In 1906, the NCAA was created to protect amateurism in collegiate athletics. At the time there were no T.V contracts, bowl game sponsorships (Tostitos did not even exist), or any of the other numerous money generating opportunities that exist today. In 1906, amateurism was in it's truest form. Over 110 years later, the NCAA has abandoned its original goals and promises and has morphed into an explotive and punitive monopoly that requires change and regulation.

In 2016. The NCAA's primary objective is financial gain, for themselves and their member institutions. They are able to accomplish this by exploiting their athletes rights and not compensating their student athletes. In 2014, the NCAA's federal income tax return showed that the NCAA was able to bring in 912.8 million dollars (Alesia). While the CEO of the NCAA made 1.8 million dollars (Berkowitz). Together the NCAA, athletic directors, coaches, and the universities are able to make millions of dollars off of the work of student athletes who make the games so exciting, television ratings so high, and licensing deals so lucrative.  

The NCAA is able to shield itself from paying athletes by arguing that athletes are compensated in the form of scholarships and by defending their stance on amateurism. First, let's examine the issue of compensation. Seth Davis, in his article against paying players says,   "Student-athletes earn free tuition, which over the course of four years can exceed $200,000. They are also provided with housing, textbooks, food and academic tutoring" (Davis). Davis is correct to state that the notion that players earn nothing for playing is incorrect. However, the scholarships they correlate to compensation for the student-athletes are often abused to the point where their worth comes nowhere close to matching the education received by other students. Further, athletes forfeit due process rights and lose the rights to transfer without penalty (Solomon). The argument continues to fall flat when one takes into account how much these student-athletes would make if they were given fair market value and the NCAA was not allowed to hold a monopoly over major college athletes. Free market principles would allow power to flow to the athletes, who are the backbone of it all. This is all surmised in Taylor Branch's piece when he states "The NCAA makes money, enables corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young college athletes." (Branch)

The latest smokescreen provided by the NCAA is in the form of "cost of attendance payments" which is used by the NCAA to cover up their lack of compensation for these college athletes (Dodd). These payments are based on a couple factors around how much it would cost for students to attend the university and takes into account for travel costs and prices of goods around the campus. These payments hover between 2000 dollars to 5000 dollars depending on what the program sets it as (Prisbell). While this is a step in the right direction it still criminally undervalues the player's worth. A prime example of this would be the university of Texas. Texas' cost of attendance payments are 4,310 dollars, but Cork Gaines claims that "we can estimate that the average college football player at the University of Texas is worth $622,104 per year based on the program's 112.5 million in annual revenue." (Gaines). The differences between the estimated and actual numbers for young athletes are life-changing.  In professional sports, an agent would negotiate on the athlete's behalf.  This is almost a criminal difference of money.  While this number varies from school to school, every power conference football team is underpaying their student-athletes by a significant margin.  As the collegiate sports market continues to grow and college sports continuing to draw more and more revenue, universities, the NCAA, corporations, and even and the coaching staffs are on pace to continue making more money and the monopoly that protects these profits will grow more defiant and powerful at the expense of the students.  

The second "compensation" shield the NCAA uses is to promote amateurism and the right of student athletes to receive an education.  The NCAA preaches amateurism as its founding statement and refuses to change its mission, however, it fails to concede the landscape of amateur sports has dramatically shifted since 1906.  The NCAA continues to amass massive profits from athletes, however, the scholarships they provide are restrictive, flawed and fail to adequately compensate the athlete.  Moreover, coaches, athletic directors, and the universities make millions off of the athletes hard work in the form of ticket and jersey sales, just as an example, yet not a single cent is received by the players.   

One of the greatest injustices the NCAA has done to their players is the creation of the moniker "student-athlete."  While at first this seems like an innocent name to describe the people who are, just as it says, students and athletes, according to Taylor Branch, economist Andrew Zimbalist claims that "The NCAA has crafted this term to deny players workers compensation for injuries that might occur during the athlete's playing career." This is in contrast to the mission of the organization which was designed to implement a safe way for these athletes to participate in these sports, and goes against everything that the NCAA claims to stand for. The only possible reason that the NCAA has for not giving their student athletes rights to workmens compensation is that it would hurt their own bank account. It is an incredible wrongdoing that athletes who are injured are not compensated, especially when others benefit from the activities that create the risk of grave injury. 

The lack of protection for these student-athletes can create some very ugly and real scenarios in which these athlete' futures are being destroyed. Kyle Hardrick, a University of Oklahoma basketball player accepted a scholarship. During his sophomore year he suffered a knee injury while playing basketball for the University.  The injury was not covered by insurance, workers compensation or any other policy.  To add insult to his injury, because he was unable to play basketball, his scholarship was revoked. The lack of the scholarship and the burden of medical bills forced Kyle to drop out of college (Oliver).  He was powerless, unprotected and paid a terrible price that the NCAA creates for their players. The change that needs to be implemented must be systematic and something that changes all different facets of the way the NCAA is allowed to operate. If this is not changed these kind of scenarios will continue and that can not happen. 

So while the NCAA is denying the students help with their injuries, they also have a set of overbearing and unreasonable rules that hurt the athletes. A prime example of this would be the sanctions the NCAA put on the University of Utah. They punished Utah for the coach of the basketball buying his player a mean and a plane ticket back home after one of his parents had passed away (Oliver). They decided this was a violation because coaches are not allowed to provide their student-athletes with anything that a not athlete would not receive. This is once again an example of the NCAA going out of their way to punish the player (and his teammates) for a coach helping one of his players in a time of great need. This is important, because one of the few choices the players have is who they play for (initially, coaches leave all the time and the players have no say in it) and the NCAA puts pointless rules, that do not protect the players, but rather hurt them and punish their teammates for unnecessary reasons. This once again shows how little the NCAA cares about their athletes, and how important it is for them to control them no matter what the circumstances may be. This is something the student athletes have no real means of protecting themselves, and efforts to protect themselves are often shut down by the NCAA.

Recently, the athletes on the Northwestern football team attempted to unionize, their goal being to according to Jake New being to " increasing scholarships and coverage for sports-related medical expenses, minimizing the risk of traumatic brain injury through measures like reduced contact in practice, improving graduation rates with help from an educational trust fund, and securing due process rights." (New). All of the goals the athlete's are asking for should be things that the NCAA either supports them having or provides for these athletes. However, the NCAA is actively fighting this in court and has brought the movement to a screeching halt with the recent National Labor Board deciding with the NCAA in a not very straightforward decision. This has at best, slowed down the movement for the athletes to become unionized to a snail's pace, but more likely has crushed the movement for them to become unionized for good. This is critical because it is an example of the NCAA actively fighting against their players for rights, that they should have provided for them regardless. The reason the NCAA is doing this is because it will impact the amount of revenue them and their member institutions bring in, forcing them to provide these things as a form of compensation will cost the schools a lot of revenue, even though it would greatly enhance the experience of these college athletes, and provide them with resources that they deserve and should be provided to them regardless. Instead the NCAA has challenged and fought the student athletes, who are pushing for their rights, every step of the way. 

It is important to note that the NCAA, as a scholarship institution,  describes the people whose role it is to protect as student-athletes, the primary emphasis on student.  However, the NCAA does nothing to protect the academic life of the student.  When athletes are being recruited they are often told that they will be able to major in whatever they want when they enroll at the school they are being recruited to, but once athletes are actually on campus they are often told that they will not be able to take a lot of the more time consuming majors and are strongly discouraged from taking it.  They are then frequently pushed into less time consuming majors with less opportunities for future employment and a lack of passion from the student-athletes to take these classes which can lead to far worse scenario's for these student athletes after their collegiate careers are over. 

Recently the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill has come under scrutiny for their use of "paper classes" which were used as grade point average boosters to ensure that these athletes would remain eligible to play. The "paper classes" were not taught by professors or faculty with an academic background, but rather people who worked in offices or other places around the university. This allowed for paper's which would be graded harshly in middle school classes to receive beneficial grade's to the athlete's grade point average, allowing them to continue to play.  These classes had been around for years and would have likely continued if a professor did not come forward about these classes. These classes were not even being taught by professors, but rather assistants in the department (Svrluga).   In light of this, the NCAA should put the University under serious scrutiny and place its accreditation at risk.  Yet the NCAA has been impotent, hiding behind a long standing "investigations" to avoid the sanctions that should come from allegations like these and protecting the University, not the students whose academic careers are being hurt.  Situations like this lead me to believe that there is no way to reasonably refute that student-athletes need to be better protected, as well as better compensated than what they are currently.  

I believe that despite how flawed the NCAA and college athletics are, they are not broken. To fix this issue the NCAA needs more regulations, harsher penalties, and other protective and beneficial measures to help the players from being mistreated and victims of the greed of the university's, athletic directors, and the NCAA themselves. The first change that needs to be made is that they either have to embrace amateurism or stop hiding behind it and using it as a shield for criticism. Since it would likely be impossible for true amateurism to be embraced with the incredible amount of money that is currently in college sports, they need to fix how the money is distributed in college sports. This is because the claims to amateurism are comical when coaches and athletic directors are making millions of dollars to play in front of crowds that pay a lot of money to be there to watch students that make nothing play. The unfairness of this can be corrected with the players being compensated for the value that they bring to their universities, as well as allowing athletes to use their abilities to make money outside of the school. Another thing the NCAA must do is regulate how many hours the athlete can actually be working to ensure that they have an equal opportunity to be chasing their academic goals instead of simply competing classes to stay eligible to play their sports. Lastly the NCAA has to do a better job of protecting these players instead of allowing universities to take advantage of them, and also lighten up the rules that govern these players to make them reasonable with more common sense policy instead of the over the top nature that is in these rules right now. 

The reason this issue is so important is because college athletics are one of the most unprotected and mistreated industries in this country, as well as one of the most profitable ones. We must hold the people accountable and cut the greed out of something millions of people have a vested interest in and protect the players that make the sports they play so popular, and give so much to the universities that are abusing their power at the hands of these athletes. It should not be acceptable for these athletes to have such a lack of rights compared to the worth they bring to numerous other people. This is why this issue is so important, and why there needs to be changes in major college athletics.  

Trevor: overall, I'm impressed with your paper, especially your conclusion. Really, what's at stake here is worker's rights in general! Athletes kind of represent how workers would be treated if there were no regulation at all, right? There are a few things you do need to address for revision. You need to cite at least 10 sources in the body of your essay and engage with some of them more fully (quotes!). There are some paragraphs where you don't have sources that it's a bit of a problem. You also use "this" alot, which in your case making it more specific will really just help your argument as you define the system you wish to change. B
