The Protect College Sports Act, discussed in Chapter 23, passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 77-22. On NPR, Becky Sullivan writes: The bill would grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption in order to restore its five-year eligibility rule and transfer limits. The legislation would also codify the regulation of name, image and likeness deals that have transformed college athletics in recent years by allowing athletes to be paid — some of them as much as millions of dollars per season.
The bill now moves to the United States House of Representatives, but given the timing of the legislation it creates complications for the bill’s backers. Of most consequence is the fact that the House is currently comprised of 219 Republicans and 214 Democrats, but many of those seats are going to be up for grabs during the November midterms. According to prediction markets — a completely unnecessary evil amidst the heavily-saturated American gambling culture — Democrats have a 93 percent chance of supplanting the Republicans in the House.
This note is of particular import if only for the idea that Democrats, theoretically, are on the side of labor, and Republicans are on the side of big business. In spite of all the noise and propaganda emanating from the bill’s supporters, including the NCAA saying hilariously that ‘there is much work left to do to ensure student-athlete benefits are codified into federal law and future generations of young people can access those benefits and use college sports as the launching point for their careers,’ there is no mistaking this is very much a bill that is anti-student-athlete.
The game is obviously the game, and the NCAA is going to talk its nonsense as a means of pretending that the Protect College Sports Act is actually centered around protecting them (the athletes) rather than ensuring their exploitation. It is only when one learns who, exactly, is against the bill that some semblance of clarity can be found.
According to Sullivan (emphasis mine): Opponents of the bill — from labor groups to athletes organizations to the NAACP, along with the 22 senators who voted against it — say it unfairly places limits on athletes without allowing them an equal seat at the table alongside powerful institutions.
I haven’t seen a single argument that the current NIL system is all that productive, or sustainable, because I think most of us can agree that it isn’t — but that’s sort of not the point here. Maybe the most fair solution is for universities and athletes to enter into contractual agreements; maybe there should be caps on the amount of times an athlete is able to transfer schools on a year-by-year basis; maybe college athletes deserve a union. Maybe the proper resolution is something else entirely.
All I know is that on one end of the spectrum are the many multi-million dollar universities, many multi-million dollar coaches and former coaches, and many multi-million dollar politicians. On the other are labor groups, pro-athletes groups, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In other words, the two sides are not in any way the same. There are only the few, who already have so much, and there are the many — who have so little.
I do not have to be so smart of an individual to know which side of the struggle is mine to support. It is perhaps too simplistic a way for a man to see the world, or to go through life. Not always is being in the corner of the little guy the righteous path, and only rarely is it the smart group to be in. But I swear to god if there does exist one hill that I must die on it will be alongside the oppressed rather than the oppressors. That much I know, and that much I do owe — as a man of the people.
The most depressing item worth any mention whatsoever is that it might not even matter. It may not matter if the Democratic Party wins the House in an absolute landslide. After all, the Democrats abandoned labor long ago. They left the cause of fighting for working Americans all the way back when Bill Clinton was in office, purging the old guard FDR Democrats — who for decades were not only popular amongst their constituents but successful at bettering the lives of ordinary people — in favor of protecting corporations and capital. They now support big business and the owners of industry as much as Republicans.
And so even if Democrats do have a noticeable majority in the House, call it 250-175, for argument’s sake, there is every reason to expect them to side with the NCAA and every other multi-millionaire who stands to gain from the passage of the Protect College Sports Act.
Because, honestly, the Democratic Party is just as responsible as the Republican Party as to why healthcare isn’t affordable, why the minimum wage hasn’t increased since 2009, why we continue bombing poor countries across the world that have nothing to do with us (in the United States), or anything else you can think of that does not benefit those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Why should people like me, or you, expect the Democrats — assuming they end up having a majority in the House — to not pass this stupid insignificant bill?
One of the opposers of the Protect College Sports Act, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy (D), argued on Twitter that: The ‘chaos’ is that (mostly Black) athletes now have bargaining power and White coaches and sports industry execs hate it. I think this is much closer to the truth than anything I have heard from the bill’s supporters. Chaos has consistently been the buzzword revolving around why, exactly, college sports are in need of change, yet none of the universities, none of the coaches, and none of the big-business-supporting politicians, ever labeled it as chaos when for generations college athletes played for free.
So, no, Senator Murphy is not wrong. I opined in a recent article that: [One] thing I can’t shake when it comes to the Protect College Sports Act is that the establishment — the money, in other words — does not appreciate the lack they have in control. Where once they had their athletes by the balls in terms of capitalizing off free labor, and draconian policies regarding players having to sit out a year if they wanted to transfer schools, now they have nothing. Players have choices now. That’s what the establishment cannot stand for.
Murphy hit the nail on the head in referencing specifically Black athletes, who account for a whopping 70 percent of all NFL players and roughly 75 percent of all NBA players. This important to note for two reasons. The first is that Black people represent only 13.5 percent of the U.S. population, and the second — as it pertains to college sports and their relationship to the NFL and NBA — is that the best players (particularly in the big revenue sports of football and basketball) earn the most money in NIL.
Given the disproportionate amount of Black Americans who excel in sports, and end up playing professionally, it does stand to reason why the NCAA (an organization led largely by old white men) and college football coaches (whom nine out of ten are white men) desire so badly to rein in the power that so many of these athletes have at current.
I am not in a position to make this an article about race, nor am I trying to say that the NCAA and/or college football coaches are racist. Because in my heart I don’t believe those things to be true. Do racists exist in the NCAA? Of course. Are there racist college football coaches? Absolutely. But I don’t find that to necessarily be the central point, or like objective, of the Protect College Sports Act.
Rather, it is about institutional control. It is about the systemic racism that exists in every industry in the United States. It is in the same vein as to why only 13.5 percent of Americans are Black yet between 35 and 40 percent of prison inmates are Black. It is why it is harder for Black people to get a loan from a bank, or buy a home, or why cocaine possession is a misdemeanor and possession of crack is a felony. Etc.
In other words, the Protect College Sports Act did not become a major issue — big enough to make its way onto our television screens on College Gameday, or big enough to warrant a vote from the Senate — because white college baseball players (who make up 86 percent of the sport) were running wild and making too much money in NIL. It had to come from football. And it had to come, to a lesser degree, from basketball.
Some random 36 year-old white guy from a significantly-more-progressive-than-average state such as California will never be able to convince the general public that racism remains a huge problem in American culture, partly because I think most individuals have moved on and partly because the lens with which I see the world through is class-based in lieu of identity.
At the same time I take pride in my ability to walk and chew gum simultaneously. It is OK for me to believe that racism is not anywhere near the problem it once was, in prior generations, while admitting concurrently that the systems in place — in the aforementioned prison system, in the amount of money Black people earn compared to whites, in the amount of money Black women, specifically, earn compared to white women, in the difference between participation within higher education, etc. — do not happen to favor minorities in the Black community.
Whether or not you like it, and whether or not you do happen to be racist, the numbers do not lie. The Protect College Sports Act benefits the institutions that are inherently racist. In a zero-sum game such that this bill represents, it requires that the losing side — the underdogs, in this case — are predominantly Black males. There is no separating the logical conclusion the NCAA seeks — a restoration to the old way, with college athletes acting as free labor — from the new way where players have agency over the universities they play for and the money they are able to earn.
As I said in my articles about the ongoing labor war in Major League Baseball: Nobody ever went broke betting on the rich to get richer and the poor to continue fighting in an uphill struggle. Given the overwhelming 77-22 vote in the Senate, there is very little optimism or like encouragement to be found even operating under the assumption that the Democratic Party holds a massive advantage in the House. We know the people the Democrats represent. They happen to look a helluva lot like the old white multimillionaires parading around the NCAA.
To that end, I fear it is nothing more than a pipe dream to envision this ‘chaos’ college athletes have been enjoying over the last five years to maintain much further. There is simply too much money behind the side of the aggressors, and there is not a big enough platform to support those who wish for a continuation of the good times for labor.
Leave a comment