A couple weeks ago, I strolled into the University of Texas book store in downtown Austin. I think you’ll be stunned to learn that there are absolutely no books for sale at the book store. Well, maybe football books. Other than that, just 40,000 square feet of burnt-orange-matter. If you can dream it, they probably stamped a longhorn on it and marked it up 30%. I walked around for 40 minutes, completely shocked at the amount of apparel they had filled this huge store with when I rounded the last corner and stood facing the stairs. I was on the 1st of 4 floors. In moments of American excess such as this, I like to imagine the Chinese guy at the plant in Shanghai, working through his non-existent lunch-break, stamping one longhorn logo after another onto random items like pool cues and dog collars while wondering to himself how it is the United States became world leaders in anything. Finally, feeling completely overwhelmed, I decided I didn’t need anything and was bypassing the long lines at the checkout counter when a speck of maroon standing out amongst the sea of burnt orange caught my eye. I walked closer to the packaged product and there, staring back at me on a roll of gleaming white toilet paper, was the logo of UT’s archrival, the Oklahoma Sooners. I can only assume the toilet tissue was an officially licensed product of the NCAA. What a country.
Growing up in New Hampshire, Boston was the only sports town I was accustomed to and the idea of rooting for a college team was as abstract to me as having a favorite NASCAR driver. Sure, Bostonians would watch the Bean Pot with detached amusement but no one really cared if BU upset Northeastern or if Harvard was struggling on the penalty kill. Unless Harvard was going to suit up against the Bruins, no one paid serious attention. Despite the large number of colleges within its city limits, Boston is a professional sports town first and foremost, which made my move to Austin, Texas a summer school-like education in the bizarrely intriguing world of college football.
Cities like Austin and towns like Norman, OK don’t have sports fans like me. Don’t misunderstand me; I love my teams, often to a fault. As a sophomore in college, during the ill-fated 2003 Red Sox World Series run, I would get so worked up about forthcoming games that I would spring nosebleeds in class, four or five hours before first pitch. I’m pretty sure a few of my professors thought I had AIDS. But when the nosebleeds subsided and the Sox were out of it, I could go through the normal grieving period, swear them off until April, pull the Tom Brady jersey out of the closet, and dive head-first into the meat of the Patriots season. No such distraction exists in college football towns. Every loss is a bridge jumper, especially in the college football world where the BCS rankings leave no room for blemishes on an otherwise perfect schedule.
I can tell you from personal experience the city of Austin lives and breathes for this football team. This is their Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots fandom all rolled into one. They shut the entire center of the city down to make way for forty blocks of tailgating space every home football Saturday. Forty city blocks and you still can’t find a piece of turf to set up your beer pong table and fire up your Coleman. The first time I walked through the pre-game festivities I was in a daze. I had the sudden, crushing realization that I didn’t understand as much about sports as I thought I did. How could these people be so crazy for a bunch of 20 year old kids that are barely even shaving yet? Why would a grown man get his family up at 5:30 in the morning to grab a 6-by-4 foot piece of ground and start drinking and cooking 8 hours before kickoff? What planet was I on? There were $400,000 RVs and tent set-ups so elaborate it made me want to stay after just to see how in the world they could possibly break it all down and fit it back into their trucks. It was like someone took all those crazy parents from Friday Night Lights and gave them giant disposable incomes.
To these people, tailgating is serious business, and businesses understand that. As I made my way toward the stadium through a 12 block stretch of longhorn-mania, I was handed free beers, energy drinks, wristbands, key chains, pens, coupons, etc., each item carrying a carefully crafted advertising gimmick that the associated business surely paid the university for the right to distribute on campus. It made so much sense. Every home game, the university can offer these businesses a large, captive, mildly to heavily intoxicated audience to peddle their crap to for up to eight hours. At that moment, realizing the football team was making money off something as minute as handing out chewing gum at tailgates, the pro-sports-only guy from the Greater Boston Area made up his mind on something he had honestly never really cared about before . . . we need to start paying these kids.
Go to a big-boy conference college football game and really have a look around. The only thing amateur about the whole operation is the fraudulent label they slap on the very people that everyone came out to see in the first place . . . the athletes. Coming from a strictly professional sports fan background, I always took the pageantry and circumstance of Fenway and Foxborough at face value. I don’t like that the beers at Fenway are $7.50 but at least I can look onto the field and see nine guys raking in $180M while working toward the goal of winning a championship and have a certain sense of where my money is going. Anything that goes above and beyond operational costs, I suppose, goes back to the owners who risked all of their own money when they bought the team. This is America, all the power to them. They’re not in this to lose money, after all.
Yet now here I was, at an “amateur” sporting event, and what was different? Absolutely nothing. From the overpriced parking passes to the vendors yelling a warning to patrons that a game-day program is on the same necessity-level as oxygen, it had the look and feel of a well-oiled money making machine. Only difference this time is there was a collective salary of $0 on the field and no owner to complain about when they crank up the prices on the soft pretzels again.
I can’t begin to imagine what the NCAA and its big time schools do with their money. Maybe they fund the chess club and the swim team. Maybe they pay for their head coach’s vacation to Bermuda. As long as they’re not wiring it to Al-Qaeda, I really don’t care how they spend it; I just know that it’s wrong not to give a piece of the pie to those actually responsible for generating the dollars.
You don’t need a PhD in economics from Oxford to figure out that the NCAA doesn’t stumble upon this money by accident. These big schools know exactly what sells and who makes them their money. You can argue the merits of Title IX until you’re blue in the face if that’s your thing, but try to go into the Notre Dame gift shop and pick out a women’s volleyball jersey in your favorite color. You know, that special one that really makes your eyes pop. Not going to happen. The NCAA can pretend that all college athletes are created equal, but they’re not. You know it, and so do they. The best player on the women’s volleyball team isn’t keeping the textile mills in Taiwan running 24-hour operations; Jimmy Clausen and Colt McCoy are. All those jerseys generate huge revenue that Clausen and McCoy will never see a dime of. The only person in this scenario that may benefit is the volleyball player whose free ride is probably paid for on football Saturdays in the very gift shop where her jersey is not, and never will be, sold.
I’m not advocating making these kids rich. I’m talking about showing good faith to those responsible for lining the pockets of the NCAA and associated colleges with millions of dollars they would otherwise never see. But instead, in their infinite malevolence, the NCAA runs in the opposite direction. They take the self-righteous-BYU approach and condemn athletes for the mere thought of acquiring financial support for all of the tickets, concessions and jerseys they are solely responsible for. The highest hypocrisy of all lies in those cheesy commercials produced by the NCAA advocating the false pretense that they actually care about the “student” portion of the “student-athlete” axiom. The commercials always end with something along the lines of “There are nearly (add number here) NCAA student-athletes, and just about all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.” Yeah, like acting. Those are paid actors! The NCAA even locks the athletes out of their own commercials! It amazes me that people get frustrated and actually wonder why the Derrick Roses of the world didn’t want to stick around for their sophomore seasons.
Michael Corleone said it best. “We’re all part of the same hypocrisy.” If you are going to run Amateur sporting events exactly the same way professionals do then don’t get indignant when your athletes expect compensation for their time and talents. Changing trivial labels such as “team owner,” to “university president,” and “commissioner,” to “President of the NCAA,” doesn’t give you the right to free labor.
Perhaps someday the NCAA will stop the insanity and provide a fair system to those providing the entertainment to the paying masses. Chances are this paradigm won’t shift in my lifetime so your humble narrator gave up all hope and enabled the NCAA even more by going online and purchasing one of its officially licensed moneymaking products. My Navy toilet paper is on its way.
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