Free Market Rules Will Destroy Intercollegiate Competition

I don’t mean to brag, but look.  I lived in Chicago when the Bulls won three straight NBA titles.  The year after I moved to Pittsburgh, the Steelers won their sixth Super Bowl.  I went to school at Florida, the last school to win back to back NCAA basketball titles.  Now I am at UConn Law and the defending national champion Huskies are a number 1 seed again.  They just won the Big East conference title in very convincing fashion.  Do the math, dummy!  Somebody should pay me like Nick Saban is all I’m saying.  I gotta be the Nick Saban of fans and I deserve a piece of the pie.  But even if I don’t get paid, I should not succeed with an antitrust or NLRB action against the NCAA.  Oh sure, the NCAA and its members schools might be screwing me by not sharing the revenue that is by now an obviously foreseeable consequence of my presence.  But there has to be a better way to achieve that without destroying intercollegiate athletics altogether.  Here is part of something I wrote for Bloomberg this morning:

March Madness is here, and the NCAA stands to reap more than $1 billion from that single three-week tournament. But intercollegiate competition is in dire straits as the NCAA grapples with the conundrum that college basketball and football athletes have never shared in the revenue generated by their efforts. We shouldn’t adopt ill-fitting market-based laws to remedy the exploitation of student athletes, lest we destroy colleges sports altogether. The desires to treat college athletes fairly and preserve a traditional charitable activity aren’t mutually exclusive.

But they can’t both be accomplished by applying free-market principles designed to facilitate profit taking. The NCAA should be instructed, and then given space, to adopt revenue-sharing rules that don’t implicate those laws. Intercollegiate competition is still a nonprofit and appropriately tax-exempt activity even when it generates astronomical profits. It produces intangible public goods the NFL and NBA also produce—as long as those things don’t interfere with “just win, baby!” in the professional leagues.  But in college sports, the effort to win is a means to instill traits comprising character and integrity, such as perseverance, sportsmanship, cooperation, resilience, pride, and humility. Winning is as secondary as profit, believe it or not.

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Bloomberg insights are not behind a paywall, by the way.  In case you ever want to make your case on why you too should be paid part of the March Madness.  

darryll k. jones