By Nick Infante
What do you get when you pull together a hundred-plus attorneys, plus a few dozen educators and media members, a Big Five commissioner and one D1 AD? [Hold the lawyer jokes please.] Well, you get the Penn Law Entertainment & Sports Law Society Symposium, that’s what you get.
This is a particularly good time in college athletics to stage a sports symposium, what with the O’Bannon case building into a June crescendo, the call for player unionization at Northwestern and concussion reform—to name just a few.
The big issues listed above will likely be settled in the legal arena, so the symposium came at a very good time indeed. The symposium consisted of four panels (two college and two pro), plus a keynote address by Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany.
Penn Law Entertainment & Sports Law Society President Eli Klein welcomed the gathered assemblage by making the point that Philadelphia was “a very appropriate place” to hold the symposium because Philadelphia is “the hotbed of professional sports.” Well said, young man, but there are quite a few New Yorkers who would point out that Philly is only a hotbed, not the hotbed.
As if all the caffeine in our coffee and the sugar in our pastries weren’t enough, we were treated to fast-moving, very energetic opening remarks by Rand Getlin, Reporter and Legal Analyst for Yahoo Sports.
Getlin quickly ticked through the college sports warts of our time—recruiting payments at UNC, improper payments to a recruiting service at Oregon, Miami’s rogue booster Nevin Shapiro, etc.
He decried the fantastic increase in coach salaries, and he cited ADs and Commissioners for excessive compensation as well.
Suffice it to say that Getlin pounded away at the “unfairness” issue. One of his overhead slides listed several vintage quotes from the born-again Walter Byers, long-time NCAA president, including the incendiary “neo-plantation” gem.
While none of this was new to the college sports folks in the crowd, there were dozens of young attorneys (and attorneys to be) in the audience who were soaking in Getlin’s snappy presentation style.
A couple hours later, when Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany took questions after his keynote address, the voluble Getlin rambled with a series of statements before he arrived at his question, which was “Why do just a few make money?” To which Delany pointed out that coaches and commissioners were not always highly compensated. [Ed.-Delany himself spent a decade at the Ohio Valley Conference, where he was presumably not highly compensated, before he went to the Big Ten Conference.]
Other tidbits . . . . .
During the first panel (“Why Amateur Status Matters”), Penn State Professor Stephen Ross described amateurism as a “vapid and incoherent concept.” UMass professor Glenn Wong made the comment that the most significant issues in college sports have to do with litigation or legislation. The panel moved from discussing fairness, how much things cost and Title IX, and it occurred to me that it would have been appropriate to have an AD on the panel, someone with day-to-day experience.
Other gems from the first panel . . . . Duke Professor Paul Haagen: “Amateurism is a floating concept.” . . . Glenn Wong: “Here’s why amateurism is important for the NCAA… more jobs for lawyers!” [that brought one of the best laughs of the day].
During the second panel (“Pay for Play Issues surrounding the compensation of student-athletes”) Temple University Professor Kenneth Jacobsen—this was maybe the fifth time of the day that it came up—asked “A lot of people make big money off college sports; why can’t student-athletes get paid?”
Vanderbilt AD David Williams (the only AD in attendance) patiently explained that only 20-plus schools meet their expenses (what most of us would call a “profit”) and that the 330 or so other D1 schools lose money, so if student-athletes were to be paid the money would have to come from somewhere else, and that could be cutting sports.
After lunch Jim Delany gave a keynote in which he took us through the history of college sports. He spent some time with the pivotal 1985 court decision that essentially took football broadcasts away from the NCAA. After that, as the decades progressed, there were more and more games broadcasted, making more and more money for conferences and schools (and coaches and commissioners). It was a History of College Sports by Jim Delany.
The third panel—“Labor and Collective Bargaining”—was interesting, but for college-oriented persons it was rather foreign. There was much discussion of what agents do and don’t do, and what they get paid (3%). Also, there’s a lot that goes on for the combine, and then not a lot in the next two years, yet most rookies make the minimum ($400,000) so there was doubt why the agents do what they do. I like college much better.
It was a very good symposium. Kudos to the Penn Law Entertainment & Sports Law Society.
Infante is the founder and editor of CollegeAthleticsClips, a service that provides executive summaries of college athletics news and issues. Visit his Website to subscribe.
