The Badgers are on the way to the Final Four for the first time since 2000. Our football team has played in four consecutive BCS Bowl Games, including three Rose Bowls. The women’s hockey team played in the NCAA Frozen Four this spring. The United States has tremendous interest in collegiate sport, which involves tremendous revenue. ESPN will pay $470 million a year to broadcast the football playoffs once it starts. CBS is paying $10.8 BILLION to broadcast the NCAA basketball playoffs for 14 years. In sum, collegiate sports are a money-making machine, with students as the cogs it easily dispenses.
This past week, the Northwestern University football players petitioned and were granted the right to form a union. Essentially, these players were asserting they were not student-athletes — not even “student”-athletes — but employees of Northwestern University. An employee is identified as someone who in return for payment provides a service under contract and under the employer’s control. Peter Sung Ohr, the director of National Labor Relations Board Region 13, judged the proceeding between Northwestern University and Kain Colter, the quarterback of the team, who had to prove all of the above to grant the football players the right to unionize. By diagramming the strict schedule of time that players were assigned and the regulations set by the university, including living situations, Colter was able to show that players were not students but moneymakers.
Ohr said players were employees because they received scholarships as payment by providing games as a service that produces millions of dollars to benefit the school. The letter of intent, signed by a high school senior, is a contract, and players are under control of their employers, who are the coaches, according to Ohr.
As a state school, this ruling does not apply to University of Wisconsin, which is not subject to the NLRB, but is subject to state labor laws. What is more concerning, however, are stipulations on student-athletes. Students-athletes are employees at UW and productive ones at that. In 2013, the UW Athletics Department made $93.5 million dollars in revenue. This is enough money to provide more protection for athletes injured in practices or other sport related events, which are often not covered under NCAA contract and lead to the termination of the player and loss of their scholarship. The NCAA contract is so tight, in fact, that the players no longer own the right to their own image, which may be used in anyway the NCAA sees fit (such as video games or promotional material, without the knowledge of the player). Players in the NFL have an average career of six years, 9.3 years for a first-round draft pick. Assuming they perform and graduate with a usable degree in four years, he or she is out of a job at 28 with a career earning of $6.1 million. NBA players on average have a career of 4.8 years, meaning they are actually out of work by age 26 or 27. This might not seem so bad considering, on average, a NBA player makes $24.7 million in their career. However, the odds a college player goes pro is 1.7 percent. The highest of any sport is baseball with 2 percent. These students enter college with a whole career ahead of them. One injury freshman year, if the team decides to drop them, strips them of everything: sports career, scholarship and all. While the professional national organizations are trying to offer more coverage for injuries suffered during an athlete’s career, the NCAA offers scant coverage.
The NCAA is robbing students of their future. These students give up control of their lives to institutions that tell them they will educate and protect them; for many athletes this gives them their only medical insurance. All of this can be revoked due to an injury. In many cases, the NCAA treats students as commodities, leaving them without the marketable skills or future they hoped for. Pushing the sports and allowing students to scrape by on eligibility turns four valuable years of their lives into a dead end. The NCAA needs more regulations designed to protect the students and their futures by encouraging them to be student-athletes and not another cog in a machine that only cares about them while they are hitting threes. The NCAA exploits students the same way child stars like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears were exploited.
Abigail Zemach ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in food science.
