College Football kicks off in early September and it is the first season with the emergence of two supper conferences and a corporate 12 game playoff system in place. The game was once dominated by Ivy League elites, it is now in the hands of TV and two giant cartel, conglomerated-conferences. Let’s just call the Southeastern Conference and The Big Ten Conference the Goliaths of football, the Goliaths of the gridiron. All the other conferences are Davids, or slain Davids who got in their way, like the PAC 12. For those who do not follow College Football, and for many that do, we are unlikely to realize the economic morphing that has been taking place since the game’s inception.
According to the NCAA the first collegiate football game took place in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton. It was probably a game that looked more like a combination of Rugby and Soccer. I liken the economics of the game at that time to a feudal game played between various colleges. The manor being the university and football players being the gallant knights of the field. A 19th and early 20th Century jousting match without horses and lances. More of a rugged, and some time fatal, version of the elementary and middle school game of capture the flag.
“These tournaments (took place) where knights fought in mock cavalry battles (mêlée), with the object of capturing as many of the opposing team as possible.”– World History Encyclopedia
College Football at the time could be just as vicious as bunch of armored men with lances and swords riding around on horseback. According to History.com, President Teddy Roosevelt said in 1903, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”
However it was more than just getting battered about. “The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season.” And in 1905 another 19 recorded deaths along with 137 serious injuries.
One newspaper editorial extolled that “The once athletic sport has degenerated into a contest that for brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats in the arena in ancient Rome,” Thank god today we have mixed martial arts fighting where we can watch both men and woman beating each other into submission.
Roosevelt used the “bully pulpit” to get College Football to enact rules that would make the game less fatal to the players. In 1906 an intercollegiate conference, the precursor to the NCAA, revolutionized football by legalizing the forward pass and outlawing massed, arm-in-arm formations. The game was blemished, to say the least, with fatalities, but moving towards safer play.
As the game became more popular the economics of the game moved from the feudal system into a more socialist economic barter system where universities set prices, a non-monetary barter system for a players labor. Because players were amateurs there was no wage consideration. It was forbidden for colleges to pay them for their athletic skills. The best universities could do is offer athletes a scholarship for their athletic prowess.
In 1934, according to Time.com, the “the U.S. Office of Education surveyed the nation’s colleges about the cost of attendance and found that the average cost for one academic year was $630 ($11,300 today).” Those figures do not include room and board and other fees. But still, not a bad deal if you consider that the median yearly income of a White male was a tad more than $1,400. Almost $700 dollars-a-year if you were a Black male. And we will not even discuss what women made.
Today the average shelled out for a year at a four-year in-state public university is around $9,500–give or take the interest on the student loan. For a private school it is closer to $32,500. Neither of those figures include room and board.” And the tuition jumps about $20,000 a year if you head off to an elite Ivy League type school. As a side note, I wonder if that extra $20,000 is worth the money considering that some of our more prominent politicians hail from such schools. It makes you wonder if you put 100 monkeys in the Senate could they compete with a group of Ivy League lawyers. I am sure the extra $20,000 has not given us better football players because it sure hasn’t given us better legislators.
So the value of the scholarship may vary from university-to-university based on tuition, fees, required books and room and board. Any additional perks for playing at a particular school would more than likely be an under-the-table-agreement with a Booster picking up the tab. Thus, enhancing the predetermined socialist benefits provided by the university.
Winston Churchill once said, “The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” I am not sure if College Football players were sharing any sort of misery but they were beholding to the university for the fruits of their labor.
But things were about to change. Two dates that sent seismic tremors through the economic structure of College Football are October 8, 1929 when radio station KDKA-AM aired the first college football game between Pittsburgh and West Virginia University. The other date: September 30, 1939 when NBC televised the Fordham University and Waynesburg University game on W2XBS. The economic volcano of money was starting spout some capitalist steam.
Technology is the accelerant to the Time, Space, Continuum. It may have taken all day for someone on a plodding-horse to make the round trip trek into town. Today, we can make the same trip in a car in less than an hour. If technology is the accelerant then money is the black hole that sucks everything into its gravitational vortex. In 12 short years College Football changed more since the 1906 season when the forward pass was legalized. The money hounds would soon be sniffing and scratching at the door.
The money ball began rolling in 1951 when universities and the meek conferences of the day turned their television rights over to the NCAA. In 1952 NBC had the exclusive rights for weekly games for the tune of $1.4 million. Texas Christian University and the University of Kansas kicked off the capitalist era on September 20 of that year. Corporate America got its nose in the College Football tent.
New technology and money expanded the playing field, so to speak. Universities and Conferences were showered with TV money and free sneakers. In 2020 Disney’s ESPN finalized a $300 million deal with the Southeastern Conference for per season broadcast rights. Yahoo!Sports says that this deal is at least five times the $55 million per year fee that CBS was paying the SEC. According to The New York Times that rounds out to about $20 million-a-game. Not a bad pay day for one day’s work. The SEC said that it doled out $741 million to its 14 schools in the 2022-23 fiscal year, meaning an average payout of $51.2 million, about a $2 million bump from the last season.
The other Goliath, The Big Ten consummated a $7 billion deal that will allow games to be broadcast across “three major networks each week.” According to the Associated Press this deal “will allow the 16 member universities to share in $1 billion per year.” As for the players, its like what Forrest Gump said about being shot in the buttocks, “They say it was a million dollar wound, but the Army must keep that money ’cause I still haven’t seen a nickel of that million dollars.”
With all of this money falling on the field, the X-factor in all of this capitalist expansion is the player. With all this TV money floating around, everybody is trying to grab as many dollars from heaven as possible. American capitalism leaves no money on the table. The problem for the players, is that It has always been the NCAA’s belief that it is their money. The NCAA believes in the amateur model: no pay for play; why start to compensate workers who have worked the last 100 years basically for room and board. According to sporstkeeda.com, there are close to 20,000 Division I scholarship players. And this does not include walk-ons. That’s a lot of compensation. It carries over to the old Southern plantation owner’s attitude: Why complicate matters with a payroll.
The Sherman Antitrust Act refers to a landmark U.S. law that banned businesses from colluding or merging to form a monopoly. Passed in 1890, the law prevented these groups from dictating, controlling, and manipulating prices in a particular market…The act aimed to promote economic fairness and competitiveness while regulating interstate commerce. –Investopedia
Enter the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. Any high school students who could stay awake long enough in their American History class has heard about, I will not say remembers, Teddy as a Trust Buster. Using the Sherman Antitrust Act Teddy took on some of the most powerful captains of industry of the time. He took on John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan’ s railroad conglomerate: National Securities Company. So how does Teddy trust bust into College Football?
In 2008, Ed O’Bannon took a page from Teddy’s playbook. O’Bannon was a former UCLA basketball player from 1991-95. When he saw his image and likeness on an Electronic Arts (EA) video game, a company that developed video games based on college football and basketball, O’Bannon realized he never gave his consent and was never compensated for the use of his image and likeness in the video game. O’Bannon sued the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company.
Here comes Teddy riding Little Texas up the virtual San Juan Hill of College Football. According to the American University Business Law Review, O’Bannon claimed that “the NCAA’s amateur rules prevented student-athletes from being compensated for the use of their NILs (name, image and likeness) and was an illegal restraint of trade under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.”
A class action suit was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court found in 2015 for O’Bannon. It turns out that the NCAA’s amature model of no pay for play in some cases is a flawed system. But there is nothing flawed when it comes to the NCAA profit-driven system. According to ESPN, “The NCAA generated nearly $1.3 billion in revenue for the 2022-23 fiscal year, more than half of which was distributed back to Division I members, according to (NCAA) financial statements.”
Any college (football player) student who has taken an Economics 101 course is aware of the Four Factors of Production: Labor, Land, Capital and Entrepreneurship. I did not graduate from the London School of Economics but if you remove labor costs from your business model profits have to go up considerably for the owners of land and capital. Capitalism has never been about sharing profits, particularly with labor. And it does not take an entrepreneur genius to see that this decision to compensate players has changed College Football’s business field of play, much like in 1906 with the forward pass. For the entrepreneur, it is how much of this largess is up for grabs.
Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise’” Abraham Lincoln–1864 in a letter to the Workingmen’s Association of New York
Since the Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Court of Appeals decision there have been other legal ramifications put in play. For instance, In 2019 California passed The Fair Pay to Play Act. Athletes can be compensated for promotional opportunities. So far 29 states have passed similar laws giving new meaning to states’ rights. It also raises the question are athletes now state employees and not student athletes?
And to reinforce player non-academic compensation, the Supreme Court upheld another Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in the Alston case saying that the NCAA was restricting the compensation colleges and universities may offer student athletes who toil away on their fields. It is now more than room and board–and free sneakers.
What will be interesting is to see how technology accelerates the economic process. What happens in the next few years when tech entrepreneurs jump into the money vortex. Take Oklahoma State’s efforts put a QR code on their football helmets to promote NIL. The NCAA said there will be no scanning today. Is this tomorrow’s court challenge?
“As we enter this new age of college athletics, the Big 12 Conference welcomes the opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation and creativity,” (Brett)Yormark (Big 12 Commissioner) said. “I look forward to partnering with the NCAA and my fellow conference commissioners in an effort to modernize legislation that enables our schools to drive value for our student-athletes.”–ESPN
And then there is unaccounted blitzer, the 12th man so to speak, Congress. The only play Congressi calls from is its playbook of late is the Punt. If there were penalties in Congress they would be continuously flagged for delay of game. They cannot sort out a federal budget. College Football could really get more mucked-up in the next few years if those knuckleheads get involved. Just look at what they have done at the border and with abortion. Dose College Football want Congress calling plays from DC.
And then what happens in the next 10 or so years when TV contracts come up for negotiations. The way technology is moving who knows what is next. Maybe AI will generate all future games. We won’t need to pay players or coaches because we want need them. Maybe then universities can get back to what they were intended to do: Educate.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalism.asp
https://www.bakertilly.com/insights/ncaas-restrictions-on-compensation-ruled-a-violation
https://www.history.com/news/how-teddy-roosevelt-saved-football
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