If Andre Woolridge had a dime for every time someone stopped him on the street in Iowa City to say, “Great game last night” . . .
No, make it a nickel. He’s not greedy.
How about a nickel for every time someone has paid $17 for a seat at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, where Woolridge performs before sellout crowds as a star guard for the University of Iowa? And how about a nickel for every time someone has asked him to sign this year’s $14-a-copy Hawkeyes hoops media guide, whose cover shows Woolridge firing a behind-the-back pass to teammate Jess Settles?
It would be a lot of nickels. But Woolridge has been told there simply isn’t enough money to pay college athletes. Not even a nickel.
Woolridge has done the math, and it doesn’t add up.
“You find yourself in the position of being a star athlete, on ESPN every night and known all over town by other students, kids asking for your autograph,” he said. “But then you get home and you don’t have enough money to wash your clothes, and then you wonder why (student-athletes) deal with agents. Guys are taking money just to make ends meet.”
Woolridge, an English major set to graduate this spring, will put poverty behind him if he plays in the NBA. But he raises an issue that has become the biggest headache in college sports: compensation for student-athletes.
It grabbed headlines last month when the NCAA gave athletes the right to work, acknowledging for the first time the growing gap between athletic scholarship packages and the true cost of attending college. And it’s timely to ponder as the NCAA’s biggest cash producer, the Division I men’s basketball tournament, dominates the national sporting consciousness next month.
The NCAA’s rote response–we won’t pay athletes–hasn’t changed, nor has its argument that a free ride to college is payment enough. But in a high-stakes age when the NCAA reaps $1.725 billion in television rights fees from the hoops tournament and bowl alliance games pay $8.5 million per team, some people sense that a scholarship with a face value of $20,000 a year is not fair compensation.
“The NCAA is trying to hold back a real economic force,” said Duke law professor John Weistart, an expert on college sports law. “These kids are celebrities and they have real celebrity value, but the NCAA refuses to recognize that. That force has gone from significant to being enormous.”
The pay-for-play call is coming from locker rooms and classrooms and editorial board rooms.
“When we started to study this 10 years ago, for somebody to talk about pay for college athletes, you were almost on the lunatic fringe,” said Brian Goff, a Western Kentucky University economist. “Nobody really viewed it as a serious thing. I see more editorials, more serious discussions of `Is it coming to this? Do they need to be paid?’
“Over the next 10 to 15 years, the NCAA faces a challenge, and it hasn’t faced these sorts of challenges in a long time. It has been one of the most successful cartels in the world. The money that’s involved, both internally and externally, is just becoming enormous, and it’s getting out of their control.”
One amount remains firmly under control: player compensation. Institutions and individuals are cashing in. Notre Dame sold the rights to its home football telecasts to NBC for $35 million, and Northwestern football coach Gary Barnett turned a single Rose Bowl season into a 12-year contract worth a reported $5 million. But the athletes’ financial share hasn’t changed. They get tuition, room, board and the cost of books. The neediest may also receive up to $2,000 in federal Pell Grants and are eligible for payments from a $15 million NCAA fund for clothing and emergency trips home. Twenty years ago, the NCAA did away with a $15-a-month “incidentals” payment to athletes.
But what about a cut of the profits? NCAA Executive Director Cedric Dempsey said he rarely passes a day without responding to that question.
“People look at the $1.725 billion basketball contract and say, `With all that money, why can’t they do this and that?’ ” he said.
Consider some of these numbers:
– $1.725 billion. That’s how much CBS paid to televise the massively popular Division I men’s basketball tournament through 2002.
– $75 million. That’s how much Host Communications Inc. has agreed to pay the NCAA for rights to market its name.
– $50 million. That’s how much one city reportedly was willing to offer in incentives to lure the NCAA to move its headquarters from suburban Kansas City.
– $2.2 million. That’s how much additional profit the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments generated last year, beyond the budgeted expectations.
– $2,500. That’s how much the NCAA will allow a student-athlete to earn each school year in part-time work.
The last figure is the smallest, but it might be the most important. It represents a historic shift by the NCAA, which acknowledged at its convention in January that some athletes require more than a so-called full ride to get by.
Some critics ridicule the new rule, saying many student-athletes, especially those in revenue-producing sports, don’t have time to work. Others, such as former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers, say it still restricts athletes.
“It’s a `Big Brother’ attitude: `We will let you work some, and tell you when and how,’ ” said Byers, who has become a sharp critic of the system he helped create. “But they will not let them use their natural athletic ability to run a summer athletic camp.”
That privilege still belongs to the coaches, who often enjoy lucrative windfalls from camp receipts. For example, Woolridge’s coach at Iowa, Tom Davis, reported to the university that he made $100,465 for running the Hawkeyes’ two-week summer basketball camp in the 1995-96 fiscal year. By comparison, Davis earns $128,148 in salary for the entire 1996-97 fiscal year.
Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany called the jobs rule a good-faith effort to help student-athletes make ends meet and saw it as an attempt to make the system “more defensible to the general public.”
Other supporters say outsiders shouldn’t tell students how to budget their time.
“I think that’s a case of people saying, `I can determine how you handle your time better than you can,’ ” said Clarion (Pa.) University President Diane Reinhard, who has worked with the NCAA’s student-advisory board.
But the issue isn’t time. It’s money.
The widely accepted notion that most schools don’t turn athletic profits has come under fire recently. A 1996 NCAA study reported that the typical Division I-A program operates at a $1.2 million profit if institutional support is counted as revenue. It found that the average program ran a $237,000 deficit if support from the school was removed. Institutional support varies widely among athletic departments, with some receiving tuition waivers and others receiving nothing.
The survey indicated that bookkeeping might have a lot to do with the perception that college sports lose money–and critics say that as long as that perception holds, the schools can say they don’t have the means to pay players.
“If the money was small, the exploitation would be small,” University of Chicago economist Alan Sanderson said. “But the money is not small, and the sense is if that’s the case, then the exploitation must not be small.”
Woolridge put it this way: “The money’s there. You know it is.”
But how much money? And who is entitled to it?
Athletes from lower-middle-class backgrounds often are squeezed the hardest, because they don’t qualify for Pell Grants and can’t rely on their parents for much support. And while it’s doubtful that the stipends being considered would slow the exodus of underclassmen to the NBA, they might help an athlete from a poor family deal better with college life.
“It’s a money, money, money environment,” said Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who favors a $75-a-month stipend for athletes. “Kids are being bought off by agents, sometimes for not a lot of money.”
Pay-for-play enjoys scant support from the NCAA establishment. Last spring, Ohio State Athletic Director Andy Geiger asked his Big Ten colleagues to vote on a plan to pay athletes $600 a year, or about $66 a month in the school year.
“It lost 10-1,” Geiger said.
Pay-for-play opponents offer a three-pronged argument against the concept:
– It isn’t economically feasible.
For the last two years, the University of Illinois has run athletic deficits of about $370,000 on budgets of about $20 million. If Illinois paid each of its 500 scholarship student-athletes $100 a month, its deficits would have approached $1 million.
The only solutions, says Athletic Director Ron Guenther, are to cut sports or to increase revenues at a time when few new sources of money are obvious. Guenther argues against pay by pointing out that the typical Fighting Illini athlete receives far more than an athletic aid package, valued at $10,000 for in-state students and $15,000 for out-of-staters.
“You take academic services support, coaching, medical, recruiting budget. . . If you dissected what we’re doing here at Illinois, you’re going to see the bulk of the money is going into the sports experience,” Guenther said. “It’s an expensive experience.”
Many student-athletes appreciate the experience–and they fear that pay for some would wipe out opportunity for others. “You go to school to get an education,” Iowa field hockey and basketball player Kristen Holmes said. “This should be your priority–not making money on playing.”
– It isn’t fair.
Given limited resources, schools may opt to pay only the athletes whose teams make money. On most campuses, that would be football and men’s basketball players.
“And then you’re going to run into troubles with Title IX,” said Val Bonnette, a gender-equity consultant.
– It would wreck the foundation of intercollegiate athletics.
“Our rules should be within the structure of educational principles,” Dempsey said. “That, to me, is more defensible than to go to the open marketplace.”
Of course, the NCAA is going to the marketplace to find the best deal in locating its headquarters, which might be perceived as hypocritical.
The powerful NCAA Presidents Commission, which forced schools to adopt sweeping academic reforms a decade ago, has only begun to tackle the compensation controversy, but it seems reluctant to part with the long-cherished notion that college athletes are amateurs. “We need to consider, how much non-amateurism will the public support?” said Washington State President Sam Smith, chairman of the Presidents Commission. “My general reaction is that there wouldn’t be nearly the emotional tie.”
But while the presidents ponder the pitfalls of professionalism, outside forces are putting increasing pressure on the NCAA. Some of the most significant heat has come in court, where the NCAA lost two recent legal battles over restrictions on athletes and coaches.
In 1995, a federal judge in Kansas City, Mo., ruled the NCAA could not limit pay for part-time basketball assistant coaches. The organization is appealing.
And the NCAA dropped a rule barring student-athletes from appearing in movies after Northwestern tailback Darnell Autry challenged it in court last spring. Realizing that it couldn’t deny Autry opportunities available to non-athletes, the NCAA granted him a waiver 72 hours after he sued and last month voted to permit participation in films and other media-related activities.
“It’s a complete flip,” said Peter Rush, a Chicago attorney who co-represented Autry. “If you look at it cynically, or in a Machiavellian sense, then they were just trying to bury this case as fast as they can.”
Some observers wonder if those cases have set the stage for an athlete to challenge the NCAA on the issue of compensation, charging that it is unfairly restraining him by placing a “cap”–the scholarship package–on his earnings.
“(The NCAA is) scared that if they don’t take the limited steps they are now (in allowing athletes to work), they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into court by athletes and agents, and they might find themselves having to pay a great deal more than they are now,” said Notre Dame economics professor Richard Sheehan, who wrote a book on the finances of big-time sports.
If–or when–that challenge comes is a matter of speculation. But as long as the cash registers ring and the turnstiles swing, pay-for-play will remain a hot topic.
“It’s going to be an effort to find a way to compensate them without killing the myths about college sports,” Sanderson said.
