Consider this. Last Saturday night, an Ohio State University junior named Logan Stieber won the 141 pound NCAA wrestling championship for the third consecutive year.
It goes without saying that Stieber earned no money for his championship. That would violate NCAA rules. However, when Stieber claimed the title, Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith rang up an $18,000 bonus.
Why $18,000? Because according to Smith’s contract, anytime an individual athlete at Ohio State wins an NCAA championship, the A.D. is entitled to a bonus of one week’s salary.
Smith’s annual salary is $940,000.
That’s right. It’s against the rules to pay the athletes, but their bosses are often the highest paid employees at their non-profit schools. When all of his bonuses are added (there are also bonuses for Ohio St. team successes), Smith’s capable of earning more than $1.5 million per year.
While Smith is the highest paid A.D. in the country, mid-to-high six figures is typical for his peers at other big time college athletics programs. Head basketball and football coaches at comparable institutions often earn even more. And then there are the endorsement deals. Millionaires are not uncommon. Six figures are a given, often even at less prominent programs. Yet the athletes that people are actually paying to watch are forbidden from receiving any salary or cash bonuses at all.
And you wonder why some scholars refer to big time college sports as a Plantation Economy.
Yet that’s exactly what former college basketball coach and current TV talking head Bobby Knight recently said.
But wait. If you can believe it, according to Knight, it’s not the millionaire coaches and A.D.s who are “raping” the unpaid amateur athletes. Are you ready for this? Knight said the National Basketball Association has “raped college baskebtall” by allowing adult players to leave college early and accept employment in the NBA.
Honest to goodness, he said that. He believes that.
Then there’s legendary Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim, who thinks players would be better off sticking around in college longer so they could receive adulation instead of playing in the NBA and earning millions of dollars. He even named a particular player, current NBA point guard and former University of Connecticut player Kemba Walker, as someone who should’ve stuck around campus longer.
“Kemba Walker, he’s about what, the 20th best point guard in the NBA? If he’d have played here for us yesterday [at the NCAA tournament], he’d have had 40 points. That’s what he would’ve had and everybody would’ve said, ‘Jeez, he’s pretty good.’”
For the record, Kemba Walker left UConn early, became a first round pick in the NBA draft, and is being paid $2.5 million this season. Next year his contract calls for a $3.2 million in salary. Because, as it turns out, being the “20th best point gu
ard in the NBA,” ie. a starting player in a league with 30 teams, is actually a pretty good job.
But Jim Boeheim, who himself makes $1.5 million per year off the sweat of unpaid athletes, thinks Walker should’ve put off a seven-figure salary for the satisfaction of having fans marvel at the way he dominates inferior competition at the college level.
People like Gene Smith, Bobby Knight, and Jim Boeheim are profoundly corrupt. Oh, they’re following the rules alright, playing fair and square by the standards of this rigged game, like an 8th grader sharing a see-saw with a kindergartner.
But they are morally bankrupt and ethically compromised individuals. They, and scores of others millionaires like them, are profiting handsomely from of the labor of other adults, the most accomplished of whom must settle for being exploited because they’ve been temporarily iced out of their professional jobs.
The NBA will not accept players until a year after they graduate high school, and the NFL will not accept them until three years after high school. The NBA and NFL do this because NCAA sports function as a free developmental league for them. This way they don’t have to pay to setup their own minor leagues like the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball do.
So the top football and basketball prospects, the ones who have what it takes to make real money, must bide their time and wait, plying their trade for no financial compensation other than tuition, room, and board: in other words, the privilege of not having to pay to do their job, and instead simply working for free.
Meanwhile, cretins like Smith, Knight, and Boeheim are raking in millions from the players’ unpaid labor. And some of these professional labor exploiters are so knee deep in entitlement and self-pity that they have the gall to complain, and literally cry “rape!” when their players jump at the chance to finally get paid for their work.
It’s one thing to be a greedy prick. It’s another to be a sanctimonious, greedy prick. I do believe there really is a special place in hell for these people, said the atheist.
UPDATE, 4:52 PM: The same day I published this article, the National Labor Relations Board handed down a decision in favor of Northwestern University athletes seeking to form a labor union. The NLRB said the players can form a labor union because they are in fact employees.
Of course Northwestern has said it will appeal the decision.