Paying College Athletes: A Movement Grows

May 31--When the National Labor Relations Board ruled in March that Northwestern football players can unionize because they qualify as employees of the school, Allen Sack felt vindicated.

Sack, a University of New Haven professor of management and a member of the Notre Dame football team in the 1960s, has for many years been an outspoken advocate of reforming college athletics. And one point Sack at which he has been hammering for decades is that the NCAA created an employer-employee relationship between schools and athletes in 1973.

That year, the four-year scholarship was replaced by one-year renewable scholarships. The way Sack sees it, that's when college athletes became glorified employees of their schools.

"That decision was critical," Sack said last week. "The NCAA took what had been a gift -- allowing an athlete to complete their education with a four-year scholarship -- and they transformed it to a contract for hire, a contractual quid-pro-quo, a common law definition of what it means to be an employee."

So when Sack is asked if college athletes are employees who should be paid, his answer is always the same:

"They are employees. The genie has been out of the bottle."

There are, of course, varying views on this and what to do about it.

University of Hartford President Walter Harrison is calling for the "full cost of attendance" to be put in place for athletes, which he says "amounts to about $3,000 above tuition, books, and fees and is meant to provide spending money that might normally be earned in part-time jobs." He also wants to see a cap on the amount of income permitted to athletic departments.

While Central Connecticut State University athletic director Paul Schlickmann said "there is a pragmatic need to address some type of additional monetary award for student-athletes on full scholarships," he is opposed to the concept of athletes being considered employees. "I believe it is antithetical to the inherent value and mission of intercollegiate athletics participation," he said.

Terrell Allen, who played basketball at Central, said the demands of a sport at the Division I level, coupled with attending classes, leaves no time to earn extra money.

"Some people might also say, 'Why don't these athletes get a job,'" Allen said. "Well, for those who don't know, playing a Division I sport is a full-time job. All in a day's work we can have study hall, three classes, lift, and practice. The time we get to relax is usually spent doing homework or simply resting for the next day. ... Everybody is making money in college athletics today except the ones who put their bodies, mind, and life on the line for the love of their school."

The NCAA had $60,908,876 in net assets for the year ending Aug. 31, 2013, bringing its total net assets of $627,325,275. It distributed nearly $504 million to Division I members and has a 14-year, 10 billion deal with CBS and Turner Broadcasting for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

As the issues reached a boiling point this year, Sack has been happy to see change finally coming in college sports. While he supports players unionizing as means of earning a larger voice, he offers what he considers a better solution: revert back to the pre-1973 scholarship procedure. Besides giving college athletes a guaranteed four-year scholarship -- provided they are students in good standing -- Sack suggests offering insurance coverage.

That's part of the College Athlete Protection Act, proposed legislation being pushed by Sack and the Drake Group for Academic Integrity in Collegiate Sport. The act also would restructure the NCAA while shifting the focus of athletics back to education.

Sack said the money for increased insurance coverage for athletes at all levels can be derived from a Division I-A college football national championship, shifting revenue away from the BCS model.

"So there would be remedial education for the athletes, an academic trust fund for the athletes," Sack said. "If you don't graduate and want to come back and get a degree, an academic trust fund that would help the athletes who really do so much for the universities, in terms of entertaining the public and all the other things. ... They would be able to come back and get a graduate degree.

"We're hoping for compensation for the athletes, but an educational and medical compensation. Not negotiated contracts that would be about the financial benefits and so forth."

The timing is right for such a proposal. The issue of amateurism and compensating college athletes has been in the spotlight, with Northwestern ruling and union vote and the class-action lawsuit by former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon over the use of player images for commercial use. Also, labor attorney Jeffrey Kessler filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA that challenges the very notion of amateurism in college sports.

The NCAA meets in August, and some sort of compensation for athletes could be approved.

When UConnShabazz Napier was quoted saying he sometimes go to bed hungry, the plight of college athlete had a face. Of course, Napier recently offered a more nuanced answer to The Courant's Jeff Jacobs.

"It's funny when the hungry thing came out, people only heard the ending of it," Napier said. "The question I was asked was should student-athletes be paid? I don't think student-athletes should be getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't think they should feel they are better than the regular students. At the same time, the NCAA brings in tons and tons of money, and money is the biggest thing that runs the world. You just can't tell them thanks for playing a night game in Texas and now you've got to fly back and get back to campus at 3 a.m. and expect them go to class the next morning. Now you're making it seem like basketball or whatever sport is way more important than school. If you really want a student ... it makes no sense.

"People took the whole hungry thing out of context. We get three meals a day definitely. There's food available after practice, but it replenishes two to three hours of basketball. You're studying from 8 to 10 and now it's late and you're hungry. That's all I was saying. I'm not saying it's so tough. I just wanted the NCAA to understand the full grind of a day we go through. I'm not for hundreds of thousands of dollars to top players in college. You look at a guy like Tor Watts, a [UConn] walk-on; you're telling me I'm way more important than he is? I don't think you should tell one player he's better than the next in college. This isn't the NBA. He puts in as much practice time and studies just like I do."

Coincidently, the NCAA passed a change in food rules just as the Napier quote went viral. The change was in the works long before Napier's quote, but the timing was priceless -- it seemed the NCAA was listening to those seeking reform.

"Athletes come from many different home environments," said Renee Montgomery, the former UConn women's player who is now in the WNBA with the Connecticut Sun. "For me, if I needed money, I knew I could always ask my parents. But there are many kids that don't have that kind of home base to rely on. They could have used some money. It's a very interesting and difficult debate.

"I know universities make a lot of money off athletes, but I would also admit that I've made a lot of money in life because I played basketball for UConn. They gave me a great education, both basketball and scholastic."

UConn athletic director Warde Manuel said he believes the NCAA is listening and is willing to make common sense changes. But Manuel, for one, isn't in favor of classifying athletes as employees.

"I never saw myself as an employee of the University of Michigan when I played football there," Manuel recently told The Courant. "All the things we do outside of sports for our athletes who are students on our campus for 20 to 21 hours a day, I don't see them as employees. So if that's what allows you to create a union, I don't see unionization as necessary. If they are an employee, what does that mean financially? Would their scholarship be taxed? Would their tutorial services, food costs, be taxed? I don't know all the details. I feel our student-athletes do have a voice in our department with the advisory council and the way the administration and I interact with them. If being a part of a union allows them to have a voice, they already have a voice in a lot of things we do here."

Like Manuel, Sack played football at a big-time program. He was linebacker on Notre Dame's 1966 national championship team, and his education at South Bend sent him on a path into the academic world. He earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. at Penn State, and has been at the University of New Haven as a professor of management since 1991.

But he fondly recalls the offer Notre Dame pitched to his parents more than 50 years ago. He would receive a four-year scholarship, whether he played or not, whether he remained healthy or not, whether he won the Heisman Trophy or not.

"I did not end up winning the Heisman Trophy," Sack said jokingly.

The message, though, was clear.

"That I was being valued by that school as a student and not as a commodity that could be fired or traded around or chewed up like a professional athlete," Sack said. "That means a lot."

The way Sack sees it, that approach changed when scholarships became renewable in 1973. And when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that the NCAA's TV plan violated antitrust laws, money began flowing into college athletics and the pressure to win grew more intense.

The NCAA did alter the 1973 rule and now allows schools to offer multi-year scholarships. That's a step in the right direction, Sack said, but he believes athletes deserve more.

"We need them to be students, first," Sack said. "The changes are coming."

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