Nearly everyone who is a college sports fan, myself included, knows the state of affairs in the NCAA is one fine mess. Especially regarding football and men’s basketball, the two major money-making sports, things have changed massively in the last few years — and mostly not in a good way.
Elite and even above-average athletes have effectively become free agents selling their services each year to the highest bidders. Every year the school rosters are different, so there’s almost no team or university loyalty. It’s rent-a-player, and the big college teams are now effectively professionals playing in professional leagues. In some cases, players can be paid professionally and retain their “amateur” status. The NCAA actually and stupidly discriminates against American kids to the advantage of older foreigners.
I went to the University of Illinois, and this year our hoops team, loaded with Europeans, made it to the Final Four. Our joke was that we were the University of Serbia.
Yet the games on the field and the court are as popular as ever, and I, for one, believe it is proper and correct that “student athletes” be paid for making tens of millions of dollars for the university.
I’m not sure how to fix things, but I do know who won’t: Congress. A new bill making its way through the Senate is the Cantwell-Cruz “Protect College Sports Act.” It’s pitched as a compromise to save college athletics. But it’s filled with federal rules, regulations and edicts, some of which make sense, while others are intrusive, unworkable and potentially ruinous to the games.
It uses the threat of antiquated antitrust statutes as the hammer to force the leagues like the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference to comply.
The bill does not formally create a government agency to negotiate college sports media rights, but it puts a figurative Mafia gun to their head to say that if they don’t comply, bad things happen.
They must accept more than 150 pages of byzantine rules governing media negotiations, revenue sharing, local broadcast access, conference transactions and even the college football calendar. Believe it or not, Congress would tell schools who they must play each year, and that “traditional rivalries” must be maintained! Is this what Congress should be working on in Washington?
On pages 100-101, the bill requires certain schools to play at least two traditional rivalry games every four years and at least one annual game against an out-of-conference opponent that ranks among the school’s top five historic football opponents.
The bill dictates when college and professional football games can be played. For example, it rewrites the Sports Broadcasting Act window by extending the restriction affecting professional football telecasts from the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December to the first Friday in September through the third Saturday in December.
The bill orders what games can be shown on which TV networks at what time. It restricts what schools can be added or deleted from certain conferences. It is meant to stifle the growth and money-making capabilities of the Big Ten and the SEC.
But it’s in the interest of the NCAA itself to make sure that the games are competitive and the same schools don’t dominate year after year. This past year, Indiana University, typically a losing team in college football, won the championship — partly by going into the portal and cherry-picking underrated and underpaid players.
Much of this has to do with the multibillion-dollar-plus broadcast contracts as college sports become ever more popular.
But for the students, spectators and athletes, the current sports broadcasting system works well, thank you. Nearly every major football game is broadcast on some cable outlet so fans can pick and choose from dozens of games every Saturday, and college basketball is on several stations nearly every night of the week.
In short, the Protect College Sports Act would make college athletics a fully regulated utility and risks ruining the joy, pageantry and competitiveness of college sports. Do we really want Sen. Bernie Sanders deciding who Ohio State should put on their football schedule?
Reform IS needed to stop treating universities as “nonprofit” educational institutions when it comes to athletics. The salaries, revenues and administrative costs should all be taxed like a professional sports team. Then the NCAA and the major conferences — not professional politicians, lawyers and lobbyists in Washington — should decide what’s in the best interest of the game and the schools.
Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.
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