The Sports Curmudgeon

If you’ve read these rants for any period of time, you have to know by now that I don’t hold the folks who run the NCAA in the highest regard. Notwithstanding that opinion, it’s interesting to ponder why the institution exists in the first place for several reasons. From my curmudgeonly point of view, it might give me hope that if the NCAA were ever to fall into “friendly hands”, maybe it could be a force for good. But there is a current events reason to think about this now because the NCAA has come under scrutiny from another institution that I do not hold in the highest esteem – the Congress of the United States.

Representative Bill Thomas (R-CA) is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. The LA Times reported that he recently sent “a pointed eight-page letter” to Dr. Myles Brand at the NCAA inquiring about why the NCAA deserves to retain its tax-free status as an institution. Oh, you didn’t realize that the NCAA, which makes all that money from TV deals and March Madness, doesn’t pay any tax on that money? Well, that is the case. Just as a way to focus your attention, the NCAA budget for a recent fiscal year was just north of $520M and close to $500M of that money came from TV rights to March Madness.

Representative Thomas reportedly went so far as to say that huge athletic programs might actually be in opposition to the fundamental educational mission objectives for colleges and universities. I hope Dr. Myles Brand didn’t gasp too loudly here because he came into his job saying that he would unite the university presidents to rein in the out of control athletic programs and make them adhere to the mainstream mission of the member institutions. That sounds as if he thought then that athletics might not be part of the mainstream…Representative Thomas said that he fully supported educational institutions as tax-exempt entities but wondered if there should be a tax exemption for college athletics - - given his inclination to think that college athletic endeavors and educational endeavors might not always coincide with one another.

Remember, this isn’t just any jamoke in the House of Representatives; this is the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and that is where tax code legislation originates in that chamber. By dint of his position, Bill Thomas is sort of related to E.F. Hutton; when he talks you ought to listen.

As you might expect, the NCAA’s initial response was a prepared statement that contained the following sentence:

“The NCAA disagrees with the fundamental assertion that intercollegiate athletics is not part of higher education.”

Let’s get something straight from the beginning. The Congressthing has an agenda and it would be highly unusual if all of his agenda to be out in the open for everyone to examine. That’s not how the Congress works. At the same time, the NCAA has an institutional agenda here and each person working there has an agenda because his or her livelihood would be at risk if the NCAA became an ordinary for-profit entity. So of course, the NCAA disagrees with this assertion in a blanket sense. So let me try to put this debate on a scale for sports fans to think about as this plays itself out.

On a scale of 1-10 where 10 indicates that something is critically important to educational pursuits of excellence, I think everyone can agree that libraries and laboratories rank at the 10 level. Fraternities and sororities rank at the 1 level because a college may provide excellent educational experiences for students without a “Greek System” and students who do not have anything to do with fraternities/sororities at schools where they exist can still receive wonderful educations. I don’t mean to say that fraternities are bad things by putting them at the 1 level here; I only mean to say they are not essential to the educational mission of the school.

So where might other college activities/institutions fall on this scale?

A school newspaper would not be a 10 but it ought to rank closer to 10 than to 1 because it does provide important learning experiences to journalism students and business students and writers.

A university thespian group or a college chorale would similarly rank closer to 10 than to 1.

A “semester abroad program” would probably be in the mid-scale range at most schools since the majority of students would not participate and so it cannot be critically important to the overall educational experience there.

Athletics would surely fall closer to 1 than to 10. Only a small percentage of students participate; watching athletic endeavors as a fan provides educational value to the fans only in the most concocted argumentation; many of the “students” who make up the major athletic teams would not even be considered for admission to the school were it not for their ability and availability to play their particular sport.

So, the NCAA disagrees with the fundamental assertion that athletics is not part of the educational experience; good for them. Do not let them define the debate that way because it is a bogus argument. Rather, people need to push the NCAA to take a stand on just how relevant and how important big time athletics might be to the core educational mission of its member schools. And remember, one way to tell if it is “vital to the mission” is to imagine that athletics is removed from the equation. Under those circumstances, would universities collapse and cease to be available to the public? Clearly, the answer is no.

The NCAA likes to say that it allocates the revenues it generates for the common good of its member institutions. I don’t doubt that this is the case for some of those distributed revenues. But I have to get off the train at the point where some big time college coaches in football and basketball are making about $2M a year and Dr. Myles Brand as the NCAA maven makes dangerously close to $1M a year Faculty members who have won Nobel Prizes don’t make that much. And where does the money come from to pay those coaches and Dr. Brand more than the Nobel Laureates – who are clearly at the university for academic prowess and not jock abilities. It comes from those TV revenues which become distributed NCAA revenues, folks. Maybe the NCAA thinks everyone within a university environment is equal but like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal House maybe some are more equal than others…

So, what is the transcendent purpose of the NCAA? I am fully willing to believe that in the current environment, the NCAA behaves like any other established institution with an internal pecking order; it’s “Prime Directive” is to assure it’s continued survival. But why is it there in the first place? And if anyone were to conclude that it is there because in aggregate the colleges and universities can better market their athletic products, then I think the tax-exempt status should be revoked in a millisecond.

Actually, I think that one of the transcendent purposes of the NCAA was to establish its Byzantine set of rules about recruiting and eligibility and all that nonsense. Much as I rail at the silliness of some of those rules, they are there for a purpose. The rules attempt to provide a level playing field for schools with regard to whom they may put out there in an athletic contest to represent the school. I‘m not even hinting that these rules work to provide that level playing field; they do not. But I do believe that may have been a primary purpose in starting this institution that has become bloated, pompous and feckless. And if that were in fact the transcendent purpose, then maybe – I said maybe – the tax-exempt status would be reasonable.

My guess is that some folks in the NCAA are hoping for enough of a change in the November elections to put someone else in charge of the Ways and Means Committee. If that happened and the new chairman never asked about the letter the NCAA received, you can rest assured that they would never bring the subject up themselves.

For me, I think the NCAA should pay tax on the money that it takes in. It could be some kind of special reduced rate for an entity that will distribute most of its net profit for a year to its member institutions and there should still be lots of money left for them to distribute. But if the citizenry is truly concerned about rich people and rich corporations not paying their fair share of the tax burden, then they ought to be concerned that this entity doesn’t pay a dime in taxes. I don’t want to put the NCAA out of business; I have my own agenda to work here. I use the NCAA as something to ridicule more than once in a while and I need them out there as a target for rants such as this. So don’t tax them into oblivion, but let the US Treasury take 10-15% of the gross revenues there.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…