Times Insider
This weekend, college basketball tournaments will unfurl before millions of viewers and against a backdrop of seismic change.
By Terence McGinley
Mar 21, 2024
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Billy Witz likes to point out that, in college sports, more has changed in the last five years than in the previous 50.
"When I started saying that, I used to think, 'Am I being hyperbolic?'" he said.
But Mr. Witz is not exaggerating: The amateur student-athlete model that drives the National Collegiate Athletic Association is unraveling. In 2021, a Supreme Court decision allowed college athletes to sign marketing deals, unleashing a flood of payments to players. Football and basketball stars who, a decade ago, might have chosen a school with plans to attend for three or four years now swap teams one season at a time. This month, an Ivy League basketball team voted to form a union after a federal official ruled that the players were employees of the school.
Mr. Witz, who has covered college sports for The New York Times since 2019, is busy staying on top of these developments. In an interview on the eve of the first round of the men's and women's March Madness basketball tournaments, two of the N.C.A.A.'s crown jewels, he put some of the dramatic changes in context and described the broad horizons of his beat. This conversation has been edited.
The Dartmouth men's basketball team voted to form a union after a National Labor Relations Board official said the players were employees of the school. What are the implications of this?
This has never happened before. Nobody has gotten this far in making the case that college athletes are employees. Ten years ago, Northwestern football players got close . The N.L.R.B. decided not to assert jurisdiction over that case. That could very well happen again.
It doesn't appear that this is going to be settled anytime soon. Dartmouth has indicated that they are willing to go to the mat for this. I was told by a Dartmouth official that the players' argument that they are employees cuts too far into an Ivy League belief that sports are not a job; they're something closer to an avocation. Some of the Dartmouth basketball players acknowledge that this may not be settled before they finish their college careers.
It's now common for elite student-athletes to transfer schools. Can you explain why?
If you turn on the TV this weekend, you'll see players in the men's and women's tournaments who are playing in their third N.C.A.A. tournament with their third school. There are two reasons behind all that movement, and they've created an environment that looks a lot like professional sports free agency, where players move because they're lured by a bigger financial payday. Coaches overhaul rosters each season.
One of those reasons is the transfer portal, which is in essence a clearinghouse. Players can enter their names in it if they're interested in changing schools, then coaches all over the country can see who's in and who they think they can get.
The other reason is name, image and likeness payments, which started three years ago. N.I.L. has allowed schools to pay athletes to come play sports for them. That's gone on for decades. But in the past that had to be done under the table. Now, those payments are perfectly legal.
The way most of this money is delivered is not through the schools themselves, but through collectives , which are a third party. Collectives operate like a political action committee. Donors pool their money to their team's collective and then, in concert with the coaches, they get a sense of what it's going to cost to get a starting point guard or a backup power forward. It really is like professional sports free agency, except there's no salary cap.
What's on your mind as March Madness basketball tournaments unfurl this weekend?
The tournaments only demonstrate that the athletes who are generating the money -- the core of this machine -- are not being compensated directly for their performance.
If you go back to Zion Williamson, who played one season for Duke in 2018 and 2019, he generated the type of attention that hadn't been seen for college basketball players since the early 2000s. A rock star following turned out to Duke games that year to watch him. Mike Krzyzewski, his coach, was making close to $7 million a year. But under the rules at the time , which limited compensation to education-related benefits, it wasn't permissible for somebody from the school to buy Zion Williamson a cheeseburger. I think the N.C.A.A. tournament forces viewers to confront dynamics like this.
There's N.I.L. now, but you can see similar dynamics with Caitlin Clark , the University of Iowa star. I'm sure she's doing very nicely through endorsements and national television commercials. But she's getting nothing directly from the proceeds of people watching Iowa play basketball .
The topic of college sports is broad. Your recent article on Matt Lynch, a junior college coach, proves that. How do you approach your beat?
Regarding the story on Matt Lynch , the openly gay coach at University of South Carolina Salkehatchie, it's not often that I'm writing about a junior college basketball program. But the story felt so compelling that I had to.
I look for stories that can explain to readers some of the things that are going on in college sports at a time of tremendous change. The entire model of college athletics is unique to the United States. Everywhere else, education and athletics are bifurcated. You go to school in the morning, and, in the afternoon, if you're a soccer player, you join the soccer club. Here in the United States, they are connected, which is really tremendous in a lot of ways. But now that athletics has become such a moneymaking enterprise, there are cracks in the model.
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