Kill the NCAA. Do It Now

I bleed UK Wildcat Blue. Here in Kentucky, March Madness is the only reason we force ourselves to suffer through four months of drizzly gray skies and no sun. But this bullshit by the NCAA is inexcusable.

Dave Zirin at The Nation, on The Persecution of Jamar Samuels.

Then came ugly, otherwise known as the case of Kansas State center Jamar Samuels. Samuels, the team’s second leading scorer and a senior, was declared ineligible and summarily humiliated by the NCAA just twenty minutes before the Wildcats’ second-round game against Syracuse. What was Samuels’s crime? He’s accusn’t know that he was doing anything wrong. “If I knew it and wanted to hide it, I would have done it differently. The kid’s family doesn’t have anything and he called me for money to eat.” Neither Malone nor Samuels thought they were doing anything wrong. Malone had known Samuels’s mother for years and they live in a situation where poverty literally means not knowing how you will find food for the week.

3. Let’s say Samuels did take the $200. Let’s say he walked on the court with two Ben Franklin’s pinned to his shirt. My only problem with that would be that it wasn’t more money and didn’t come from the NCAA instead of Curtis Malone. This March Madness tournament brings in $10.8 billion in television funds alone, comprising 90 percent of the NCAA’s operating budget and underwriting the lavish salaries of everyone we don’t pay to watch. NCAA President Mark Emmert won’t disclose his salary as leader of his “nonprofit” but it’s thought to be in excess of $2 million a year. He has fourteen vice presidents, each of whom make at least $400,000 annually. They are paid to make sure Jamar Samuels and friends don’t get a dime. What proud work.

4. Jamar wears Nikes and the swoosh adorns his shoes and uniform. This is not personal brand preference. Nike is in the last year of a six-year, $12.3 million contract with Kansas State. Jamar has spent the last four years as a running, jumping human billboard for the global sporting apparel giant, with not a dime for his troubles. His coach, Frank Martin, with nary a swoosh on his body that we can see (I can’t speak for hidden tattoos or brands) makes $1.5 million a year.

5. It’s striking that Emmert didn’t issue any kind of a statement last week when Samuels’s teammate Angel Rodriguez endured the racist invective of the Southern Mississippi band, who chanted “Where’s your green card?” at the freshman guard. Why is that? My working theory is that there is no financial incentive for sticking up for Mr. Rodriguez, just a moral one. In contrast, regulating the financial life of their players, particularly whether or not their pockets possess more than lint, is the NCAA’s reason for being.

All players don’t suffer this level of scrutiny, however. Credit to DC sports host Ivan Carter for pointing out on Twitter that football and hoops are the only sports where you can’t go pro right out of high school. Play college hockey, you can have an agent and even be called up to the pros. Play college golf or tennis, and you can be a part of the most lucrative grand slam events on earth. There is no equal protection under NCAA law. It doesn’t take Clarence Darrow to explain why. Basketball and football is about poor kids who generate billions, divided by coaches, colleges and the NCAA. It’s their orgy and players are expected to act the role of eunuchs, seen, not heard and definitely not paid. The NCAA’s arrogance is stunning. They are banking on us being oblivious to the fact that they destroyed a team as well as possibly the prospects of Jamar Samuels just to flex their “moral authority” over an utterly amoral system. Former LSU coach, Dale Brown, was absolutely correct when he said that the NCAA does little more in the end, than "legislate against human dignity." This is why it has to go.

A week earlier, Zirn wrote:

Yet there is precious little discussion about the teenagers, branded with corporate logos, generating this tidal wave of revenue. This is why Dr. Edwards believes the set-up is in desperate need of a shake-up. In a recent lecture at Cal-Berkeley, he directly tied the relationship between the NCAA and its “student athletes” to the injustices that spurred the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It’s not just a comparison, it’s a connection.… The college athletes are clearly the 99 percent who create the wealth in college sports. The question is, where is the individual from the ranks who is going to frame and focus and project that political reality? Who is going to provide the spark that mobilizes the athletes? A lot depends on the extent to which the 99-Percenter movement now confronting Wall Street can encompass the movement on campus around tuition increases and these outrageous compensation packages for administrators. Someone is going to have to focus and frame that.

That “someone” may have been the great chronicler of the civil rights movement, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch. Branch, writing for The Atlantic Monthly last October, turned his eyes toward the NCAA. The genius of his subsequent piece, “The Shame of College Sports,” was that he was a fresh set of eyes, pointing out what many of us see every day but have become too calloused, too jaded or too bought-off to notice.

While college presidents cry about athletic department deficits, Branch pointed out that in 2010, the Southeastern Conference (SEC), “became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts. The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.”

Branch, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s biographer, looked at the state of affairs and could come to only one conclusion:

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not…

Racist, greedy, motherfucking one-percenters, that's what the NCAA is. Kill it now.