At this point it's just under three weeks until the Aggies of Texas A&M take the field to begin their 2013 season. Like many college football teams, they are unsure who will be under center when they take the field on August 31st against Rice. The difference between the Aggies and those other teams is that they never anticipated their particular brand of uncertainty. While other teams lost their signal caller to the NFL draft or to graduation, theirs is of a different sort. When freshman sensation Johnny Manziel took over last year after Ryan Tannehill left for the Miami Dolphins of the NFL, fans weren't sure what to expect. They soon found out. Manziel was nothing short of magical in leading the Aggies to a very successful 11-2 season. A&M won the Cotton Bowl with a big game versus Oklahoma and Manziel walked away with the Heisman Trophy.
With that wonderful backdrop expectations for 2013 were sky-high in College Station. But now just a few weeks before the start of the season things have taken a dark turn. Manziel has found himself at the center of an argument that has been brewing for at least twenty-five years in amateur athletics. ESPN has reported that Manziel took money in exchange for signing helmets and other sports memorabilia. Although no one seems to have actually seen any money exchange hands, the NCAA is investigating and the Manziel family has hired an attorney to represent them in the matter.
Did Johnny Football take money for signing the autographs? We don't know yet. The NCAA will plod along, bank accounts will be checked for withdrawals and deposits and they will eventually come to a conclusion. Texas A&M will have a choice to make. Do they play Manziel and hope that he's cleared? If they do they risk vacating their wins and leaving themselves open to further NCAA sanctions. If they don't they risk playing a season in the toughest conference in college football without their best player. They can probably beat Rice on August 31st and Sam Houston State the following week without Manziel. It's the rest of the season that's in question. On September 14th Alabama comes calling, looking for revenge from last years loss to the Aggies in Tuscaloosa. And the schedule doesn't get a whole lot easier from there. Although they don't face anyone of the caliber of 'Bama (there is no one else of the caliber of 'Bama) they do face road games against Arkansas, LSU, Ole Miss and Mizzou and home games with Auburn, Mississippi State and Vandy.
However, no matter what happens to the eligibility of Johnny Manziel or the football fortunes of the Aggie nation this year there arises a much bigger question. Is it fair for the NCAA, universities themselves and licensing entities to make money off of the name of a college athlete while they make nothing themselves?
It's here where we have to leave the particular case of Manziel behind and focus on the larger issue. If Manziel has been found to be in violation of existing rules and it can be proven that he took money in exchange for his autograph he deserves to lose his eligibility. He would knowingly have violated existing NCAA by-laws. Fair or unfair, they were the rules that were currently in place when the events in question happened. However, whether Manziel plays what would clearly be his final season in College Station or not is immaterial. He's indicated that he isn't particularly happy there and since he was redshirted he would have satisfied the requisite three year span between high school and professional football. Whether he's ready or not both emotionally and mentally to face NFL defenses he will almost certainly declare himself eligible for the draft. So no matter what happens in this case the real impact will come from the firestorm that it's caused with regard to the amateur status of players and their ability to earn money for their efforts on behalf of the universities that they play for.
Let's examine for a moment why the amateur status even exists in college athletics. In the early part of the twentieth century very few people were college educated. The vast majority were men. The vast majority of those men were from families who could afford to pay for them to be schooled and for room and board and books. These were mostly the elite of society, the blue bloods. College was itself a fraternity. If one played a sport and was interested in continuing to play that sport it would have been unseemly to have accepted money to play it. That would have amounted to taking a part-time job, something that the majority of society men wouldn't have wanted to appear to do. As a result, the college sports team was born. Young men could represent their school, play the sport that they loved to play and compete against other young men from nearby colleges to uphold the honor and athletic prowess of their institution. There was a stigma against professional athletics at that time. Although America loved baseball and celebrated heroes like Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby and Christy Matthewson, playing baseball professionally and riding trains around the eastern half of the country was not something that most Ivy League young men were encouraged to do. Baseball players were loud, crude, rowdy men that came largely from lower class backgrounds. In golf, Bobby Jones chose to keep his amateur status rather than sully his reputation by turning professional and playing for money.
Over the last thirty years or so things have changed dramatically in college athletics and in America in general. There is no longer any stigma attached to professional athletics. Indeed, it's really just the opposite. Professional athletes are at least equal to, and in many cases above movie stars and TV stars in terms of popularity and marketability. There is also no stigma attached to making money from almost any source any longer. You served as a juror in a salacious, high-profile case? No one blames you for being unseemly when you sign a seven figure book deal three days after the verdict is read. Need a little free publicity? Make a sex tape and then make sure that it gets "accidentally" leaked to the media. Are you an attractive young lady who needs money to fund your college education? Hire yourself out as a companion to lonely older men. Not an escort, mind you. Just a companion. Has the money from your reality show pregnancy of eight babies run low? Make an adult movie and hawk it with appearances on the talk show circuit. The point here is really just that society doesn't look down on the ways that people decide to make money the way that it did forty years ago, much less one hundred years ago.
So maybe it's time to re-adjust our thinking when it comes to paying college athletes. What would be wrong with providing the young men (it would only be the revenue producing sports that could do this, so right now that's football and men's basketball)? Many of those who are opposed to paying college athletes like to point out that they are getting a free education out of the deal. While that is correct we've got to realize that it's not really all that valuable to a substantial segment of those who are participating in big-time college football. The only way that free tuition, books, room and board becomes a valued commodity is if a particular kid would go to college somewhere anyway. For a lot of these young men that is simply not the case. The sole reason that many attend college is to be able to be eligible to play football. If this is the case then the free college education isn't really worth much. For the kid who grew up loving Auburn football but isn't quite good enough to play at that level, a athletic scholarship to play at Appalachian State is an excellent deal. He's not going to play professionally, so for four years he exchanges his ability to play at that level for a free education and when he enters the job market in four years he benefits because he doesn't have fifty or sixty thousand dollars in debt facing him from day one.
Imagine this scenario; the NCAA sets up five division. The Division Two and Division Three would not look much different than they do right now. The three division at the top though, would undergo some fairly dramatic changes. At the top you'd have the Football First, Football Last, Football Always, Football Factory Division. These are the seventy-five to eighty-five schools that actually make money from their football programs, play in the major conferences like the Big 10, Big XII, SEC, ACC, PAC 12 or are named Notre Dame or BYU, sell out their games, make a ripple in the TV ratings water and sell serious dollars in apparel and merchandising. There may be a few more intrepid schools such as Boise, Nevada, East Carolina or Louisiana Tech that decide to join and there may be a few schools such as Vandy or Northwestern that decide not to fish in the deepest end of the pond. The next tier on the ladder would be a true amateur college experience, much like the one that we pretend that we have now. This would enable schools that don't have the resources to compete or pay for top-level prospects to still field competitive teams comprised of kids that are legitimately interested in playing college football and earning a college degree. The third tier is more or less like the Football Championship Subdivision now.
These schools would compete only with other schools in the Football Factory Division. They would pay players a stipend of $10,000 or $15,000 per year plus allow them to attend classes or live in the athletic dormitory and eat in the cafeteria just like they do at present. If the player chose not to attend classes and work toward a degree that would be his choice. Additionally, the player would be free to sign with an agent out of high school. That agent would be able to negotiate with the university for a percentage of the jersey sales directly attributable to him after signing his letter of intent. If you're Jadaveon Clowney and you're the #1 high school pick in America, you have one more thing to consider when signing with a team to play college football. If you're the Florida Gators or Clemson Tigers or Georgia Bulldogs you may have to sweeten the pot and give Clowney a larger share of the apparel licensing in order to lure him to your school because you know he's a heavy lean to South Carolina. The money would be invested by the agent on behalf of the player. A player like Clowney, a sure fire top ten NFL draft pick probably wouldn't be concerned by the potential loss of money over leaving the Gamecocks after his junior season. The NFL money would more than make up for it. However, if you're a three star kid who had only two or three offers out of high school who has worked hard to add weight or get faster and may get a shot at the NFL as a third or fourth round pick that jersey money might be enough to make you stay for a senior season. Is it crass commercialization of college athletics? Yes. Without a doubt. However, anyone who truly believes that college football (or basketball either) is an amateur sport is fooling themselves. The television rights to broadcast the games of just the major former BCS conferences is just north of $1 billion. That doesn't include things like re-braodcast and tier three rights.
The landscape of college athletics is changing. The conference realignment that has caused tectonic shifts in age-old rivalries over the past few years isn't over. The current playoff system to replace the BCS will no doubt be expanded. The money is just too great for that not to be the case. Would paying the players in these high profile programs $10,000 or $15,000 take the corruption completely out of college football? No. There will always be boosters with hundred dollar handshakes and offers of under the table money. However, it might reduce it to a considerable degree. If the agents, who are now part of the problem, suddenly become part of the solution because they've now got something tangible to protect the booster problem might begin to go away. Would an agent want to risk what could amount to several hundred thousand dollars in licensing money over a few hundred dollars from a booster? Of course not. The agent would want to protect his future investment and would rightly have a high level of influence over the player. The player is getting perhaps a thousand or twelve hundred dollars per month in addition to having no living expenses so they would be less apt to risk the loss of their eligibility and their claim to their licensing fees over a few hundred dollars from a booster.
We need to stop pretending that we're still living in 1922. There are literally billions of dollars being thrown around and the only people who don't derive any immediate benefit from it are the very young men who make the whole thing possible. Create a pay for play system that gives the players a stake in the game, separate the football factories from the other institutions who don't want be involved in the monetization of the sport, put the ball on the tee and let's get on with it. Whether Johnny Manziel ever plays another down of college football or not, we may have him to thank for being the straw catalyst that finally broke the pretend camel's back.
Stephen Walker writes blog articles on a wide range of topics. He is a novelist and short story fiction writer who writes for the Erudite Aardvark and other online concerns. He can be reached at stephen.walker@eruditeaardvark.com.
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