College and Olympic Sports Need Rebuilds. Why Does Only One Get It?
Today’s guest columnist is Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State.
The American sports ecosystem is at a crossroads. The Olympic and Paralympic Movement gets it. Why don’t universities?
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Two very different policy conversations are happening in Washington, D.C., right now about the future of American sports. The first involves U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Movement stakeholders and seeks to leverage Congressional interest in elite athletics to reimagine what youth and community sports in this country could be. The second showcases leaders of institutions of higher education trying to prevent any more disruptions to the business of college football—and they want Congress to make that happen for them.
The year 2024 could very well be a landmark one in American sports policy, thanks to the work of the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics (CSUSOP). In the spring, ahead of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, the CSUSOP will be releasing its final report and recommendations to Congress. Under the leadership of co-chairs Dionne Koller and Han Xiao, what the commission seeks is no less than a complete overhaul of the American sports ecosystem.
The Amateur Sports Act, passed in 1978 and amended in 1998, charges the USOPC and the national governing bodies of each sport with a dual mandate: serving participation in both a narrow apex—high-performance, elite, Olympic and Paralympic sports; and its massive base—grassroots, community and youth sports. In Capitol Hill testimony last September, I explained that the many pressures to prioritize top-of-pyramid success coupled with the absence of funding or incentives to support grassroots have meant that the USOPC has only ever been successful in fulfilling half of its dual mandate. The commission seeks to show Congress that the federal government holds the responsibility to correct this failure of public obligation as well as the power to overhaul the American sports system, making it one of sports for all.
While the CSUSOP has embraced an optimistic, future-looking agenda with a clear plan forward, college leaders are operating in a parallel dystopian universe marked by anxiety, fearmongering and claims of ruinous disaster, and are closed off from the world around them. They are asking Congress for help in regulating the business of the sports industry operating on their campuses so that schools have more power to control how money from third parties goes to athletes, and so that athletes cannot be classified as employees or paid directly by schools or conferences.
What college leaders are saying to Congress also runs the risk of serving as a textbook case of doublespeak: Their words and actions tell two different stories. While they ask for antitrust exemptions to restrict and limit athlete economic actions, they do not ask for similar protections to place restrictions on athletic department spending and coaches’ salaries or buyouts. The University of Kansas recently doubled Bill Self’s base salary and threw in all sorts of additional perks to make him the country’s highest-paid basketball coach at (at least) $13.7 million this season. Just a few days after KU’s announcement, Texas A&M fired Jimbo Fisher and now owes him approximately $77 million to not coach its football team.
Meanwhile, because the NCAA works for the schools and does not serve as an oversight check on their actions, we have witnessed the abrupt demise of an entire athletic conference this year, when the Power Five auto-cannibalized and the Big Ten and ACC became coast-to-coast megaconferences spanning four time zones (and the Big 12 nearly became so). The picking apart of the Pac-12, perhaps more than anything else in the history of college sports, shows that schools are fine with causing deleterious consequences for athletes in other sports as they pursue football money.
As the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee ponders holding what would be the 11th hearing on NIL, Senators should look to schools’ actions—and NCAA inaction—rather than listen to their lobbyists’ words.
As an educator, it is hard to not become frustrated when leaders of American institutions of higher education, who claim to be the generators of best-in-world innovative solutions to the world’s problems, choose to defend and continue a jerry-rigged and unsustainable business model—all because they don’t want to touch college football.
Big-time college football is intimately, deeply intertwined with the industry of higher education. What is at stake for American universities is far more than a desire to maintain the status quo in the business of big-time college sports. Tinkering with college football exposes fault lines across the entire industry of higher education, because it has long been too dependent on the sport to serve many parts of its enterprise: fundraising, alumni engagement, infrastructure projects, maintenance of good relations with state legislatures, and, most of all, the marketing bit—selling the idea of what it means to go to college to American families. And in a political moment when higher education has been besieged, football still serves as an apolitical force (at least with respect to state politics), uniting fans and government officials across the spectrum.
Because of their fixation on football, university presidents are missing that they have an out. The CSUSOP’s ambitious redesign plan provides them with an opportunity: to restore within sports the community-serving function at the heart of higher education’s mission.
The stakes here are high, because universities are running the risk of losing their status as guardians of American U-23 sports. If schools’ actions continue to show that they prioritize university business interests—making sure football players aren’t employees or paid directly by them—over the real work of serving students’ and communities’ sporting and educational interests, the NCAA may lose the privilege of presiding over college sports. (It is not much of a leap to imagine a future in which USA Track and Field, for example, runs college national championships along with the others it already operates.) And colleges may lose their tax-exempt status for all the sports offerings on their campuses, not just football, if they do not start teasing out and making clear the different sports industries they operate. That football industry has long been professional, of course.
As former UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Holden Thorp recently warned at a college sports symposium co-hosted by Duke and UNC, higher education is toying dangerously close to tax fraud. And, “when the chickens come home to roost,” it will have massive repercussions rippling out from athletic departments to all of higher education.
That’s what happens sometimes when you run to Congress for help: The wrong public official might peek under the hood.
Victoria Jackson is a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University. She is a former NCAA champion and retired professional track and field athlete.
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