The coaches could pay H-O-R-S-E instead: "NCAA Players Should Strike at the Final Four."

Photo credit: Forbes.

They're schools first, and sports programs second. Perhaps the single point uniting Democrats and Republicans is a shared tendency to ignore this fact.

That's why I'm obliged to continue reminding you.

NCAA Players Should Strike at the Final Four, by Dave Zirin and Etan Thomas (The Nation)

They have the power to force a change, but only if they refuse to be pawns in someone else’s game.

 ... One common argument against paying these athletes is that the cost of their tuition and room and board is already covered. But NCAA is a billion (with a b) dollar annual industry. The idea that players should just be grateful for what they get is in line with the contention that workers in a multi-national corporation’s sweatshop should be grateful to earn pennies for their labor. Free market proponents argue that those workers are better off because they have been given the “opportunity” to make those pennies, but that doesn’t change the reality of exploitation. That’s what’s going on in the NCAA. The NCAA sits on a cash cow, a Scrooge McDuck-type gold mine, and they are very happy with the system working the exact way they designed it to work ...

 ... Whenever the topic of paying college athletes is brought up today, forecasts of the death of college sports flood the airwaves. Yet the only thing that will destroy intercollegiate athletics is continuation of the current system, a system without a moral center that careens from one scandal to the next and is rooted in rank exploitation. This system will either be wrecked by its current minders or remade by the players themselves.

The NCAA is not going to change anything if they are not compelled, just as the NBA and MLB weren’t going to change anything back in the day without the push of people like Oscar Robertson and Curt Flood. The players have the power to force a change, but only if they refuse to be pawns in someone else’s game.

"The NCAA is a zombie system, feeding on the flesh of the people they are supposed to be educating."

A book worth reading, but you won't, will you?

It's another of my periodic reminders that Dave Zirin is among the select few sports writers worth reading, for the simple reason that he refuses to view sports outside a broader societal context: Our games, and the games we play.

Your March Madness Bracket Is Exploiting Student-Athletes, by Dave Zirin (Edge of Sports)

The quote of this year’s NCAA tournament was spoken before a minute of action took place on the court. Lavar Ball, the garrulous hype-man/father of UCLA star freshman Lonzo Ball as well as upcoming prepsters LaMelo Ball and Liangelo Ball, was asked if he believed that he was “exploiting” his sons. His response: “What do you think UCLA is doing?” Half the sports commentariat reached for their fainting couches and the other half said, “Damn right” ...

... If the economic structure of this thing we call amateur college basketball has altered so dramatically, the situation of the players is painfully similar to the days when Kareem patrolled the paint at Pauley Pavilion. In fact, the most tangible differences for players, compared to Kareem’s days, are that they travel greater distances, play more games, risk more injury, and have less flexibility in terms of the classes that they can take. In other words, as the money has become greater, the level of exploitation has increased.

Enjoy the tournament, suckers. The robber barons appreciate it.

---

Previously:

"A rank hypocrite and a user of teenagers. In other words, a typical, big-time, top-tier NCAA football coach."

The corrupt NCAA monopoly: "American society is lying to itself about the virtues of its favorite form of entertainment."

"A billion dollar sports enterprise where the athletes aren't paid a penny."

Zirin on "Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny."

R.I.P. Malone and Dawkins, the "two original prophets of justice about the sham amateurism of NCAA basketball."

"A rank hypocrite and a user of teenagers. In other words, a typical, big-time, top-tier NCAA football coach."

A book worth reading, but you won't, will you?

It's another of my periodic reminders that Dave Zirin is among the select few sports writers worth reading, for the simple reason that he refuses to view sports outside a broader societal context: Our games, and the games we play.

Bob Stoops and the Geyser Cesspool of College Football, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

The 2014 video of Oklahoma University player Joe Mixon breaking the jaw of a female student is exposing, yet again, the rot of college football.

It is an insult to cesspools to call Division I college football a cesspool. Cesspools serve a legitimate societal function as a gathering point for putrid waste. College football sprays that waste like a geyser, contaminating everyone it touches. Every year there are examples of putrescence. In fact, the endless parade of scandals are critical to keeping the system afloat. Our eyes are so glazed over by the annual flip book of impropriety and misconduct that we don’t recognize how we have normalized a sports system that has become anything but normal. (This makes college football very similar to a certain recent presidential campaign.)

Money? Indeed, and Zirin follows it.

A question that those who might not be familiar with the geyser cesspool that is college football might ask themselves is how Bob Stoops can live with himself. It’s easy. He makes $5.5 million a year in a state where one in four people under 18 live below the poverty line. He makes $5.5 million a year at a school where adjunct professors make $17 an hour and in a state where first-year public-school teachers make $31,000 a year. He makes $5.5 million a year, while his players make meal money. But Bob Stoops is not here to educate. He’s here to win football games and ensure that football in Norman, Oklahoma, maintains its place as a tent pole of the neoliberal university.

Previously:

The corrupt NCAA monopoly: "American society is lying to itself about the virtues of its favorite form of entertainment."

"A billion dollar sports enterprise where the athletes aren't paid a penny."

Zirin on "Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny."

R.I.P. Malone and Dawkins, the "two original prophets of justice about the sham amateurism of NCAA basketball."

"A billion dollar sports enterprise where the athletes aren't paid a penny."

The video is from 2015, but since the story is repeated each year, the relevance has no shelf life. Last year 'round this time, I was stunned to learn that ...

John Calipari is far more refreshingly transparent than Jeff Gahan.

In 2016, there's a new book for papa to read: Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss.

Does the NCAA exploit student-athletes? by Nick Romeo (Boston Globe)

... Nocera and Strauss quote a wide range of economists and attorneys who agree that the NCAA functions as an economic cartel by colluding to artificially suppress wages for workers. The phrase “student-athlete” was a legal fiction concocted in the 1950s to avoid paying worker’s compensation to the widow of a football player who died on the field. In 2014, football players at Northwestern went on strike, noting that they regularly worked more than 50 hours per week on sports. One economic analysis suggests that a free-market competition between schools to recruit men’s football and basketball players would result in natural wages between $100,000 and $300,000 per year.

Nocera is a heroic figure -- and there'll be lots of reading time these next few weeks.

From John Oliver's 2015 video.

Zirin on "Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny."

Former University of Michigan and NBA star Jalen Rose, as quoted in the Detroit Free Press on the topic of college athletic recruitment:

"Yes, there is drinking. Yes, there is members of the opposite sex that are present. Remember, they're trying to woo me to the campus ... and as a 17-year-old kid, first off, if I'm not getting laid, I'm not coming. I'm not signing. I'm not coming."

At times like this, as the fanatics rush to decry and defend the coach, I take a deep breath and remind myself that we're about the only country in the world to confuse sports with education.

In this, it's helpful to know that Dave Zirin is out there somewhere, writing about sports and those aspects of it embracing genuine significance. Zirin warns against moralizing and cynicism, and hits the center of the target.

Louisville Basketball and the NCAA’s Political Economy of Misogyny, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

 ... both of these reactions miss the most urgent issue—the NCAA’s political economy of misogyny. There’s a lesson in this scandal if we’re willing to learn it. It starts with Louisville Basketball, whose use of transactional sex as a method of recruitment produced results and made a small number of people very rich. Louisville has now been at the top of Forbes Magazine’s list of most valuable NCAA hoops programs for four consecutive years. Pitino won an NCAA title in 2013 alongside a new contract that pays him well in excess of four million dollars a year. The connective tissue before us between the political economy of amateurism and misogyny has been written in a neon script. It also shines a harsh light on how the use of women as currency links many of the public relations crises that plague sports and the psychological pain that plagues ex-athletes.

Olbermann: "Sports (and its consumer -- you) are unavoidably, inescapably and permanently political."

Olbermann's not alone. On Saturday, Dave Zirin published his version of the same argument.

Why the NCAA Should Move the Final Four Out of Indiana, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... If (NCAA President Mark) Emmert really wanted to make a statement, he’d move next week’s Final Four out of Indianapolis. Emmert could announce that they were moving the basketball semifinals and finals to Cincinnati, less than 100 miles from the locale, so anyone who had their plane tickets or driving plans set wouldn’t be egregiously inconvenienced. Play it at the University of Cincinnati—hell, play it at a Cincy YMCA—but just get it out of the clutches of Mike Pence.

As noted here, I view it as unlikely. But the reasoning is strong.

John Calipari is far more refreshingly transparent than Jeff Gahan.

Meme from John Oliver's video. Follow the SB Nation link to watch it.

Great opening from the New York Post's Phil Mushnick.

The refreshing transparency of education-shunning Kentucky

Finally, after all these years, we have an NCAA Tournament favorite we can root for without moral compromise, a team so steeped in unconditional, conspicuous integrity that right-headed folks can cheer as one. Go tell it on the mountain!

Ladies and gentlemen, sports fans of all demographic ages, Nike jersey and sneaker sizes, your University of Kentucky Wildcats!

Finally, a team without false collegiate pretense, a team that plays on courts stripped of scholastic varnish. Finally, a team fronted by a major university that knows we know that this team now annually has the same relationship to college as pigeons do to stone soldiers standing in town squares.

"This whole system seems fundamentally flawed," says John Oliver, and of course he's right. It is, and that's why Mushnick's snark is gospel. In turn, that's why for the first time in 25 years, I'm rooting for a team in this year's tournament: UK.

Who better than Calipari to achieve immortality by recording an undefeated championship season for the first time since IU's sainted Bob Knight did it during the Ford administration? By leveraging a dishonest system, Calipari is rendered scrupulously honest. It's the system you crave, so how can anyone among you begrudge him working it to the maximum degree?

Go Wildcats. Not that I'll waste any time watching games.

John Oliver went all in on NCAA for shameful March Madness commercialism, by Michael Katz (SB Nation)

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver set his premium cable warpath on March Madness. Oliver ~destroys~ the NCAA for insisting college players are not employees while the tournament rakes in so much cash.

"All this makes it even harder to swallow when some coaches like Clemson's Dabo Swinney, a man who makes over $3 million a year, insists that his players not get paid."

Previously at NAC:

Finally tackling "the hypocrisy at the root of the big-time college sports system."

REWIND: A labor theory of basketball value.

Down with the NCAA? Sounds wonderful to me.

Weekend reading update: College sports reform, J. Edgar Hoover and hypocrisy.

Finally tackling "the hypocrisy at the root of the big-time college sports system."

There's nothing inherently wrong with the notion of college athletics, even if the system makes a mockery of any sensible notion of "student" athlete, because America is irony-free .... but ONLY if the human beings actually creating the megabuck value are remunerated fairly. This has not been the case for decades, and whatever might be done to change it, should be commenced immediately.

Delicious commentary is here:

With Judge’s Rebuke, a System Built on Hypocrisy Is Wobbling, by William C. Rhoden (NYT)

... Representatives of these power conferences complain about allowing athletes a share of the revenue. They want it both ways: The rich universities want to break from the pack and set up their own rules, but they object to sharing the revenue with the athletes who generate the wealth.

Wilken’s ruling put a price on the cost of doing business.

The judge's decision is here:

N.C.A.A. Must Allow Colleges to Pay Athletes, Judge Rules, by Ben Strauss and Marc Tracy (NYT)

In a decision that could drastically reshape the world of college sports, a federal judge ruled on Friday that the N.C.A.A.'s decades-old rules barring payments to college athletes were in violation of antitrust laws ...

... Advocates for student-athletes declared it a major victory.

“The decision goes behind the curtain of amateurism and says there’s nothing there,” William Isaacson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said. “It’s a remarkable step forward for decency for college athletes.”

More on the "college athletics charade."

I've been here before, oft times.

Down with the NCAA? Sounds wonderful to me.

Diggin' it: "Lawsuit Declares NCAA An 'Unlawful Cartel' That Illegally Restricts Athlete Earning Power."

REWIND: A labor theory of basketball value.

But rather in keeping with the notion that guns make them free, Americans do enjoy their fiction -- the virtues of "amateur" athletics being high on that list.

Column: Enough with the college athletics charade, by Paul Newberry (Yahoo)
By PAUL NEWBERRY

It's been another glorious week in college athletics.

Alabama's Nick Saban finalized a new contract worth nearly $7 million a year, only to get one-upped - or should we say million-upped? - by Kentucky's John Calipari, who'll make even more on an annual basis with his seven-year, $52.5 million deal (at least until Saban's next raise).

Then, on Friday, came a report in which former North Carolina star Rashad McCants claimed he took a bunch of sham courses during his time with the Tar Heels, supposedly with the full knowledge of coach Roy Williams.

All in all, a good reminder of what's really important in our alleged institutions of higher learning.

Clearly, it's got nothing to do with learning.

Diggin' it: "Lawsuit Declares NCAA An 'Unlawful Cartel' That Illegally Restricts Athlete Earning Power."

Power to the people. Who among us finds it acceptable to generate billions and be remunerated farthings? Especially when you read pieces like this:

  We’re No. 1! Forbes again names U of L ‘America’s most valuable team’; taxpayers remain unranked (Terry Boyd at Insider Louisville)

Yeah, that's right. Fill out those brackets, make a hundred bucks.

Lawsuit Declares NCAA An 'Unlawful Cartel' That Illegally Restricts Athlete Earning Power, by David Porter (Associated Press, via Huff Post)

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — The National Collegiate Athletic Association and its five dominant conferences are an "unlawful cartel" that has illegally restricted the earning power of football and men's basketball players while making billions off their labor, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday that seeks to paint big-time college athletics as being in blatant violation of antitrust laws.

REWIND: A labor theory of basketball value.

In 2011, this column appeared in the newspaper, and today, I'm liberating it from behind the Hanson Pay Wall. In our fast-moving world of ephemeral meaninglessness, some of the topical references have aged better than others, but the gist remains precisely the same: When it comes to the artful fiction of student athlete amateurism amid rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, college basketball is tops.

---

A labor theory of basketball value.

Numerous sources agree that on average, Americans spend at least four hours a day watching television, and although three decades of competitive beer drinking have atrophied my basic math skills, I’m fully capable of calculating this amount to a weekly total of 28 hours and a yearly tally of 1,456, give or take a TV evangelist’s sermon or three.

In truth, it’s probably a lot more than that, and speaking personally, I can’t fathom it. Wasting one’s life watching television makes less sense than squandering valuable agitation time asleep. Both are better done when dead.

Reading and writing, or staring passively at someone else’s creative output, assuming “reality” TV can be “creative”?

Walking and biking, or another numbing episode of Two and a Half Men?

I’d rather mow grass or even put up hay bales than subject myself to Glee, American Idol or any show about comic book criminal forensics, and if refraining from these vapid intrusions, and avoiding the even more disgusting commercials accompanying them, means I’m missing out on a shared “cultural” experience, that’s fine by me. I’ll listen to Duke Ellington instead.

However, exceptions prove the rule. While spending nowhere close to 28 hours a week staring at the tube, I enjoy selected sporting events – a few baseball games in summer, and National Basketball Association (NBA) contests.

‘Round here, the merest mention of my preference for the NBA usually is enough to incite anguished howls from those with rooting interests in universities that many rabid fans have never visited, and couldn’t locate on a map even if map reading were a widely shared skill in Christina Aguilera’s America.

In my admittedly obtuse and distended world, colleges and universities are places where students go for an education, the overall contempt for which severely punishes our American battered work force in a time of increased global competitiveness.

Conversely, America’s (and recently, the world’s) finest basketball players are paid to play in the NBA, which functions vaguely as a market economy, with laborers remunerated in a manner somewhat commensurate with the wealth they assist in creating.

In the NBA, it’s all about the money – and refreshingly, not a single person involved ever bothers denying it.

In American college basketball, it’s also all about the money – and alarmingly, almost every person involved constantly denies it.

---

As products competing for the entertainment dollar, sporting voyeurism in both the NBA and college hoops is a paying proposition. Fans pay to watch athletes play, and make no mistake: At both levels, without the presence of athletes out there actually playing basketball, no one would ever pay to attend. Remember this whenever college or pro basketball’s “cult of the coach” rears its pompous, idiotic head, because there have been no recorded instances of fans tithing for the privilege of watching Bob Knight or Phil Jackson bark instructions to an empty court.

Given that basketball players are the means of generating profit from nothing, a significant proportion of the money generated by NBA players comes back to them in the form or salaries and endorsements, and that’s as it should be, even if it took until recent times to rightly end the sort of artificially maintained monopoly/cartel at the professional level that merrily and deleteriously persists in college basketball to this precise moment.

In short, while the NBA is far from perfect, at least it’s free of hypocrisy.

---

Meanwhile, in college basketball, a strikingly small percentage of the money generated by the players comes back to the players, not as pay, but in the form of scholarships and grants. Before Cards or Cats fans begin waving this bogus “free ride” statistic in my face, recall that NCAA Division One basketball players generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Yes, the players are lightly “paid” with wholesale-priced scholarships, representing what amounts to sweatshop wages in proportionate terms, as well as being “rewarded” with the opportunity to work more often than study. All of it is hypocritical and exploitative, and the system as currently constituted is to the detriment of higher education, as Murray Sperber concludes in his classic study, “Beer and Circus."

In the book, Sperber (who the iconic Knight understandably detests) charges that Big Time Universities knowingly entice students not with bang-for-the-buck learning, but with the siren’s lure of party culture and upper echelon NCAA athletics, hence the term “Beer and Circus,” which consciously echoes ancient Rome. Distracted by parties and ballgames, students hopefully fail to notice that their educational institutions fail to provide them a quality undergraduate education … and tuition never decreases.

In a nutshell, that’s why I can no longer watch college basketball. The sham is too much for this hardened cynic, even if every once in a while a school like Butler comes along to encourage us to giddily swallow the bait and get all touchy-feely about the alleged triumphs of amateurism, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

To maintain the populace’s preference for the fiction of student athlete amateurism amid the rampant, monopolistic and profiteering hypocrisy, why not institute a program of delayed gratification?

Take a percentage of the revenue generated annually by NCAA basketball (just think of the advertising monies generated by March Madness alone) and use it to pay the players according to an agreed upon wage scale -- but deferred, not until they graduate, or failing graduation, when they reach a certain age.

Until then, how ‘bout them Heat?

Down with the NCAA? Sounds wonderful to me.

Even if you buy the bilge water of collegiate amateurism, and I surely don't, you should be in favor of dismantling the NCAA -- which does more to enhance the hypocrisy than end it. Dow, down, down. As fast as possible.

The Lawsuit That Could Bring Down the NCAA, by Jonathan Mahler (Bloomberg)

The storm that’s slowly rolling toward Indianapolis quietly gained strength this week with the filing of several devastating documents in a federal court in California. If it stays on course, it’s going to hit with biblical force, reducing the National Collegiate Athletic Association to a heap of rubble.

This storm is also known as O’Bannon v. NCAA. It’s an antitrust lawsuit filed in 2009 by former UCLA All-American basketball player Ed O’Bannon and a handful of other ex-college athletes, who don’t think the NCAA should be profiting from their names and images without sharing the royalty payments.

Ware's place as a cog in the NCAA money machine.

I understand not many hoops junkie readers will want to think about this, but it doesn't mean you should ignore it.

Will Ware be stuck with the bill?, by David Sirota (Salon)

Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware’s injury today in the Midwest Regional finals of the NCAA tournament will likely be remembered alongside Joe Theismann’s career-ender as one of the most tragically gruesome in sports history. But that’s not the only tragic and gruesome part of this episode, because unlike Theismann, who was working under a guaranteed contract, Ware was an NCAA athlete helping to generate millions of dollars for the NCAA, but not automatically guaranteed a four-year education scholarship. As in so many other similar cases, that means his injury in service to the NCAA’s multimillion-dollar machine could spell the end of his financial aid and massive healthcare bills to boot.

Zirin nails it: NCAA as "Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation."

Couldn't have said it better myself, although heaven knows, I've tried. Call me a Marxist if you wish, but when players generate billions in revenue for others while receiving farthings in return value, it's simply a farce.

Go get 'em, Dave.

The NCAA: Poster Boy for Corruption and Exploitation, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

It’s time for that period of breathless college-hoops hysteria known as March Madness. It’s time for bracketology, Final Four predictions, office pools and the gambling of billions of dollars, legal and illegal. What will go largely unnoted is the fact that kids, ranging in age from 18 to 22 and branded with corporate logos, are producing this tidal wave of revenue—and they’re not receiving a dime of it.

Welcome to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the twenty-first century, about as corrupt and mangled an institution as exists in the United States.

Why discuss student-athletes when there's money to be made?

As noted here previously, the first requirement for the meaningful reform of a core-rotten edifice is for its devotees to acknowledge the prevailing hypocrisy.

Show Me the Money, by Joe Nocera (New York Times)

The annual IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, held last week in Midtown Manhattan, is the kind of meeting where football games are routinely described as “product,” television networks are “distribution channels,” and rooting for State U. is an example of “brand loyalty.” The university presidents, conference commissioners, athletic directors and corporate marketers who attend spend very little time mouthing the usual pieties about how the “student-athlete” comes first. Rather, they gather each year to talk bluntly about making money.