By Jordan Kobritz
Unless you’ve been quarantined without access to the news for the past eight months you know 2020 has been the year of change. Nothing exemplifies that more than the about face taken by the NCAA regarding playing sports when students aren’t on campus.
In May, NCAA president Mark Emmert was quoted as saying, “college athletes are college students, and you can’t have college sports if you don’t have college (campuses) open and having students on them.” Emmert went on to say that every commissioner and president he had spoken to – without identifying them by name – adheres to the belief that if regular students aren’t on campus, student-athletes can’t be, either. One of those commissioners could have been Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who made similar statements several weeks before Emmert spoke for the NCAA.
Well, either something got lost in the translation or Emmert wasn’t speaking for all conference commissioners and every college president. Fast forward three months and it’s clear some colleges plan to play football, the coronavirus permitting, even if campuses are not open.
The University of North Carolina opened its campus to students in early August but after a surge in COVID-19 cases – 526 students in isolation or quarantine, and nearly 14 percent of its virus tests coming back positive – moved all undergraduate courses online. Students were told they should go home for the remainder of the semester and log on for classes, but football players were sent a different message: stay on campus, keep practicing, study online and hopefully you’ll get to play football. UNC is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, one of three Power 5 conferences that has yet to cancel fall sports.
Other schools have either postponed the start of the fall semester or temporarily interrupted it after bringing students back to campus. How many of them are likely to follow UNC’s lead if the campus spread of COVID-19 forces them to pivot from in class to remote learning this fall? When — not if — that happens, it will not only render Emmert’s May statements moot, it will remove the last remnants to the sham that football players are student-athletes, rather than employees.
If there are no classes on campus, yet athletes are still playing, they are no longer amateurs but professionals, on campus for the primary — sole? — purpose of generating revenue for the school.
The task of convincing courts athletes shouldn’t be paid, or they don’t have the right to market their name, image and likeness (NIL rights), just became infinitely more difficult, if not impossible.
You could say the coronavirus has undermined the NCAA’s pillar of amateurism, peeling away the last vestige of the phrase “student-athletes.” Instead, we can now refer to football players by their proper designation: athlete-student.
Jordan Kobritz is a non-practicing attorney and CPA, former Minor League Baseball team owner and current investor in MiLB teams. He is a professor in the Sport Management Department at SUNY Cortland and maintains the blog, sportsbeyondthelines.com. The opinions contained in this column are those of the author. Kobritz can be reached by email at jordan.kobritz@cortland.edu.
