The end of amateur hour

Incoming Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby rocked the world of college athletics last weekend with a radical statement: College athletes, he argued, should not be paid.

OK, so maybe that’s not entirely true.

Bowlsby’s announcement barely made headlines, appearing either in brief wire reports unceremoniously crammed into the back pages of sports sections or as an afterthought in long conference realignment articles.

But while the new commissioner’s opinion might not be particularly newsworthy, the fact that he had to come out and make the statement in the first place is. The idea of player compensation -- once considered blasphemous in collegiate athletics -- has not only become a legitimate topic of discussion, it has drawn the commissioner’s attention in one of the nation’s top athletic conferences.

As the college athletics industry has become more and more lucrative, a chorus of protesters has risen in support of the player-pay movement. Journalists, coaches and even historians have come out on the controversial issue with passion and in numbers heretofore unseen.

South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier, for example, has volunteered to pay football and men’s basketball players $3,500-$4,000 per year, out of pocket. His SEC colleagues have backed him up on that claim.

“We as coaches believe they're entitled to a little more than room, books, board and tuition,” Spurrier told Sports Illustrated.

Others have come out with even more extreme rhetoric.

“Two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence -- “amateurism” and the “student-athlete” -- are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so that they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes,” historian Taylor Branch wrote in The Atlantic last fall.

Branch’s point, though argued more vehemently than usual, is the most common argument for paying college athletes: The idea that there is something inherently wrong with a system that makes billions of dollars based on the labor of unpaid workers. It’s compelling for many people, but the court of public opinion appears to remain unconvinced.

How do we know? Here’s the thing -- many schools violate NCAA rules and do pay their athletes. But when they get caught, these coaches and institutions are largely decried as cheaters rather than praised as revolutionaries. Kentucky head coach John Calipari, who has been implicated in several scandals involving paid players, is considered less a modern-day Robin Hood and more a scammer of the system.

Part of this reaction is undoubtedly due to the severe sanctions the NCAA levels on any school that breaks its rules; no fan likes to see major programs declared ineligible for tournament play and barred from recruiting. But the sentiment goes beyond that. We like the idea that everyone plays by the same rules, and discontent with this particular rule has not the reached critical mass needed to sway the public opinion.

For player-pay advocates, a more utilitarian argument may be in order.

Third-year Milwaukee Bucks guard Brandon Jennings, one of the NBA’s most dynamic scorers, shocked basketball fans across the nation as a high school senior by electing to play in Europe rather than attend the University of Arizona for a year.

While Jennings’ experience was far from a walk in the park, he earned a fat paycheck for a year immediately out of high school and showed up in the NBA ready to run with the pros. The controversial star hasn’t quite opened the floodgates of American high schoolers in the European leagues, but the success story is undoubtedly in the minds of blue-chip prospects in the U.S.

Colleges, of course, wouldn’t be able to match the paydays offered by European squads. But offering something might be enough to deter future stars from taking their talents overseas, or even from leaving school after one year.

Of course, the change would come with challenges. How would paid athletes work under Title IX? Would athletes in more lucrative sports earn more? How would the work be taxed?

All these questions and more will remain unanswered for the foreseeable future. But the fact that conference officials are being forced to defend their positions on this issue signifies a massive shift in college basketball discourse. And before too long -- for better or for worse -- the era of the amateur college athlete might be over.

Pat Curran is a Summer 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.