Relying on Congress to fix college sports is a road to nowhere | Opinion

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To take the leaders of college sports at their word, they are facing an existential crisis that can only be solved by a piece of legislation getting through the United States Congress.

Can you imagine executives of any other thriving business in this country admitting the same thing out loud? 

Instead of owning the embarrassment of being unable to do the most essential function of their jobs, college athletics administrators are now fully committed to farming out the regulation of their industry to a legislative body that is very good at holding hearings and grandstanding on the back of the NCAA but not so great at solving problems. 

With another round of legislative ideas and bills being raised in the U.S. Senate — one Wednesday by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and another Thursday by a group that includes Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., — it’s worth asking what gives college administrators such faith that Congress will be able to do their job for them? 

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It can’t be the three-year track record of NCAA president Mark Emmert going to Washington and asking for help on name, image and likeness “guardrails,” only to see nothing get done. It can’t be the built-in partisan divide that makes it difficult to get 60 votes in the U.S. Senate on just about anything. It can’t be the reality that Congress has far more urgent priorities from inflation to climate to election security to health care. 

So why are college administrators so sure that they’re in line for a legislative bailout this time? There are even gleeful whispers that if Republicans take back Congress this fall, it might lead to an antitrust exemption, put caps on how much players can earn, limit their ability to unionize and a variety of other goodies administrators would love codified into law.

Not only is this magical thinking, it’s a dereliction of duty for people who view themselves as leaders to hand off regulation of their own industry to others. 

It's time to do your job

How about this instead? Do your job. That’s it. If name, image and likeness, transfer portal and athlete’s rights are too much for you to handle, go find something else to do and put some grown-ups in the job who aren’t afraid of solutions. 

There has been nothing more pathetic in the last five years of college sports than hearing commissioners, athletics directors and top NCAA officials — all of whom are making ridiculous amounts of money — try to position themselves as helpless while whining that the inconveniences brought on by expanded college athlete rights are unsustainable. 

It’s true that things are changing quickly, escalated by a series of leadership missteps and bad legal strategy. By clinging to a notion of amateurism that was outdated and unnecessary, the NCAA made itself vulnerable to all kinds of lawsuits and a 9-0 wipeout in the Supreme Court last summer in a case involving the restriction of educational benefits colleges could offer athletes.

But it’s difficult to reconcile the notion that everything is awful and in need of Congressional rescue when the Big Ten is about to sign a media rights deal that could distribute $100 million annually to its members and $5 million is considered an insulting coaching salary in the SEC. College sports, in the big picture, are just fine. It’s the inevitable reallocation of resources from bloated coaching staffs and gold-plated facilities to athletes that is causing the problem.

It's past time for collective bargaining

When longtime college administrators say they do not have a problem with athletes being paid through name, image and likeness, why should anybody believe them? Most of these people like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey have worked in college sports for decades, served on every NCAA committee known to mankind and didn’t lift a finger for most of that time to expand economic opportunity for college athletes until forced at the point of a bayonet. 

Now, when that reality was foisted on them by state legislatures, they are complaining that differences in state laws have made it untenable.

“A national standard would mean that high school juniors and seniors and their families don’t have to sort through dozens of different state laws or institutional policies where state laws don’t exist,” Sankey said at SEC media days recently. “It’s an unfair way to treat young people making a college decision, and a common standard would allow them to have clarity around the rules and policies that govern their own decision-making and activity.” 

Beyond being a gross exaggeration wrapped inside unnecessary pandering — the differences from state to state are largely a matter of small degrees, and the opportunity to make money is not causing mass anguish for families — the laws aren’t the real issue. It’s the lack of control colleges now have over the marketplace for their players, which can only truly be solved by collective bargaining. 

State-by-state NIL laws were only a means to an end to get the NCAA to change its rules. Now that those rules have been changed, the laws are pretty much irrelevant. Until the moment the rules are set through collective bargaining like they are in every other professional sport, the notion that NIL will be regulated successfully is a fantasy bordering on delusion. One way or another, money is going to get to players. 

That’s why it’s barely worth the energy to roll our eyes when you hear Tuberville, the former Ole Miss/Auburn/Texas Tech/Cincinnati football coach, prattle on from Capitol Hill about what he and Manchin will try to accomplish after their specifics-free announcement Wednesday. 

“We're going to take the month of August and try to figure out a way forward to make this even or as close as possible so everyone can be competitive and not just a few,” Tuberville said on the Paul Finebaum Show. 

There aren’t many Congressmen or women who know the inner workings of big-time college sports. For someone of Tuberville’s experience to cite competitive equity as a reason for legislative action is shockingly disingenuous given a current landscape whose inequity has nothing to do with NIL and everything to do with which conferences ESPN and Fox want to put on their airwaves. 

Meanwhile, there’s an effort led by several Senate Democrats to codify a "College Athletes Bill of Rights" that goes well beyond NIL into post-career health care, guaranteed scholarships and ensuring schools can’t restrict on athlete speech, which is far more expansive than what Republicans seem interested in doing. 

It makes no sense to expect there’s a common ground between those two positions that will result in something more meaningful than what the NCAA could do for itself if its leaders were motivated by something other than fear, greed and preservation of a dying system. 

If this is truly a crisis as we’ve heard suggested by commissioners and coaches from coast to coast the last few weeks, the time to act would be now. Relying on another round of Congressional promises is a road to nowhere. 

Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken