getting enough money.
13:56It's going to take some well-versed student athletes in world affairs,
14:00in the world of negotiating, or maybe a Donald Fear,
14:02to come in and say, what are you guys doing?
14:04You guys are an incredibly profitable business.
14:08And you guys, you are the product.
14:11And the only way to get your way is to withhold services.
14:16Ultimately, if the players don't play, nobody makes money.
14:19And that's the leverage student athletes have.
14:22One day, there'll be time for a national championship game to be played,
14:26and there will be football players in a locker room
14:30that are willing to say to one another,
14:33everybody's making a lot of money here, what about us?
14:36It crossed my mind many a times while I was in school, you know,
14:39to kind of unionize players to really make an effect on how money is distributed.
14:47Everyone else in college sports has an organization of their own.
14:52There's no independent union or organization speaking for athletes.
14:58In 1980, we actually got an organization funded by the federal government.
15:03We were going to revolutionize things.
15:05We were going to change the NCAA.
15:06We were organizing labor unions.
15:08The organization, known as the Center for Athletes' Rights in Education,
15:13died broke less than two years after it was formed.
15:16Since 2001, the Collegiate Athletes Coalition,
15:20backed spiritually and financially by the United Steelworkers Union,
15:25has been demanding a chair at the NCAA bargaining table.
15:28They asked for help, and we stepped up to the plate to help them.
15:30If a group of workers are being exploited, that damages all of us.
15:36We're basically the voice for the college athletes.
15:39There's some things that need to be taken care of that needed to be taken care of for a long
15:43time.
15:44We need those changes made.
15:45They've got to band together and get it done.
15:47Nobody's going to do it for them.
15:50If you haven't bought into our argument yet, maybe reason number two will help.
15:57College presidents. They make the rules.
16:00You can't blame the NCAA for not passing legislation that would increase the size of a scholarship,
16:08because the national office of the NCAA has no authority for doing that.
16:13The presidents have the final say. They're on the board of directors.
16:15There's a handful of them. They rotate. They have all the power.
16:18You blame the colleges and universities around the country,
16:20whose representatives make those decisions through voting.
16:25I think that the presidents should move boldly and quickly to cover the full cost of attendance,
16:32not just room and board and books.
16:35I think they're trapped, because now they have these huge budgets,
16:39and they're required to fund all the scholarships.
16:42We've created this monster now. We have to keep it going or the whole thing collapses.
16:49You know, when you talk to the school officials, they say,
16:51Hey, hey, we're with you. You know, we think we should be able to do this for you and that
16:54for you.
16:55But hey, our hands are tied. It's the NCAA.
16:57Well, they're the NCAA.
16:59President Brandt has, in fact, advocated for increasing the value of the scholarship.
17:04But remember that these are decisions that aren't made by President Brandt.
17:08He's not the czar of intercollegiate athletics.
17:12The college presidents bear more responsibility, because they should have the kind of courage to stand up.
17:22They are paid. A free college ride is priceless.
17:28I can't blame the NCAA for not wanting to pay college athletes,
17:31because they're paying them one of the greatest gifts of all, which is a free education.
17:35Education has a value. They are being paid.
17:39If you get a scholarship, it is extremely important that you understand that it has a money value to it.
17:45The average cost of a year at a public university is more than $12,000 a year and nearly $30
17:52,000 a year at a private college.
17:57Saying who gets the better deal, Brady Quinn or Notre Dame is kind of like saying who gets the better
18:02end of the deal, Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt.
18:05They're both getting a pretty good deal here.
18:08See, that's where we have this disconnect in college sports.
18:12I mean, they're going there to get an education first, but that whole concept has been lost.
18:18And they don't put any value on the fact that they're getting a free education.
18:21If they got the scholarship and they put in the time, they should be able to walk out of there
18:26with a great set of life skills that will allow them to succeed,
18:30whether they continue in sports or they pursue their careers elsewhere.
18:34Goal! What a play!
18:36You grow up a lot to college, and I think a lot of kids miss out on that.
18:39You think about it, you know, you learn so much in college about responsibility, about trusting certain people.
18:45It's so great. It's the best experience ever.
18:48To cover emergencies and some campus incidentals, the NCAA established a fund in 2003.
18:55When we could not send a kid home because his mother died to go to her funeral, that was awful.
19:03But now those things don't happen.
19:05The NCAA has provided a fund.
19:07It is a fund that right now is almost $25 million a year to cover costs that aren't already covered.
19:16Paying for insurance, paying for their parking permits on campus.
19:22That there are student athletes who can no longer get a winter coat that they need simply doesn't exist.
19:29I never would have been able to go to college had I not been a football player.
19:33And I went to Northwestern, one of the finest. So I had a career.
19:36I knew what I was going to do when I finished playing football.
19:39This is not right, man. This is a privilege. You don't have to be here.
19:42If somebody's interested in college, they want to go to school, they want to accept boom board fees and tuition,
19:48that's great.
19:48And if they don't, go to the Boston Celtics or the Rockford Lightning.
19:55For many of them, they're not going to play after college anyway, and that education is extremely important to them.
20:01For the win. Caught! Touchdown!
20:06What a deal. Should we be paying salaries beyond that? Absolutely not.
20:12Well, there you have it, the top five reasons the NCAA shouldn't pay student athletes.
20:16Did we change your mind? Well, one thing is certain.
20:19While the debate continues, the NCAA will continue to reap enormous profits.
20:23I'm Brian Kenney. Thanks for watching.
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