Sports Media Review by Jonathan Weiler

Tuesday, January 2, 2007
10:51:00 PM EST

A Few Items:

  1)      from the DVR backlog on my TV set, ESPN’s “Top Five Reasons You Can’t Blame…” covered the issue of paying NCAA athletes. Specifically, ESPN offered five reasons why you can’t blame the NCAA for not paying them. “You Can’t Blame…” is a hit or miss show, but one of its virtues is that it often covers substantive issues and its primary goal is not so much to resolve an argument as to add to it. The five reasons for not blaming the NCAA on the issue of athletes’ pay are as follows:

5) Title IX makes it impossible. If athletes from revenue sports (essentially, men’s basketball and football, with some exceptions) received pay, the threat of law suit would hang over the NCAA.

4) Paying athletes would only escalate what is already a disturbing arms race among major programs for the services of top high school athletes

3) There’s no Donald Fehr or similar figure to organize effectively and agitate for the rights of NCAA athletes.

2) The college presidents, not the NCAA itself, have all the power.

1) The athletes are getting paid, in the form of a free education, which host Brian Kenney described as “priceless.” And, in concrete dollar terms, the average annual cost of an education at a public institution is $12,000 and at a private institution, $30,000.

Five and four seem like reasonable arguments to me. Number three is silly – an opportunity to repeat the shibboleth that Donald Fehr alone controls baseball (one talking head described Fehr as personally canceling the World Series – it was, unquestionably, a mutual affair between him and Selig), while missing the larger point: the NCAA would never accept recognizing college scholarship athletes as legitimately subject to collective bargaining. Whether they should, or not, is a matter of debate, but the lack of leverage of NCAA athletes vis-a-vis the universities, conferences, and the NCAA itself is itself a product of the structure of college athletics, which the NCAA controls far more decisively than the athletes. </>

Number two strikes me as one of those arguments that, while technically correct, fails to address the key issues – whose interests does the NCAA, practically speaking, represent – the conferences, universities and athletic departments – or the athletes? I think it’s pretty clear the answer is not the latter.

Number one is really just a re-statement of one side of the debate as if it’s a definitive answer to the debate. It’s certainly true that, looked at from one perspective, the provision of a full scholarship to attend college is a great gift which could pay a lifetime of dividends regardless of whether an athlete progresses to the next level of his sport. But, from another perspective, it’s peanuts compared to what the universities, especially at the elite athletic schools where the big-time sports are generating enormous revenues. And, this disparity – between the cost of a scholarship on the one hand, to the amount of money that the sports’ stakeholders are reaping on the other hand – is only becoming more obvious. The $40 million dollar contract that Alabama is currently dangling in front of Nick Saban highlights that disparity. Furthermore, given the questionable commitment of many of the major programs to their athletes’ education, the isn’t-a-free-education-great argument sounds more like political spin than a substantive argument.  

As I said, ESPN’s “Top Five Reasons…” is not trying to resolve an argument, so much as add fuel to a fire, and I respect the spirit in which the show is produced. It happens that they don’t always have five good reasons for whatever they’re arguing.

Anyway, it’s good fodder for sports junkies.

  2)      Speaking of sports junkies, The Washington Post is doing an in-depth series on what went wrong with the Redskins’ season, with two six-screen feature articles and numerous other supporting pieces on the debacle that was the 2006 season. DC is a football-insane town. I lived there from 1987-1989, and I can imagine only one other city in America being as singularly obsessed with its pro football team as Washington – Denver. When I lived in DC, the Sunday night local news led off with the Redskins (and this, recall, is the nation’s capitol, where, presumably, other significant happenings merit attention by the news media). Norm Chad, whom most of you would know as the color commentator on ESPN poker broadcasts, was then a sports media columnist for the Washington Post. Chad was a funny and gifted writer and one column I will never forget was his assessment of the ten different weekly television shows devoted to Redskins football. That’s right – ten. Every week. Before the advent of 1000-channel cable television, satellite, the internet, etc. </> <>Football is, of course, big everywhere these days, but I still believe there is no more fanatical football city in America than DC (notwithstanding the arrival of a major league baseball team a couple of years ago), and the Post’s Watergate-like expose of what’s gone wrong this year – one of the six-screen articles is devoted exclusively to the strained relationship between Joe Gibbs and his hand-picked offensive coordinator Al Saunders - is a reflection of that fanaticism.

3)      At the risk of dividing the attention of my vast audience, there a new website – sports media watch. It focuses more on ratings and media trends, but also tackles substantive issues, particularly related to race and media coverage, and it’s well-written and informative. For example, here’s today’s post on the murder of Broncos’ cornerback Darrent Williams – titled “Murder, Hip-Hop and Hypocrisy.”

It's worth checking out.

 

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