When did college sports become professional sports? There was once a very clear distinction between college and professional sports. Professional athletes played sports for a living. College athletes were students who represented their universities, received scholarships, and — at least officially —participated in amateur athletics.
Today’s major college sports have many of the characteristics we traditionally associated with professional sports. Athletes can make money through endorsements, appearances, social media and other name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities. College athletes can use agents and marketing professionals to help manage those opportunities. And following the House v. NCAA settlement, participating Division I schools can now provide substantial financial benefits directly to athletes. At some point, we have to ask an obvious question: When does college sports simply become professional sports?
Are college and pro sports the same?
Consider how the college “amateur” system now operates. Universities compete vigorously for talented athletes. Players consider financial opportunities when deciding where to attend school. The transfer portal allows athletes greater freedom to move between programs, sometimes multiple times during their college careers. Schools can assist athletes with NIL opportunities, and athletes who satisfy academic requirements generally have much greater freedom to transfer and compete immediately. The similarities to professional free agency are difficult to ignore.
If an athlete chooses one university partly because the financial opportunity is substantially better, how different is that from an NFL or NBA free agent player choosing another franchise? If schools compete for talent by promoting the financial opportunities (i.e. NIL) surrounding their programs, is that still traditional recruiting—or has it become professional free agency? And if athletes are increasingly encouraged to make decisions based upon their own economic interests, should fans continue expecting the old-fashioned concept of loyalty to a particular school — even if the college athlete has more lucrative deals from other schools?
None of this necessarily means paying college athletes is wrong. In fact, there was always something contradictory about the old system. Universities, conferences, television networks and coaches could participate in an enormous commercial enterprise while the student athletes responsible for the on-field product faced significant restrictions on their ability to profit from their own popularity. Coaches could leave for better opportunities and enormous contracts. Universities could sign lucrative television and sponsorship agreements. Athletes, however, were expected to view their participation primarily through the lens of amateurism, and gladly accept their partial/full-academic scholarship as more than enough in exchange for helping the university make millions of dollars directly from their on-field contributions.
Perhaps what we are witnessing isn’t the destruction of amateur college sports as much as the inevitable conclusion of what college sports had already become: A second professional sport league.
Final thoughts
Universities wanted the television contracts, corporate sponsorships, luxury facilities, enormous coaching salaries, merchandising and massive audiences associated with professional sports. Eventually, it became increasingly difficult to justify maintaining that enormous commercial enterprise while insisting that the people actually playing the games remain amateurs. In other words, continue to work for free.
Perhaps college sports have not changed dramatically on the field, but the college economic model has fundamentally changed. Maybe that’s neither good nor bad, but simply reality. But if college sports look like professional sports, generate money like professional sports, recruit like professional sports, compensate athletes like professional sports and increasingly operate according to the same market principles as professional sports, perhaps the more interesting question isn’t whether college sports are becoming professional. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that they already are.
drstankovich.com
