*We are excited to present our first essay for the Ethos Forum. This year's theme is focused on ethics in the University. Our first essay comes to us from Dr. Joy Blanchard, an associate professor of higher education here at LSU. The essay focuses on pay for NCAA college athletes and was first published in The Dallas Morning News.*


Will NCAA college athletes get rich on endorsements? Hardly.

With so many caveats in the NCAA's long-overdue policy, we can at least hope that athletes will avoid hunger and poverty.

I must admit that when California recently passed a law paving the way for college student-athletes to be compensated for their image and likeness through third-party endorsements, I did not hold out hope that much would change.

For decades when student-athletes have tried to challenge the status quo in college sports, the NCAA (or should I say the representatives from the colleges and universities that comprise the NCAA) has predictably repeated the trope that any change to the traditional college athletic scholarship — which is mandated by NCAA regulation to include no more than tuition and fees, room, board and course-related books — would fundamentally extinguish the amateur model on which intercollegiate athletics was founded. (In his testimony in the Ed O’Bannon case, which challenged provisions that prohibited former student-athletes from being compensated for the use of their image and likeness in videogames, NCAA President Mark Emmert said paying student-athletes would diminish the educational aspect of college sports and result in student-athletes being less engaged on campus.)

And because the NCAA is a voluntary organization (though, one could argue how voluntary membership is if one wants to participate in college sports), those who advocate against NCAA regulations are often met with vigorous litigation, or sometimes even a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum.

The last big ultimatum came in the early 1980s when schools like the University of Oklahoma, Notre Dame and the University of Georgia formed their own association after becoming frustrated with the provision that only one college football game could be televised per week, and that the NCAA controlled the distribution of that television revenue across all member institutions. The NCAA responded by threatening expulsion for anyone who competed against teams from the newly formed College Football Association.

The story ended happily (I suppose “happily” would be a relative term, depending on with whom you spoke) when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that restricting universities’ ability to capitalize on their position in the television marketplace violated federal antitrust law. That is why on any given Saturday one can watch dozens of football games across a litany of cable television channels.

The resultant excess revenue from those television contracts, however, widened the gulf between the athletic haves and have-nots. Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter estimated coaches’ salaries have grown more than 500% since the landmark 1984 ruling. Meanwhile, unable to utilize revenue to increase the amount of scholarships, athletic departments have lured recruits and placated student-athletes with excessively posh facilities.

In fact my university, Louisiana State University, was met with widespread dissension recently when it unveiled a $28 million renovation to its football locker room, while portions of the LSU library remained inaccessible to the public due to persistent flooding.

So I must confess, I thought that California’s recent law would play out much like the College Football Association of the 1980s, with the NCAA expelling any institution in California that sought to implement these new state provisions. However, a skeptic like me was proved wrong, and the power of the collective (with the force of the most populous state behind it) won out. But was the NCAA’s decision that student-athletes should be allowed to capitalize on their image and likeness so progressive and beneficent?

One, though litigation courts have begun to recognize and rule that indeed there is a potential marketplace for student-athletes’ image and likeness. (But always falling short of challenging the longstanding tradition of conceding to the NCAA’s ethos of amateur ideals.) So maybe the NCAA’s move yesterday was a shrewd attempt to skirt continuing litigation.

Second, this sea change will not solve the underlying issues that have troubled college athlete advocates for years, such as concerns over player safety, the single-year athletic scholarship that allows coaches to capriciously withdraw support from an athlete who is no longer of value to the team, equity and participation opportunities for women, and programs to financially support student-athletes who cannot complete their degrees during four years of athletic eligibility.

Third, though reaping IRS benefits as a nonprofit entity, college sports bring in billions in revenue, yet allowing student-athletes to enter into third-party endorsement deals will not cost athletic departments a dime. Meanwhile, according to the National College Players Association, 85% of student-athletes on full athletic scholarships still fall beneath the poverty rate. In one year players at the University of Alabama received more than half a million in Pell Grants, according to reporting by AL.com, yet the Crimson Tide made more than $175 million in revenue in 2018. Even the NCAA rulebook (Section 15.2.2.4) specifically allows student-athletes to obtain food stamps.

So can we put this one in the win column for student-athletes? In the words of ESPN commentator Lee Corso, I caution “not so fast, my friends.” The NCAA’s edict includes an amorphous clause that student-athlete benefits from endorsement deals must remain within the “collegiate model” and seeks to monitor that “the priorities of education and the collegiate experience” do not override “professional opportunities.” Does that mean I won’t see the nation’s top football players and gymnasts in national Nike campaigns, though UCLA needed no one’s permission to broker, according to the Los Angeles Times, a 15-year, $280 million deal with Under Armour? (And don’t forget that the NCAA collects the majority of its annual operating budget from its television contracts for March Madness.)

The NCAA Division I Student-Athlete Committee cautioned that this new policy could disproportionately benefit the men in highly publicized, big revenue-producing sports, leaving no safeguards in the free marketplace for those who compete in nonrevenue sports — especially women. And that certainly is true. But when student-athletes continue to be prohibited from accepting meals from anyone outside the university’s athletic department, I suppose I’m not opposed to them endorsing a local pizza parlor. That might have prevented the revelation that Shabazz Napier, who led U-Conn to a national basketball championship in 2014, sometimes went to bed hungry because he couldn’t afford food.

Joy Blanchard is an associate professor of higher education at Louisiana State University. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.