NCAA’s place in sports pyramid remains unclear

Millions of Americans watched the Giants and the Patriots face off in the Super Bowl last Sunday night, and I would be willing to bet that a large percentage of those viewers, at some point in their lives, considered themselves athletes.

The world of sports is shaped like a pyramid. A broad base of people play sports in their childhood and adolescence. A smaller group plays club or intramural sports in college. A yet more exclusive group gets to don the jerseys of their colleges and universities to compete in intercollegiate athletics. A talented and lucky few ply their trade semi-professionally or professionally at some level, most of them never seeing their names in lights. A more talented and even luckier few may make it to the NFL, the NBA, or the MLS. These athletes at the very top of the pyramid might, once in their lifetime, play in a game as momentous as the Super Bowl.

One of the problems facing the NCAA right now is that it doesn’t know where it fits into this pyramid—or, rather, it represents so many different parts of this pyramid that it has failed to develop rules that adequately reflect the diversity of the student-athletes it supposedly represents.

In big colleges’ football and men’s basketball programs—called “revenue sports” because they actually bring in money to the university—the NCAA blatantly exploits the dream that so many college athletes have of making that next, big leap up the pyramid. You want to be a pro? You can act like a pro right now! Just let us sell your body as an advertising space for Nike. Let us use your likeness to get a fat contract from EA Sports. You won’t see any money now, but hey, don’t you want to be a pro? This is what the pros do.

Regardless of talent, sheer math dictates that most of these revenue-sport athletes will never make the pros. In the Bowl Championship Series conferences alone (a small proportion of the total Division I football universe), there are 66 colleges and universities represented, many of which carry over 100 football players on their roster. There are only 32 NFL teams, though, and the maximum roster size is 53 players. Each step up the pyramid is steeper than the last.

The NCAA, however, does not only serve large colleges’ football and men’s basketball programs. Most of the teams and athletes under its umbrella do not produce large sums of money for their schools, conferences, or the NCAA itself. This two tiered system within the college sports world complicates every question for the NCAA, making it harder to come up with uniform rules to cover both the Alabama football team and, say, the Bard College women’s volleyball squad (go Raptors!). The major problems that infect the revenue sports, such as recruiting scandals, low graduation rates, and blatant exploitation of athletes for others’ monetary gains, do not, for the most part, face non-revenue sports, or schools like Columbia.

The NCAA’s current model for revenue sports in which conference administrators, athletic departments, and coaches share the profits while the players themselves make nothing is clearly not sustainable. The decision to allow conferences to offer $2,000 annual stipends on top of scholarships illustrates that even the NCAA recognizes this fact. More and more commentators and former college athletes are making convincing arguments that college athletes should receive a fair share of the wealth they create. But the solution for these sports may not fit the smaller, non-revenue sports in which a much larger percentage of the NCAA’s athletes actually participate. The NCAA must figure out how to serve the athletes on every step of the sports pyramid.

Paying salaries to a few collegiate athletes is the best way to accomplish this goal. The NCAA, through the collusion of colleges and universities and with no representation from the athletes themselves, has imposed universal amateur rules on college athletes across the country. No one would think it fair if the Ivy League’s policy of providing no athletic scholarships was mandated in every conference. Yet the NCAA expects us to have no problem with the imposition of the same rules on Kentucky basketball players and Wichita State golfers (go…Shockers? That’s awkward). I’m hardly a fan of Reaganomics, but what the NCAA needs is some old-fashioned American deregulation. Colleges should not be required to pay their students who play sports, but they should also not be prevented from doing so.

This solution would allow us to preserve the scholarship athlete model as well as the Ivy League and Division III models for the vast majority of the country’s true student-athletes. But for those select few athletes already on the higher level of the pyramid, who create billions in revenue that they never see, it would represent a major step away from exploitation and toward fairness.

Sam Klug is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. He is a Spectrum opinion blogger.