Author: Joe Siegal
The NCAA tournament, aside from being the most exciting college sporting event in America, is also a reminder of just how lucrative college basketball often is for Division I universities. This March and April, as the tournament has brought college basketball to the forefront of media coverage, there have been various red flags set off by the flawed nature of the NCAA and the conduct of its member institutions, signaling yet again that the industry of Division I college sports is exploitative and unfair to athletes.
When Louisville guard Kevin Ware broke his leg in his team’s Elite Eight game against Duke, the immediate aftermath, specifically the emotional reactions of his teammates and coaches as well as the respect shown by the Duke players and staff was commendable, empathetic and a sign of the morals and maturity of both programs. Unfortunately, less than a week later, Louisville and Adidas revealed designs for t-shirts that read “Ri5e to the occasion,” referencing Ware’s number five.
While seemingly a nice gesture in support of the sophomore whose career will undoubtedly be altered by the horrible injury, the profits from these $25 shirts—which were later pulled from shelves—would have been going to Adidas and Louisville’s scholarship fund instead of Ware. As an amateur athlete who cannot receive money even from profits on merchandise using his jersey number, Ware is the newest public example of big-time college sports’ exploitation of athletes’ stories and talents.
Adidas and other sponsors of athletics programs are not barred from profiting off of unpaid athletes, nor are universities, whose athletic departments bring in millions of dollars. Too often, players serve as cogs in the machine of collegiate athletics, representing promotable figures who themselves reap none of the benefits of their marketability.
As a further example, the NCAA has had numerous licensing deals for football and basketball video games, in which the names of players are not used, though their real-life jersey numbers, physical attributes and likenesses are. The same standard is used to deny athletes royalties for replica jerseys or merchandise that may feature their uniform numbers. While this specific issue has been brought into the legal realm, few solutions to the larger matter of athlete compensation have been proposed, and even fewer have been acknowledged by the NCAA.
Ware, just as the countless others before him in the history of NCAA sports, is an example of how the NCAA’s rules have led to today’s college sports setting in which athletes’ efforts fill only the pocketbooks of universities and sponsors and how, even in a moment of horrific injury for a player, the gears of profit-making athletics departments keep churning. Scholarships are often held up as being representative of adequate payment, but relative to the money-makers that are college athletic programs, athletes are under compensated.
The institutional inequality of NCAA sports is far-reaching and all-encompassing and it too often takes unfortunate events like Kevin Ware’s injury to serve as a reminder.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
