By Dan Matheson
Mark Emmert, NCAA President, recently suggested that member schools and conferences may reevaluate the rules that made it possible for current NCAA student-athletes to accept prize money for winning medals at the summer Olympics while maintaining their NCAA amateur status for eligibility purposes. Emmert made his comments at The Aspen Institute, a forum to address complex societal issues with the goal of promoting real-world action.
As has been widely publicized, several NCAA student-athletes received big paydays during the Olympics. Most notable among them were Joseph Schooling and Kyle Snyder, as well as then prospective student-athlete Katie Ledecky, who each received in excess of $100,000 for winning medals. Schooling, a swimmer at the University of Texas who competed for Singapore in the Olympics, reportedly received about $740,000 for his gold medal.
The NCAA rules that allow such exceptions can be found in bylaw 12 of the NCAA Manual, “Amateurism and Athletics Eligibility”:
“12.1.2.1.4.1.2 Operation Gold Grant. An individual (prospective student-athlete or student-athlete) may accept funds that are administered by the U.S. Olympic Committee pursuant to its Operation Gold program.”
“12.1.2.1.4.1.3 Incentive Programs for International Athletes. An international prospective student-athlete or international student-athlete may accept funds from his or her country’s national Olympic governing body (equivalent to the U.S. Olympic Committee) based on place finish in one event per year that is designated as the highest level of international competition for the year by the governing body.”
Emmert’s comments related to this issue included the following:
“To be perfectly honest, (Schooling’s award from Singapore), it’s causing everybody to go, ‘Oh, well, that’s not really what we were thinking about’ (when the bylaw 12 exceptions were created). So, I don’t know where the members will go on that. I mean, that’s a little different than 15 grand for the silver medal for swimming for the U.S. of A. So, I think that’s going to stimulate a very interesting conversation…The question is whether that person is still an amateur. Because if they competed in South Africa and (got) paid $750,000 to play ball in South Africa, they would be declared a professional athlete and be not eligible for NCAA play. That’s the fundamental problem…I think the amateur model still is very important.”
Contacted later by Steve Berkowitz of USA TODAY, Stacey Osburn, my friend and former colleague who is the NCAA’s Media Relations Director, added, “There have been preliminary conversations. The membership ultimately will decide if it wants to take a different approach.”
So where does this issue stand? At this point, it would be extremely premature to jump to any conclusions. NCAA leadership from member schools and conferences and the national office are probably exploring privately whether the bylaw 12 exceptions should remain open and/or if they require tweaking, such as by capping the allowable amount that could be received for medal wins. Part of the job of NCAA leadership is to monitor the rules to assure they do not conflict with basic NCAA policies and strategic goals.
One potential problem for the NCAA may come up in litigation. The NCAA is defending itself against several antitrust attacks targeting its rules limiting what student-athletes are allowed to receive. You can be certain that plaintiffs’ attorneys will go after the seeming inconsistency of an exception that allows a few student-athletes to receive six figures in prize money for outside competition while most other student-athletes are prohibited from profiting from their sport under the concept of amateurism.
My wish would be for the NCAA membership to maintain the bylaw 12 exceptions, without modification, and use this Olympics issue as a starting point for a more thorough theoretical review of NCAA amateurism legislation. And if I were in those NCAA Board of Directors meetings where the future of the amateurism model was being debated, a few things I would bring up for discussion include:
Could relaxing some of the amateurism rules actually help encourage student-athletes to stay in school longer and make more progress toward a degree, which would help achieve an important NCAA goal? The NFL draft in recent years has seen a sharp increase in underclassmen declaring for the draft and giving up their remaining NCAA eligibility. In the past three years, 38% more underclassmen declared for the draft compared to the previous three-year period (this figure does not include 11 student-athletes who completed their degrees but declared for the 2016 draft with eligibility remaining). Unfortunately, many of those young men will never receive the financial windfall they were counting on in the NFL; 28% of those underclassmen went undrafted in 2016, 28% in 2015 and 39% in 2014.
If those young men who declared early for the draft had the opportunity to pursue off-the-field compensation related to their athletics ability while playing college ball, how many would have resisted the allure of an NFL payday and instead played out their NCAA eligibility and earned their degrees? The NCAA website states, “The NCAA membership has adopted amateurism rules to ensure the students’ priority remains on obtaining a quality educational experience.” Are amateurism rules actually prematurely pushing some student-athletes away from the educational experience the NCAA strives to provide them?
If the NCAA allows any exception for Olympians to receive prize money for winning medals, how can it create an arbitrary limit on that prize money now that student-athletes such as Schooling, Snyder and Ledecky have earned more lucrative awards than the NCAA anticipated would be available? How would the NCAA reconcile its actions to create the exception, which seemed to be an acceptance that being a little bit professional is okay, with the subsequent limiting or closing of the exception, which would seem to be saying that being considered too much of a professional is unacceptable?
Part of the NCAA’s support for the amateurism principle is the argument that all student-athletes should be “competing equitably.” In other words, amateurs should not be competing against professionals on an uneven playing field. However, does that competitive advantage not already exist where you have student-athletes receiving full cost-of-attendance scholarships competing against walk-on student-athletes? The difference in what’s being received in financial support in the form of tuition, room and board, books and miscellaneous expenses can amount to well over $30,000 per year between the scholarship and the non-scholarship student-athlete. Is that situation really all that different from any perceived competitive advantage that would be gained between one student-athlete who is able to make a celebrity appearance and sign autographs at a local business in exchange for $750 on the weekend and another student-athlete who is not in demand for similar compensation opportunities?
Since the vast majority of student-athletes will never earn any money as a professional athlete, would the NCAA better serve its mission of supporting the well-being of student-athletes if it allowed them to somehow capitalize financially on their earning power during the couple of years they become regional celebrities on a college campus? Would doing so be that much different than schools capitalizing on the regional celebrity of their recognizable student-athletes to help generate revenue, which is allowable?
Are there compliance systems that could be established to help protect against abuse of relaxed amateurism rules while allowing student-athletes to earn legitimate outside income based on their status as a student-athlete?
The questions I raise are not intended to suggest that I believe the intercollegiate athletics model should be thrown out. There are valid arguments on both sides of each issue, and I am a proponent of any model that spends hundreds of millions of dollars providing thousands of young adults free or reduced-cost education annually. The NCAA and the intercollegiate athletics model is often unfairly criticized and rarely receives the credit it deserves for all of the good it does. But as I tell students every semester in my Sport Business course, intercollegiate athletics is far more interesting than pro sports to study because of the challenging issues raised by an increasingly commercialized athletics enterprise that adheres to an amateur model and is embedded within an institution of higher learning. As I suggested above, if NCAA leaders reconsider the bylaw 12 exceptions, I would simply like to see some of these broader issues raised at the same time, and I believe the spirited debates that would ensue would be fascinating. Bottom line: Please let collegiate Olympians retain the prize money they earn every four years, as well as their NCAA eligibility.
Dan Matheson is the Director of the Sport & Recreation Management program at the University of Iowa. Prior to that, he worked as an NCAA Associate Director of Enforcement and as the New York Yankees Director of Baseball Operations.
