Beware of California pay-for-play law for ‘student’ athletes

Our universities should be wary of legislation in far-off California that could cost their sports programs untold millions as the student-athlete myth vanishes.

We once believed – or at least pretended – that college attendees who played for sports teams were in fact students who just happened to be athletes, playing only for the love of the sport and the glory of the university.

Today, that fiction is history. New legislation in multiple states has made clear that college teams include hired hands who also must go to class as a byproduct of their sports jobs. Some are also true scholars, but that is by chance.

Recent legislation in Florida and elsewhere allows pay for sports stars for use of their name and image. It also makes recruiting of college players more professional.

And now comes the burial of the student-as-athlete myth. California’s state assembly last week voted to require universities to use all new revenue generated by sports such as football and basketball to pay players in cash.

The past weekend’s Wall Street Journal reports that the bill that’s headed for state senate action could give athletes a slice of tens of millions of dollars yearly. The report says individual pay would be up to $25,000 a year now, plus a share of whatever remains in the sports revenue fund when they graduate.

It may be minor league pay, but it’s real cash – in fact, $25,000 yearly is about what a Double A minor league baseball player gets, with no future leftover payout. In professional football and to a lesser extent basketball, the university teams are the equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues.

Considering that university players get room and board, food, tuition, books, transportation payments and more, plus new pay for their images and names as well as endorsement compensation, the image of the starving student is the last thing that fits athletes.

There are even ongoing legal battles over whether college sports players are entitled to the minimum wage and other worker benefits, which Florida this year denied to minor league baseball players.

It’s fair that big-time college sports players get paid, because it’s clear these young men are on the job on the campus.

In fact, a case could be made that they need not graduate or even go to class. They are hired to play. If they don’t want to struggle to learn, that shouldn’t bother their employers. End the fiction of “students” and admit they’re just playing on the team.

But what players on university teams must do to earn their pay isn’t the issue. Rather, it’s how universities can run athletic programs as cash cows if California passes this law and it spreads around the nation, as it almost certainly would.

That law would share future sports revenues above the 2021-22 level among university athletes, with none of the revenue increases going to the schools. If campus sports spending were to rise, as seems likely, while revenue to schools were frozen at past levels, profit-making sports could become money-losing enterprises.

This could be significant at the University of Miami, where a $100 million football operations center is in the works today.

Moreover, the California bill would split all the money for university athletes in a politically correct manner – half for men, half for women – though women’s sports generate significantly less income. That could also factor into sports funding issues on campus.

In 2010, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics reported a need for major reforms in college sports finances, findings that are inescapably true today but that have been bypassed by the new realities of pay for athletes.

The commission, formed in 1989 by Miami-based James L. and John S. Knight Foundation, found in 2010 after an 18-month study that annual spending per athlete at the top 103 university sports-oriented schools rose from $61,218 in 2005 to $84,446 in 2008. We can only image what that level is today and where it will end up once added sports revenues shift from universities to the athletes themselves.

While per-athlete spending was $84,446, by the way, per-student spending was only $13,349. It was easy to see where these schools were oriented.

Unfortunately, with all that sports spending, the study found, only five of the top sports schools broke even on athletics over a five-year period.

Universities have for years said they compensate for financial losses on athletics with alumni funding because of sports. Two Florida International University presidents have told me that.

“Nothing brings alumni back like athletics,” former FIU President Mark Rosenberg once said. “It’s a major part of the university’s identity.”

Now, that major identity bedrock is on the precipice of a seismic shift in California in an earthquake that could rock the academic world across the nation. University athletic conferences have hired lobbyists to battle athlete pay efforts. Financial and policy studies on local campuses are vital today.