Loose Talk: The Editors’ Take

The average Northwestern football player spends forty to fifty hours a week, every single week, for four years of their life, dedicated to their organization. Forty to fifty hours of early morning lifts with the team before breakfast, film sessions during lunch, practices that can take up an entire afternoon, dinners at the trainer’s offices or Saturdays completely devoted to travelling to, playing in and returning from games.The average Chic-Fil-A worker also spends forty to fifty hours a week dedicated to their organization. However, there are four key differences between your average minimum-wage cashier and student-athlete, or “SA”, at a top-tier university. Chic-Fil-A workers don’t have to go to two to three classes a day into their schedule. Chic-Fil-A workers don’t leave work and go home to a long night’s worth of homework. Chic-Fil-A workers weren’t unanimously shut down by the National Labor Relations Board when they attempted to unionize. But most importantly, Chic-Fil-A workers get paid.Northwestern football, like many other NCAA Division I program, made millions of dollars in 2013. According to CNN, Northwestern football made $8.8 million off of ad revenue, money from the naming rights of BCS bowls and ticket and gear sales. But it isn’t just football; NCAA basketball netted $989 million in profit last year. So if the NCAA claims to be a not-for-profit institution and all the checkbooks have to balance out at the end of the day, then where is all this money going?This past year, Northwestern’s B1G rival, the University of Michigan, just gave their new head football coach, John Harbaugh, a $38 million, 7-year contract.The longtime Duke basketball head coach, Mike Krzyzewski, earnsl $10 million a year, more than most NBA head coaches.However, the money doesn’t just go to the coaches, the profit goes to the brand new, state-of-the-art facilities that every D1 school seems to be churning out every half a decade. It goes to the fitness and conditioning centers being installed at universities across the nation, and it goes to the pockets of every trainer, facilities worker and lower-level coach around the league. When the Huffington Post asked five sports economists whether the NCAA and its member institutions could afford to pay SA’s, the answer was clear: yes. College athletics are a multi-billion dollar monolith, but the lowest level of the pyramid that the entire system was built upon—the athletes—is being crushed. And it shouldn’t be.Before delving into the semantics about why an NCAA athlete should get paid, it’s important to dispel the popular myth that “an education is payment within itself.” SA’s at D1 programs (like the aforementioned Northwestern) are placed under such restricting binds with heavy time commitments to their team that academic flexibility is virtually unheard of. From having to block of hours out of a day for practices that classes can’t be scheduled in to having to stay up significantly later than their non-athletic counterparts to do the same amount of homework, D1 SA’s are held to all of the same academic standards and are given no extra help.Thus, many athletes “choose” not to thrive in the classroom. At one of the world’s finest higher learning institutions, Stanford, Pro Bowler Richard Sherman spoke out about the high time commitments required for the football team, stating, “People say you get room and board and they pay for your education, but to [the school officials'] knowledge, you're there to play football…I was blessed to go to Stanford, a school primarily focused on academics, but as [our coach] would attest, we were still there to play football.” Even at a high school like Exeter, students were very vocal about the difficulty of juggling academics and athletics “I often wonder if colleges would really understand the added weight [SA’s] carry compared to their non-athletic counterparts,” said senior and water polo captain David Shepley. “As a varsity athlete, I never have Saturdays free, and 2 hours of practice every day wears down on your physical strength. While others have all afternoon to complete the next day's work, [SA’s] are working out for two hours just to return back in your dorm at 7 and begin everything.”While a lack of an equal education is certainly one of the downsides to being an SA, they also face two more major problems a regular student does not: injury and the risk of running out of value. Injuries can happen to anyone, but to an SA, that injury can be the difference between making millions post-graduation and being bankrupt with a garbage degree. Former UGA star running back Todd Gurley found this out the hard way, after he decided to play during his final year of mandatory schooling instead of sitting out and tore his ACL, taking him from a top five overall pick in the 2015 NFL draft to the middle of the first round. And what, you may ask, was Gurley’s projected net loss? At least $8 million off his rookie contract accroding to ESPN. And Gurley was one of the lucky ones.There are countless collegiate SAs on the bubble between being drafted and becoming an UDFA, and if you’re injured, there’s nothing that can help you. While there are pre-draft insurance policies for player projected to be drafted in the top three rounds of the NFL draft offered by insurance company Oswald with a 1:12.5 payoff ratio, due to the strict and confusing parameters set by the company, there has never been an injured player that successfully claimed his payoff. In terms of running out of value, thanks to the NCAA’s 1973 decision to allow colleges to switch from four-year scholarships to one-year renewable grants (which has now become the standard,) collegiate coaches have absolute control over the academic future of an SA; able to cut them from the team (and by proxy, the school) at any time.The way I see it, there are two solutions. One: drop the preface of collegiate athletes being an amateur program and pay SAs (perhaps even create a true developmental league, unaffiliated with colleges?) Or two: allow players to unionize, give them health insurance policies that will cover injuries that occur during their sport, and bring back guaranteed four-year scholarships.