Business as Usual: Big Time College Sport and Inequality

Business as Usual: Big Time College Sport and Inequality

by Richard C. King and David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan

On December 6, 2011, amid the jubilation of students and alumni, fanfare from the marching band, and media hype, Washington State University (WSU) presented its new football coach to the public.  After four losing seasons, the announcement that a proven winner would take the helm had Cougar nation in a frenzy, excited by the high scoring offense and return of fun to the Palouse.  Much of the media coverage echoed fan sentiment: With headlines like "Why Mike Leach is Awesome” and “Leach is a Dream hire,” journalists and pundits alike celebrated the bold decision making of Athletic Director Bill Moos and the promising future of the once great program.   

Apparently, the unfolding sex abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse, the play of Ndamukong Suh, and the NBA labor agreement have exhausted the always-limited critical powers of the sport media and sport fans alike. Even in a social moment seemingly primed for connections between sport and society, few, if any public voices seemed willing or able to do so: the short lived outrage sparked by Taylor Branch's “The Shame of the Game” a scant two month earlier had no lasting resonance, no place in public discourse. In fact, when framed critically for students on campus, our classes reacted with indifference, if not hostility. 

Two fundamental issues are lost in the hype, pleasure, and possibilities surrounding the new hire: the racial politics of college athletics and the increasingly inadequate resources devoted to higher education.  Indeed, the hiring of Mike Leach exposes the workings of higher education in stark terms, highlighting the ways in which the status quo simultaneously perpetuates economic and racial inequality and masks structures of power.

   

Fifty years after integration of it began in earnest, big time college athletics remains one of the clearest of examples of racial inequity and racist exclusion in the United States.  Historically white colleges and universities exploit black bodies for publicity and profit.  Although black athletes have dominated football for decades, few coaches and fewer administrators are African American.  Efforts by organizations like Black Coaches and Administrators have made a difference to be sure: African American head coaches have rise from 1 in 1979 to 25 at the start of this season and today 31 of 260 offensive and defensive coordinators (11.9%) are black.  The recent firing of Turner Gill at the University of Kansas not only reduces the total number of active head coaches, but reminds us how limited the success of black coaches is: only one black coach (Tyrone Willingham) has been hired after being fired as a head coach (see here for additional information). The hiring of Mike Leach thus fits a broader pattern.  Historically white universities headed by white Athletic Directors, such as Bill Moos at WSU, tend to hire white coaches. 

Arguably more troubling is how Leach was hired.  The search committee appears to have been Moos, who wanted to make a bold statement about Cougar athletics, increase attendance and alumni interest, and make the program relevant again.  This too resonates with prevailing practices in college athletics, ranging from unilateral hires to selecting internal hires groomed for the position, and virtually ensures the unbearable whiteness of college coaching, where the failure to take measures to cultivate and promote a diverse athletic leadership, it is unlikely it will ever materialize.  This has nothing to with overt racism and isn’t a question about the intentions of any individual.  Rather priorities and preoccupations render such questions largely unthinkable, and when asked they are deflected by defensiveness about “how race doesn’t matter” and how he was “best qualified person.” In the end, don’t we need to reflect on why, how and the significance of candidate pool being overwhelmingly white?

In its most recent Annual Hiring Report Card, the BCA gave WSU a C for its hiring practices. No doubt, the fait d'accompli hiring of Leach would receive an F. But one might wonder when did grades ever stop fans and alumni from enjoying college football.  As with the larger shifts in our society that has resulted in further economic inequality, even more evident as we examine persistent and worsening racial inequality, we are struck by the symbolism here of the a millionaire white coach profiting off the labor of black players even while the students, faculty and staff at the university are left behind by tuition increases, worsening working conditions, and a culture defined by budget cuts.        

As with much of the 1%, Leach’s salary far exceeds that the 99% of faculty and staff at Washington State University.  Earning an astounding 2.25 million dollars per year, Leach is set to become the third highest coach in the Pac-12.   Compared to the average associate faculty members’ salary, who makes $74,700, the disparity in income is significant.  The gulf between faculty and college football coaches is a relatively new phenomenon.  For example, in 1969, the head coach at Oregon State University earned $24,000, while the school’s president earned $34,500 and the dean of the college education brought home $29,760.  As of 1986, salaries had not increased significantly, with the average NCAA football coach earning roughly 150,000.  Beginning in the 1990s, this changed with the norm slowly becoming over 1 million dollars.  Obviously faculty salaries have not increased on similar levels.  The income gulf evident between football coaches and faculty is emblematic of larger inequality that defines that relationship between the 1% and the 99%.  In “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Joseph E. Stiglitz reflects on this historical shift 

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.

The same shift and income inequality that is evident in society at large is visible with the income gap between college football coaches and everyone else. 

According to the Sports Business Journal, the athletic budget for Washington State University increased from $37.0 million in 2010 to $38.5 in 2011.  For 2012, the budget was set at $39.3 million, representing a +6.2% increase.  And this was all before the hiring of Mike Leach.  If we can examine these numbers within a larger history, it is clear that a disproportionate amount of revenues and much of costs are associated with the football program.  Michael Oriard, in Bowled over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, Washington State football generated almost 10.5 million in revenue (as part of 38.2 million in total revenues for all of athletics), yet it spent 7.5 million (the athletic department spent 38.2 million).  And that was before Mike Leach. 

On the heels of endless chatter about overpaid NBA players being tone deaf to the economic difficulties facing the NBA and the nation at large, the absence of a conversation about the salaries of college football coaches is particularly revealing.  On the heels of widespread demonization of teachers and other public employees as overpaid and pampered, the absence of a sustained discussion of investment of public colleges and universities for football coaches is telling.  Like state investment in prisons (in California, the 5 highest paid state employees work in prisons), the investment in collegiate sports is a testament to our collective priorities. The expenditures and the silence from the citizenry, media, and institutions illustrates the values of a society, one that puts profits over people, that puts victories over education, and one that puts the potential of a successful football program ahead of anything else. 

While the hiring of Mike Leach focuses our attention, to make this about Leach or even WSU is to miss the point, misconstrue our analysis and misdirect our energies.  The erasure of context, the dissolution of structure and power within media spectacle, and the seeming impossibility of critique are systemic and systematic, just as with the case in the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.  In the end, this is not a commentary of Leach or other individuals but instead priorities and values, inequality and divisions.  It is as much about a media that flocks to campus for a press conference while failing to give attention to the meaningful issues facing of all us.  It is about a campus that unreflectively celebrates what it all means for us, that rarely is encouraged to think about us beyond the sport team and never asked to determine what it all means. It is a reminder that amid the 99% at America’s universities, football coaches are the 1%. 

 ***

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop(SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @DR_DJL.

Could Dr. King Watch Big Time College Sports?

Could Dr. King Watch Big Time College Sports? Race Beyond Shame

by David Leonard and C. Richard King | NewBlackMan

In “Shame of College Sports,” legendary American historian Taylor Branch turns his college sports in this month’s The Atlantic.   Focusing on the profits generated through college sports, the lack of power available to student-athletes, and the absurdity to claims of amateurism and student-athletes, Branch exposes the exploitation and hypocrisy that is as much part of the NCAA experience as March Madness and Bowl Games.   Almost hoping to disarm critics who often scoff at ‘slavery analogies,’ Brand avoids that comparison instead embracing one that centers on colonialism.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

Providing readers with an amazing history, including the origins of the term student-athlete (as part of a systematic effort to avoid paying workers’ compensation claims for injured football players) and illustrating the methods used by NCAA and its partner schools to maintain the illusion of amateur sports all while raking in the dough, Branch surprisingly avoids the issue of race.  The colonial analogy notwithstanding, there is virtually no discussion of the racial implications in this system, the larger history of the NCAA in relationship to race, and the ways in which white racial frames help to justify an acceptance of such a system.  

Branch seems to point to the racial implications here in a section entitled, ““The Plantation Mentality,” where he quotes Sonny Vaccaro:

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

The reference to the “Plantation mentality” and the explicit acknowledgement that the bulk of profits are generated within sports that in recent years have been dominated by African American athletes generates surprisingly little discussion of the radicalized political economy of college athletics today.  Over a decade ago, D. Stanley Eitzen observed

These rules reek with injustice. Athletes can make money for others, but not for themselves. Their coaches have agents, as many students engaged in other extracurricular activities, but the athletes cannot. Athletes are forbidden to engage in advertising, but their coaches are permitted to endorse products for generous compensation. Corporate advertisements are displayed in the arenas where they play, but with no payoff to the athletes. The shoes and equipment worn by the athletes bear very visible corporate logos, for which the schools are compensated handsomely. The athletes make public appearances for their schools and their photographs are used to publicize the athletic department and sell tickets, but they cannot benefit. The schools sell memorabilia and paraphernalia that incorporate the athletes' likenesses, yet only the schools pocket the royalties. The athletes cannot receive gifts, but coaches and other athletic department personnel receive the free use of automobiles, country club memberships, housing subsidies, etc.

To our minds, then, Branch clearly  misses an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the system is built around generating profits through the labor of young African American men.  Those profits – the billions of dollars earned through television contracts, merchandizing, video game deals, concessions, booster donations, ticket sales – find there way into the hands of overwhelming white constituency, coaches and athletic directors, in support of a largely white establishment. 

Much of the money generated by football and basketball programs funds those other non-revenue generating sports; those that are not only overwhelmingly white but also reflect a larger history of segregation and inequality.  That is, the labor of black student-athletes pays for sports that many African Americans have no chance of securing scholarship in because those sports are not available in high school.   

In “The Color Gap in Girls' Sports,” Sara Clarke Kaplan highlights this inequality, comparing the sports offered at Washington D.C. schools compared to those Arlington County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, concluding that whereas D.C. (and most urban school districts) offer “varsity basketball, volleyball, softball, and track for girls” those neighboring suburban districts offer the “big 4” along with “soccer, field hockey, tennis, swimming, gymnastics -- even crew.”  According to studies, roughly 85-95% of suburban youth play sports, compared to 15-25 percent of those living in urban areas.  EuroAmericans play high school sports at far greater levels (more sports=more opportunities) than African Americans and therefore have a greater chance of securing a scholarship.  According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, “African-American females represent less than 5% of all high school athletes, less than 10% of all college athletes.”

We can see a similar reality with boys sports, with golf, tennis, volleyball, baseball, lacrosse, and countless others.  The pipeline to a college scholarship comes from America’s suburban public school and private school; yet, it is the profits generated from football and basketball that pays the ticket for those other athletes.  Indeed, without the labor of black athletes in college football and basketball, support and subsidies for other sports would wither away.  Importantly, it is this radicalized labor, moreover, that enables more elite or rarefied sports to thrive on many Division I campuses: on the one hand, black athletes subsidize white privilege; on the other hand, they make it possible for many schools to recruit and retain white student-athletes, arguably making historically white institutions more competitive in their efforts to attract white students.

And here, the historian of Civil Rights Movement misses a fundamental connection between those struggles for freedom and the bondage of the black student-athlete.  The most prestigious and profitable college sports programs in the country are all historically white institutions, some which resisted for decades efforts to integrate them. Now, ironically, even as these ivory towers remain disproportionately white, they happily exploit those too long excluded and marginalized.  Moreover, these white dominated institutions of higher learning still refuse to properly educate African Americans.  Where, historically, it was the color bar, Jim Crow, and separate-but-equal that enabled them to avoid their obligations, today, it is the primacy of on-field performance, overt and covert efforts to discouraging thinking and learning, and the threat of losing one's scholarship.  Graduation rates for black athletes should remind us how little interest or care most institutions of high learning have for their black student-athletes: it as if most colleges and universities regard them as chattel that can be easily replaced with another disposable body.  This pattern of denying access and blocking education attainment, same as it ever was, multiplies the exploitation. 

Big time college sports feeds on a system of primary and secondary education that under-educates African Americans, skimming of the most talented, while rarely giving the communities from which they corm and to which they will return a second thought.  The NCAA has structured a system in which coaches, scouts, and administrators are all too happy to channel the dreams and desperation of young black men who often have no other options and nothing to fall back upon but their bodies.  In the process, they not only reinforce tacitly the notion of black physicality--in contrast with white intellect, but they also strengthen racial hierarchies, including the barriers that have kept African Americans from participating fully as students and as athletes.

But then, perhaps, this should not surprise us.  The very notion of amateurism and its later complement, the student athlete, emerged as meaningful social and political forces during an era in which intercollegiate athletics were almost exclusively white only spaces--and in the case of amateurism elite white spaces.  And importantly, both constructs took shape to contain threats to big time college sports: amateurism to rebuff scandals and corruption, the latter to squash the rights of athletes.  The invocation of the ideals (if that is the right word) often works to contain threats to the status quo and do so by cleansing or forgetting the radicalized history of the NCAA and sport more generally in the USA. 

In post-Civil Rights America, African Americans now find themselves awkwardly crowded under ill-fitting ideas of the past, but try as it might big time college sport cannot hide the proliferation of racial hierarchy.  One need only glance at studies of stacking and until recently the paucity of black quarterbacks to see the truth; but it is perhaps more visibly seen in the small numbers of African American coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents.  Big time college sport may be one of the few domains in American life where the people with most experience in pursuit have the smallest representation in its management and leadership.

In responding to Branch’s piece, Kenneth Shropshire points to the missed opportunity in expanding upon the colonialism analogy when he writes, “Colonialism was shrouded in, "Europe knows what's best for Africa, and by colonizing them we will guide their savage ways toward ours."   The ubiquitous references that celebrate college sports as a place of discipline, as a place of teaching values, “seasoning,” maturation, enlightenment, and otherwise HELPING student-athletes points to a larger history encapsulated by the ideology of white man’s burden.  The celebration of college sports as a vehicle to secure the “American Dream” and to secure the requisite skills and discipline needed to excel in society reeks of colonialism and race given that (1) it is so often used in reference to African American athletes, and (2) because it is used as evidence of the compensation provided to those excelling in revenue sports. 

White owners and overseers then, white administrators and coaches now: in both cases systems of slavery.  To return to Eitzen,

Slaves, by definition, are not free. The slaves of the antebellum era did not have the right to assemble or petition. They did not have the right to speak out or freedom of movement. Those conditions characterize today's college athletes as well. The NCAA, schools, and coaches restrict the freedom of the athletes in many ways. By NCAA fiat, once athletes sign a contract to play for a school, they are bound to that institution. They make a four-year commitment to that college, yet the school makes only a one-year commitment to them. If an athlete wishes to play for another big-time school, he is ineligible for one year (two years if his former coach refuses to release the athlete from his contract). Yet, if a coach wants to get rid of an athlete, the school is merely bound to provide the scholarship for the remainder of that academic year. Coaches, on the other hand, can break their contracts, and immediately coach another school… The right to privacy is invaded routinely when it comes to college athletes…Freedom of choice is violated when athletes are red-shirted (held from play for a year) without their consent. Athletes may have little or no choice in what position they play. They may be told to gain or lose weight, with penalties for noncompliance. Coaches may demand mandatory study halls and determine what courses the athletes will take and their majors.

While we, with Eitzen, acknowledge that the analogy between athletes and slave can be "overdrawn," we remain mystified that did not foreground the racial politics of big time college sports.  Even if only an element in his larger analysis, discussing race would surely have produced a more hostile reception and may have led some to dismiss his reading of the NCAA now.  As it, "Shame of College Sport" affirms common sense understandings of the racial contours of contemporary American life, allowing most Americans, the NCAA, and sport off the hook precisely when we should insist on engagement, equality, and inclusion.  Dr. King would expect nothing less of us.

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press). Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan and blogs @ No Tsuris.

C. Richard King is the Chair of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.