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.
