Let Big-Time College Football and Basketball Collapse (column)

Somewhere in the hard drive of one of my old, now-impenetrable laptops is an Excel file with a breakdown of members of the 2012 U.S. Senate. It was annotated by, among other things, where they went to college and how they might have voted on a hypothetical piece of legislation to end the educational tax exemption for big-time football and basketball.

I made the spreadsheet as part of an exercise to assess the odds of a scenario I viewed as a possible, if unlikely, outcome of the mess that college athletics was back then, amid yet another period of crisis that included not only the ever-growing commercialism and the usual major recruiting scandals but also child abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse. In an Inside Higher Ed news article in January 2012, I predicted,

At the time, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference still had only 12 members, the NCAA hadn’t yet revamped its governance structure to give additional independence to what came to be known as the “Power Five” conferences, and we did not yet have a college football playoff system.

But having covered college athletics on and off since 1986, I had seen money and power increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and I threw out this near-term scenario:

I foresaw other senators being upset, too. (This is where my long-lost spreadsheet came in.)

The picture would be intensified, I posited, “if the greed were to go a step further, with the superconference members contemplating their own basketball tournament and putting the many billions of dollars from the existing NCAA tournament that flow to the association’s other 1,000-plus members at risk.”

At that point, I argued, “the legion of Congressmen and women whose constituent colleges and universities see their financial and athletics futures threatened would grow to include all lawmakers who represent historically black institutions (since all of them would be left behind) and colleges that more or less ignore football but have high-octane basketball programs, like Georgetown, Gonzaga and Villanova, to name a few.”

I concluded, “In a restructured college sports landscape in which the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.

“And a ‘No’ answer to that question—forcing colleges to pay taxes on their sports revenues, to pay athletes market wages and workmen’s compensation, etc.—would truly transform college sports in a way that nothing being discussed now can.”

In other words, I was envisioning—and, I can admit now, secretly hoping for—a piece of legislation that would essentially burn down the crumbling edifice of big-time college sports and force a set of greedy universities that turned their backs on their peers to operate what they had actually built: a set of largely professional teams.

The situation right now isn’t exactly what I foresaw 14 years ago, but the political landscape surrounding big-time college sports is very much in the news now, and a very sophisticated analysis that makes my spreadsheet look like a 5-year-old’s is making the rounds.

This one involves the Protect College Sports Act, which is essentially a mirror image of the legislation I envisioned. The bipartisan bill is a well-intentioned and in some ways thoughtful effort to do what may be the impossible: “fix” college sports in a way that satisfies colleges, athletes and fans alike.

Smart analysts like Michael McCann and Kyle Saunders (a Colorado State political scientist and Substack author whose name keeps popping up in my columns for a reason—he’s that thoughtful and good on a wide range of subjects) have assessed the legislation and its prospects more deeply than I can.

My summary is that while the legislation would do a bunch of things that could ease the chaos and strengthen the rights of athletes, it is still first and foremost the NCAA’s preferred answer to use antitrust laws to maintain its relevance; block many if not most federal, state and local legal challenges; and do what colleges themselves have been unwilling to do: rein in out-of-control spending and protect the viability of sports other than football and basketball.

(It also fails to address the important question of whether athletes in football and basketball at the highest level are employees, which, to me, as a nonlawyer, they clearly are. And it is virtually silent on the fact that the payments to players for their names, images and likenesses, which I wholeheartedly support, have only exacerbated the extent to which college athletics isn’t supporting men and women equitably, as federal law requires under Title IX.)

The legislation is designed to do one other thing: stop, or at least slow, what has been the steady (and arguably inevitable) consolidation of money and power that I described at the beginning of this column. For decades, roughly half of the 120 to 140 universities that play football at the sport’s highest collegiate level (which was once called Division I-A and is now the Football Bowl Subdivision) have sought various ways to keep more for themselves and peel away from peers they view as lesser.

They’ve done this by discarding longtime allegiances to join nonsensical conferences that span 3,000 miles and consolidating their voting power in the NCAA to pass favorable rules (or block unfavorable ones), among other tactics. And to get what they want, over the decades those 50 to 75 schools have occasionally trotted out their biggest threat: that they might one day take their ball and walk away entirely, breaking up the phenomenally successful NCAA basketball tournaments and leaving the NCAA’s other 1,200 members behind to fend for themselves without billions in television revenue.

A decision by a few dozen greedy universities to forsake the rest in search of more riches would, to me, force a reckoning: recognition of big-time football and basketball as commercial enterprises, with paid employees, taxable revenues and all that would come with that, including unionization and workers’ compensation. I suspect the house of cards would collapse.

I’ve been quietly rooting for such an outcome, because I believe big-time college football and basketball long ago became mostly professional enterprises that still pretend to operate as quasi-educational. The massive amounts that a few dozen institutions invest in those programs (especially football) are becoming increasingly unsustainable as the payrolls for players go up, resulting in fewer funds for programs in women’s and Olympic sports that have long been (somewhat) supported by football and basketball revenues.

That’s to say nothing about the ethical, academic and other compromises that most people (including many professors) cover their eyes to ignore as they root for their campus teams. (My years at The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed—covering stories like the football corruption scandal that tore Southern Methodist University apart, the battle of wills between Jerry Tarkanian and Robert Maxson over who had more power at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and growing evidence that many athletes in football, men’s basketball and some other sports at the NCAA’s top levels could not possibly get a real education—permanently tainted the subject for me.)

But I know I’m unusual in rooting for the collapse, which is why efforts like the Protect College Sports Act want to try to wallpaper over the rot.

The sophisticated scorecard that Saunders and his co-author Darren Heitner regularly update to predict the likelihood that the bill passes the Senate (as well as their weekly analyses of the latest developments) basically show that the vast majority of higher education leaders and sports groups support the legislation because it may be their last, best hope of keeping college sports whole.

The main opponents to date have been the two behemoth conferences, the Big Ten and the Southeastern. The two leagues’ position appears to be based primarily on giving them carte blanche protection against federal and state antitrust claims and a slew of other changes that would strengthen their hand.

To the extent I want the federal effort to fail, it’s not because I support the Big Ten and the SEC or share their goals. It’s because I’m confident, based on past performance, that left to their own devices, their thirst for more—more television money, more control—will lead them to prioritize their own interests so much that they end up killing the golden goose.

That will be bad for college athletics and higher education in the short run, but it may be the only way to ultimately get us to a point where a relatively small number of colleges play openly professionalized football and basketball (and maybe baseball and hockey) and the rest stage athletics programs that actually complement education and give young people a chance for a better future.