By George Laase
Special to the Observer
Back in 1994, CBS Sports bought the rights to the NCAA men's basketball
tournament with an eight-year contract averaging $215 million annually. This month, a single, 30-second TV ad airing during the men’s Final Four will cost the
advertiser around $1.5 million.
The prospect of selling future advertising during the College
Football Playoffs is seen as being so lucrative that ESPN bid more than $5.5
billion over the next 12 years for the rights.
As the NCAA coffers continue to balloon, lawsuits are piling up calling
for it to share its billion dollar bounty with the players who help generate
it.
Battle-Tested Fighting class-action lawsuits is nothing new for the NCAA, but it has lost its share.
Most notably the 1984 decision striking down the association's
control of televising college football games and then in 1994 a
ruling invalidating a NCAA-imposed $12,000 salary limit for assistant
coaches.
More recent court rulings concerning college players’ rights to
form an athletic union have gone against the NCAA. Another, brought about by
UCLA grad Ed O’Bannon, gave college players additional rights in sharing
revenue of TV broadcasts and video game sales.
Both rulings are being appealed by the NCAA and are in the Federal
Appellate Court system.
But these lower court rulings have put a serious crack in the
NCAA’s long-held claim that its players are, in the true sense, amateurs and
not professionals.
But, as coaches’ signing bonuses and salaries, along with their deferred
compensation packages spiral higher exponentially, it
seems the public has become much more cynical about why college athletes are
not receiving a share of the revenue they help to generate.
How much?
Local examples of soaring compensations mentioned can be verified with a
quick check of the University of California’s payroll on the public website
Transparent California. It shows that the UC’s top five highest paid
employees in 2013 were either present or former head coaches:
Steve Alford, current UCLA basketball coach --- $2.64M
Jeff Tedford, former Cal football
coach --- $2.44M
Jim Mora Jr., current UCLA football coach --- $2.41M
Daniel Dykes, current UC Berkeley football coach --- $2.37M
Ben Howland, former UCLA basketball coach ---- $2.31M
When the players’ coaches are receiving such
outrageous salaries, do you really blame them for wanting a piece of the
pie?
A Legal Pied Piper
Jeffery Kessler, the lead attorney in the latest
anti-trust lawsuit against the NCAA, is calling for expanded free agency
rights for college players.
You may have heard Kessler’s name before. Over
the past 20 years he has garnered a well-known, legal reputation by
representing professional players’ rights against league owners. He was
instrumental in bringing about free agency to the NFL and he negotiated the
current free agency/salary cap systems in the NBA.
The New York Daily News recently described him as "a pain in the butt
to the NFL for decades.”
Plainly, Kessler is trying to spread free agency to yet another
multi-billion dollar sports industry; one still quaintly referred to by its
purists as “college sports.”
Kessler’s free agency class-action suit is
working its way through the judicial system. Preliminary hearings have been
heard, and if the lawsuit makes it past the initial NCAA’s legal challenges,
the trial could start as soon as this coming fall.
If it is successful sports lawyers widely disagree on what the
implications of his lawsuit could have on the federal law called Title IX, in
concerning the treatment of female college athletes.
But most agree that success probably would trigger huge tax implications for big-time college programs.
Status Quo
The NCAA argues that changing the academic system to focus solely on
Athletic compensation would be a mistake. Most students, they say, leave college
richer by earning an academic degree, not in negotiating a multi-million
dollar professional contract like the “one-and-done” college
athlete.
Dissenting Point of View
In a recent interview with CBS Sports, Kessler rhetorically asked, "What
is there about an educational mission for the SEC schools to spend $25
million this year on digital television studios
on their campuses for the SEC Network?
"It's a very nice business investment, but does that have anything
to do with educating their students? Does that have anything to do with the student-athlete experience? It has to do with
one thing: selling cable television programs. That's OK, but acknowledge the
reality.
The people who say, 'Gee, I wish we went back to no television
schedule and no sponsors and none of this and just focus on the educational
mission,' that's a perfectly worthy viewpoint and small schools, like the Ivy
League, do that.
That's a perfectly legitimate choice. Maybe in some sense
it's a better world. But the world we live in, there are more than 150
schools who have made a very different choice, and those schools have decided
to engage as businesses to generate huge amounts of revenues, and what they
need to do is treat fairly the people who helped them generate those
revenues.
Summation
But Kessler’s lawsuit asserts that 20 years ago football and men's basketball programs generated far less revenue than they do today.
Kessler also points out that as you look around everything that’s
going on is about money -- even the latest conference realignments were based purely on financial considerations.
The NCAA's ability to maintain its façade (of amateurism) has been decreasing at an accelerating rate.
We all know times change and if Jeffery Kessler has anything to say about
it; it looks like change to the NCAA’s business model is coming much sooner than later.
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