Sacrifices, students and the NCAA

When it comes to worshipping at the altar of UNC sports, I know my devotion doesn’t hold a candle to many of my classmates.

But even students like me, who have only been to a handful of games, care about sports on some level. (Lets be honest, my heart melted instantly upon reading Kendall Marshall’s tweets after his wrist was fractured.)

But it’s easy to forget that even after this year’s March Madness answers the question of who the best basketball team is, there are still larger questions about the NCAA and what we mean when we use the term student athlete.

Paradoxically, it seems that college sports can be successfully commercialized precisely because they aren’t “commercial.” At least part of the appeal appears to be the innocence of amateur sports.

But the NCAA’s ridiculous regulations and history of punishing athletes harshly for minor infractions is far from innocent.

Whereas any other student enjoys the luxury of due process when they break the rules, NCAA athletes are subject to a pseudo-court system that doesn’t even seem to operate on precedent. And the organization isn’t really accountable to anyone or anything except its own agenda.

And yet the student athletes who are bound by these draconian restrictions are the only ones in the $6 billion empire of the NCAA who don’t actually profit from it.

There is obvious irony in students generating revenue for their athletic departments by wearing a certain brand, but not actually having rights to their own signature.

It’s pretty difficult to reconcile this with the NCAA’s apparent goal of ensuring that student athletes receive the same academic experience as every other college student.

When I went to hear New York Times columnist Joe Nocera speak on this topic last week, someone in the audience asked him what the appeal of being a student athlete actually is, given such strict rules.

“I think that’s pretty straightforward,” he said. “Because they love sports.”

From a young age, we are told that we have to make sacrifices to do what we love. But usually those sacrifices are necessary. The sacrifices we require of student athletes, however, aren’t as necessary as we might think. For all the ways we romanticize and bleach it, the concept of amateurism was essentially invented by the NCAA.

If athletes are going to create value for a university, they ought to receive value. And our athletes should have advocates within the system that governs them.

I’m not an expert on the structure of college sports. But I am a student working my way through college, and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t receive compensation through work-study jobs.

Comparing myself to an athlete may seem like a funny analogy. But it’s worth asking why I get paid by the university for working about 10 hours a week, but athletes aren’t compensated for a commitment that’s more than a full-time job?

Is it really to preserve the purity of playing for the love of the game? If so, then I’m not sure why college sports are commercialized at all.

UNC wouldn’t be able to claim such a tradition of excellence if we didn’t have such stellar athletics, and all of our identities are richer for it. But tradition and reform are not mutually exclusive.

We’re all about innovation here at UNC. But the greatest innovation to come from this school could, after all, be a realigning of the way we and others understand college sports.