Every fall, a few weeks into the new college football season, some commentator launches into a diatribe about the inherent injustice in the NCAA’s decision to not pay its Division I-A football players. It certainly makes sense. The NCAA and its “power conferences” rake in hundreds of millions of dollars each year from their lucrative deals, so why not spread the wealth to the players?
Being in my fifth year working in Wesleyan’s athletic department, I can honestly say that the devotion I have observed from Wesleyan’s student-athletes is exceptional—and we’re just a Division III school. This fact only makes one more sympathetic to the idea of paying them for their countless hours of labor.
But big-time college athletics isn’t about sympathy. It’s a business, and there’s one thing that matters in business: the bottom line.
Here’s a figure for you: $13.7 million. That’s the estimated 2009-10 athletic department’s deficit at the University of California, Berkeley, as of April 2010. In light of an even grimmer budget picture for the 2010-11 academic year, Cal recently announced the elimination of its 108-year old baseball program, which joins women’s lacrosse, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and men’s rugby (demoted from varsity to club status) as casualties of the ever-worsening California budget picture.
In the meantime, work continues on renovation of the school’s football stadium ($321 million) and a new “Student-Athlete High Performance Center” ($136 million), the latter of which, as the school’s “UC Berkley Budget Crisis” page notes, is “a facility with access that will be restricted to only 450 student-athletes [and] less than 1 percent of the students, staff, and faculty on campus.” That’s $467 million in construction projects that will benefit less than one out of every 100 individuals on the 36,000-student campus, and noticeably worsen the balance sheet of a department in dire financial straits.
What’s scary is that the situation at Cal is not the exception, but the rule. Let’s take another example: the University of Minnesota. UM estimated a $1.6 million budget deficit in the 2008-09 fiscal year—and that’s after taking into account a $3.4 million subsidy from the University’s general fund as well as the $6.4 million it received from the Big Ten Network. Does that sound like a school that can afford to take on the added expense of paying its football players?
As so many commentators have noted, the current “arms race” in big-time college football is unsustainable. Every school has to have the largest stadium, the largest practice facility, and the largest weight room. Meanwhile, sports such as gymnastics and wrestling are fighting for their lives. Yes, it’s true that these sports lack the revenue-generating capacity of football—but they also have a fraction of the expenses, making their elimination akin to patching Sideshow Bob’s Springfield Dam with a piece of chewing gum. And now the schools should exacerbate this problem by paying their athletes and spending more money they don’t have?
There is simply no way for a big-time D-I school to pay its football players and avoid additional carnage elsewhere in the athletic department, to say nothing of the university community as a whole. In economics, we call this situation “Pareto optimal,” meaning it’s impossible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off.
In everyday English, we have a simpler term for it: fair.
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