[Fuck The NCAA]-Athletes Now Able To Make Money Like Rest Of Us Edition

enlightenedbum

And really athletic departments don't make money because of administrative bloat, not coaching salary. The good coaches (or elite coaches; I'm really saying Jim Harbaugh) are demonstrably worth the money, based on ticket/merchandise sales.

daveNYC

enlightenedbum wrote: »

Pro coaches see way more money. 6/7 million is normal.

Lowest I saw was $3.25M and they go up to $8M (with a fair number of coaches not having data). At least with the NFL you can say it's not taxpayer money. Not counting all the tax credits and free stadiums and whatnot, which is it's own brand of goosery.

That said, there are 27 college coaches making $3.25M or more in base salary. So roughly there's close to an NFL worth of college coaches getting paid NFL wages, with a whole lot of others making $1M+. And the max bonus for a lot of the coaches is pretty crazy. Depending on what the details on getting the bonus are, I'd almost be willing to say that there are more college coaches getting paid NFL wages than there are NFL coaches.

At least the athletes are getting a free quality education. Right?

AngelHedgie

daveNYC wrote: »

At least the athletes are getting a free quality education. Right?

Should we tell him?

daveNYC

Look, anything else would mean that the NCAA is exploiting students in order to make piles of money while leaving a trail of broken bodies, shattered dreams, and wasted minds behind it. Football is a quintessentially American sport, so if that were true, then that would mean that you hate America.

So the question is, why does AngelHedgie want the communists to win? QED (also quasi in rem and ipso facto), I rest my case your honor.

enlightenedbum

Football mostly pays for itself, for reference. It often pays for the other sports too, but that + having like a 20 person marketing team for no reason and a Assistant Director of the Vice Presidents of Compliance that you're paying 200,000 to for no reason bankrupts you. Not that Dave Brandon did those things or anything. Also actively removing the things that make people like college football more than pros.

I have WAY more problem with administrative bloat than Saban/Meyer/Harbaugh getting paid. And obviously the players not getting paid, that's the other major problem.

Eat it You Nasty Pig.

if you consider coaches to be what they actually are (essentially CEOs of pretty large businesses), their salaries don't seem all that unreasonable (especially considering the media/fundraising responsibilities they also have)

crazy coaching salaries speak much more to the general emphasis we place on football than any type of corruption; you can definitely argue that we shouldn't place to much emphasis on it, but setting that aside football coaches are sort of our society's most publicly accountable executives

shryke

daveNYC wrote: »

Look, anything else would mean that the NCAA is exploiting students in order to make piles of money while leaving a trail of broken bodies, shattered dreams, and wasted minds behind it. Football is a quintessentially American sport, so if that were true, then that would mean that you hate America.

So the question is, why does AngelHedgie want the communists to win? QED (also quasi in rem and ipso facto), I rest my case your honor.

Exploiting people for money while leaving a trail of broken bodies, shattered dreams, and wasted minds behind sounds quintessentially American to me.

AngelHedgie

https://twitter.com/38Godfrey/status/674620392309465088

Dear goose ADs: until you start paying what you fucking owe, you don't get to talk about players being irresponsible with money.

Edit: And by the way, a hoverboard (which, for the uninitiated, is basically the love child of a Segway and a longboard) is a incredibly effective way for a student to get around campus. So you don't even know what you're talking about!

Duffel

As someone who works on a university campus, hoverboards are the most idiotic thing to ever be invented. It's bad enough students can't communicate or take notes without a technological umbilicus, now we're moving toward a world where they can't even propel themselves through space without some kind of gizmo. Cyberpunk is so much more boring and lame in reality than it was in fiction. [/bitteroldman]

EDIT: For the record, this does not mean I care about what undergrad athletes spend their money on. Just that hoverboards in general are stupid, and horribly misnamed.

VishNub

Those things are unbelievably obnoxious. People are not using them because they have a hard time getting around.

Santa Claustrophobia

Who gives a damn what other people chose to spend their money on?

DevoutlyApathetic

Santa Claustrophobia wrote: »

Who gives a damn what other people chose to spend their money on?

NC State AD Debbie Yow and Bill Battle apparently.

NSDFRand

Duffel wrote: »

As someone who works on a university campus, hoverboards bicycles are the most idiotic thing to ever be invented. It's bad enough students can't communicate or take notes without a technological umbilicus an abacus and lap board, now we're moving toward a world where they can't even propel themselves through space without some kind of gizmo. Cyberpunk Industrial Revolution is so much more boring and lame in reality than it was in fiction. [/bitteroldman]

EDIT: For the record, this does not mean I care about what undergrad athletes spend their money on. Just that hoverboards in general are stupid, and horribly misnamed.

No offense meant, I just thought this was pretty funny.

AngelHedgie

Welp, this is all sorts of fucked up:

Earlier this year, Missouri’s football team provided a stark, and to some, a terrifying reminder as to the power that Division I football players possess when they threatened to go on strike in response to brewing racial tensions on campus. Essentially, Missouri’s black football players demanded that University President Tim Wolfe resign or they would refuse to play football.

And it worked.

Within 24 hours, Wolfe stepped down, the football team won its next game against BYU, and the black athletes of an SEC school proved that football players are the most valuable commodities on Division I college campuses.

To some, the athletes’ stance against the administration’s perceived dismissal of racism was akin to Martin Luther King Jr.’s protests. Others, of course, viewed the football players as “cowardly liberal lazy douchebags.”

Today, Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin (R-Harrisonville) sided with the latter sentiment and pre-filed a bill that would strip NCAA student-athletes of their scholarships if they refuse to play for any reason “unrelated to health.”

Granted, this is the same Republican legislator who introduced bills requiring women to obtain permission of the biological father before obtaining an abortion, preventing food stamp recipients from purchasing cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak, and mandating that Missouri textbooks treat “intelligent design and destiny” as equal to evolution.

However, this proposed law is not only a poor attempt to control the free speech of predominantly black college students, but it highlights the mindset of many behind the behemoth industry of college sports that NCAA athletes do not have any rights at all — that they should be grateful for their scholarships and shut up and play while everyone around them makes money off of their performance.

The go-to defense behind not compensating athletes, or at least allowing them to unionize, is that college athletes are just like any other students and should not be treated differently.

Yet, Rep. Brattin’s proposal does exactly what the NCAA fears. It treats athletes differently. It seeks to use a college scholarship from a public university as collateral for preventing athletes from exercising their First Amendment rights. As I have written previously, “Theoretically, the athletes are breaching their contracts, aka scholarships, by not playing. However, the schools can never actually make that argument. Otherwise, they would be admitting that the athletes are employees under contract to perform athletic services in exchange for tuition, room, and board.”

Rep. Brattin might be on to something. Maybe Missouri’s football players really are employees who deserve compensation. If so, the athletes and schools could then negotiate those contracts to deal with strikes just like the professional sports leagues do. Preventing walk-outs, and the subsequent loss of millions of dollars of revenue is something that could be collectively-bargained for if the players had a union.

If the athletes were employees receiving wages for their performance, the schools could impose all kinds of restrictions that do not apply to ordinary students.

However, under the current college athletics model, Rep. Brattin’s proposed law is not only a thinly-veiled attempt at keeping black athletes in line, it is also a violation of Missouri’s own constitution.

Article I, Section 8 of the Missouri Constitution’s Bill of Rights provides that “no law shall be passed impairing the freedom of speech, no matter by what means communicated: that every person shall be free to say, write or publish, or otherwise communicate whatever he will on any subject.”

Revoking a scholarship if an athlete elects to strike as a form of protest certainly seems like a strong way of the government impairing speech.

In this instance, the school is a state actor so it would be subject to a constitutional challenge unlike a private employer even though the athletic department is supposedly a private entity. For the government to actually restrict speech in a content-neutral manner such as this proposed law, it must meet what is known as the intermediate scrutiny test. This test means that the proposed law must further an important government interest by means that are substantially related to that interest.

Without diving into a deep constitutional law analysis, on its face, revoking scholarships does not appear to further an important government interest. Similarly, social media bans, are also likely unconstitutional.

Most likely, this Missouri proposal will never make it to the governor’s desk. However, if I were a football recruit considering Missouri I would certainly be wary of a state with a political climate so volatile as to support someone like Rep. Brattin seeking to strip student-athletes of fundamental rights.

Yeah. I would imagine this state representative is getting a number of phone calls telling him to not upset the cart.

AngelHedgie

TL;DR: In response to the Mizzou football players getting the school president ousted via a strike threat, a Teaper state representative has proposed a bill that would force Mizzou to recind the scholarship of any athlete who refuses to play for a non-medical reason.

Needless to say, neither the NCAA nor Mizzou want this law, as it would be tantamount to the state saying "these players are employees."

Santa Claustrophobia

Is the tea party actually going to be good for something? Do I need to invest in dog/cat interspecies hotels?

Phoenix-D

Santa Claustrophobia wrote: »

Is the tea party actually going to be good for something? Do I need to invest in dog/cat interspecies hotels?

It's still shit, it just has some torn shreds of silver lining.

Parents died? Tough, play on. etc.

AngelHedgie

https://twitter.com/MatthewACherry/status/676518046308036608

Duffel

The Missouri situation is a lot more complex than it has been made out to be in the media. The football players didn't "get the president fired", their boycott was just the straw that broke the camel's back. It was very likely Wolfe was going to be forced to step down very soon anyway, because of the ongoing hunger strike, which was strongly supported by the faculty and had already led to a campus-wide walkout. People had been protesting on campus on a variety of issues for over a year - since Ferguson - and it really intensified in the fall when the grad students got their health insurance pulled with no forewarning. Wolfe had made a series of errors that was making the university look very bad in the national media. The board probably offered him an ultimatum.

The attempt to silence the ability of players is obviously disturbing. I sincerely hope it's not made into law, even if it does postpone player unionization/compensation somewhat. "Shut up and play" has a lot of support by people who do not want to deal with the fact that there are actual human beings, with problems and opinions, behind the sports programs they ravenously consume.

AngelHedgie

Duffel wrote: »

The Missouri situation is a lot more complex than it has been made out to be in the media. The football players didn't "get the president fired", their boycott was just the straw that broke the camel's back. It was very likely Wolfe was going to be forced to step down very soon anyway, because of the ongoing hunger strike, which was strongly supported by the faculty and had already led to a campus-wide walkout. People had been protesting on campus on a variety of issues for over a year - since Ferguson - and it really intensified in the fall when the grad students got their health insurance pulled with no forewarning. Wolfe had made a series of errors that was making the university look very bad in the national media. The board probably offered him an ultimatum.

The attempt to silence the ability of players is obviously disturbing. I sincerely hope it's not made into law, even if it does postpone player unionization/compensation somewhat. "Shut up and play" has a lot of support by people who do not want to deal with the fact that there are actual human beings, with problems and opinions, behind the sports programs they ravenously consume.

That said, the fact that they were able to say "unless you deal with Wolfe, we will not suit up, and that will cost you seven figures" made their actions a rather heavy piece of straw.

And I can guarantee this won't become law, because the NCAA won't let it. If this law passes, it will state with the force of law that the athlete-college relationship is of employee and employer.

Polaritie

AngelHedgie wrote: »

https://twitter.com/MatthewACherry/status/676518046308036608

That actually does seem to brush up against the 13th? Specifically, the involuntary servitude clause.

Well, it comes closer than any law I can think of in my lifetime anyways.

jothki

Does that law distinguish between athletic and academic scholarships?

AspectVoid

From what I heard, its all directed at "college athlete" and does not specifically state what scholarship the athlete is receiving. So, whether you're there on an academic or athletic scholarship, if you are an athlete and step out of line, it can be pulled. I also heard that it has language in there aimed to also penalize any coaches who support athletes who take a stand as well.

Basically, it'd destroy college athletics in the state of Missouri.

jothki

My concern in particular is that it would permanently lock any student into any sport, even if the reason that they're there has nothing to do with sports. If you're on an academic scholarship, and you join the table tennis league, you're going to have to make every single table tennis game until you graduate or your scholarship is gone. Tired of playing table tennis after a year? Too bad, that's not a medical reason.

enlightenedbum

The bill was withdrawn today. Hooray.

Veevee

enlightenedbum wrote: »

The bill was withdrawn today. Hooray.

AngelHedgie wrote: »

And I can guarantee this won't become law, because the NCAA won't let it.

I see a phone call was made last night...

AngelHedgie

Veevee wrote: »

enlightenedbum wrote: »

The bill was withdrawn today. Hooray.

AngelHedgie wrote: »

And I can guarantee this won't become law, because the NCAA won't let it.

I see a phone call was made last night...

Either that, or he woke up with a horse's head in his bed.

AngelHedgie

USA Today covers the obscene amounts college athletics spends on image and branding:

With a football practice facility set to open in the summer of 2011, Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs wanted to tell the story of the Tigers’ success through graphics that would keep the full-sized playing area from looking like the interior of an airplane hangar.

So he looked to Advent, a graphics and branding company that turned more than 300 yards of wall space into splashy orange-and-blue displays of the program’s success and motivational credos.
The cost? Nearly $750,000 to start, plus updates over the past five years that cost about $60,000, according to documents Auburn provided in response to an open-records request from USA TODAY Sports.
Auburn’s display and its price tag are becoming the norm among college athletics programs as they seek touches that administrators and coaches think will give them even the slightest competitive advantage. Auburn’s was among more than 600 projects Advent says it has done since 2007. Forty Nine Degrees, a competitor, is averaging 50 to 75 a year, while Rainier Sports has seen this part of its business increase 15% to 20% a year for several years.

USA TODAY Sports requested contracts, purchase orders and bid documents related to facility graphics work at 34 of the NCAA’s 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools and received at least partial responses from 29. From 2007, the first year for which USA TODAY Sports asked for data, through 2010, those schools combined to spend a little less than $500,000 a year on such projects. Since then, their combined spending has been an average of more than $2.5 million a year.
In 2014, those schools reached their highest total yet — more than $3.1 million.
With prices ranging from a few thousand dollars to more than a million, these visual accessories are now being treated as a standard cost component of updating facilities or constructing new ones.
“You wouldn’t build the house and forget to put the carpet in,” says Mississippi State athletics director Scott Stricklin, whose school has worked with Advent on facilities in a variety of sports. “To me, the graphics piece is very similar to that.”
While spending on graphics occurs for public spaces such as stadium concourses and halls of fames, it increasingly has become a part of team-exclusive spaces like weight rooms, office and meeting spaces and practice facilities.
Athletics directors cite recruiting — primarily of athletes, but also of donors — as the top reason for investing in this work. But does it have the desired effect? Beyond Advent’s research, which the company declined to share, the effect on player recruiting remains largely anecdotal.
Interviews with a handful of elite-level football recruits by USA TODAY Sports elicited responses that ranged from enthusiasm about the graphics and their impact, to ambivalence, to almost dismissive indifference.
What’s certain is that the pressure to spend now extends beyond the wealthiest programs to those at the midmajor level that heavily rely on student fees and/or money from the school’s general fund.

And let us not forget - the reason there's money for big ass stickers is because the people playing the game don't get paid.

AngelHedgie

Pulled from the CFB thread, because it fits better here:

lwt1973 wrote: »

Nice article on paying college players and why they should boycott the game tonight.

While it's a nice idea (and the threat at Mizzou showed there was power there), it really doesn't work, because you're asking the players to shoulder all the risk. They're the ones putting their futures on the line, and despite what Yee might think, it's not guaranteed that they would succeed. The better strategy is to attack the legal grounding of the regulations - as we saw with the O'Bannon case, the NCAA's legal house is on sand.

AngelHedgie

So, the Mizzou men's basketball team is the latest on the sanction-go-round. So, why are they making the 13-14 season go away?

A donor (Representative #1) to MU Athletics provided impermissible benefits to three men’s basketball student-athletes and one prospective men’s basketball student-athlete from 2013-2014. The impermissible benefits included compensating student-athletes for work-not-performed at a business through a summer internship program. Through the internship program, the donor also provided other impermissible inducements and extra benefits including housing, cash in the amount of $520, local transportation, iPads, meals and arranged for the use of a local gym for the student-athletes, all in violation of NCAA bylaws.

A second donor (Representative #2) was discovered to have provided impermissible benefits to 11 student-athletes and three members of one student-athlete’s family from 2011-2014. The benefits included providing student-athletes with a “friends & family” reduced rate at a hotel as well as meals and a ride on a recreational boat. A Missouri men’s basketball student-manager also provided transportation for multiple student-athletes to the hotel from the Missouri campus, all in violation of NCAA bylaws.

But the cherry on top is this:

A former associate head men’s basketball coach assisted in the relocation of a prospective student-athlete by providing the phone number of the prospect’s mother to a donor (Representative #2) to arrange for rental housing. The family paid a market rate for the rental. However, the actions of the former associate head coach are in violation of NCAA bylaws.

Yeah.

AngelHedgie

So, turns out that one of the big drivers in opposing paying college athletes is good old fashioned racism:

There’s evidence that he’s right. In survey after survey, strong national majorities oppose paying college athletes. In March 2015, for example, an HBO Real Sports/Marist Poll found that 65 percent of Americans do not think college athletes in top men’s football and basketball programs should be paid.

But these attitudes vary significantly by race. In every survey to date, blacks are far more likely to support paying college athletes when compared to whites. For instance, in the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), 53 percent of African Americans backed paying college athletes–more than doubling the support expressed by whites (22 percent).

...In a statistical analysis that controlled for a host of other influences, we found this: Negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes.

The more negatively a white respondent felt about blacks, the more they opposed paying college athletes.

To check our findings’ validity, we also conducted an experiment. Before we asked white respondents whether college athletes should be paid, we showed one group pictures of young black men with stereotypical African American first and last names. We showed another group no pictures at all.

As you can see in the figure below, whites who were primed by seeing pictures of young black men were significantly more likely to say they opposed paying college athletes. Support dropped most dramatically among whites who expressed the most resent towards blacks as a group.

Santa Claustrophobia

Fuck.

iTunesIsEvil

Oh, I'm just absolutely shocked. This is my shocked-face. I'm wearing it right now. Promise. :rotate;

AngelHedgie

And as if to demonstrate the matter, here's Jon Chait scraping the bottom of the barrel to defend not paying players.

The bit about Alabama is the really annoying part to me. Yes, Saban gets away with tossing players from year to year to field the strongest team he can - because the utterly corrupt NCAA system puts all the cards in his hands, letting him boot players at will, while confining their options. Get rid of those rules, let players get paid, under employment contracts, and now he won't be as able to toss players for hot new recruits. And I'd be willing to bet that in that environment, Saban very quickly falls to Earth - there's a reason process coaches tend to do poorly in the NFL.

AngelHedgie

Also, it turns out that college athletes are using their stipends to support their families:

Clemson cornerback Mackensie Alexander looks back on his upbringing in Immokalee, Florida fondly.
The son of immigrants, Alexander remembers growing up poor and he and his brothers helping pick tomatoes and oranges along with their parents to help make ends meet.

It’s an image, he said as his team prepares to meet Alabama in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game, which motivates him. The thought of how much his parents worked so he and his brothers could have better lives has become part of his drive to be the best cornerback in the country. His goal is to one day make their lives easier.

And that financial path started this year thanks to the NCAA.

There’s been a lot of debate about giving college athletes “cost of attendance” stipends, but for Alexander, the extra money has become his first step toward helping his impoverished family.

“All my money’s helping my parents and stuff like that,” Alexander said. “They’ve got bills and stuff and they’re not working so that’s where my money goes to, helping them out and making sure they’re OK.

“I don’t need much. I’ve never had anything, so for me to sit here and try to go buy things that I don’t need. And I’m not a big materialistic like the world wants everybody to be. I’m a whole lot smarter than that. There’s people that need help. Helping others, not myself, and serving other people. That’s the biggest thing.”

Alexander might be in a small pool of college athletes who are using their modest stipends — ranging from $3,000 to $6,000 during a 10-month period depending on the university — to help their families, but it’s a reminder that the money isn’t just being used to buy shoes, clothes and hoverboards like North Carolina State athletics director Debbie Yow asserted during the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in New York last month.

“Mine’s just in the bank, I’m saving it,” Clemson offensive lineman Eric Mac Lain said. “I’m just looking long term.

“I think us as student-athletes do not have the opportunity to go work like other students have. Obviously, our days are more consumed with things that we have to be at. You know, our day goes from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. mostly and there’s no time for me to go get a job somewhere. So I think it’s been awesome what the NCAA has been able to do.”

Of course, a few players said they like to spend the money on food despite the fact that part of the new NCAA rules includes increased food available for student-athletes throughout the day. Others do purchase luxury items such as clothes and shoes. Some even said the extra cash affords them more dates with their girlfriends (and consequently, happier relationships). But the vast majority of players from Alabama and Clemson said they use extra money to pay housing costs and bills.

"I think it's working great so far," Alabama coach Nick Saban said. "I think it's helped our quality of life to some degree and I think that's always been the goal from my standpoint. We're always supportive of trying to do more for the players."

Alexander smiles wide when he talks about his family and how he’s able to provide some help even if it’s modest. His mother had back surgery last Friday and his entire family will be watching Monday night’s championship game from a hospital room in Naples, Florida. He knows that the little bit he sends home allowed his mother to have surgery instead of working through pain.

“It’s been good, I think we needed it,” Alexander said of the stipends. “I think every athlete around America’s like, ‘Thank you Lord.’"

tinwhiskers

While that is heartwarming let's not kid ourselves, we all know where the majority of stipend money is spent. You know how much natty ice you can buy with $3,000?

AngelHedgie

Analyst and goose Kirk Herbstreit wants NCAA Football back, says that Ed O'Bannon ruined things:

Herbstreit contends that — pay or no pay — athletes want the franchise to return.

“Every single college football player,” he said. “You know what they’d love for their compensation to be? Just give ‘em a free game. That’s the compensation that they would take.

“I’ve never met one player in college football that’s like: ‘They can’t use my name and likeness! I need to be paid!’ They’re just thrilled to be on the game. They love being on the game. It’s like the biggest highlight of their life, is to be on the game.”

...For now, Herbstreit is not placing blame on anyone but a former player.

“Ed O’Bannon ruined that for all of us,” Hebstreit says. “And hopefully we can get that fixed.”

https://twitter.com/KirkHerbstreit/status/689491005981069312

Fuck you very much, Kirk, you goosing tool.

chrisnl

Well of course Herbstreit wants the game back, since he no doubt got paid for his voiceovers (even if he only had like five lines total).

Santa Claustrophobia

Herbstreit is a prime douche canoe.

AngelHedgie

Vice Sports takes on the racial aspect of college athletics and amateurism:

Understand this: there's nothing inherently racist about amateurism itself. And there's no reason to believe that its defenders and proponents—including current NCAA president Mark Emmert—are motivated by racial animus. When amateurism was fashioned out of whole cloth by Victorian-era English aristocrats, its ethos was strictly classist: snobby upper-class rowers didn't want to compete against unwashed bricklayers and factory workers, and concocting an ersatz Greek athletic ideal of no-pay-for-play provided convenient justification. Likewise, the American colleges that copied their English counterparts at the dawn of the 20th century weren't looking to plunder African-American athletic labor—not when their sports and campuses, like society at large, were still segregated.

Today, the economic exploitation within college sports remains race-neutral on its face. The association's strict prohibition on campus athletes receiving any compensation beyond the price-fixed value of their athletic scholarships applies equally to players of every color. White former Texas A&M University quarterback Johnny Manziel couldn't cash in on his market value any more than black former Auburn University quarterback Cam Newton could. When black former Vanderbilt University center Festus Ezeli was suspended in 2011 for accepting a meal and a hotel room from a school alumnus, it wasn't any different than when white former University of Nebraska quarterback Eric Crouch was suspended eleven years earlier for accepting a plane ride and a ham sandwich from a candidate for the school's board of regents.

And yet, while the NCAA's intent is color-blind, the impact of amateurism is anything but. In American law, there is a concept called adverse impact, in which, essentially, some facially neutral rules that have an unjustified adverse impact on a particular group can be challenged as discriminatory. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark 1971 case that a North Carolina power company could no longer require prospective employees to have a high school diploma and pass two intelligence tests—a screening process that didn't relate to job performance but did have the effect of excluding high numbers of African-American applicants at a workplace that already was highly segregated. Similarly, sociologists speak of structural racism when analyzing public policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on minority individuals, families, and communities. State lottery systems that essentially move money from predominantly lower-class African-American ticket buyers to predominantly middle-and-upper-class white school districts fit the bill; so does a War on Drugs that disproportionately incarcerates young black men; so does a recent decision by officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to drastically cut the number of presidential primary polling stations in and around Phoenix, which unnecessarily made voting far more difficult for the residents of a non-white majority city.

Big-time college sports fall under the same conceptual umbrella. Amateurism rules restrain campus athletes—and only campus athletes, not campus musicians or campus writers—from earning a free-market income, accepting whatever money, goods, or services someone else wants to give them. And guess what? In the revenue sports of Division I football and men's basketball, where most of the fan interest and television dollars are, the athletes are disproportionately black.

According to the NCAA, 58.3 percent of Division I basketball players and 47.1 percent of Division I football players in 2014-15 were black, making them the largest racial group in both sports.