Is the NCAA's Foundation Beginning to Crumble?

The timing of yesterday's ruling by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that some members of the Northwestern University football team are employees of the university and therefore have the right to form a union could not have been more perfect. It comes right in the midst of the sporting world's biggest money-maker, the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. You know, the basketball extravaganza that Americans spend $12 billion gambling on, generates more than a billion in ad revenues, and supposedly costs companies millions in lost productivity. The timing of the ruling is perfect because a lot of people make a killing off March Madness. Everyone except the players.

It will likely be a long time before we know the full ramifications of this ruling (broken down in great detail by SB Nation), but for now it only affects Northwestern football players on scholarship. Northwestern has said it will appeal the decision, and some legal analysts have said the case could wind up in the Supreme Court. Still, it is an intriguing milestone in the brewing debate over whether college athletes (most notably, the players in the two largest revenue sports, football and basketball) should be compensated beyond their scholarships. It's an argument that is being made by an increasing number of people, most forcefully by civil rights historian Taylor Branch in a 2011 Atlantic article. "Big-time college sports," he writes, "are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes."

Their can be little argument that the NCAA is not fully commercialized, or that collegiate basketball and football programs don't generate a lot of money for the NCAA. The current contracts to televise the new college football championship tournament alone is $7.3 billion over 10 years, while the contract to televise March Madness is more than $10 billion over 14 years. Last year, the Big 10 (or 12 or 14 or whatever it is) distributed more than $25 million to each of it's member schools (Northwestern among them), most of that money coming from the conference's TV deals with ABC/ESPN and the Big Ten Network.  Where does all that money go? Back into the athletic departments, where it helps to fund scholarships and pay for many of non-revenue sports, which athletic directors will be sure to remind you. The question is, should the players be able to get a piece of this pie?

Defenders of the current system will use up a lot of oxygen exalting and defending the notion of the student-athlete, a notion that has been blurry for decades now. The idea is simple: athletes receive scholarships to pay (fully or partially) for their education, and in return they compete for their university. But the reality of modern-day college athletics is that the athletes in the revenue sports are spending most of their time preparing for competition. Yesterday's ruling made no bones that the concept of the student-athlete, at least as the NCAA views it, is a fallacy. “It cannot be said that the employer’s scholarship players are ‘primarily students,’ ” wrote NLRB regional director Peter Ohr in his ruling. He went on to break down the numbers in explaining his decision:

“The players spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three- or four-month football season. Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies.”

If players at Northwestern, not known as a football powerhouse, are spending 40-50 hours per week (which would be 20-30 more hours than allowed under the NCAA's bizarre countable hours rule) on football duties, how many hours are players spending on football at perennial powers like Michigan and Ohio State? When you think about those numbers, it's hard to suspend your disbelief over the idea that the student comes before the athlete.

Defenders of the current system will argue that the scholarships athletes receive should be enough payment, and there is some fairness to that argument. Getting a full ride to an elite university like Northwestern is a tremendous benefit, especially in an era of overwhelming student loan debt. But how many big time college football and basketball players are taking advantage of that, or even have the time to? Furthermore, as Big Ten Network analyst Stephen Bardo, a former University of Illinois basketball player, noted today on the show BTN Live, "I paid for my college tuition in the twelfth game of my freshman season. Every game after that was profit for the university." So is the scholarship enough when the student-athletes, particularly the football players, are putting their bodies on the line for their schools? Or when schools are profiting off the use of the players likenesses, an issue that will be reviewed in the O'Bannon case?

I'm on the fence on this one. Despite it's commercialization, their is still a faint whiff of purity about college athletics that I buy into, and changing the current system will forever alter that, for both fans and players alike. If yesterday's decision ultimately leads to a new system in which players get some form of compensation beyond scholarships, will athletes simply go the highest bidding college? Will there be different levels of compensation for players depending on position (one pay rate for a quarterback, for example, and another for an offensive lineman)? And if schools have to start paying basketball and football players, will that mean reduced budgets for the non-revenue sports, and perhaps the elimination of those sports altogether?

Ultimately, the issue here is fairness, and I'm not sure I can say that it's fair for the athletes not to share in the billions they generate. Only a fraction of these athletes will turn pro and make some of that money back. Whatever the outcome, the fallout from this ruling will be interesting to watch.