The student-athlete, an oxymoronic term in big-time college football employed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to justify its thoroughly professional operation as “amateur” sport, has died under the weight of hypocrisy. It was 70 years old.
The concept had been suffering mightily for years, its impeding demise hastened by the 2021 Supreme Court decision against the NCAA that opened the door for star players to regularly bank massive payouts via “name/image/likeness” contracts. A notable nail in the coffin was the April decision by the Heisman Trust to return former USC running back Reggie Bush’s 2005 Heisman Trophy, based on the belated conclusion that “student-athlete compensation” had become “an accepted practice and appears here to stay.”
Bush’s award had been rescinded based on his family having received gifts in violation of NCAA “amateur” policies, but the current realities include the six-year-old “transfer portals” that transformed top players into free agents who are allowed to move from school-to-school in search of those six-figure NIL deals and as many as six years of college eligibility.
Just in the month of December, more than 3,000 football players had entered the transfer portal, aware that NIL compensation for quarterbacks ranges from $500,000 to $800,000; for offensive and defensive linemen up to $500,000; for running backs and wide receivers up to $300,000.
Colleges—rather, their athletic departments—now establish so-called “collectives” that pool resources to secure lucrative deals to entice players. (The University of Texas set a standard there, disclosing $20.8 million in agreements to compensate its athletes from July 2021 to July 2024.)
Not a healthy thing for the NCAA branding that was meant to maintain the organization’s hold on free labor to generate its riches. For the just-expanded football playoffs, those riches include $7.8 billion in exclusive rights purchased by ESPN through 2031.
Sick? Nick Saban—who as the University of Alabama coach, benefitted mightily at the rate of more than $10 million a year in the NCAA’s lucrative football system—recently pronounced (ironically) “the student-athlete is dead. The school is not important anymore because [players are] going to get paid….Nobody talks about the college experience anymore. Nobody talks about graduation.”
The student-athlete appears to have been birthed—or, at least, formally adopted—by Walter Byers, the NCAA’s first executive director, in office from 1951 to 1988, who promoted the jargon by insisting that “those playing for NCAA colleges have to be students at their schools. They aren’t hired gladiators.”
History would take issue with that statement. As former Notre Dame and Kansas City Chiefs gridder Michael Oriard wrote in his 2001 book, “King Football,” college football was haunted since the 1890s by “the need to recruit top athletes, irrespective of their academic soundness, all the while maintaining a fundamental fiction that college football players where student amateurs despite their participation in a multimillion-dollar business…. ‘Ringers’ and ‘tramp athletes’ began appearing on college campuses in the 1880s, often staying only through the football season before returning to whatever employment occupied them the rest of the year.”
George Gipp, the early college football legend—Notre Dame’s first All-American who was portrayed in a schmaltzy film by Ronald Reagan that recounted coach Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech—was suspended in 1920 for missing too many classes and frequenting off-limits establishments. He was reinstated only after other schools bid for his football services. In two of his five years at Notre Dame, he did not receive any grades.
By 1998, the stability of the student-athlete label was in rapid decline, when Ithaca College sports media professor Ellen Staurowsky co-authored “College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA Amateur Myth.” By then, even Byers had reversed field a bit, telling Sports Illustrated that higher education likely could not “stand the strain of big-time intercollegiate athletics and maintain its integrity.”
Staurowsky suggested splitting revenue-generating sports from the educational process, saying that football players still could go to classes if they chose to, but university athletic departments should lose the role of promoters and brokers of athletic talent and mass sports entertainment.
“Maybe it makes sense,” New York City law professor Marc Edelman wondered a decade ago—still before NIL and transfer portals appeared—“if schools have to sell off their sports programs” to create a firewall between sports and academics. “Maybe there should be a football program that wears blue and maize and plays out of Ann Arbor and is separate from the University of Michigan.”
Might that be a solution for those hired gladiators who could dabble in a college education on the side—if they had the energy and the time? As former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn recently told ESPN, “between practice and then NIL responsibilities for marketing [and] so forth; where does school even come into it? Like, where does it come into play?”
With no logical means of resuscitation, the student-athlete’s only survivors appear to be at the Division III level. Or playing women’s water polo.