Thomas Werner Speech

THE NCAA IS A DAMN GREASY ORGANIZATION

You are a college football player, and your coach gives you a bagel. That seems ok right? Right. But uh oh, here he comes with a bagel with cream cheese. Well now you’ve done it. That is a violation of NCAA rules and your career and scholarship can be ripped out from underneath you. Believe it or else, this is an actual rule. A bagel fits under the NCAA’s nutritional supplement category, of which athletes are allowed unlimited amounts. But using a spread such as cream cheese makes it a meal, of which athletes are only allowed 3 a day. The NCAA is full of ridiculous restrictions like this, which anyone who has chosen sports as a way of life is doomed to follow. And the NCAA knows it. The NCAA is able to use their complex language and rules to take advantage of kids and remain a non-profit organization, raking in millions of tax free dollars off the labors of athletes. And this needs to be changed.

You could say the system of college sports is part of America: a person under contract to work for a definite period of time without compensation for free passage through college. But when we first saw it, it was free passage to the New World: Yup, college athletes pose a scary comparison to indentured servitude. By forcing athletes to adhere to a code of amateurity, the NCAA cannot compensate the athletes for their work (except with education), and it is able to stay a non-profit organization. By claiming to be “an association of colleges and universities sharing a common academic mission,” and saying that the kids are only amateurs, they are able to maintain their non-profit status and heap in close to a billion tax-free dollars a year from ticket sales, TV deals, brand sponsorships, and merchandise. All fruits of the players’ labor, who are left with nothing. But what about their scholarships? That’s what they’re rewarded with, right?  A scholarship to UCLA is worth about $28,000 a year, while the school estimates the total cost of attending is actually around $34,000. This is a difference impoverished students simply can't make up. While the coaches are often the highest paid people in their state, players don’t have enough money for food, and will turn to stealing, selling drugs, or worse, violating NCAA rules. Think about this: an English major needs some extra cash, so he writes for a blog that pays him a little bit. Should his scholarship be taken away for it? If he was an athlete who wrote his name and got paid a little bit, then according to the NCAA, yes his scholarship should be taken away. Because if the athlete is allowed to do this, or allowed to have a bagel with whatever he wants on it, he can no longer be called an amatuer, and the NCAA loses its non-profit status.

Along with being deemed amateurs, the kids are also labeled “student-athletes”. The NCAA claims that “maintaining amateurism is crucial to preserving an academic environment in which acquiring a quality education is the first priority,” and that kids will always put academics ahead of sports. A free education is the reward for their grind on the field. However, education is treated as being of secondary importance. How can you claim that college basketball players who take an entire month off of classes in March are putting their education first? The people don’t care if Marcus Lee got an A on his math test. They care if he slams it over a whoremonger Cardinal next weekend. The fact of the matter is, the players simply can’t put their education first. They could have a 4.0 GPA, but still have their scholarship taken away if they don’t get it done on the field. This leads to the state of mind that eligibility to play is the focus, rather than actual learning. For 18 years, UNC had independent-study “paper classes”, which were basically fake classes that athletes could enroll in to artificially improve their grades and remain eligible to play. This kind of scandal is not unique to UNC and demonstrates that education is not the priority, no matter how much the NCAA pushes their student-athlete facade. This notion of being a student athlete also lets the NCAA stay slippery in tricky situations, where god forbid, they might actually have to do something for an athlete, at the risk of jeopardizing their non-profit status. In Waldrep v. Texas Employers Insurance Association, Kent Waldrep sued his school, Texas Christian University, for the expensive medical bills he racked up from being paralyzed from an injury he sustained in a game in 1974. He claimed he qualified for workman’s comp, as he was working for them at the time. However, TCU was able to say, under NCAA guidelines, that Kent was a student-athlete and sustained his injury during an extracurricular activity. If Kent was ruled to be an employee, the NCAA could potentially lose their non-profit status. In the end, TCU didn’t pay a dime. Kent wasn’t classified as an employee, and the NCAA remained non-profit. Kent, being a model student athlete, was still determined to get his education. But guess what? TCU cut his scholarship.

Surely there are other options. Do kids really have to go through the NCAA to make it to professional sports? Of course not, says the NCAA. They say that if you don’t like it, then just don’t do it. It is really that simple? .Since 2006, when the NBA stopped drafting kids straight out of high school, only 3 US born athletes have been drafted into the pros without going through the NCAA. OK, so the kids are pretty much trapped into going through the NCAA. But can’t they be the voice of change? They’re the ones on the front lines, the ones who know firsthand about the injustices committed against them. Why not speak out? They wish they could. The NCAA has full control over their eligibility, something the players aren’t willing to risk. The NCAA has all the power.

The NCAA needs to be changed. There are many routes we can take to mending the bureaucratic monopoly they have on kids. We can pay the players evenly across all sports, we can have salary caps like professional teams, we can allow players to make money off endorsements or signing autographs. The one problem that stands in our way is the powerhouse that is the NCAA. Their worst nightmare is allowing this to happen, and losing their non-profit status. Their argument, that “it’s too complicated,” is hypocritical for a company that conducts hundreds of business deals a day.

We need to stop the NCAA from taking advantage of college athletes and using complex rules to hoard as much money as possible. Kids shouldn’t be bound to a strict amatuer code so the NCAA can remain non-profit. Student athletes can’t put school first, because if they do, they won't play as well and the revenue from their play will go down. Kids shouldn’t be trapped into adhering to so many rules. We know that calling athletes amateurs provides the NCAA with their tax-free money. But we have to ask ourselves, what does amateurity provide the athlete?

Bibliography

Branch, Taylor. The Cartel inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA. San Francisco, CA: Byliner, 2011. Print.

Infante, John. "Athletic Scholarships." How the NCAA Banned Cream Cheese. 4 Oct. 2012. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA." NCAA.org - The Official Site of the NCAA. Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

Schooled: The Price of College Sports. Dir. Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, and Jonathan Paley. Makuhari Media, 2013. Netflix.

"UCLA Undergraduate Admission." Fees, Tuition, and Estimated Student Budget Web. 13 Dec. 2015.

Waldrep v. Texas Employers Insurance Association. Court of Appeals of Texas, Austin. 15 June 2000. Print.