Shamateurism: The Scam of the Student-Athlete
09.24.21
The Fort Lewis A&M Aggies was an unlikely team to leave a mark in college football history, much less inspire the creation of the NCAA’s greatest marketing scam of all time: the proverbial student-athlete. Stationed in Hesperus, Colorado — a remote, back country settlement that never got quite big enough to become a real town — Front Range recruits were in for a culture shock when they learned that the nearest entertainment was 16 miles away.
“We’d hitchhike,” center Fred “Mighty Mite” Sabell recalled. “All the guys in cars up in the mountains knew we were on the football team at Fort Lewis, and they’d take us into Durango. We’d go to movies. And — ” he said, grinning “ — and try to hustle a gal.”
The players’ slow country living all changed in September 1955, when Ray Dennison — a World War II vet who went to school on the G.I. Bill and joined the football team so he could stop pumping gas — died from an injury on the field. He left behind three children and a widow, Billie, who filed for death benefits under the Workmen’s Compensation Act. Her case would ultimately land in front of the Colorado Supreme Court, which determined that he was neither a student nor a worker under the law, since Fort Lewis was “not in the football business.”
“It is a foundational case,” said Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian who has written about the evolution of the NCAA’s continued labor transgressions. “It opened up a protection for the NCAA and all of its member colleges to treat their athletes who are generating a lot of money as volunteers, and not have to worry about someone classifying them as employees.”
Walter Byers, the NCAA’s executive director at the time, was inspired by the verdict to coin the term “student-athlete,” which all schools were instructed to subsequently use. Byers himself admitted that “the student-athlete was a term used to try to offset these tendences for state agencies or other governmental departments to consider a grant-in-aid holder to be an employee.” The widow lost her suit, and the NCAA gained a bullet-proof legal defense that continues to haunt the bank accounts of student-athletes today.
Our Aristocratic Athletic Heritage
The NCAA’s classic defense for restricting student-athletes’ income opportunities is that they are amateurs and, therefore, can’t accept “pay for play” (as monetary compensation is so often disparaged). In June’s Supreme Court case, NCAA vs. Alston, which challenged the association’s restrictions on educational spending for athletes, the NCAA pointed to a 1984 ruling that credited it with the heroic preservation of amateurism.
“The NCAA plays a critical role in the maintenance of a revered tradition of amateurism in college sports,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens. “There can be no question but that it needs ample latitude to play that role, or that the preservation of the student-athlete in high education adds richness and diversity to intercollegiate athletics and is entirely consistent with the goals of” antitrust laws. (Thankfully, Justice Gorsuch dismissed this passage as an irrelevant “aside” that was no longer sensible given the market realities of 2021.)
What exactly is an amateur? The term has plagued every discussion of college football for over a century, and yet it has highly suspect origins. In fact, it is an elitist, class-based invention, first popularized by Edwardian cricket leagues — the ultimate “imperial sport” — to protect their rarified (and fast disappearing) lifestyle. “The British aristocracy invented amateurism in the nineteenth century,” complained Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College. “When the working classes began to have enough leisure time to take up sports, the upper classes drafted the amateurism rules to segregate themselves.”
Professionals were expected to address amateurs as “Mister” or “Sir,” whereas amateurs referred to professionals by their surnames. At matches, the two groups were physically distinguished by separate locker rooms, uniforms, and hotel arrangements. The “gentleman amateur” was the ultimate sporting ideal: an angelic figure unsullied by the corruptive effects of money, competition, or winning. According to one historian, “The amateur was the gentleman with the bat, and the professional was the laborer with the ball.”
Whatever Happened to Volunteer-Coaches?
Bizarrely, this aristocratic holdover was introduced to American universities, where mere college students were expected to espouse the same pedigreed lifestyle. The amateur ideal was immediately compromised, however, by a wave of “tramp athletes” who “roamed the country making cameo athletic appearances, moving on whenever and wherever the money was better.” As late as the 1940s, a halfback at the University of Washington became known as the “first college player ever to take a cut in salary to play pro football.” He once boasted:“[A] wealthy guy puts big bucks under my pillow every time I score a touchdown. Hell, I can’t afford to graduate.”
Intriguingly, the amateur ideal applied to students as well as coaches. It was once considered inappropriate to pay coaches, who were expected to volunteer their time out of the goodness of the hearts, as they did on administrative committees. Flouting this decorum (as all colleges soon did) could result in sanctions: in 1924, Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, the first liberal arts college west of the Mississippi, was denied accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools for placing an “undue emphasis on athletics.” Its principal error? The school paid its football coach more than the college president.
Apparently, the tradition of the volunteer-coach is long-forgotten by Division I college football, where many coaches now command nearly $11 million a year (with some of their assistants making more than $2.5 million). And yet, many within the industry continue to cling to the unpaid student-athlete model, no doubt because their own salaries would fall.
College sports reformers Gerald Gurney, Donna Lopiano, and Andrew Zimbalist reflected on the absurdity of most college football economic models in their 2017 expose, Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong with College Sports and How to Fix It. “Today, the top-paid college coaches are paid on a par with their counterparts in the NFL or NBA, yet their teams generally generate one-fourth to one-tenth as much revenue,” they explain. “These discrepancies would not make sense in a normal market, and they make sense in college sports only because compensation to the players is artificially compressed.”
The NCAA’s Rise to Power
You “see everybody getting richer and richer,” said Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, “and you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”
Believe it or not, the NCAA was not always such a Scrooge-like stickler for enforcing player compensation restrictions. Today, it is known for its Byzantine, 1,000-page manuals, and has rules for everything from eating at someone’s house too many times to “hook-ups on tatts” — that is, getting free or discounted tattoos in exchange for autographs and memorabilia. But for the first 50 years of its existence, the NCAA was a toothless debating society for bored faculty. At its first annual convention in 1906, the treasurer reported a balance of $28.82, and it remained financially impotent for decades after (it couldn’t even mandate helmets until 1939).
Power dynamics changed in 1951, when the association hired Walter Byers, a 30-year-old college-drop out who would turn the NCAA into a national powerhouse. As the NCAA’s first full-time employee, Byers possessed an unusual capacity for control, detail, and finding money streams. His first victory was securing the NCAA’s exclusive right to negotiations with the new television networks — most colleges were terrified of television’s impact on sports, and willingly conceded. A few years later, when schools wised up and reclaimed their negotiation rights, Byers simply replaced the football honey pot with March Madness.
The NCAA used its newfound financial power to impose increasingly strict compensation rules for colleges, despite their growing commercialization. In 1973, four-year scholarships, once the norm, were subjected to renewal on an annual basis, not unlike many employment contracts. “This rule allowed a coach to cancel athletes’ scholarships at the end of one year for just about any reason, including injury, contribution to team success, the need to make room for a more talented recruit, or failure to fit into a coach’s style of play,” reports Zimbalist in Unwinding Madness.
Ironically, Byers came to regret many of the changes that occurred under his tenure. Upon retirement, he released a memoir, Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Exploiting College Athletes, where he lamented the “neo-plantation mentality that exists on the campuses of our country and in the conference offices and in the NCAA.” The college player, he realized, “cannot sell his own feet (the coach does that) nor can he sell his own name (the college will do that). This is the plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives.”
Players Fight Back: NIL & The Slow Path to Compensation
The late Byers would be comforted to know that, in recent years at least, players have begun to regain control of their names, images, and likenesses (NIL). NIL first came to public prominence in 2009 when Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, watched a video game his friend’s son had been playing. The game used an avatar figure based on O’Bannon, matching his height, weight, bald head, skin tone, jersey number, and left-handed shot.
“And then [my friend] told me he paid X amount of dollars for it, and I didn’t get a penny,” O’Bannon said. “And that’s when it really hit me. The rest is history.” O’Bannon, along with nineteen other former players, filed a class-action lawsuit, where the 9th Circuit Court eventually found that the NCAA was in violation of antitrust laws. The case inspired a spate of legal attacks, both in court and in Congress. As of September 2021, 40 states have either passed or introduced an NIL bill, or signed an executive order to enact the law.
Representative Mark Walker, a former student-athlete who proposed the Student-Athlete Equity Act in Congress, summed up the growing public resistance: “Signing an athletic scholarship with a school should not be a moratorium on your rights to your name, image, and self-worth.”
Many proponents regard NIL as a key avenue for players to net income during their prime earning years, considering that 98% of players will not advance professionally. The ability for TikTok athletic stars to partner with brands or to monetize their Instagram followings could provide lucrative income streams for more than just star players. “NIL will become the new facilities war in college football in terms of what you’re offering,” predicted one business school executive. “We’re going to leverage the incredible assets and courses already being taught and adjust them for a different stakeholder.”
But perhaps the most damaging legal challenge to date came in the NCAA’s defeat in Alston vs. NCAA, delivered by the Supreme Court in June. In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion, he opened the floodgates for more lawsuits to directly challenge the NCAA’s compensation restrictions. “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” wrote Kavanaugh. “The NCAA is not above the law… [it] must supply a legally valid procompetitive justification for its remaining compensation rules. As I see it,” he added, “the NCAA may lack such a justification.”
Extended health insurance, salaries, and player unionization may all be future areas of contention between the NCAA and a radically reimagined system of college athletics. Some, like historian Branch, believe we will look back one day on the age of amateurism as a decades-long collusion, asking, “How did we get away with it for so long?”
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