A Note on Cardale Jones and the NCAA

🔖 Patrick Minton on Apr 12th, 2016

Recently, Cardale Jones had some choice words for his old employer exploiter, the NCAA:

Recently, on the BBALLBREAKDOWN podcast, former college hoops player Luke Bonner joined coach Nick and expressed many of the same thoughts. The topic often came up that Luke wasn't necessarily advocating that colleges pay athletes, but didn't understand why the NCAA prevents athletes from using their own names and likenesses to make money. Why can't, for example, a player go to an autograph signing session, or write a column for Sports Illustrated, or do a commercial for a local Car Dealer?

Actually, I know EXACTLY why the NCAA forbids this. And sadly, it does, in fact, have everything to do with why Cardale wasn't paid. It's because the NCAA must vigorously defend the idea that players are amatuers. Johnathan Weiler said something interesting about this:

As the NCAA has framed it, commercial exploitation of athletes happens when they receive any compensation above the cost of the grant in aid. That bizarre, inverted understanding of ‘exploitation’ is, in turn, premised on the NCAA’s insistence that, by definition, ‘amateurs’ cannot be exploited. As soon as college athletes do receive compensation above and beyond the grant-in-aid, they are no longer amateurs, according to the NCAA. At that point, they are being exploited.

In other words, the association’s conception of commercial exploitation is necessarily predicated on its untenable formulation of amateurism.

I often complain that people never use the phrase "Begging the question" correctly, and then people ask me, "Ok, smarty pants, what's the correct usage?" Well, the NCAA has come to the rescue!

To beg a question means to assume the conclusion of an argument—a type of circular reasoning. Example:

Me: Why don't you pay your players?

NCAA: Because our players are amatuers, and amatuers don't get paid.

If you are one of those people who still are not convinced that the NCAA's refusal to pay athletes is exploitation, and are trying to understand the NCAA's "unfair" rules, then you need to understand this: all of those rules exist purely to prop up the ludicrous and tenous assumption that all of its players are amatuers. If, for instance, the NCAA had ever allowed Cardale Jones to take money for his jersey's sales, or to do a commercial for a car dealership, or to take money for an autograph session, then this would have provided legal precedent for the fact that a) Jones' name and likeness was, in fact, worth money and b) that Jones was, in fact, a professional, which, to borrow the NCAA's language, means that he was, "by definition", not an amatuer.

Everything (EVERYTHING) the NCAA enforces has the sole purpose of buttressing their legal position that all NCAA players are amatuers. It's the "slippery slope" argument. Except, in this case, it's more like the "slippery cliff", because only intellectually dishonest people truly believe that the NCAA is an organization composed entirely of amatuer players. The NCAA is not worried about its athletes being "exploited" by the local car dealer or the newspaper or ESPN, but rather, it is worried about maintaining its own ability to exploit the athletes.

A couple of last important notes: if you are raising your hand to talk about your buddy in the fencing program who is "clearly" an amatuer, you are about to commit what we call a "straw man" argument. Yes, there are many college athletics programs that make no money and that are filled with amatuers. Their existance does not magically mean that Texas Football or Duke Basketball are teams full of amatuers. Also, if you bring up Title IX, I'm going slap you with wet chicken broth noodles. The vast majority of colleges are currently not compliant with Title IX.

 

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