Naming rights: thoughts on the Ed O'Bannon NCAA case

I have been reading about the Ed O'Bannon vs. NCAA lawsuit with great interest, because the topic of compensation for college athletes often prompted long, heated debates among my sportswriting/coaching/administrative friends in college sports.

The agreement between school and athlete should be simple: one plays ball (or whatever the sport is) for the school, and in exchange that school promises to do everything it can to enable the athlete to achieve a legitimate college degree.

But of course, there is nothing simple about the NCAA and college athletics. In fact, I suspect the reality is that such a basic agreement never existed in college athletics at any time. The very premise seems flawed to me to begin with, in that schools are there to develop the best and brightest minds of our young people, so what does being the physically fastest and strongest have to do with that? But that's another (pointless) debate.

From the beginning, schools recognized that a successful sports team wearing the name of Enormous State U. across the front of the jersey brought a level of recognition that an academic institution could never achieve on its own. And that recognition produced more interest from potential students as well as more faithful (financial) support from graduates and 'fans.' So right from the start, schools were known to compete for top athletes regardless of their academic accomplishment or potential.

Go back to 1932 and the Marx Brothers' movie "Horse Feathers'' and you'll hear Groucho's character berate his college faculty, saying: “This college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education." My father, born in 1919, used to tell me about seeing guys who played for one school one year and then the next year would be competing for another school, selling their athletic ability to the highest bidder. Academic progress was never a consideration.

There is no question the monitoring of college athletics is far better than it has ever been. "Student-athletes" (to use the colloquialism of the NCAA member institutions) are actually now required to achieve a certain minimum standard to be eligible to compete at a four-year school, a standard that has risen periodically and that - despite outcries to the contrary - the athletes generally are able to raise their academic performance to meet.

And once in school, there are actual "academic progress'' rules intended to help athletes along toward that graduation (although I always did like the old coaches' response to the question "How many of your athletes graduate?" "Everyone that wants to.")

However, how far does an athlete sell himself in that play-for-education agreement?

That's the crux of several of the lawsuits the NCAA has found itself involved in recently.

The NCAA argues that it has absolute rights to all money-making associated with the athlete while that athlete is in college - including that athlete's ability to sign an autograph, offer pictures of himself, his ability being used as a component of a video game. If the athlete is successful, the school jersey bearing that athletes' number goes up in value; as does his teams' value to appearing on TV and radio.

In the old days, the greed of the fans and lack of academic oversight by schools forced the NCAA to step in and create so many rules. Otherwise, fans would be providing athletes with enormous benefits (money, cars, clothes, trips, girls) to both lure those athletes to the fans' favorite school as well as enable the fan to be seen associating with the young jock. The NCAA couldn't allow an open, free market on athletes, because only the biggest schools with the wealthiest fan bases would win.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how it is anyway. Why? Because those same fans, in their passion, can't bestow their gratitude upon individual players (legally), so they give to the school. They buy game tickets, season tickets, sky boxes, parking passes, and even make ever-larger donations in order to have the privilege of buying those things. The demand for the college game and benefits of a successful college team bring more "revenue streams" to college athletic departments. About the only individual who can truly benefit from this is the head coach, which is why college head coaches make professional-grade money - and are worth every cent, when you look at the revenue stream their programs produce for the school's athletic department and, by extension, university at large.

Quite frankly, I don't see how it can be legal for a school to tell an individual he can't profit from his name, his likeness, his ability, his marketability, and yet turn around and itself profit from those attributes of the individual. If there is anything each of us would seem to have exclusive rights to, it is our identity - not that we can't sell our identity away, but shouldn't that be our own, individual choice?

So, then, what do you do? If you let athletes profit from their identity, then the smart athletes will look to see what school provides the best opportunity to generate the most profit. Let's be honest: opportunities vary from school to school. The signature of a star athlete at, say, Lehigh is not going to be worth that of the signature of a mediocre athlete at the University of Texas, for a number of reasons.

In a free market system, athletes would be able to choose which offer from which school they feel is best for them, and then be free to profit from their own accomplishments (outside of ticket sales and broadcast revenue, which is negotiated not on the value of an individual but of the collective reputation built by scores of successful athletes and coaches). I have no problem with schools/conferences negotiation huge TV deals and selling season tickets for enormous sums of money and collecting outrageous contributions from fans without a dime of that money going to an individual athlete.

What I do have a problem with is the athlete not being able to capitalize on what he or she does do that is unique to them, meaning their individual ability, which in turn creates a value in their name and reputation and likeness.

Do all athletes deserve to be compensated? No. Track and field, tennis, swimming, rowing, lacrosse, rifle, equestrian, bass fishing, rodeo, rugby ... a host of sports sponsored by schools big and small do not generate the revenue stream of football and men's basketball (not even men's baseball or women's basketball, despite a growing popularity, comes close).

Yet schools are government entities, and operate by law under this idea of equality that says you can't discriminate based on gender or sport. In fact, most schools are forced to offer more scholarships for women's teams than men's teams despite women's sports not being nearly as profitable. Title IX and other laws attempt to force a certain equality that isn't really there.(Title IX became law in 1972, long before anyone imagined a time of multi-million dollar coaching contracts, broadcast agreements, rights fees, merchandising and naming rights). In fact, you can take that further and even say that a star football player at the aforementioned Lehigh is not worth the same as the star at Texas, at least not economically speaking.

So NCAA member institutions are caught in this no man's land, playing socialist institution on one side and free market capitalist on the other. To borrow a line from one of my favorite sports movies, "North Dallas Forty" (about a pro team, but the point is the same), when one side calls it a sport, the other side says it's a business; but when the first side then says OK it's a business, the other side calls it a sport.

The problem with saying a basketball player deserves more than they already get (and make no mistake, they are well taken care of between education, books, housing, meals, shoes, clothes when needed, expense money and, when warranted, spending money from the full amount of a Pell Grant) is that if you say you'll give basketball players more, then you will also be required to give more to the guy on a lacrosse scholarship, which isn't sustainable unless you devalue the basketball player in order to create value for rugby.

The NCAA has tried to legislate parity, just as professional sports leagues do. Unfortunately, while in professional leagues the value of each individual franchise can be pretty close (in a given year), colleges have a huge disparity in value -- which means if the NCAA allows the schools who can afford to offer greater benefits (which could be anything from spending money to long term health benefits), then it has to accept that some schools - perhaps the majority of NCAA schools - will be at a competitive disadvantage and many schools - and their fans - would just have to accept that.

But then, that's the real world. Established businesses can offer far better benefits than a start-up company. A Fortunate 100 company can attract a higher quality employee than the mom and pop shop on Main Street. Every start-up and mom and pop shop typically hopes one day to compete at the level of an Exxon or Apple, but until then, Exxon and Apple simply enjoys benefits they've earned by either being first in the field, or perhaps just simply better at "playing the game" than the competition.

The easy way is for schools to simply stop selling merchandise identified with individual players (which a handful of schools have done), stop marketing anything that highlights the individual athlete (isn't that the essence of "there is no 'I' in team'?")

But, as Michael Jordan once famously said, "there is an 'I' in "win."

The NCAA hopes no one remembers that.