The Privileged Apprentices-Busting the Myth of the NCAA Slave

The NCAA has a Byzantine rule book which acts as blunt instrument with no relation to common sense. Check. Some college coaches make big money. Check. Some schools make big money. Check.

The Kabuki-theater Dance Of Penance done annually by schools like USC is but a superfluous charade. Check.

I, like many, don't want to hear millionaire coaches groan over how difficult their job has become because of "one and done," "pimp-agents," and the like. They knew the job was dangerous when they took it. Likewise, no more sob stories about how this most privileged class of student is being exploited.

I did not stutter, and you read that right. Few in society have a better deal than D-I college football and basketball players. Only lottery winners have a faster track to upward social mobility. No group takes more and gives back less, especially those who play for large southern institutions.

Behind white Greeks and Legacies, these athletes are the most privileged male students on campus, and NO group gets more from the institution. Period. For those who are academically inclined, they get the privilege of an education worth $50-$200K in exchange for labor, with the promise of a debt free start to their earning career. For those who aren't, let's boil this down to brass tacks. You get unlimited access to state of the art weight rooms, to build muscle mass and tone. You get unlimited access to training facilities, to build balance, agility, conditioning and skill. You get unlimited access to consulting services from the human capital that is coaches, who show you how to improve yourself through film study, drills, and discipline. You get to audition your skills in public, mass broadcast forums available for free to all of your potential employers for 1-4 years. All the while, you get to sport the latest high performance gear, free, including shoes that aren't in stores yet. Rip your knee up? Avail yourself of the best sports medicine professionals in the world, all on the university's dime. We still have Lloyd's of London, and as Willis McGahee proved, a ripped knee now is not the same as a ripped knee in 1985. You pay nothing out of pocket for this, and leave the institution having incurred no debt. Should you not go pro, you can get a gig as a graduate assistant or as a coach. What do have?

You have, my friends, the best free job training program in the United States, and all you have to do is workout (something most men that age do for free), and play a game you love. These kids know that they have the best deal going, which is why each year, a new crop lines up to get their ticket. In advertising, we call that a trade agreement.

To illustrate this point better, let's examine the played-out slavery metaphor more closely, and play it out fully.

Several dozen "Massas" send their overseers to recruit you to come their plantations. Most of these overseers make more than the owners and started where you are, as field hands. You can choose to visit five plantations for free tours, at each plantation owner's expense. They tell you that you have a choice of 2-4 years to work. You have exclusive access to the tools (free computer labs and tutors) that make their kind successful. The one you choose avails you of the free training to toil the fields at optimum level, for money. When you decide to leave, the plantation holds tributes to you, thanks you for your service, and brings to you those who will pay you to toil similar fields. If you're not good enough, the overseer gives you a leg up on getting to his position, teaching you the skills he knows. If you absorb them well enough, you can advance quite quickly to direct your own smaller plantation, putting yourself on a track to one day run the one you currently toil for. Oh, and Massa gives you license to taste the sweet nectar of the finest, most well-bred feminine fruit on his plantation, some of whom he dispatched to entice you to his fields.

Upon departure, you have no obligation to pay recompense for your largesse, even though you will pocket more than double what the plantation owner will ever make in your likeness. In your first year. That includes if Massa has to pay huge fines for your illegal behavior long after you've left.

I could go on, but the point is made. Au revoir, slavery metaphor, and may those who hereafter inveigh it be backslapped by the Ghost of Frederick Douglass.

Go talk a few graduate school teaching assistants about scholarship athlete "slavery." After you get laughed out of the room, get back to me.

So what are these guys who choose to flush away the educational opportunity, if they are not "student-athletes?" Reggie Bush was not a slave, nor was Dez Bryant or any other NCAA player. As the school is not entitled to any of their future earnings, they are not indentured servants.

The word you are looking for is "apprentice." As apprenticeships go, it doesn't get any better.

"Look at what they do for the university," some might say. "Jersey sales, booster money, blah, blah, blah." Have we forgotten the 10-15 guys each class who spend their entire careers in the trainer's room, whose entire career is a blur of ankle tape and ice baths? They get to keep their perks, and are on the hook for none of it. How about the two-star cornerbacks who spend all four years on the punt coverage team? These privileges extend to them as well, not just the Blue-Chip All-Americans. Now, factor in the flunkouts, suspensions due to arrests and untold other miscreance and mischief, academic

ineligibility, violation of team rules. This is money the schools lose and never get back. All those supplies, books, meals, and rent. . . gone. Texas Coach Mack Brown stated recently that only 19 schools made money on football in 2009. The more liberal estimate is about 30. Puts those jersey sales in a perspective.

NCAA football is a high-risk, high-stakes game, with the risk incurred almost totally by the schools and coaching staffs. When Notre Dame sputtered, it was the coaches and their families who had to uproot, not the players. The players have no skin in the game, and thus spend several years playing with house money, with the option to cash out when the getting's good. The Reggie Bushes of the world are canceled out by the Darrelle Revises, Terrell Davises and Chris Johnson's, who were unknowns in college. The latter played for East Carolina, which plays on TV about as often Halley's Comet comes around. Both got the same free job training as Bush, and the free education. Who got the better end of the deal, Johnson or ECU?

To put this in perspective, add up the money Nick Saban has made at Alabama. Now add up the sum total of the pro contracts and endorsements Alabama players have signed during his tenure.

The elephant in the room is that all kids from 120 FBS schools coast to coast receive the same magic lamp, but only black kids from the south seem unable or unwilling to rub it. This despite the great heritage of scholarship in the black south.

Many, like Jason Whitlock have called the "education" a sham because the players are ill prepared for it. Really? Whose fault is that? USC just received great scores for academic progress under Pete Carroll. For those who can't suppress a chuckle when they hear the words "free education" and "student-athlete," I say fine. Let's give the young men a choice. The traditional scholarship-apprenticeship relationship, or allow them to be employees of the Athletic Department. The meals and facility access would come with the deal, but no scholarship, no free room and board. If players should get paid, then the university should also demand a percentage of the future pro contract and endorsements.

Let's say that these guys do get paid, and there is no Title IX, and they still go on to their NFL careers. Will they be any better off? A Sports Illustrated piece from last year says otherwise. Nearly 70% of NFL and NBA players are broke within a few years of their retirement.

The people who diminish the value of a free college education for black athletes perpetuate the same poisonous self-defeatism as those who hypnotize inner city families into the delusion that "failing schools" are why little Dejaun can't read, never mind poor reproductive choices, failure to read to their kids, but instead pushing them before the TV, and only bothering to interact with them when it's time for a beating, only to cry to Jeffrey Canada and Steve Perry after they flunk or fall back. I know of what I speak. I'm from South Central Los Angeles. I made it because my mom read to me as child, and began college when I was 4. I'm well read because I saw her reading, all the time. I'm the first to smack down Bill Cosby when he's wrong. On this one, he's spot-on.

There are plenty of options now available to budding pro athletes. Why then, do they do this, when paid transitional options abound? There is the Arena League, the UFL, and the IFL. For hoopsters, there is the NBDL and Europe. Brandon Jennings, for one, chose to avoid the charade altogether.

The answer is status. USC players circa 2003-2008 were the Kings of LA, with the Lakers down, no NFL franchise, and the Dodgers largely irrelevant. In the South (where these problems are centered), fans cheer players in stadiums bigger than Flint, Michigan, merchants cut them freebies, . . . and if they need anything, from use of a car, backstage passes to the Li'l Wayne concert to just adding a few snacks to the pantry, no problem; just get on the horn to the sugar mama on your iPhone contact list. ALL of these guys have them, whether they be a sorority girl or legacy kid, to take care of all their needs, and I do mean ALL. In any other context, Chelsea from Pi Beta Phi would turn her nose up at Jamal from South Houston. They need money? For what?

Do some have their vision blurred by this intoxicant of exalted status, and loose focus? Of course. That doesn't make it a social justice issue. It makes it a caveat emptor issue, and ALL parties come into the agreement eyes wide open. That your jersey would be sold was no secret. That the conference you are in will cash in on your labors was no secret. To take Saban's pimp-prostitute analogy further, the modern NCAA is an exemplar of why you legalize prostitution. The hooker becomes the steward of his/her own sexual destiny, as in Nevada or some European countries; he/she decides whether to enter the agreement, and the terms. Everybody knows what he or she is getting into. If the tryst lands you a parting gift you had not anticipated, well, que sera, sera.

Just do us all a favor--no bellyaching. Now, excuse those of us who scraped by in college through work-study, Pell grants, menial jobs, and loans. We have debt payments to scratch. These are givens for us, and obligations we don't have the privilege of overlooking.

Sources: Sports Illustrated, 3-23-2010, Why Athletes Go Broke.