Leveling the pay-ing field

California bill challenges the NCAA and redefines the role of athletes in college sports

Eric Boose / Opinion Editor / The USD Vista

During the 2017 college football season, a Stanford University football player with a full-ride scholarship earned no more than 0.4 percent of the total profit the team generated for the university. That year, the Stanford football team generated a profit of $19.85 million, according to disclosures to the U.S. Department of Education. 

Closing the yawning gap between the money athletic departments receive and the amount players earn is the target of California’s Senate Bill (SB) 206, also known as the Fair Pay to Play Act. The bill, which would go into effect in 2023 if passed, allows athletes at four-year colleges and universities in California to receive compensation for the use of their “name, image, and likeness,” opening the door for college athletes to sign endorsement deals. The bill would also allow college athletes to obtain professional representation, for example, a lawyer or agent, in dealing with any contracts they might sign. College athletes are currently not prohibited from doing so by state laws, but by the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s (NCAA) rules. 

Ultimately, SB 206 will benefit student athletes at schools with high-profile athletic programs, such as Stanford, the University of Southern California, the University of California Los Angeles, or even San Diego State University, more than students at the University of San Diego. While Stanford’s football program raked in more than $19 million in profit in 2017, the U.S. Department of Education reports USD’s football program earned only $987,010. This is not to say that USD student athletes are less deserving than those at Stanford, but instead that USD’s athletics programs have nowhere near the national prestige of those at Stanford, USC, UCLA, or SDSU.

In recent history, only one USD athlete — former Torero baseball star Kris Bryant — has come close to the superstar level necessary to cash in on big-money endorsement deals. In comparison to star athletes like USC’s Sam Darnold, UCLA’s Khalil Mack, or Stanford’s Bryce Love, any deals that USD athletes might sign are likely to be relatively small. In essence, SB 206 is unlikely to provide more than a marginal benefit to USD student athletes.

That benefit looks even smaller when compared to the possible retribution that the NCAA has already threatened. In June, the association’s  president, Mark Emmert, stated that should SB 206 become law, the executive body would ban California from competing in championship tournaments. This would mean no playoffs for a USD football program which has been to the postseason for three years straight, no tournament for a USD volleyball program which has not missed the postseason in nearly a decade, and no March Madness for either USD men’s or women’s basketball. While SB 206 expressly prohibits any “athletic association, conference, or other group or organization with authority over intercollegiate athletics” from barring California schools from competition, the NCAA has the power to decide which schools get to play, not the state of California. 

Under this threat from the NCAA, the passage of SB 206 creates a huge risk for USD athletes while not guaranteeing a reward. Looking solely through this lens, USD should obviously oppose SB 206. However, there is also a moral element to the Fair Pay to Play Act.

Explicitly, SB 206 allows student athletes to benefit from the use of their name and face and to obtain professional representation. Implicitly, the Fair Pay to Play Act puts a crack in the NCAA’s façade of amateurism — the assertion that college sports are just for fun, and that college athletes are not professionals. That façade weakly conceals the enormity of the industry that college sports have become. 

Having already looked at the money involved, consider the pure spectacle of college sports. Look at the amount of television coverage, from ESPN’s College Gameday to prime-time coverage of the College Football Playoff. Look at sold-out stadiums; the Rose Bowl seats just over 90,000 and the LA Memorial Coliseum seats around 78,000. Look at the media circus of March Madness alone, from “bracketology” shows to national broadcasts of all 67 games. 

Add to that spectacle the money involved, and to call college sports “amateur” is a gross miscategorization. Athletic departments across the country bring in revenues in the $100 million range yearly, making college sports not only an industry, but a billion-dollar industry. College sports is also an industry in which the people who create the product, the athletes themselves, see practically none of the money they generate. In any other industry, this would be unquestionably unacceptable. While college athletes do not necessarily match the traditional view of what a worker is, they are still workers, and therefore deserve to be paid.

SB 206 is not a perfect bill. Superstar athletes will likely receive the most benefit, and the state of California may face a legal battle with the NCAA to keep California schools in postseason competitions. However, SB 2o6 is the first tangible step in combating what could be called exploitation of college athletes. Most importantly, it asserts that no matter what industry, the workers — those who create the product that industry sells — have the right to be paid fairly for their work.