Somewhere in the hard drive of one of my old, now-impenetrable laptops is an Excel file with a breakdown of members of the 2012 U.S. Senate. It was annotated by, among other things, where they went to college and how they might have voted on a hypothetical piece of legislation to end the educational tax exemption for big-time football and basketball.<\/p>\n
I made the spreadsheet as part of an exercise to assess the odds of a scenario I viewed as a possible, if unlikely, outcome of the mess that college athletics was back then, amid yet another period of crisis that included not only the ever-growing commercialism and the usual major recruiting scandals but also child abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse. In an Inside Higher Ed news article<\/a> in January 2012, I predicted,<\/p>\n \u201cA few dozen universities, tired of being constrained in their ambition and spending by the association\u2019s less-wealthy members, could form themselves into a handful of \u2018superconferences,\u2019 create their own national football playoff system, and possibly even peel away from the NCAA and create their own basketball tournament, destroying the NCAA\u2019s gold-plated chief asset in the process.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference still had only 12 members, the NCAA hadn\u2019t yet revamped its governance structure to give additional independence to what came to be known as the \u201cPower Five\u201d conferences, and we did not yet have a college football playoff system.<\/p>\n But having covered college athletics on and off since 1986, I had seen money and power increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and I threw out this near-term scenario:<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s 2013, and after a period of calm, the conference merry-go-round cycles up in earnest again. This time, four superconferences of 16 teams each emerge, and the leagues, frustrated by NCAA-imposed limits on football scholarships and season lengths, create their own playoff system that\u00a0\u2026 formally excludes all others.<\/p>\n \u201cEven at that stage\u2014far short of a full-scale withdrawal from the NCAA\u2014the more than two dozen senators in the numerous Western and Northeastern states that have no universities in one of the four conferences grow more furious and step up calls\u00a0\u2026 for antitrust investigations into big-time football.\u201d<\/p>\n I foresaw other senators being upset, too. (This is where my long-lost spreadsheet came in.) <\/p>\n \u201cWhile a list of those institutions included and excluded from such a superconference setup is always open to debate, it\u2019s not hard to envision a U.S. senator with South Texas roots taking offense at the University of Houston and Baylor University being left behind, or a California senator unhappy with most members of the University of California system being left in the dust by Berkeley and UCLA, or the equivalent in the University of North Carolina System (with UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State). It\u2019s also possible that a university like Rutgers or the University of Connecticut could be left out of a superconference mix, giving New Jersey\u2019s and Connecticut\u2019s senators reason to fume.\u201d<\/p>\n The picture would be intensified, I posited, \u201cif the greed were to go a step further, with the superconference members contemplating their own basketball tournament and putting the many billions of dollars from the existing NCAA tournament that flow to the association\u2019s other 1,000-plus members at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n At that point, I argued, \u201cthe legion of Congressmen and women whose constituent colleges and universities see their financial and athletics futures threatened would grow to include all lawmakers who represent historically black institutions (since all of them would be left behind) and colleges that more or less ignore football but have high-octane basketball programs, like Georgetown, Gonzaga and Villanova, to name a few.\u201d<\/p>\n I concluded, \u201cIn a restructured college sports landscape in which the \u2018haves\u2019 and the \u2018have-nots\u2019 are much more clearly and formally separated, it is not too farfetched to envision a group of angry members of Congress looking very differently than they historically have at the question of whether big-time sports is truly an amateur enterprise that warrants tax exemption as an educational activity.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd a \u2018No\u2019 answer to that question\u2014forcing colleges to pay taxes on their sports revenues, to pay athletes market wages and workmen\u2019s compensation, etc.\u2014would truly transform college sports in a way that nothing being discussed now can.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, I was envisioning\u2014and, I can admit now, secretly hoping for\u2014a piece of legislation that would essentially burn down the crumbling edifice of big-time college sports and force a set of greedy universities that turned their backs on their peers to operate what they had actually built: a set of largely professional teams.<\/p>\n The situation right now isn\u2019t exactly what I foresaw 14 years ago, but the political landscape surrounding big-time college sports is very much in the news now, and a very sophisticated analysis<\/a> that makes my spreadsheet look like a 5-year-old\u2019s is making the rounds.<\/p>\n This one involves the Protect College Sports Act,<\/a> which is essentially a mirror image of the legislation I envisioned. The bipartisan bill is a well-intentioned and in some ways thoughtful effort to do what may be the impossible: \u201cfix\u201d college sports in a way that satisfies colleges, athletes and fans alike.<\/p>\n Smart analysts like Michael McCann<\/a> and Kyle Saunders<\/a> (a Colorado State political scientist and Substack author<\/a> whose name keeps popping up<\/a> in my columns for a reason\u2014he\u2019s that thoughtful and good on a wide range of subjects) have assessed the legislation and its prospects more deeply than I can.<\/p>\n My summary is that while the legislation would do a bunch of things that could ease the chaos and strengthen the rights of athletes, it is still first and foremost the NCAA\u2019s preferred answer to use antitrust laws to maintain its relevance; block many if not most federal, state and local legal challenges; and do what colleges themselves have been unwilling to do: rein in out-of-control spending and protect the viability of sports other than football and basketball.<\/p>\n (It also fails to address the important question of whether athletes in football and basketball at the highest level are employees, which, to me, as a nonlawyer, they clearly are. And it is virtually silent on the fact that the payments to players for their names, images and likenesses, which I wholeheartedly support, have only exacerbated the extent to which college athletics isn\u2019t supporting men and women equitably, as federal law requires under Title\u00a0IX.)<\/p>\n The legislation is designed to do one other thing: stop, or at least slow, what has been the steady (and arguably inevitable) consolidation of money and power that I described at the beginning of this column. For decades, roughly half of the 120 to 140 universities that play football at the sport\u2019s highest collegiate level (which was once called Division\u00a0I-A and is now the Football Bowl Subdivision) have sought various ways to keep more for themselves and peel away from peers they view as lesser.<\/p>\n They\u2019ve done this by discarding longtime allegiances to join nonsensical conferences<\/a> that span 3,000 miles and consolidating their voting power in the NCAA to pass favorable rules (or block unfavorable ones), among other tactics. And to get what they want, over the decades those 50 to 75 schools have occasionally trotted out their biggest threat: that they might one day take their ball and walk away entirely, breaking up the phenomenally successful NCAA basketball tournaments and leaving the NCAA\u2019s other 1,200 members behind to fend for themselves without billions in television revenue.<\/p>\n A decision by a few dozen greedy universities to forsake the rest in search of more riches would, to me, force a reckoning: recognition of big-time football and basketball as commercial enterprises, with paid employees, taxable revenues and all that would come with that, including unionization and workers\u2019 compensation. I suspect the house of cards would collapse. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve been quietly rooting for such an outcome, because I believe big-time college football and basketball long ago became mostly professional enterprises that still pretend to operate as quasi-educational. The massive amounts that a few dozen institutions invest in those programs (especially football) are becoming increasingly unsustainable as the payrolls for players go up, resulting in fewer funds for programs in women\u2019s and Olympic sports that have long been (somewhat) supported by football and basketball revenues.<\/p>\n That\u2019s to say nothing about the ethical, academic and other compromises that most people (including many professors) cover their eyes to ignore as they root for their campus teams. (My years at The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed\u2014covering stories like the football corruption scandal<\/a> that tore Southern Methodist University apart, the battle of wills<\/a> between Jerry Tarkanian and Robert Maxson over who had more power at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and growing evidence that many athletes in football, men\u2019s basketball and some other sports at the NCAA\u2019s top levels could not possibly get a real education\u2014permanently tainted the subject for me.)<\/p>\n But I know I\u2019m unusual in rooting for the collapse, which is why efforts like the Protect College Sports Act want to try to wallpaper over the rot.<\/p>\n The sophisticated scorecard<\/a> that Saunders and his co-author Darren Heitner<\/a> regularly update to predict the likelihood that the bill passes the Senate (as well as their weekly analyses of the latest developments) basically show that the vast majority of higher education leaders and sports groups support the legislation because it may be their last, best hope of keeping college sports whole.<\/p>\n