by Glenn Stout
It’s not hard to see what’s happening, the McCormicks say. You just have to look.
“One group is predominantly white, the other is predominantly black, and only one has the power and writes the rules for its benefit,” Robert says. “I was a big Michigan State fan for a long time before we wrote our first article, and it’s kind of embarrassing it came so late in my life. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
Understand this: there’s nothing inherently racist about amateurism itself. And there’s no reason to believe that its defenders and proponents—including current NCAA president Mark Emmert—are motivated by racial animus. When amateurism was fashioned out of whole cloth by Victorian-era English aristocrats, its ethos was strictly classist: snobby upper-class rowers didn’t want to compete against unwashed bricklayers and factory workers, and concocting an ersatz Greek athletic ideal of no-pay-for-play provided convenient justification. Likewise, the American colleges that copied their English counterparts at the dawn of the 20th century weren’t looking to plunder African American athletic labor—not when their sports and campuses, like society at large, were still segregated.
Today, the economic exploitation within college sports remains race-neutral on its face. The association’s strict prohibition on campus athletes receiving any compensation beyond the price-fixed value of their athletic scholarships applies equally to players of every color. White former Texas A&M University quarterback Johnny Manziel couldn’t cash in on his market value any more than black former Auburn University quarterback Cam Newton could. When black former Vanderbilt University center Festus Ezeli was suspended in 2011 for accepting a meal and a hotel room from a school alumnus, it wasn’t any different than when white former University of Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch was suspended eleven years earlier for accepting a plane ride and a ham sandwich from a candidate for the school’s board of regents.
And yet, while the NCAA’s intent is color-blind, the impact of amateurism is anything but. In American law, there is a concept called adverse impact, in which, essentially, some facially neutral rules that have an unjustified adverse impact on a particular group can be challenged as discriminatory. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 1971 case that a North Carolina power company could no longer require prospective employees to have a high school diploma and pass two intelligence tests—a screening process that didn’t relate to job performance but did have the effect of excluding high numbers of African American applicants at a workplace that already was highly segregated. Similarly, sociologists speak of structural racism when analyzing public policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on minority individuals, families, and communities. State lottery systems that essentially move money from predominantly lower-class African American ticket buyers to predominantly middle- and upper-class white school districts fit the bill; so does a War on Drugs that disproportionately incarcerates young black men; so does a recent decision by officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to drastically cut the number of presidential primary polling stations in and around Phoenix, which unnecessarily made voting far more difficult for the residents of a nonwhite-majority city.
Big-time college sports fall under the same conceptual umbrella. Amateurism rules restrain campus athletes—and only campus athletes, not campus musicians or campus writers—from earning a free-market income, accepting whatever money, goods, or services someone else wants to give them. And guess what? In the revenue sports of Division I football and men’s basketball, where most of the fan interest and television dollars are, the athletes are disproportionately black.
According to the NCAA, 58.3 percent of Division I basketball players and 47.1 percent of Division I football players in 2014–15 were black, making them the largest racial group in both sports. Focus on the Power Five conferences that gobble up most of Division I’s broadcast revenues, and the picture largely looks the same—black participation percentages are a bit lower in the Big Ten and Pac-12, and the same or higher in the others:
Conference
Percentage of Black Football Players in 2014–15
Percentage of Black Men’s Basketball Players in 2014–15
SEC
57.6
66.7
Big Ten
41.5
51.2
Pac-12
37.5
49.2
ACC
51.3
57.0
Big 12
50.0
60.2
African Americans also make up a disproportionate share of the very best, most valuable athletes in college sports—that is, the prep recruits ranked the highest coming onto campus, and the departing players most coveted by the NFL and the National Basketball Association. The McCormicks found that 82 percent of the top 250 high school football seniors and 88 percent of the top 150 high school basketball seniors in 2010 were black. Don Yee, the sports agent, calculates that in recent NFL drafts, five times as many black players were taken in the first two rounds as white players. In the last five NBA drafts, 84 percent of the top 10 selections who played college basketball were black.
According to the U.S. Census, blacks made up 12.3 percent of the nation’s total population in 2012. Meanwhile, a 2016 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that black men made up only 2.5 percent of the overall student population at the schools in the five biggest Division I conferences. In other words, African Americans aren’t just overrepresented in big-time college sports; they’re wildly overrepresented.
This does not hold true, however, when it comes to positions of power. The head of the NCAA always has been a white man, and none of the Power Five conferences has ever had a nonwhite commissioner. A 2015 study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport of the 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools—most of the major college sports money-makers—and a second UCF study of campus athletics as a whole found that industry decision-makers were overwhelmingly white:
Football Bowl Subdivision School Positions
Percentage White in 2014–15
University president
89.8
Athletic director
86.7
Head football coach
87.5
Assistant football coach
67.2
Conference commissioner
100
Faculty athletic representative
89.9
Full-time faculty
75.2
NCAA Division I Positions
Percentage White in 2013–14
NCAA senior executive
76.5
NCAA director
81.9
NCAA administrator
79.8
Division I associate athletic director
87.2
Division I assistant athletic director
88.1
Division I men’s head basketball coach
86.8
Division I athletic administrator
84.6
The white-majority leadership of college sports has a long history of acting in its own economic self-interest when it comes to the rights of black athletes. Consider basic participation: in the 1930s and 1940s, Northern teams typically benched their African American players in order to participate in profitable Southern bowl games—Boston College twice benched Lou Montgomery to play in the Cotton and Sugar Bowls—while in the 1960s and 1970s, Southern teams integrated their football squads because failing to do so was competitive (and financial) suicide. Does the current amateurism status quo reflect more of the same? It’s hard not to wonder.
“You could argue that the system is not failing us, that it is doing exactly what it is intended to do,” says Eddie Comeaux, an associate professor of higher education at the University of California–Riverside who has studied race, diversity, and structural inequality in college sports, and once played Division I baseball at th
e University of California–Berkeley. “Think of the stakeholders. The coaches, presidents, the people in positions of privilege and power—namely, white men—all benefit handsomely from this enterprise.”
Now follow the money. The NCAA takes in roughly $700 million annually from CBS, Turner, and ESPN for the broadcast rights to March Madness—a sum that reportedly will jump to nearly $900 million per year from 2019 to 2024. ESPN is paying $7.3 billion over 12 years to televise the College Football Playoff and four other bowl games—about $470 million annually, or roughly $67 million per contest. Major football conferences are collecting hundreds of millions more through their own television deals and networks—the SEC [Southeastern Conference] made a NCAA record $455.8 million in 2014–15—and Yee says college sports merchandising and licensing revenue exceeds $4 billion annually.
According to Institutional Investor, the 124 schools with major football teams brought in a combined $8.2 billion in athletic revenue in 2014, double what they made a decade earlier. Dan Rascher, a San Francisco–based economist and expert witness for the former athlete plaintiffs in the recent O’Bannon v. NCAA federal antitrust trial, estimates that Division I football and men’s basketball generate between $10 billion and $12 billion in yearly revenue.
No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of cash. Where does it go? Mostly not to the predominantly black athletes who play the games. NCAA rules restrict player compensation to athletic scholarships, small cost-of-living stipends—worth roughly $2,000 to $5,000 per semester—and association hardship funds for things such as travel for family medical emergencies. (Oh, and athletes are also allowed to keep up to $1,350 worth of bowl game swag bags and gifts, like the Xbox One video game consoles handed out at the Military Bowl.) The result, Rascher says, is that Division I college football and men’s basketball players only receive about 10 percent of the total revenue they help generate.
The rest largely ends up in white pockets. Outside of the athletes, compensation levels across major campus sports are astronomical. Williams and Wright, the coaches in tonight’s men’s basketball championship game, earn $2 million and $2.5 million a year, respectively. NCAA president Emmert was paid $1.8 million in 2013. The five power conference commissioners, all white men, earned between $2.1 million and $3.5 million the same year. University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who won the college football championship earlier this year, makes about $7 million annually; his program’s strength coach (who is also white) reportedly makes over $600,000. Clemson University football coach Dabo Swinney was the lowest-paid College Football Playoff coach at $3.3 million per year, and has a “chief of staff” who makes only $252,000.
According to USA Today, nine campus athletic directors in 2013 were paid more than $1 million a year, and the average salary for the position at FBS schools was roughly $515,000. Average base pay for head football coaches at the same universities exceeds $2 million, while 37 of the 68 head coaches in this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament made more than $1 million annually. Yee notes that bowl game directors can make nearly $1 million for administering a single game. There are other job perks too. The Washington Post reports that the Pac-12 gave commissioner Larry Scott an interest-free, $1.86 million loan to buy a four-bedroom, four-bathroom, wine bar–equipped 4,600-square-foot home in 2009. Expense report documents viewed by VICE Sports show that former University of Washington football coach Steve Sarkisian, who made about $2 million a year in salary, was also given football and basketball tickets in 2011–12 valued at almost $19,000, all while the school leased his wife a $55,000 sport utility vehicle.
Then there are non-revenue sport athletes: swimmers and rowers, golfers and cross-country runners, tennis and lacrosse players, most of them supported and subsidized by the profits from big-time football and men’s basketball. Like the people in charge of college sports, NCAA statistics indicate that this group is primarily white:
Division I Sport
Percentage of White Athletes in 2014–15
Cross-country
72.9
Field hockey
77.4
Golf
65.9
Ice hockey
62.3
Lacrosse
85.6
Rowing
75.4
Soccer
66.1
Softball
71.6
Swimming
77.3
Tennis
43.2
Volleyball
67.6
This matters too. As Fortune points out, U.S. Census data indicates that African American households make around $35,000 a year, about 35 percent less than the average white household. Meanwhile, the Aspen Institute’s Project Play reports that the poorer the family, the less access their children typically have to the increasingly expensive youth sport feeder system that stocks the rosters of these non-revenue sports. The result? Black athletes paying the freight for white ones, even though the former group is more likely to need the money than the latter. “The idea that you rob the poor to pay the rich is what’s happening,” says Renae Steiner, a Minneapolis-based antitrust lawyer who worked on the O’Bannon case. “The [college] lacrosse team gets no revenue. Well, who plays lacrosse?”
Add it all up, and this is the amateurism-enabled wealth transfer that Nobel Prize–winning economist Becker and others have diagnosed, the one the McCormicks can’t unsee. Just how much money is being extracted from black athletes and their families by the major college sports industry? Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. In the NFL and NBA—where football and basketball players are free to unionize and collectively bargain with their employers—athletes receive about half of total league revenues. In major college sports, it’s 10 percent. Bump that up to a pro-level 50 percent, and that’s an extra $4 billion annually for all revenue sport athletes.
Since African Americans make up about 53 percent of football and basketball players put together, that means they’re losing about $2.2 billion, each and every year.
Of course, that’s a rough guess, and one that lumps both sports and every Division I conference and school together. In 2011, the National College Players Association, a college athlete advocacy group, and Drexel University professor Ellen Staurowsky published a study estimating that if FBS football and basketball players received the same percentage of industry revenues as their professional counterparts, the average football player would be worth $121,048 per season, and that the average basketball player would be worth $265,027. For the very best athletes at the biggest, most lucrative college programs, those numbers could be even higher: the average University of Texas football player would be worth $514,000 a season, while the average Duke University basketball player would be worth $1 million.
Keep in mind, those numbers were based on college sports revenues in 2010–11; given the subsequent influx of additional television money, those estimates would be even higher today. Moreover, Staurowsky’s estimates don’t take into account any potential outside athletic income—like athletes signing autographs for cash, or starring in commercials for local car dealers, or getting paid for wearing Nike hightops instead of seeing coaches and administrators pocket money for wearing branded shoes during golf outings with donors, and sticking the company’s swoosh logo on equipment trucks. Nevertheless, they help show what amateurism costs the average African American major college football or basketball player: somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million over a four-season campus career, a tidy sum that those same athletes will never, ever get back.
A well-known NCAA television advertising campaign claims that “there are 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and almost all of them will go pro in something other than sports.” This is true. Only 1.2 percent of college basketball players are drafted by the NBA; just 1.6 percent of college football players reach the NFL. So for the vast majority of those revenue-sport athletes, the four years they spend starring on ESPN’s Big Monday or in the Battlefrog Fiesta Bowl are the prime
earning years of their athletic lives, and likely of their lives in general—in 2010, the percentage of American households with adjusted gross incomes of over $500,000 a year was less than 1 percent in 49 of 50 states.
“Several black athletes have told me how even when they get a [cost-of-living] stipend, they have to send it back home to help family out,” says Billy Hawkins, a University of Georgia professor who studies the sociology of sports and is the author of The New Plantation: Black Athletes and College Athletics. “Whereas the majority of white athletes coming from middle class families don’t have those same responsibilities. So even if and when white athletes are experiencing economic exploitation, it can still be a disproportionate impact.”