Can you imagine if you had a free labor force at your disposal? Think for a moment what it would be like to have legions of people go out each day, work for you, and then you get to reap the lucrative earnings! Unfortunately, short of college sports, that’s not the way the world works —- and this explains why so many college coaches now feel victimized each time a student athlete enters the transfer portal, de-commits, or earns a huge NIL paycheck. Seemingly overnight, the “magic” many of these coaches had building their dynasties on controlled, unpaid labor has revealed that it may never had been their coaching genius, but instead the complete control coaches used to have managing free labor. Most college coaches today seem uneasy about paying student athletes, and some still maintain they should not be “paid” beyond the exchange of their athletic participation for college tuition. But are these views legitimate and based in morals and integrity, or a selfish reflection of their near-perfect labor market model being disrupted from the advantages they once had?
Gaining clarity on an outdated model
It’s interesting, but the farther away from the previous free-labor college athletic model, the more we can see clearly just how out of touch it was. Sure, on the surface it looked good offering free or reduced classes in exchange for playing a sport, but the model was always laced with inequities and vulnerabilities favoring coaches and college programs. While today’s new, pay athletes model still has a lot of improving to do, the old model stopped making sense many years ago. Prior to the NIL age, most coaches, including assistants and other related personnel, were paid millions of dollars, while student athletes (literally thee product!) were provided an opportunity for a free or reduced education. But how valuable was that trade when student athletes were often put in “dummy” majors (read: easy, and with a bleak future) to simply stay eligible, or were quickly disposed of once the university no longer saw them as a revenue producer?
The old model survived for a very long time, largely because student athletes didn’t have a place to organize and collectively bargain. A few half-hearted attempts were made, but nothing seemed to ever stick, until now. For student athletes, sure, the free courses were always nice, but when you are steered away from majors you like in exchange for “eligibility” majors, what is the real value? Or when you are physically worked to fatigue through your sport that you literally can’t take advantage of the courses offered because of exhaustion, is that good? The truth is many of these student athletes endured because they had hope they could eventually cash in on the athleticism when they go pro — but with only about 2% of college student athletes making it to professional sports, that pay day simply never comes for most.
It is sad that it took this long for a correction to be made to the “amateur” model the NCAA used for years, and because these corrections are now so dramatic (i.e. instant college athlete millionaires) some are arguing the previous model that more resembled indentured servants was better. No, it wasn’t. The new model certainly needs work, but to go back and expect student athletes to give their lives to play a sport (and, in turn, make the university and coaches tens of millions of dollars) while making no money themselves makes no sense.
Final thoughts
Granted, in this moment college sports look like the wild west, with little direction or oversight. Efforts are currently underway to standardize NIL and related changes with college sports, and a more clear picture of what “amateur” sports will look like in the future will soon emerge. The old, free-labor student athlete model has been phased out, and the farther we get away from the previous model the more people will see how unfair the original amateur approach was in sports. In fact, years from now people likely won’t even believe that coaches, administrators, and most other related sport employees and officials made great money, while the literal product that drove those dollars received nothing more than discounted college classes…and for the few lucky ones, a chance to go pro.
drstankovich.com
