The NCAA men's basketball championship is one of the most captivating events in all of sports. The month of March descends into madness every year as 68 teams from universities across the country compete in a single-elimination tournament to crown a winner. The entire country, or at least the part that has any interest in sports, tunes in. Whether by watching the games on television or filling out a bracket online, millions of individuals make some sort of investment into high-profile college sports. Many do not even have a particular rooting interest; instead, it is the overall spirit of competitiveness that attracts old fans and creates new ones.
Some claim that the appeal of March Madness lies in the perceived amateur nature of the competition. In no NCAA sport are athletes officially paid to participate on athletic teams. They compete, according to the NCAA, for the sake of competing and not for personal monetary gain. This is why the term "student-athlete" is used by the NCAA to refer to any man or woman on a college athletic team, regardless of sport or position or school. For many student-athletes, such a designation is accurate the vast majority of participants in NCAA competition simultaneously undertake serious academic studies. However, at the highest levels of competition in collegiate sports, men's football and basketball, the term loses credibility.
Major sports powerhouses, like the University of Alabama in football or the University of Kentucky in basketball, maintain constant success by attracting premier athletes with full scholarships. Since these are athletic scholarships and not academic rewards, such institutions are acknowledging that the contribution they will receive from these student-athletes entirely revolve around the second half of the NCAA's favorite term. Many of these high-profile athletes take notoriously light course loads. For example, Matt Leinart, a former Heisman Trophy winner, was famously enrolled in only a ballroom dancing class for his final term at the University of Southern California. Furthermore, such student-athletes sometimes receive compensation through unofficial channels, normally wealthy alumni who serve as "boosters" and lavish star players with benefits off the books. Although the NCAA has implemented regulations and has enforcement capabilities to defend against such behavior, corruption in high-level college sports is a well-documented problem that makes a mockery of the idealistic concept of amateurism.
It is not a coincidence that the NCAA sports people care about, Division I men's football and basketball, are the ones plagued by these problems. The parties involved, mainly the major athletic conferences and their constituent schools, earn billions upon billions of dollars every year from television and merchandise revenues. The fact that none of this money is officially distributed to athletes, scholarships notwithstanding, is both unfair to players and a cause of the corrupt behavior that has tarnished college sports. Such a status quo creates two options for the NCAA going forward. The first is to continue to pay lip service to the concept of amateurism and withhold revenue from players in favor of schools and conferences. The second is to abandon amateurism as the central tenet of the NCAA's existence and start paying athletes for their services.
The second option is preferable. It would require that the NCAA acknowledge that amateurism is not its central tenet. This should not be too difficult, since it is already apparent that money, not amateurism, is the main focus of the NCAA. More fairly distributing this money would solve the corruption problem and improve the lives of players, who are the engine of the NCAA's success and deserve part of the fruits of their labors. The general public, in all likelihood, would not care so long as the high level of competition does not drop. Yet athletes at schools like Dartmouth, which do not field teams capable of making significant amounts of money, would remain unpaid. Would this be an injustice created by an effort toward fairness? Perhaps only in the minds of such athletes themselves an equitable compensation system can only reward those who contributed towards the money-making product. Any relationship that the State University of New York at Albany's women's soccer team, for example, can claim to the financial lucrativeness of the NCAA is tangential. Athletes who make millions for their schools should be treated as the employees that they are leave amateurism to everyone else.
