I don’t recall what Greg Sankey’s salary was in 1996, when he was elevated to his first executive role in college sports as commissioner of the Southland Conference. But I’m certain that the increase in his remuneration from then to now, when he serves as commissioner of the SEC — the richest and most powerful conglomeration in the college sports industrial complex — is far greater than that of the athletes over whom he has lorded have realized during that quarter-century.
Yet Sankey and Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff flew last week from their headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., and greater San Francisco, respectively, to Washington to meet with Capitol Hill lawmakers. Sankey and Kliavkoff traveled to the nation’s capital to plead with legislators to regulate what college athletics bosses like them feel is a seismic disruption to their business: the ability for the laborers who generate college sports’ billions of dollars in revenue — i.e. athletes, who have made commissioners, athletic directors and coaches millionaires many times over — to take agency of their athletic celebrity and turn it into their own income.
The tool college athletes leveraged to secure some modicum of equitability, in what is far more than the mere fun and games we camouflage as March Madness and the College Football Playoff, is called name, image and likeness — or NIL. It was a change to NCAA policy approved less than a year ago as the public embarrassment of financial inequity in college sports became almost too much for supposedly high-minded educational institutions to bear.
Profligate spending, of course, long has been as much a part of college sports as pep bands and coaches’ polls. But Sankey and company became so concerned about NIL and its beneficiaries that they didn’t even wait to hear back from lawmakers. On Monday, the NCAA moved on its own to crack down on what it sees now as some sort of renegade movement it made possible last June. College sports’ honchos couldn’t wait for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spend lobbying on Capitol Hill to kick in.
None of this would be problematic, of course, had the lords of college sports just been fair brokers in the first place. But they weren’t. Never have been. Still aren’t. NIL was born only after lawsuits, most notably the class-action challenge from former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon that found the NCAA had violated U.S. antitrust laws by not allowing athletes to get a share of the revenue generated from the use of their images in broadcasts and video games.
NIL gave college athletes for the first time a chance to exchange their status as Big Men and Women on Campus for things like endorsement deals without suffering some trumped-up charges from the college sports kleptocracy called the NCAA. In short, basketball and football players (and their nonrevenue peers) could now sell jerseys with their names and numbers on them, too, just like the swag shop on the campus drag. Or front for the local sandwich shop or pizza joint. And they hopped on it.
NIL is for athletes’ pockets, though. It is absolutely no skin off the noses of Sankey, Kliavkoff, athletic directors such as Ohio State’s Gene Smith — who gets bonuses for how well the football team performs on top of his $1.5 million salary — or the football coaches who get windfalls if their athletes garner a top-50 ranking.
NIL does not provide sharing of revenue. It does not deliver workers’ compensation. It does not offer long-term health care — unless its returns are used by the athletes to purchase coverage.
NIL, in other words, does not guarantee anything that the college athletic operators should be doing on their own. This is a good time to mention that Kliavkoff’s Pac-12 in March announced it was moving out of its San Francisco office and not renewing its building lease to save its schools upward of $7 million annually in rent. I won’t wonder whether that savings will be disbursed to the schools’ athletes.
But not yet a year into NIL, college athletics’ bosses want to control it, manage it, restrict it. Yet, for as long as anyone can remember, for as long as some onlookers have complained and some insiders such as retired college president Charles Young have cautioned, college athletics’ bosses haven’t controlled their own spending or managed or restricted their own salaries.
“We got to stop complaining,” Notre Dame basketball coach Mike Brey told reporters this week at the ACC spring meetings. “This is the world we’re in. Last time I checked, we make pretty good money. So everybody should shut up and adjust.”
No one does disingenuousness like those who run college sports.
The argument to lasso this newly created college athlete freedom is ostensibly because boosters — those funders of all the extras that athletic departments like to dole out and who have garnered rogue reputations over the years — are now pooling their money into what are being called collectives to attract the best football and basketball players to their favorite schools. Somehow it’s unfair that one State U. may have more collectibles than another State U. No matter that they’ve been doing all of it before — and not even necessarily in less profligate ways.
And adding to the gall of this hypocritical hand-wringing is the overwhelming imagery of who is profiting from whom — and who is desperately trying to control it. What Sankey and Kliavkoff looked to be doing was leading a charge of White men who have benefited the most from this college sports system, in which the cogs are mostly and disproportionately young Black males.
This is a systemic issue. What Sankey and Kliavkoff’s visit to D.C. last week represented, and what the NCAA quickly decided to restore, was vestiges of the old status quo.
