The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes

The 2020s mark a momentous time in college athletics. College athlete activism highlighting racial exploitation in sport and beyond punctuated the pandemic; legal efforts granted athletes modest rights to their name, image, and likeness; and colleges chased ever-more lucrative football television deals, collapsing regional alliances and creating nationwide mega-conferences. For those who find these changes head-spinning, this is the book for you. For those who find these changes predictable, this is also the book for you. In The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes, Richard Southall and his collaborators nimbly educate novices and experts alike on how higher education, through its athletic associations, have “unilaterally and collectively” stripped profit-generating athletes of their human, legal, and employment rights (11). In doing so, they reposition the history of college sports as a “120-year labor negotiation in which the employees have had little voice” (11).Unfolding through three parts and eleven chapters, the authors interweave interdisciplinary approaches—media analyses, management studies, legal analyses, and critical frameworks—to meticulously document how the folklore of amateurism veils an entrenched system of racial exploitation. The authors circumscribe their analysis of exploitation to the approximately 2–3 percent of college athletes in profit-sports—Power-5 football players and Division I men's basketball players, most of whom are Black.Utilizing Gramscian hegemony theory, the authors illustrate how the NCAA successfully weathered athletes’ calls for greater pay and rights. Throughout its history, the NCAA utilized varied tactics (e.g., coercion and consent) to build alliances across ruling blocs (e.g., politics, law, school, media, and corporations) to support amateurism. The NCAA created American amateurism—athletes play for the love of the game, not money—to deny participants benefits like workers’ compensation. Through relationships with the media, Hollywood, and corporations, the NCAA romanticized amateurism and disguised the sordid reality—that everyone profits but the athletes. The American legal system entrenched amateurism by granting the NCAA antitrust exemptions, which it used to strip athletes of legal and employment rights. The result: a global “amateur” sports industry in which the players have few rights and even less compensation. As the authors aptly conclude: “NCAA profit-athletes are the assets on which multibillion-dollar multimedia agreements are negotiated. . . . Money from those media contracts not only supports the NCAA's eighty-nine other annual championships but also pays the salaries of NCAA staffers and lobbyists. In effect, the athletes fund efforts to keep them from claiming control over their working conditions” (197). Said differently, the NCAA created an inescapable cycle for profit-athletes whose labor funds their entrapment.Each part of the book holds a different lens to inspect amateurism and defend the book's argument. Part 1 utilizes historical methods to debunk the NCAA's origin story—fictionalized as a moralizing force to curb commercialism and ensure player safety—showing how the organization instead centralized control and power over profit-athletes and expanded its market share. These chapters dispel other misconceptions about intercollegiate athletics by examining college sports’ organizational structure, educational missions, and financing.Parts 2 and 3 expose the myth that athletes are not paid. Utilizing legal analyses, the authors forcefully argue that profit-athletes meet common-law standards of employment. Part 2 deconstructs another pernicious myth: that Title IX restricts colleges from classifying profit-athletes as employees and paying them accordingly. Using divide-and-conquer political tactics, the NCAA has convinced the public and the courts that compensating profit-athletes would siphon already-meager funding from women's sports, forcing institutions to shutter programs. The authors show these claims are legal and financial fictions.In Part 3, the authors position sports exploitation intersectionally as patriarchy, paternalism, and racism facilitate the legal and economic degradation of profit-athletes. Across micro, meso, and macro levels, profit-athletes are constructed as “kids” incapable of proper decision-making, undeserving of fair compensation, and in need of strong (white) fatherly mentorship. Amateurism obscures how racist rhetoric, policies, and beliefs uphold racial exploitation, convincing the (white) majority that profit-athletes are “better off” with colleges controlling sport profits.The authors conclude that profit-athletes’ liberation will come through their reclassification as employees, a radical yet modest proposal. Radical in the sense that transitioning profit-athletes from “amateurs” to employees will require paradigm shifts in law, education, and industry. Amateurism has governed college sports for over a century, and such paradigms are difficult to change. Even still, the authors show how reclassifying profit-athletes is achievable. Through the “underground economy”—a practice dating back to the NCAA's inception—profit-athletes have always been paid. Bringing these practices above board will not fundamentally change the relationship between players and institutions. Additionally, with billions of dollars circulating in college sports, there is money to pay athletes, and the industry should. Moreover, the NCAA's sway over the legal system may be eroding. In recent years, the courts have shown an interest in compensating athletes.If these signs do not convince readers a paradigm shift is afoot, the authors’ legal analyses reveal that granting athletes employment rights may be in the NCAA's and universities’ best interest. Employment status may shield universities from future uncapped liabilities and permit institutions to retain legal control over players’ compensation, mobility, and behavior. Perhaps least shocking to Marxist readers, it's clear that athletes will still be exploited as employees.The authors avoid a prescriptive conclusion or outlining how to transition profit-athletes to employees. Instead, they argue “a best first step is truth telling” (317). Some may find the book's “truth telling” and resulting writing style jarring. But its sharp-tongued style and scathing critiques counteract the NCAA's circular logic: college athletes are amateur because they're not professional, and they cannot be paid because they're amateur. The book's unrelenting approach cuts through the “common sense” and reduces the NCAA's avowals of amateurism to gibberish. The authors have decades of experience as activist scholars, pushing against the NCAA's exploitation regime. As evidenced by recent public polling and impending court cases, the legal system, media, and fans are turning against the NCAA. Collectively, the authors’ previous research and advocacy efforts undoubtedly influenced these changes. This book may be the final set of facts needed for profit-athletes to win the legal right to employment

Advertising · Athletes · Business · Economics · Microeconomics · Physical therapy · Political science · Profit (economics · Medicine · Psychology · Sports Analytics and Performance · Sports, Gender, and Society