(ThyBlackMan.com) March Madness is a wonderful time of the year for sports fans. The excitement of young players fighting hard to advance their schools in the tournament can be intoxicating to the viewer. The game of basketball is like a religion to some, especially in my home state of Kentucky, where I taught Calculus at The University of Kentucky when I was an exciteable 22-year old still trying to figure out why the basketball coach didn’t want the players to read my articles in the campus paper.
Now I understand why my articles might have been dangerous to those in the establishment:
1) I value education,
2) I know Financial theory and how money is made, and
3) I’m a black man who tends to say whatever is on his mind. These three factors came together to help me to better understand the shear magnitude of the mass exploitation taking place within NCAA sports. Even worse, they remain hopeful that black people will never figure out
what’s going on.
Here are five reasons that the NCAA should be burned to the ground by Congress, the IRS and the athletes’ families themselves:
1) Players do the work, but someone else gets the money: The NCAA earns more ad revenue during March Madness than the Superbowl and the World Series. When I participated in a CBS sports special regarding whether or not college athletes should be paid, I noticed that every single person arguing that the players shouldn’t be paid was himself earning at least a million dollars per year from athlete labor. It makes sense: If the athletes’ families were to get a cut of the money they’re earning, then this reduces the financial rewards from those who maintain this exploitative system. Most of those who support the current NCAA system are those who stand to benefit financially.
2) Even the free education part doesn’t actually exist: I once had a student in my class who was on the football team. I remember that I kept getting messages from one of the assistant coaches telling me that the student was going to miss the first week of class. Then I got another message stating that he would miss the second week of class. I then asked the coach these questions:
1) Why are you emailing me instead of the student?
2) Why is he missing two weeks of class to prepare for games that he’s not being compensated to play in? If sports is truly extracurricular, that means that the games should only occur when he does NOT have academic duties to fulfill,
3) You do realize that, by forcing him to miss two weeks of my class, you’re effectively guaranteeing that he’s going to fail?
After that conversation, the student was taken out of my class, and they never sent another player to my class again. I think they even told him to change his major, since Finance was too difficult for an athlete’s schedule. Hence, this young man’s future was permanently altered so he could participate in an EXTRACURRICULAR activity. Extracurricular my azz….this was his JOB.
I’ve seen athletes get all the way through college without learning how to read better than an 8-year old. In many cases, the professors and administrators are fully aware of these blatant violations of academic integrity. Unfortunately, faculty are too frightened to speak up, since the financial pressures provide incentives for campuses to get rid of whistle blowers rather than reward them.
3) The NCAA’s massive propaganda machine: The NCAA is great at running ridiculous ads creating a fairytale illusion that its athletes are being provided with a high quality education. Some students in non-revenue generating sports are given a chance to actually learn something, but let’s be clear: Most of the basketball and football players are being shuffled around like cattle. With millions of dollars on the line, most campuses aren’t going to give up that kind of money for the chance to educate a bunch of black men. Just ask the North Carolina Tarheels, an “extraordinary academic institution” that spent decades putting athletes through school with the education of 12-year olds.
4) Athletes are only amateur because the NCAA says they are: I’ve heard many coaches on numerous occasions say that they expect their athletes to behave like professionals. The athletes keep the schedules of professionals. They are on television as much as professionals. The NCAA makes more ad revenue than most professional sports leagues. So, why are they amateur again? Oh yea, because the NCAA says they are. Even Walter Byers, the man who created the false amateurism model that the NCAA worships to this day, said that college athletes should be paid. That’s like Jesus telling his disciples that God really isn’t his dad.
5) The players don’t have much of a life outside of sports: When you’re practicing early in the morning, again at night and then having video sessions in the afternoon, it’s almost impossible to really dig into the academic experience. Most Division I athletes at major revenue-generating schools are in a constant state of mental and physical exhaustion. The idea that sports is merely an extracurricular activity is part of a fantasy world that was created by those who want to believe that the NCAA engages in humane treatment of its animals athletes. At the University of Kentucky, I recall that even the dorm that the athletes live in surrounds them with nothing but sports imagery all the time. This might be helpful for the brainwashing process.
The NCAA annually engages in one of the biggest wealth extractions from the black community outside of the prison industrial complex. Many of the black men who dedicate their lives to college sports aren’t given the chance to be head coaches at the same universities that were happy to use them up for their athletic ability. Also, most of them don’t go pro and many of them aren’t given the time to get a good education.
By educating the public and the parents of these athletes, we can slowly chip away at the sinking ship called the NCAA. The massive anti-trust lawsuit filed by Sonny Vaccaro and former NCAA athlete Ed O’Bannon is pushing the envelope and helping the highlight the gross inequities being perpetuated by this system. It’s only a matter of time before equity is achieved, and it is only then that we can all sit down and enjoy a college basketball game without wondering if we are contributing to a form of athletic prostitution.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.
