It may seem obvious now, when we have lived without sports and concerts and all public entertainment for several weeks. But when we awoke on the second Thursday in March, the coronavirus pandemic had not yet ground the world to a halt.
Faced with the looming unknown, NCAA officials didn't equivocate. They didn't postpone, didn't give anyone any hope, didn't shirk from making the decision no one wanted to make. They sacrificed the Final Fours, their biggest financial engine, for more important objectives. They chose to preserve the health of student-athletes, coaches and fans rather than the bottom line.
"We tried, in all of these conversations," NCAA president Mark Emmert told my colleague, Mark Schlabach, "to have it be first and foremost about what's the right thing to do for our students but also for the broader public."
It's the kind of swift, decisive leadership that college sports needed, and it stands out even more because swift and decisive is exactly what the NCAA has not been regarding the most important issue facing intercollegiate athletics. How could the NCAA get coronavirus so right and get name, image and likeness so wrong?
The NCAA Division I Council was expected to take up the NIL issue at its meeting Friday. Earlier this month, NCAA vice president Kevin Lennon hinted that people would be "surprised" at how "robust" the Council's recommendations on NIL would be. Now there's an understatement. People are "surprised" it has taken more than a decade for the NCAA to deal with it.
Since former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon filed suit against the NCAA in 2009 for licensing the use of his NIL in a popular video game, the NCAA has obfuscated, fulminated and stiff-armed its way to finding a solution. In that time, as O'Bannon won his case, as several NCAA member schools ratcheted their annual athletic revenue to more than $200 million and paid coaching salaries approaching $10 million annually, the NCAA resolved not to give one inch on allowing NIL benefits to athletes.
The NCAA refused to prepare for NIL, even as public opinion shifted in favor of allowing the Joe Burrows of the world to benefit from an LSU jersey being sold because it has the name "BURROW" across the shoulder blades. You can tell public opinion swung because politicians from sea to shining sea have swung with it, in favor of student-athletes and against the NCAA.
As the NCAA dithered, state governments filled the vacuum. In the NCAA, state politicians found an institution respected less than government. They heard the siren call of a cost-free ticket for public approval. Give a politician the chance to toady to the public will, then make a bowl of popcorn and watch.
Think about it. The California Legislature's votes early last September to grant NIL rights to college athletes in the state look like the scores of buy-an-opponent games played in early September: 73-0 (Assembly) and 39-0 (Senate). In Colorado this month, the 35-member Senate passed its bill unanimously while the House had to settle for a 55-9 victory. In a time of polarized politics, on what other issues do Republicans and Democrats agree unanimously?
Yet the NCAA painted itself into a corner from which only Congress could extract it. When Emmert testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on Feb. 11, he begged Congress to do the job the NCAA should have been doing all along. "[We] cannot effectively achieve our goals if we are pulled in various and potentially inconsistent directions by state legislatures," Emmert said.
Emmert's plea is understandable. Congress can solve the issue of having 50 rules in 50 states by passing a federal law. But really, Congress?
More to the point, the NCAA could have solved the issue before the state legislators seized the easy pickings of siding with athletes. Emmert's problem reminded me of a line Red Smith wrote in The New York Times as the baseball strike began in 1981. "This strike wouldn't have happened if Bowie Kuhn were alive today," Smith wrote, referring to the Major League Baseball commissioner of the time.
"We've had a vacuum of leadership to some degree in intercollegiate athletics," said Roy Kramer, the former commissioner of the Southeastern Conference. "There are not very many who want to face this issue for these hard, tough decisions."
Not to mention that the NCAA is run by a board of governors made up largely of university presidents, a class whose lack of knowledge of athletic administration is matched only by their reticence to act.
"The common approach of most education leaders is to appoint a committee," Kramer said. "They don't want to make a decision."
Kramer, who turns 90 this year, is old enough not to care whether he steps on toes. And he's right about the NCAA administrators. They certainly can't claim that NIL took them by surprise. In 1985, eight years before EA Sports brought its first NCAA video game to market, the NCAA Council and Executive Committee received a memo recommending that student-athletes be allowed to make product endorsements. What radical section of the NCAA community had the temerity to make that suggestion? The Mark Emmert of the day, the NCAA's first executive director, Walter Byers.
During his 34 years running the NCAA, Byers developed an organization known for adhering to its manual of rules, even in the face of compassion or common sense. But even Byers could see, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, "Unsportsmanlike Conduct," that the athletes whose talent fueled his multimillion-dollar industry should have the same access to the free market that their coaches enjoyed.
As he prepared to retire, Byers proposed that the endorsement income go into a trust fund from which athletes would draw upon graduation or the completion of their eligibility.
"I earnestly hope that the membership does not take a righteous stand in favor of old-time amateur principles for the athlete, but modern-day commercial involvement for coaches and institutions, and somehow expect a relatively small NCAA enforcement crew to keep the situation clean," Byers wrote.
Thirty-five years later, it appears the times have caught up with Byers' vision. Allowing student-athletes to benefit from the use of their NIL has been a fait accompli since the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn the O'Bannon ruling of 2013. That ruling prompted the NCAA to allow student-athletes to receive "cost-of-attendance" stipends that are available to other scholarship students.
For decades, the NCAA and its members considered cost-of-attendance stipends anathema to amateurism. And then they didn't. That pretty much describes the NCAA attitude toward amateurism throughout its 115-year history. The definition of amateurism would seem to be hard and fast -- either you receive compensation for playing or you don't. Not in intercollegiate athletics, where every generation draws its own line in the sand.
Amateurism is at best a beau ideal, the belief that an athlete should play only for the glory of competition. That beau ideal also has been, since the dawn of college football, worshipped by rule makers and dismissed by the coaches, players and fans more interested in victory. "As long as you keep score," Kramer said, "it's going to be hard to get rid of cheating."
When convenient, amateurism has been held as the standard. And when the sham has become too obvious to ignore, the NCAA simply has changed its definition of amateurism to bring it closer to the actual behavior of its coaches and players.
In 1935, the two-year-old Southeastern Conference voted to offer athletic scholarships with the novel idea of providing benefits over the table rather than under it.
In 1948, the entire NCAA adopted the Sanity Code, limiting scholarships to tuition and fees, to be offered only by the financial aid office, not by the athletic office. Any school that didn't adhere to the Sanity Code would be expelled from the NCAA. Two years later, after seven schools admitted to violations, the membership refused to expel them. There went the Sanity Code.
And so on, to this day, when millionaires in one sport may be amateurs in another, and student-athletes who earn monetary prizes for winning an Olympic medal are allowed to take them. The "college model" of amateurism has never stopped evolving, if by evolving we mean loosening the restrictions placed on compensation.
Today, an amateur athlete can receive a four-year education with a sticker price (at private institutions) of approximately $250,000. After the O'Bannon ruling, the NCAA agreed to allow student-athletes to receive the cost of attendance, a figure that varies from campus to campus, but is generally several thousand dollars. If the student-athlete's family income is below a certain level, he or she also may receive a federal Pell Grant (as much as $6,195 annually). The athlete also receives training, head-to-toe medical care (physical and psychological), unlimited food, and all the academic counseling he or she desires. And those who receive a full ride, unlike 70 percent of today's college graduates, leave campus with no debt.
So why did the NCAA waste time, money and power clutching its pearls over NIL? There are hurdles that involve labor law and Title IX, issues that can be skirted if the NIL mechanism is carefully constructed. Then, there are the bogus issues, such as the claim that tension in the locker room will rise when the quarterback makes more money than the offensive linemen who keep him upright.
Two things come to mind here:
One, don't you think players talented enough to play guard in Division I have figured out by now that quarterbacks will get more attention than they do?
Two, for nearly four decades, professional athletes in one sport are allowed to remain collegiate amateurs. Kyler Murray signed with the Oakland A's for $9 million in 2018, then played quarterback for Oklahoma. As you recall, Murray's wealth generated so much jealousy among the Sooners' offensive linemen that Murray won the Heisman Trophy.
Somehow, the NCAA is chasing the parade it should be leading. The NCAA may well catch up when the Division I Council meets Friday. But let's not confuse belated acceptance of responsibility with leadership. This never would have happened if the same Mark Emmert who canceled the Final Four were alive today.