Evil, Thy Acronym Is NCAA

Tech­ni­cal­ly, NCAA is an ini­tial­ism rather than an acronym — but you know what I mean.

I have long been irked at the way the col­lege sports com­plex abus­es stu­dents, but I was absolute­ly floored by some of the details Tay­lor Branch shared in “The Shame of Col­lege Sports” (pub­lished in The Atlantic).

Two snip­pets to whet your appetite:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jor­dan, the pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of Penn State, “should a uni­ver­si­ty be an adver­tis­ing medi­um for your indus­try?”

Vac­caro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to con­tin­ue sell­ing them. You can be very moral and right­eous in ask­ing me that ques­tion, sir,” Vac­caro added with irre­press­ible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our mon­ey. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

And lat­er:

But after an inquiry that took me into lock­er rooms and ivory tow­ers across the coun­try, I have come to believe that sen­ti­ment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time col­lege sports are ful­ly com­mer­cial­ized. Bil­lions of dol­lars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes mon­ey, and enables uni­ver­si­ties and cor­po­ra­tions to make mon­ey, from the unpaid labor of young ath­letes.

Slav­ery analo­gies should be used care­ful­ly. Col­lege ath­letes are not slaves. Yet to sur­vey the scene—corporations and uni­ver­si­ties enrich­ing them­selves on the backs of uncom­pen­sat­ed young men, whose sta­tus as “stu­dent-ath­letes” deprives them of the right to due process guar­an­teed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmis­tak­able whiff of the plan­ta­tion. Per­haps a more apt metaphor is colo­nial­ism: col­lege sports, as over­seen by the NCAA, is a sys­tem imposed by well-mean­ing pater­nal­ists and ratio­nal­ized with hoary sen­ti­ments about car­ing for the well-being of the col­o­nized. But it is, nonethe­less, unjust. The NCAA, in its zeal­ous defense of bogus prin­ci­ples, some­times destroys the dreams of inno­cent young ath­letes.

The whole thing is worth read­ing, so zip over to The Atlantic and read “The Shame of Col­lege Sports” now.