The leaders of college sports still don't get it

Washington Post

8 hours ago

A quarter century ago, the NCAA invested $150,000 in lobbying on Capitol Hill. To a couple of lobbyists. For one year. In the first quarter of this year alone, the college sports governing body spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on the same. Using more than a dozen lobbyists. After having spent more than half a million dollars on lobbying last year, just as it had in each year since 2021. While throwing its authority behind bills such as H.R. 8534, titled the 'Protecting Student Athletes' Economic Freedom Act,' which would actually do anything but by restricting college athletes from being classified as employees who receive a paycheck and benefits like everyone else working in college sports.
The NCAA's lobbying fund has been well spent.
So too, apparently, was the $200,000 that the bellwether college athletic conference, the SEC, spent in 2025's first quarter to get its concerns before legislators, on top of the $800,000 it doled out last year. And the $160,000 the Big Ten spent in this year's first quarter, chasing the $460,000 it paid in 2024.
Because listening Thursday to a congressional subcommittee discussing the barely week-old court approval of the multibillion dollar House v. NCAA settlement, which codified for the first time that colleges can pay their athletes directly, it was clear that what much of the media touted last week as a landmark victory for athletes may have been a big win for those who have always controlled them — the NCAA and the colleges and universities for whom they toil.
Certainly, the Republicans who control House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade sounded Thursday as if they had bought what those entities were selling, from outdated terminology describing college athletes to ideas about how to manage them in the future, no matter last week's liberating decision.
They called the hearing, 'Winning Off the Field: Legislative Proposal to Stabilize NIL and College Athletics.' The senior member of the committee, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Florida), and most others referred to college athletes as 'student-athletes,' the misleading phrase created by the modern NCAA's architect, Walter Byers, as a prophylactic for the NCAA and its member schools against claims that college athletes were employees entitled to compensation and, particularly if injured, benefits.
Most of the inquisitors — 14 of the subcommittee's 25 members are Republicans — seemed to prefer answers from one of the four witnesses, SEC associate commissioner William King, who in his opening statement regurgitated the false bromide about college athletes: 'We're the only country in the world where elite athletes … can use their athletic ability to receive a college education for free while pursuing their athletic goals at the same time.'
Free? Their athleticism, which results in scoring touchdowns and getting buckets, is called labor. In return, they get room and board and the chance to pursue a degree. Meanwhile, King, on the backs of those athletes' labor, was paid three-quarters of a million dollars last year and his boss, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, pocketed $4.2 million.
SEC football and basketball players are no less employees than the conference executives, athletic directors and coaches for whom they perform. And they should be treated as such. Sharing in the revenue they produce in addition to selling their name, image and likeness. Enjoying the ability to organize. Being represented at the bargaining table.
But the Republicans running Thursday's subcommittee have also floated legislation titled the 'Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act of 2025' that includes, among other restrictions on those athletes, several provisions ensuring those athletes would not be designated as employees.
Unless and until those who control college athletics fully acknowledge and treat athletes as the employees who make college sports thrive, it will forever be a queasy enterprise, morally and ethically. Even Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh underscored as much four years ago in the ruling that tipped the scale and helped make last week's ruling possible.
'The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the pay of student-athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year,' Kavanaugh wrote in NCAA v. Alston. 'Those enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student-athletes. College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives take in six- and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student-athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.'
Yet these legislators, so many college athletic administrators from the most powerful conferences such as the SEC and, of course, the NCAA, still don't want to share the whole loaf. Only a slice. Last week's agreement gives colleges the options to share up to $20.5 million with their athletes over the next year. But that's a fraction of the wealth produced by college sports.
King defended using the vernacular vestiges that deny employment status to college athletes by claiming, without evidence, that most SEC athletes don't want to be employees of their universities. This is the same conference that I found talking its football players into playing amid a newfangled pandemic with long-term health consequences unknown at the time.
It strains credulity, of course, that those athletes wouldn't want to be paid like King, or their coaches, or even someone on the maintenance crew — and to receive all the same health benefits, long-term and short, and worker's comp. After all, the NCAA likes to tout that most of its athletes 'go pro in something other than sports.' Which means college is their biggest opportunity to earn money from their athletic talent. Don't be hypocritical by denying them.