Emma Watson, Amateurism, and the Collegiate Model

The revenue-driven commercialization of intercollegiate athletic programs embodies an increasing disconnect between the treatment and restrictive rules governing student-athletes and  athletic department budgets and the money spent on bloated coach salaries and extravagant athletic facilities.   

            Emma Watson, Hermoine Grainger in the Harry Potter movies, attends Brown University.   She can endorse a product or do a commercial and still act in Brown amateur theatricals and get a scholarship.   Exploiting her name and likeness value does not bar her from amateur campus productions.  If college athletes similarly exploited their name and likeness value, they’d be barred forever from college competition. 

            The NCAA currently is the target of litigation by former college players Sam Keller and Ed O’Bannon.  They seek a share of revenues generated from use of their names and likenesses grounded in right of publicity (Keller) and antitrust (O’Bannon).  The NCAA claims that the viability of the collegiate model irreparably will be threatened if college athletes can derive benefit from their names and likenesses, either by sharing of NCAA revenues or even by independently marketing themselves ala Emma Watson.  But perhaps the NCAA should learn a lesson from Emma Watson. 

Certainly Watson’s situation differs from that of college athletes.  Brown University neither creates nor enhances Watson’s name and likeness value.  Brown’s theater group does not compete with other college theater groups.  And I doubt Brown theater boosters would pay Watson to endorse products just to get her to enroll.

Not so with college athletic boosters.  SMU’s football team was shut down for two years because of booster payments.   The NCAA would fight an uphill battle trying to untangle the strings of booster/athlete endorsement deals to separate the bona fide from those made just to give a school a competitive edge.  The better wisdom might be not to try.  The result might be a “wild west” bidding war for elite athletes.   

So, yes, Emma Watson’s situation is different from that of college athletes.  And yes, undesirable consequences may result if college athletes have the same opportunities that she has.  But there also is no perfect in the status quo.

The money and popularity of football and men’s basketball strain a collegiate model developed more than 100 years ago.  Letting college athletes make the same deals that Emma Watson – and, for that matter, their own coaches – can make enhances (and modernizes) the treatment of college athletes.  It does so, moreover, without implicating athletic department revenues.   That means no collateral consequences such as athletic departments further ramping up the arms race or cutting non-revenues sports. 

The projected negative consequences may be ameliorated, moreover, by requiring that college athletes exploit their names and likenesses through group licensing deals.  In any event, negative consequences likely are overstated as there is very good reason to predict that only elite football and men’s basketball players will be situated to command large payouts, whether through bona fide or even sweetheart deals.  

Texas A&M estimated that the year he won the Heisman Johnny Manziel added just $20,000 to school revenues.  That $20,000 was the only money not attributable to fixed revenues from a stadium sold out before Manziel joined the team, long-term broadcast contracts, and corporate sponsorships.  That said, without football players, A&M’s fixed revenues disappear.  

Calculating a college athlete’s name and likeness value is an impossible dream.  Econometricians don’t even try.  Instead, they attempt to quantify what percentage of overall team revenues is generated by college athletes and what percentage generated by the quality of coaching, fan and donor loyalty, a university’s reputation, team long-term success, and other market factors.  Estimates differ based on data used and assumptions made.  According to Colorado College Professor Kevin Rask, if you assume that a football team produces 50 percent of all team revenues each year, a player of mid-level talent is worth about $100,000 annually and  the very top players about $330,000.     

Rask’s numbers neither offset the value of a full-ride scholarship and other benefits schools provide to college athletes nor factor in the $1 million difference in lifetime earnings between college and high school graduates.  The valuation dance, moreover, is not done solo.  College athlete name and likeness value, whatever it is, does not come exclusively from athlete talent and visibility. Some part is because the uniform on their backs says Michigan or Alabama.  

Consider Tim Tebow, the 2007 Heisman-Award winner from the University of Florida, widely acknowledged to have the talent to be an NFL quarterback.  If Tebow played in an NFL-equivalent to baseball’s minor leagues, not for Head Coach Urban Meyer at Florida, would he have gotten major endorsement and promotion contracts, and, now, a job doing game broadcasts?

College athletics is college competition played by college students.   That means the programs must be operated consistent with campus norms and protocols and the athletes must be students in more than name only.  The critics overstate, but it is hard to dispute their core conclusion that college athletic programs now range too far from their campus tether.  The answer is to rein in these programs to better reflect their collegiate core, not to dismantle the collegiate model because of the excesses.  That’s one side of the equation.

There is another side, and the critics are not completely wrong here either.  The NCAA version of amateurism ill fits a world where football and men’s basketball games are big business, coaches are paid millions, and athletic budgets hit $160 million.  A good first start to change:  letting college athletes market their names and likenesses.  Nothing inherent in the definition of amateurism, or the contours of a collegiate model, prevents it.  Emma Watson proves that.