BY MARTIN KICH

This item appeared in yesterday’s Morning Education newsletter from Politico:

NCAA LOSES ANTITRUST LAWSUIT: The unanimous decision from three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means that the NCAA must allow costly educational benefits and even cash awards for student-athletes.

— The ruling falls short of the push for college athletes to be paid for playing sports. But it marks a serious legal setback for the NCAA, and could open a new frontier in college sports as the big-money group calls on Congress to help protect its business. The court also determined that allowing colleges to offer graduate school scholarships, study abroad opportunities, tutoring and equipment is reasonable.

— “When college sports return, there will now be a fairer system in place where the football and basketball players in D-1 and FBS football can receive much greater education related benefits and academic achievement awards,” said Jeffrey Kessler, who represented the student-athletes in a lawsuit named after lead plaintiff and former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston. “Hopefully this will be extended to other deserving athletes as well.”

— “We hoped for a different legal conclusion by the Ninth Circuit. We argued and believe the lower court’s ruling is inconsistent with both Supreme Court precedent and the Ninth Circuit’s own decision in the O’Bannon case,” said Donald Remy, the NCAA’s chief legal officer, in a statement.

— The ruling could reach the Supreme Court. The case is part of a legal strategy by an organization of current and former players who want to use federal antitrust laws to challenge NCAA rules that limit compensation to student-athletes. Read more from Juan Perez Jr. and Leah Nylen.

I have no idea why, but this item suddenly made me think about the issue of whether college athletes ought to be paid, which has all sorts of ethical and fiscal dimensions, from a somewhat different angle.

In practical terms, only the universities in the Power 5 football conferences will be able to afford to pay players, and even some of those universities who have been chronically relegated to the bottom half of the standings in those leagues may decide that their odds of ever competing have become too long to justify the escalating costs.

But let’s assume that we are left with 50 or 60 teams that can afford to compete for players and remain competitive. How exactly is the top tier of college football then different from the triple-A level of minor league baseball?

With the proliferation of one-and-out recruits to the top basketball programs, men’s basketball has been moving in that direction, but there is still some credibility in the notion of “Cinderella” teams advancing in the NCAA tournament. In fact, the one-and-out phenomenon has served, to some degree, to level the competition because four or five seniors who have little chance of making an NBA roster but who have played together since they were freshmen and have become a cohesive team can sometimes compete with and even defeat four or five NBA prospects who are all freshmen.

But in football, the possibilities of a “Cinderella” champion are pretty close to non-existent. There are six to eight times the number of athletes involved, and in the top programs, the depth is such that even the loss of a starting quarterback will not necessarily derail a team’s prospects of winning a championship. Before any season begins, one can try to predict the four teams that will be selected to compete for the national championship and have some confidence that at least three of the predictions with turn out to be correct. And if one were permitted to pick seven or eight teams from which the final four will come, the percentage of correct prognostications would amount to at least a high-B average.

For forty years, people have been arguing against college athletes being paid, but as college athletics has become a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, the pleas for maintaining the amateur spirit at the core of the competition have lost all resonance: that is, they don’t even ring hollowly any more.

The problem isn’t that college athletes are demanding to be paid. The problem is that everyone else is now getting paid so much that college sports, at the top level, have gone so far past their ostensible reason for being that there is no turning back. Or, there will be no turning back until the television audience catches on and the billions of dollars that the sport is generating from broadcast rights, merchandising, and endorsements start to go elsewhere.

I can’t prove it, of course, but I have the feeling that everyone involved in “big-time” college football knows that it is the equivalent of triple-A baseball, even if it is still being marketed as something different than and therefore not lesser than but even better than professional football.

The salaries of college football coaches in the Power 5 conferences are not much different than those of NFL coaches. Mike Gundy, who coaches at Oklahoma State and whose regrettable, if not sufficiently regretted, comments were featured in a recent post, is paid $5 million per year, and as the Sports Illustrated article on his comments points out, his teams have not had a .500 record in conference for several years. Given that college coaches have had roughly the same very limited rate of success at the pro level as college players have had, and perhaps even less, it’s yet another indication of a serious imbalance. Triple-A baseball managers don’t earn anything close to what MLB managers earn.

The nostalgia for what college football once does still drive a remarkable amount of interest in and even passion for the sport, but at a certain point, it will start to seem increasingly contrived to more and more fans. And once that starts to happen in a more pronounced way than is evident now, I don’t see how it’s reversible.

ESPN is now televising Korean baseball games. I have seen newscast after newscast in which people have opined about how starved we are for sports programming and in which they have suggested that Korean baseball is a godsend when there is no Major League Baseball. I truly mean no disrespect to Korean baseball, but I have not tuned in to watch a single inning. And my acquaintances who are equally addicted to watching sports seem to be equally aware that the games are being televised, and yet not a single one of them seems to have tuned in either.

Some triple-A baseball teams consistently sell out their modestly sized stadiums, but there isn’t an ESPN channel devoted to triple-A baseball—even though there are several dozen ESPN and other cable channels devoted to sports, including one that features things such as Russian slap fighting. In case you have not watched this “sport,” two fat guys stand on opposite sides of a small but tall table and slap each other, in turn, very hard in the face until one of them cannot take any more of it. I watched it for several hours at a time, but then the novelty did finally wear off (probably much more slowly than it should have).

We are such a sports-obsessed culture that the history of sport has become almost more important to the culture than actual history.

But if history has taught us anything, it’s that nothing last forever. In the 1970s, television elevated college football from a largely regional to a truly national obsession. But, in the process, college football became inexorably a bigger and bigger enterprise. And the history of American business offers many examples of iconic enterprises that became so successful—so much more than what they had originally been conceived to be–that their eventual failure seems to have been almost inevitable.

I went to graduate school at Lehigh University, several blocks away from the original and main Bethlehem Steel plant, which stretched for three or four miles along the Lehigh River. Most of the furnaces and sheds are now long gone, and several of the buildings that have been saved and repurposed now house a casino-complex (because a casino alone is somehow not enough) and a museum. In the immediate postwar period, it had been one of the largest steel producers in the world, the largest producer of structural steel–an industrial behemoth.

Thirty years after its demise, there are a large number of department stores and malls that are in the process of being similarly repurposed.

Postscript:

It doesn’t seem as if it was quite that long ago, but in 2013, I wrote a post titled “How Big-Time College Football Is like Walmart” that attracted quite a bit of interest. I suppose that college football, American retail, and my own views have continued to evolve over the intervening years.

I just came across the article “Minor League Baseball Is in Crisis,” written by Robert Sanchez for Sports Illustrated. So perhaps I did not need to reach to the example of Sears. Triple-A baseball is an example in itself of what may happen to big-time college sports.