National Committee to Abuse while profit off Athletes

Slavery might have been abolished a long time ago, but it seems that college athletics was one caveat to law. 

This is illustrated by the continuous exploitation of our college athletes in order to make exorbitant amounts of money off of them with little to no compensation. After all, that is what capitalism is all about right? Obtain a profit at all costs. 

Don’t let the amateur non-profit designation fool you, the NCAA is big league money. In fact, just the television ad revenue from the 2014 NCAA Tournament totaled $1.13 billion. That isn’t enough though. No, the NCAA in 2009 decided they needed to increase their revenues in the Final Four by switching from regular basketball stadiums to NFL stadiums. The attendance in the 2008 National Championship was 43,256. Last year’s attendance was listed at 75,505. Why sell 43,000 tickets when you can sell nearly double? 

So don’t be mistaken, the NCAA is a billion dollar corporation and involved in the money-grab business. 

As a gesture of gratitude, but more-so a result of a February 2017 lawsuit, the NCAA will pay 40,000 athletes from 11 conferences between $5,000 and $7,000 each for food and the cost of living. Keep in mind this was fought tooth-and-nail from the NCAA side to not give the athletes anything. 

This comes just two years after the NCAA conducted a study and found that 80 percent of college basketball players in the top conferences, live below the poverty line despite full ride scholarships. Many of these athletes reported not being able to afford transportation at home and had trouble paying for food and books. In the same study, Duke basketball players - one of the premier basketball programs - were valued at $1,025,656 each for what they bring in for the University. The average team member lived $732 above the poverty line. This all while their coach is among the top paid employee at the University. 

If you are asking yourself, why don’t these athletes get a side job? 

First, a lot do because they need at least some extra money. But really how many hours do you think they are able to work? On average, college athletes practice around 30 hours per week. Keep in mind that is just practice, it doesn’t take into account all the time they spend doing extra work either on the field or in the weight-room, time spent doing homework or with a tutor - which are more and more becoming mandatory for college athletes - or in class. Still think they can balance all of that with a little side job and still afford to pay for their own food, books, clothes or cost of living? 

And you wonder why there are so many scandals with players receiving money/benefits from coaches and boosters? That actually happens a lot more than what is known or reported. Of course broke, over-worked teenagers are going to accept money, food or clothes if offered from a booster. 

But these guys are going to go pro right? They’ll make enough money to cover what they lost in college, I mean the average NBA salary this year was $6.2 million. Unfortunately that theory doesn’t match up with the numbers. On average only a little more than one percent of college players make it to the pro’s in their respective sport. 

The NCAA runs quite a brilliant scheme. Did you know they even invented the term ‘student-athlete’ so they could fight insurance claims for injured football players. Pretty slick, huh? 

But that seems quite obvious to me. The issue that needs to be investigated deeper is the discrepancy between black men that are full-time degree-seeking undergraduate students and black men that are on the athletic teams. For example, a 2010 study from the Penn Graduate School of Education found that in the big six NCAA conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12 and SEC)  between 2007 and 2010, Black men were 2.8 percent of full-time degree seeking students but on 57 percent of the football teams and 64.3 percent of basketball teams. 

To me that says that these top and prestigious Universities, which already charge an arm and a leg for tuition, won’t admit black students unless they can exploit them. 

That is a serious problem.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher or NCW Media as a whole.

Zach Johnson can be reached at lcmeditor@gmail.com or (509) 682-2213.