Change Management (NCAA)

Daily Intelligencerthe sports section April 20, 2014 9:00 p.m.

Leitch: Can College Sports Survive Collective Bargaining?

By Will Leitch

477050379AT00344_NCAA_Men_sPhoto: Tom Pennington/2014 Getty Images

On a recent Monday night in Texas, the entire sports world stared at one man, Shabazz Napier, waiting to speak.

They’d paid quite a bit for the privilege. The game, the NCAA college basketball national championship, was played in AT&T Stadium, the $1.2 billion behemoth built by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (along with hundreds of thousands of taxpayers), which features one of the largest HDTVs on the planet and, in the upper deck, Earth’s most expensive stripper poles (left vacant for the tourney in the name of amateurism, I am sure). Eighty thousand fans watched in person, and 21.2 million watched the game on television—the fourth NCAA championship in a 14-year TV contract worth around $11 billion. Sponsors like Coca-Cola and Capital One ran constant ads on the air and even on the court; they had paid so much they weren’t even called sponsors anymore but “Corporate Champions.” Nike plans to give both Kentucky and Connecticut, the two schools facing off in the title game, more than $60 million so that players wear shoes branded with their swoosh.

In this glittering building made from diamonds and Jim Nantz’s tears, Shabazz Napier took the microphone. His Connecticut Huskies had just won a wildly improbable championship—just as improbably, it was the school’s fourth in 15 years—and he had been awarded the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player trophy. Decades of watching sports have taught us what to expect in this moment: clichés about God, and family, and taking it all one game at a time. And why not? No one takes a stand during a moment of universal worship.

But Napier did something different. He addressed the NCAA, the governing body of college athletics that is increasingly looking like a cartel. “I wanna get everybody’s attention right quick,” Napier shouted. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at the Hungry Huskies … This is what happens when you ban us!” Ostensibly, he was referring to the NCAA’s banning of the Huskies from last year’s tournament for low academic performance. But that’s not all he was doing, particularly with that “Hungry” comment. A couple days before, he had told reporters how he often went to bed “starving” because he couldn’t afford food. “We as student-athletes get utilized for what we do so well, and we’re definitely blessed to get a scholarship to our universities. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t cover everything. We do have hungry nights that we don’t have enough money to get food … It may not have your last name on it, but when you see your jersey getting sold … you feel like you want something in return.”

College athletics are dying. This may seem counterintuitive, given all this money being thrown around. But the current system—a multibillion-dollar business built around unpaid labor—is unsustainable.

This has all happened fairly quickly. Historian Taylor Branch’s 2011 Atlantic essay lit the college-athletes-should-be-paid candle, and since then, everything in the sport has been up for grabs. A lawsuit settlement put an end to video games using player likenesses; the NCAA was exposed for selling merchandise searchable by athlete names, and, in the latest and biggest shoe to drop, a National Labor Relations Board director found last month that attempts by Northwestern football players to unionize are allowed because athletes are not “student-athletes” to these schools: They’re employees.

The change has happened in part because of changing attitudes about amateurism and in part because of continued missteps by the NCAA. But it has mostly been about the money. And for all the money flying around college basketball, it’s college football that is raking in the craziest amounts: ESPN is paying reportedly $5.64 billion over 12 years for the upcoming College Football Playoff—six games each season. It is one thing to say that a $50,000 scholarship package is sufficient compensation for players when teams play 11 games a year on local television; it is quite another when the TV contracts are exceeding those of professional sports. The money has turned an abstract argument into a moral one.

The problem is that every fix seems to fundamentally alter things: You just can’t mend college sports without breaking them. At least, we haven’t figured out a way yet, as the recent challenges to the status quo show.

The first existential arrow aimed at college sports was the class-action lawsuit, led by former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon, alleging the NCAA was making money off the images of

former college athletes without properly compensating them. In pro sports, these kinds of disputes are resolved by collective bargaining between owners and players. But in college sports, collective bargaining is impossible, as the NCAA is so devoted to the principle of amateurism that players aren’t allowed to take part-time jobs, no matter how much they need the money, and can get suspended for receiving gifts as small as a pair of sneakers. Which is why it was so radical for those Northwestern football players, led by graduating quarterback Kain Colter, to try to unionize after last season. Their goals were modest: They weren’t seeking pay-for-play but health care extending beyond their years on the field and to have their scholarships guaranteed even in case of injury. But when they won the right to unionize, it opened the door wide open to collective bargaining (and not just for modest negotiations like the Northwestern team was engaging in).

Will collective bargaining help? It’s hard to see how, in part because you can’t negotiate a compensation structure for football players without rearranging a lot of other stuff on college campuses. The NFL and the NBA don’t subsidize other sports, but in college, to hear college presidents tell it anyway, football pays for women’s field hockey and soccer, which in turn allow schools to obey federal Title IX gender-equality laws. The system wasn’t designed to subsidize less popular sports, but it does that now. Would killing those money-losing programs in order to pay the football players count as progress?

Plus, it’s not clear how much unionization can scale, since even programs within the same conference often operate at very different levels—Northwestern is a pathetic moneymaker next to Ohio State and Michigan, for instance, and what qualifies as fair compensation to a Wildcat would likely seem inadequate to a Buckeye. And then there is the cultural hurdle: It’s not even clear the Northwestern football team, having established the right to organize, will actually vote to again this fall; its coach, Pat Fitzgerald, publicly encouraged his players not to.

Whatever the fate of unionization, the one thing the Northwestern decision did do was secure that “employee” label, and that might be the point of no return. The ruling has required the NCAA, ultimately, to decide what it is: a nonprofit regulatory organization or a moneymaking enterprise. If it’s the first, its billions in TV money have to be redistributed; if it’s the second, its rules will have to be dramatically altered. The most likely possibility is that the high-revenue schools could split off from the NCAA. They could set rules that allow players greater compensation and basically turn major college athletics into the biggest free-agent market in sports. (Imagine Scott Boras or Jay Z negotiating with Jim Boeheim.)

It is a travesty that Shabazz Napier goes to bed hungry the night before he makes millions upon millions for a bunch of balding white men. (The NCAA took the food thing so seriously it is now considering a major rule change allowing schools to offer more than three meals a day, something that, astoundingly, they hadn’t been allowed to do before.) This is a system that must be changed. The question is whether it can be without killing it entirely. College athletics very well might be unfixable; you might have to burn down the whole village. After sitting through Jerry Jones’s Final Four, I’ll confess: As much as I love all college sports … I’m ready to light the match.

*This article appeared in the April 21, 2014 issue of New York Magazin

For Shabazz Napier, N.B.A. Can Wait

MARCH 30, 2014 Sports of The Times By JULIET MACUR

The stands at Madison Square Garden shook when Shabazz Napier, the plucky 6-foot Connecticut guard, was named the most outstanding player of the East regional tournament. His fans applauded and roared. Some high-fived. A few others hugged.

At least one person was crying so hard that her tears soaked the front of her No. 13 Napier jersey. More on that later.

With unflappable leadership, Napier basically willed the Huskies to the Final Four in a 60-54 victory over Michigan State on Sunday. He was smooth and cool and seemed to be in on every play. He scored a game-high 25 points, going 9 for 9 from the foul line.

While his performance Sunday was amazing, just as his performances were throughout this season, Napier has been a standout for other reasons, too — more important ones. At a time when top college players often head to the N.B.A. after just a year or two, Napier is a senior who has stuck with Connecticut through some trying times.

His career started off well: As a freshman, he backed up Kemba Walker, who went on to play in the N.B.A. They won the national title. But in 2012, Huskies Coach Jim Calhoun, Napier’s mentor, left for health reasons. Even worse was that the team was banned from postseason play last year because of its below-average academic progress rate. Because of all that, Napier had seen the N.B.A. or a transfer to another university as attractive possibilities.

UConn, headed to its third Final Four in six years, is very likely ecstatic that he remained loyal to the Huskies. But the example Napier has set is something everyone should celebrate.

Napier, 22, is on track to graduate this spring. He has been on the dean’s list and has been on the athletic director’s academic honor roll, which means he had at least a 3.0 grade point average, a university spokesman said.

“I don’t think there’s anything bad with staying four years, though a lot of guys think there is because I guess you can lose money that way,” Napier said. “I just feel like the more you understand that education’s going to be key in your life, the more you mature.”

It took a while for him to understand that. Though Napier started playing basketball at 5 and was soon a leader in a local Y.M.C.A. No Books No Ball league, his devotion to education needed nurturing. As a teenager in the tough Mission Hill section of Boston, he was a self-described clown during his first three years of high school. He stayed back a year because of it.

When he signed with UConn, his mother, Carmen Velasquez, made him promise that he would graduate, so she could see him walk across the stage and receive his diploma.

“My dream for him was college, and his was basketball,” she said in the stands Sunday. “I said: ‘Bazz, you’ve got to start what you finish. What are you going to do with your life if basketball doesn’t work out? You have the brains to make something of yourself, and I want to be there to see it.’ ”

In response to the single mother who had raised him and his two siblings on a small paycheck, Napier remembered saying: “Of course, Mom. Anything for you. I promise.”

There is no question that Napier and his family could have used the money if he had left college early. Velasquez has worked as a bank teller, but the work has not been steady.

But look at Napier now, headed to college basketball’s biggest stage. On Sunday, Calhoun called Napier one of the “greatest players in college basketball in the last 10-12 years” and said it had been fun to watch him grow up on and off the court.

“Shabazz led this team,” Calhoun said. “You could see him talking to them. His swagger, his positive arrogance about how good we are translates to every single guy. He’s just a very special player.”

Other coaches have called Napier probably the best point guard in the college game. John Thompson, a former Georgetown coach, praised Napier as a role model.

“I understand that some kids have to leave college because of the money, when they definitely aren’t ready to leave, and that’s an unfortunate situation,” he said. “So you’re always extremely glad to see it work out for a kid that does stay, because then you can cite that to other kids.”

To that, Napier said, “Everybody’s life is different.” For him, it was important for him to graduate and keep his promise to his mother.

“She did so much for me, paid the bills, kept the lights on,” he said. “I’m still in awe of how she did it. I could never let her down.”

Velasquez was in the stands Sunday, on her feet for what seemed like the entire game, pumping her fist and dancing whenever her son made a basket. Afterward, as she saw Napier cut down part of the net from the basket, tears poured onto her No. 13 jersey, soaking the front of it. Her son’s persistence was worth it, she said.

She expects to shed even more tears in Texas, for the Final Four. But, she said, the most tears will come after that, for sure.

In the second weekend in May, Velasquez expects to watch her son walk across a stage to pick up his college diploma. Appropriate timing. It will be Mother’s Day.