It’s not just mania about college hoops that puts the “madness” in March Madness. Think about the money behind NCAA basketball. John Calipari, coach of perennial powerhouse University of Kentucky, makes $8 million a year. Duke’s famed Mike Krzyzewski makes $7 million. Closer to home, University of Illinois men’s basketball coach Brad Underwood got $3.8 million this year.
Before the pandemic, March Madness raked in $1.18 billion in television ad revenue for the NCAA, which also gets $1.1 billion for TV rights to the tournament. How about the man at the top — NCAA President Mark Emmert? Nearly $4 million annually.
What about the athletes who hit the buzzer beaters, who dunk the dunks and leap into end zones to win games and championships? Consider the story of Shabazz Napier, who in 2014 helped the University of Connecticut Huskies win the NCAA men’s basketball title. Napier told the media at the time, “Sometimes, there are hungry nights where I’m not able to eat, but I still got to play up to my capabilities.”
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that could finally open the door for college athletes to be fairly compensated for their work and talent, which makes millions for the people at the top. The case involved a former University of West Virginia football player who claimed the NCAA rules governing education-related compensation violated federal antitrust law intended to foster competition. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that the NCAA cannot prohibit education-related payments to college athletes.
The decision has the potential to go much deeper, however. The court appeared open to a much broader challenge to the NCAA’s ban on paying athletes. In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate.
“And under ordinary principles of antitrust law,” Kavanaugh continued, “it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.”
Kavanaugh summed it up perfectly. It’s true, student-athletes often get scholarships, room and board, books and other perks in exchange for what they do on the court, field or gridiron. But what they do amounts to a full-time job. And the daily grind they endure — the practices, the strength training, the games and tournaments — is work product that morphs into massive profits for the NCAA and the people at the top rungs of universities.
We fully expect the NCAA to dig in its heels and fight to the last. The organization should brace itself, however, for the possibility that the nation’s high court decides sometime in the future to address, in a much broader way, the NCAA’s exploitation of student-athletes. Justice Neil Gorsuch offered a window into the court’s mindset, writing that the NCAA is a “massive business” and adding that those “who run this enterprise profit in a different way than the student-athletes whose activities they oversee.”
The NCAA doesn’t have to wait for the Supreme Court to act, however. It can see the writing on the wall, pay athletes, and finally remedy the unfairness it has perpetuated for far too long.
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