Some thoughts on the state of the NCAA

Four year scholarships?

For the purpose of this article, I am only going to consider the case of college football. It's what I know the most about and can speak about most intelligently.

USC decided to move to awarding football and men's and women's basketball players with four year scholarships. To understand the significance of this move, we need to first examine the current renewable scholarship system.

Traditional athletic scholarships (hereon referred to simply as scholarships) are awarded/renewed prior to start of each academic year. Regardless of what peripheral clauses the agreements may have, these scholarships are awarded purely on the basis of athletic performance. The path to renewal is pretty cut and dry: play well. Even if you get thrown off your team for stealing computers, another school will probably give you an offer as long as you're good (Note: I actually don't have a problem granting second chances to players who do boneheaded things like this. I don't particularly like third chances).

Academic performance isn't Cardale Jones's biggest concern

Right off the bat we see academics and athletics at odd with one another: an athlete creates more value for the school (and will thus be rewarded for that value by way of scholarship) by performing well on the field rather than performing well in the classroom. In the documentary Schooled: The Price of College Sports (available on Netflix and highly recommended), Maryland cornerback Domonique Foxworth asserted that given the choice between staying up on a Thursday night to study for a test and compromising his performance on Saturday or going to bed, failing the test, and getting a pick on game day, the language of the scholarship strongly incentivized choosing the second option. A pick in a big spot could be the difference in keeping his scholarship for the next year and not being able to pay for school. But, if he can't dedicate the requisite time to his schoolwork to really be educated, why is he in school in the first place? (Note: NOT HIS FAULT)

This is where four year scholarships come into play. They don't need to be renewed and thus continued enrollment in the university is no longer predicated on athletic performance. If a player is struggling on the field due to off-field issues, he doesn't need to add worrying about his scholarship being revoked to the list of problems. This also means a school honoring a scholarship of a permanently injured player no longer becomes; it's just what is required.

From the athlete's perspective, I cannot find any downsides to a four year scholarship. In a way, it allows the athlete to become more a regular college student. I hope the NCAA moves to this policy in the near future.

UPDATE 8/19/14: University of Maryland announces lifetime degree guarantees for all student-athletes. As it should be.

Pay for play?

The hot topic of the day regarding the NCAA is paying athletes for their services. I have conflicted thoughts on this. On the one hand, athletes are powerful marketing tools and revenue drivers for universities and should be compensated for this. On the other hand, one of the things I love so dearly about college sports is the (blissfully ignorant?) idea that each every team is roughly equal.

Football players are supposedly limited to 20 "countable" hours per week of practice activities in season plus 3 hours of competition¹. When non-countable hours get factored in, that amount of time more than doubles. A quick look at the definition of countable vs. non-countable hours shows why this is the case: travel to/from competition, "voluntary" weight training, training room hours, and several other time sucks are categorized as non-countable.

Let's do a quick weekly hour breakdown for an in-season football player: 44 hours on football, 40 hours on school², and the doctor's recommended 56 hours of sleep. Add those up and we have 140 hours of the 168 in a week blocked off. The point I'm trying to get at it is these athletes are working two full-times jobs: football and school. They cannot reasonably be expected to pickup another job to make a little money for food³ or entertainment. The athletes are compensated for their education but resulting lack of funds from athletic commitment (which generates revenue for the school) preventing a kid from seeing a Sunday matinee with his friends is shame.

The simple argument for paying kids is as such: they generate money and publicity for the universities and the NCAA and should be appropriately compensated.

But...

Unranked Stanford upsetting #1 USC

What I love about college football is that the Jameis Winston makes the same amount of money as Middle Tennessee State's long snapper. While some universities certainly have distinct recruiting advantages over others⁴, one of those advantages is not a contract⁵. Under the current rules, Alabama, despite its best efforts, can't become the New York Yankees. This is one factor that leads to the higher variability of CFB and then we get things like the 2007 season.

App State over #5 Michigan

From an organizational standpoint, I also find equality amongst teammates to be hugely important. One receiver getting paid more than another while the lesser paid receiver was more productive would be a fast track to disaster; similarly, there could be administrative pressure to keep higher paid athlete on the field despite underperformance⁶. College athletics are so refreshing because so much of this, for lack of a better word, bullshit, is non-existent. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of bullshit to go around, but this source of it is dry.

What I see is a necessity for compensation paired with a slightly irrational + emotional desire for no compensation. How can these square? I've discussed this with Fritz and we disagreed slightly.

My plan is give every Division I FBS player (scholarship or walk-on) a certain allowance. I have no idea what is fair. That should be determined by a third party (not some NCAA committee). The players can access a certain percentage of that wage at any point, no questions asked. Another percentage will be doled out in certain intervals (like a pay check). The remainder will be accessed by request through the AD's or coach's office. Anything not spent during the year will be moved to a trust⁷ which will be transferred to the athlete upon graduation. Maybe a certain percentage should be withheld from the start.

Under my system, the quarterback at one school is worth the same as his punter and is the same as the quarterback at any other school in the country. There is no discrepancy among teammates and there is no recruiting advantage between schools vis-à-vis compensation. If a five-star left tackle wants to play for his hometown Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, he's not losing out on anything new by not going to Notre Dame.

Perhaps even more important is this system will teach the athletes personal finance! If a guy blows through his cash in a week, he'll learn the consequences and (hopefully) won't do it again. Fortunately, this mistake won't be back-breaking because it's occurring in a controlled environment. When he's in the real world, he'll be able to make a budget. If he makes the NFL, he'll have a better shot at avoiding becoming one of the money broke players upon retirement⁸. I don't much bad in my plan.

Fritz disagrees with me on part: he thinks each conference should have equal pay, but pay across conferences can vary (eg players in the SEC will be paid more than players in the MAC). As stated, I prefer my plan, but I could live with this too.

I really don't know what the trajectory of pay for play is. But something is going to change soon.

Recent NCAA Violations

Let's have a little fun:

Cake cookies: NCAA violation?

• South Carolina recently self-reported an NCAA violation for "impermissible icing" on cookies. After much debate, the NCAA decided it wasn't a violation. Better safe than sorry on SCAR's part, though.
• Oregon self-reported violations including mini golf and laser tag at team dinners, accidentally responding a recruit's text message, and buying a shaving supplies for a recruit (full list of violations here). I get the violation for buying the shaving supplies: it's slippery slope from a disposable Mach3 to Eric Dickerson's gold Trans-Am (while I'm being a bit sarcastic, there is, without question, a grey area that should be avoided altogether). But the school paying for mini golf is a problem? I guess team building isn't a tenet of the NCAA.

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¹I'm pretty curious how this is defined: is it time only spent competing? I've spent more than 5x the allotted time at a track meet in a weekend but only actually ran for < 40s.
²15 hours of class, 25 hours of schoolwork--this might be a little skewed because they could be doing work in study hall that they count as football time, but I think the 44 football hours is an underestimation.
³Thanks to good old Shabazz Napier, schools can now feed their athletes.
⁴Facilities, academic prestige, girls, coaches, etc.
⁵Let's assume everyone is cheating equally here.
⁶Eg Stephen Drew on this year's Red Sox.
⁷Or whatever.
⁸ESPN has a 30 for 30 on this called Broke. I haven't watched it yet, but every episode in the series is fantastic.

Fritz vs. 'Them'

I would like to begin this post by apologizing to my mother for the headshot that appears in Bryan's last post. To any readers who don't know me personally: I promise I don't usually look like that.

My current thinking on the NCAA is fairly well-captured by a column that Bryan and I ran in the Middlebury Campus newspaper last week, and what I want to get into here is essentially an expounded version of that piece. For posterity: let it be known that Bryan and I penned the column before the NCAA changed its policy on feeding athletes. Call us game-changers.

The NCAA's (from henceforth, 'them') most basic orientation to its athletes is two-fold: to make sure that we are brand ambassadors for the national organization (see Bryan's post) and to ensure that we behave in a way that reflects positively on the brand. The latter point is, in my view, a vehicle to a deeper sort of criticism of how they conduct business.

Consider three anecdotes from my weekend in Lincoln:

1. In the athlete hospitality room, there was a staff member (Tyrone) on hand to ensure that we did not take an unreasonable number of snacks.
2. The championships featured an elaborate and fairly confusing credentialing system. There were certain areas designated for spectators, for athletes, coaches, media folks, etc. There were scores of staff stationed at choke-points to ensure that no one was in violation.
3.When we wanted to go to the field house to warm-up on Friday, they assigned us a volunteer to supervise as we waited for the bus. His name was Alex. I'm not sure what exactly he was looking out for, but I was probably the only athlete who spoke with him all weekend. This show was surely just as dehumanizing for the scores of "volunteers" as it was for us.

The point here is simply that they treat their athletes like children. This point isn't in itself that damning; many 18-22 year-olds probably deserve to be treated like children, and I happen to have the privilege to be part of an athletic program that trusts its athletes to drive college-owned vehicles, host recruits and do their own homework.

It is a bit suspicious, however, that this paternalistic attitude is paired with indulgence. When you're at the championships, they pay for everything: travel, hotel, meals, snacks, gear. I got the sense that all of this expense was supposed to make us feel important, like we were being celebrated for all of the hard work that it took just to qualify for the meet. For most of my teammates, this effect was realized; it just left me feeling like I was being manipulated.

Mark Emmert doesn't stand a chance.

Here is the part where I wave my English-major flag a bit. There is a word in literary criticism for this sort of indulgence that is used to cover up a less fun reality: carnivalesque. The idea comes from Mikhail Bakhtin, who thought of the carnival as a way for those in power to keep their subjects contentedly suppressed. The carnival presents a warped version of reality in which traditional standards and power structures are temporarily put aside and subordinates get to feel like they run the show, if only for a short while. Think Mardi Gras or, in a lesser sense, Halloween.

The NCAA championship doesn't feel like real life. It feels like a slightly altered form of real life in which people are constantly showering you in attention and free stuff, asking in return only that you abide by a few rules that easily go unquestioned in the face of so much free stuff. Bakhtin's point, and mine here, is that we should try to look past such a system to see what is really going on.

What is really going on at NCAA championship events is that athletes are being combed to be NCAA spokespersons who return to their real lives after a weekend of "carnival" to show off their flashy new gear and tell stories about how amazing it all was. As long as that system is working and we all continue to "participate" (their favorite word, but not in the way that Bakhtin uses it) in the big show, no one is likely to ask questions like "What does the NCAA do for me?" and "Why does all of this exist in the first place?" (or, if you are a Division-I men's basketball player, "Where is all this money going?") When people start to do that, they realize, it will mean an end to all the fun and games.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Tacit approval of what we don't approve of

Last month, I qualified for and Participated in the NCAA Division III Indoor Track & Field Championships.  While the weekend in Lincoln, NE, and the frantic fortnight leading up to the event could be the subject of decently-lengthed short story perhaps of interest to a non-trivial number of people, I'd rather use this space to talk about my first personal experience with the NCAA; specifically, the manner in which the NCAA uses its student-athletes as advertisements for itself.

Briefly, some background.  I qualified for the meet running the second leg of Middlebury's 4x400m relay.  Fritz Parker, blog co-contributor, ran the first leg.  Middlebury also qualified one guy in the mile, a women's DMR, a woman in the 400m (she ran the 800m leg on the DMR), and a woman in the high jump.  We arrived in Omaha, NE, on a Thursday night and left before dawn on the following Sunday.  The Championships were on the intervening Friday and Saturday.  In terms of performance, my relay came in 12th (out of 12, but saying we were 12th in the country sounds a lot better than last), but we also entered the meet seeded 12th (again, last).

F. Parker             B. Holtzman             A. Nichols               P. Hetzler

As I mentioned, this weekend was my first direct experience with the NCAA.  Prior to my Participation, I had perceived the NCAA as two factions: the governing body of big-time college football (and basketball, but I don't follow CBB the same way I do CFB) and as the name of the national meet which I had spent four years trying to qualify for (much in the same way that, back in my day, Nike Indoor Nationals was the namesake of the national T&F meet run by the NSSF).  I never gave much thought to its governance over other sports and student-athletes.  The NCAA had never affected me before so I never considered it in that context.  The only NCAA regulation I ever cited was its ban on gambling as an excuse to get out of playing poker for money while home on school breaks.

That said, I have historically been a skeptic of the NCAA in regards to how it treated its high-profile athletes and teams.  I always thought the organization was out to get the odd athlete or program instead of protecting those athletes and programs (some examples, and it would be irresponsible not to mention that Oklahoma had to self report an NCAA violation because a few players ate too much pasta.  Thanks in large part to comments by Shabazz Napier, schools can now feed their athletes).  This historical skepticism was recently compounded by a renewed interest in the NCAA manifest largely by reading numerous news articles both criticizing and defending it.  With this in mind, I undoubtedly--perhaps subconsciously--approached my experience with disdain for the NCAA.

The NCAA Experience is one of continuous overstimulation.  Everywhere I looked, the NCAA was present.  From being constantly babysat to the countless number of blue logos emblazoned around the track, there was no escaping the watchful eye of the NCAA (nor the constant reminder that we were at UNL: popcorn isn't just popcorn, it's Husker popcorn; the time on the clock isn't simply just time, it's Husker Time, which, it's worth noting, was incorrect).  This made me uneasy.  Forgetting to wear my Participant badge made me feel like I was accumulating an NCAA infraction for each minute I was without it.

The NCAA has, in a sense, adopted the "everyone gets a trophy" attitude towards the championships.  By qualifying, I will eventually be sent an NCAA pull-over I can proudly wear around telling the world I Participated in an NCAA event, a drawstring bag, and a commemorative medallion.

(Side note--really wish I could do foot/endnotes on this blog: I am usually stoutly against the "everyone gets a trophy" attitude, but not in this case.  For example, I did not receive an All-American trophy by simply Participating, so there was some separation between the winners and the Participants.  Additionally, the commemorations are a nice reward for the accomplishment of qualifying.)

Right at the door to the track was an ad hoc gift shop selling shirts, sweatshirts, and hats with the NCAA logo and the event printed on them.  Items were flying off the shelves, appealing to the athlete's desire to be marked as a Participant when they return to their respective institutions (I'm guessing they don't have to wear a badge at school labeling them as a Participant).  I am guilty of purchasing apparel: I bought a quarter-zip sweatshirt and an Under Armour technical shirt.

Wearing my gear makes me uneasy on two fronts: first, I feel kind of obnoxious by showing such an outward display of my accomplishment.  Realistically, nobody cares that I Participated in the meet.  I also separate myself from my teammates; they don't need a reminder that we went to NCAAs--they all know we did.  Second, by wearing my gear, I passively tell the world I support the NCAA in whole when I staunchly do not.

We are Participants

The second point is what really gets me.  At most schools around the country, some segment of students (athletes?  student-athletes?  Participants?) are wearing NCAA sponsored apparel.  Here at Middlebury, I see students who have NCAA patches sewn on their backpacks, students carrying NCAA water bottles (officially sponsored by Powerade), etc.  Even when you're not at an NCAA event, the NCAA is present and ever-looming.  We Participants are propagators of its presence and the NCAA knows this.  It knows the Participants will display their free mementos and commemorations creating a walking advertisement out of every Participant.  When you add up EVERY athlete in EVERY sport in EVERY division, this number becomes quite large.  I'd wager 90% of them will show the world a piece of their memorabilia with some frequency.  This reminds everyone who sees such memorabilia a. that the NCAA exists and b. that Participating in an NCAA event is good.  To the second point, if one qualifies for NCAAs in something, one is obviously good at what they do.  The association of NCAA = good is immediate.  Unfortunately, there is not much depth to this association.  The achievement of making NCAAs is remarkable, but the associated approval of the NCAA--either by the wearer or viewer--is not questioned when it should be. 

This brings me to my concluding question: how can the accomplishment of competing in an NCAA event be separated from the NCAA (and thus tacit support of the NCAA)?  Students should not feel even the slightest amount of guilt about showing the world a memento of their accomplishment.  They should be proud of their accomplishment.  I am proud, damnit.  But I cannot, in good conscious, show my pride.  This, to me, is unfortunate and is a slight to every athlete in the country.