An Immodest Proposal:

     Earlier this month administrators at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) announced that they will disband their football program next season. As an alumni of a state university whose football program has ranked near the bottom of Division 1(I’m not calling it Football Bowl Subdivision and you can’t make me) since I was in junior high, (we won’t get into how long ago that was) and who is also overshadowed by its neighbors that spend its Saturdays playing nationally televised games, the news got my attention.

     UAB’s administrators cited “numbers” which is shorthand for the program was costing the school too much money to sustain (1). It’s an explanation that in this case I agree with. At “big-time” athletics universities, football, and to a lesser extent men’s basketball, help subsidize the rest of the athletic department. However, at smaller schools athletics, particularly a costly sport like football is a serious drain on university budgets. It is simply unfair to ask the rest of the students at an institution of higher learning to subsidize the football program in this age of rising tuition costs. This is a problem that only stands to get worse as colleges and the NCAA attempt to respond to public sentiment by beginning to consider allowing athletes to receive at least some form of compensation for their efforts on the field.

     I would like to propose an unorthodox but relatively straight forward solution to this issue. Let boosters pay athletes. I know what you might be thinking; he’s clearly lost his mind, but hear me out. Boosters currently underwrite large portions of elite athletic department budgets, Phil Knight at Oregon and T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State are just two high profile examples. Why sports crazed alumni should be allowed to fund state-of-the art training facilities in an attempt (at least in part) to lure athletes to universities, while being prevented from just giving the money to the kids themselves is a question I imagine university presidents and athletic directors do not want you to ask yourself. You might think that by just allowing the funding of construction projects and the like, at least the university retains the buildings long after the graduation (hopefully, maybe) of a top ranked recruiting class. I would argue that the money is there to do both. A glance at the largest university endowments reveals numerous athletic powerhouse schools right alongside the private colleges that usually spring to mind when thinking of large endowments(2). Where does this money originate from, you might ask? From the same donors that would be prospectively compensating next year’s freshman quarterback recruit or this year’s senior point guard. Incidentally, this could also be used as a way to reduce the incidence of athletes making the early jump to the professional leagues. Maybe more athletes would stay for all four years of eligibility if they weren’t impoverished.     

     One of the most frequently cited roadblocks to compensating college athletes, specifically football and men’s basketball players, is that it would violate Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972(3). Title IX has many applications in civil rights law, but for our purposes here, its main function is that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender by any education program or activity receiving federal funds. Basically, the argument boils down to, “we can’t play football and basketball players, because then we would have to pay the women’s swim team and there simply isn’t enough money to do that.” Given that NCAA’s current television deal for the NCAA basketball tournament is worth 11 billion dollars, you could be forgiven for being skeptical, but for the moment let’s takes them at their word(4). Allowing non-university related individuals to compensate athletes; the gender equality issue is taken off the board, at least in the legal sense. Universities would still provide scholarships, but the money that would allow an athlete to go to a movie, or grab a meal off campus, or (let’s be honest here) purchase a car, would come directly from the people that have are so emotionally invested in the success of the program that they are willing to spend millions on it, and not from student fees paid by young people going deep into debt through student loans. Americans say that they love the free market, why are we allowing an unelected, unaccountable organization to dictate how money is spent and received as it relates to a perfectly legal activity.

     I won’t pretend that a move in this direction wouldn’t produce complications, but the current state of affairs is unsustainable. This is one method to address the problem that I haven’t heard being discussed anywhere, and I think that it should be. What do you think?

Links:
http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/103047862/uab-program-college-football-bowl-mid-major

http://www.bc.edu/offices/endowment/top50endowments.html

) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2014/04/15/the-most-valuable-conferences-in-college-sports-2014/