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Swarbrick: Treat athletes like all students

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick would like to see his peers return to fundamentals: Whatever standards apply to the normal student body should apply to athletes as well, even if that means athletes can get paid for their talents just like any other student.

The further colleges move away from that model, the more trouble they seem to find, Swarbrick said last week at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in New York. That stance puts Swarbrick in the minority of ADs who espouse a model that permits athletes to benefit financially from their likeness.

“You’ve got to ask yourself why the music student can go downtown and perform on Friday night and make whatever he wants, and the athlete is limited on that,” Swarbrick said. “There are some good reasons and some not-so-good reasons. But you have to start that analysis by asking why we’ve drawn a distinction between students and athletes.”

Swarbrick, one of 20 athletic directors who spoke during the two-day IAF, was asked whether any of his peers agree with him, and he smiled. “I don’t know,” he said.

Swarbrick’s panel focused on the future of Olympic sports and women’s athletics, but afterward he spoke at length about a future model for college sports that might involve elements such as group licensing for athletes. And for Swarbrick, the future means, to some degree, returning to the past when athletes were treated like any other student. And if any other students can make money from their talents, why shouldn’t athletes?

“Conventional thinking in these areas is not going to get us where we need to be,” Swarbrick said in the speakers lounge after his panel. “It’s the whole separation of the student athlete from the student body that’s at the core of our problem.

Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick
Photo by: MARC BRYAN-BROWN
“We spend a lot of time in our industry talking about student attendance at our events. We talk about Wi-Fi and all of the activities they have. But part of the challenge with student attendance is that they don’t see the players on the field or on the court as their classmates. They see them as a different category of students, and that’s not good. We don’t do that in any other way at a university.”

For an AD of Swarbrick’s stature to admit that he’s open to a model that would enable athletes to benefit financially, beyond cost of attendance, is a sharp contrast from most administrators. Swarbrick said his thinking on these topics is constantly evolving.

“It’s evolved a lot in the last few weeks, frankly, from talking to a lot of different people,” he said. “It’s just being open about it.”

Swarbrick said he would favor a group licensing model that would enable athletes to aggregate their rights, much like players associations in the pro leagues. He would stop short of an open market that would allow donors to pay an athlete simply for attending a school.

“Professional unions have been figuring this out for years,” Swarbrick said. “It’s not high math. You can get there, but it does require a mechanism like a group license. You can’t let that happen on an individual basis.”

Athletics, as Swarbrick and Duke AD Kevin White pointed out, have long since moved away from treating athletes like other students, so determining the right model for the future will require new thinking. Or it simply might come down to a judge’s decision in a case like Jenkins v. NCAA, which argues for a completely open market.

But there certainly doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how college athletics will arrive at its new destination.

“When I started out, I really felt I was an educator and had a chance to dabble in the entertainment side,” said White, who started in athletic administration more than 30 years ago. “Over these years, I feel like I’m now in the entertainment business, and I’m working like hell to hold on to the educational side. I really worry about where we’re heading. We’re becoming so commercialized. I have this fear that college sports will become semi-pro. I think that’s the biggest challenge we have in front of us, to save us from ourselves.”

Vanderbilt AD David Williams, a law professor, said: “Is college athletics in a crisis or [at a] crossroads? I say both. It’s a fork in the road, and we need to figure out which way it’s going to go. The easy answer is, we don’t know the answer to it. We’re trying to get it right. The crisis is that everybody is now in our business. Congress is in our business. The courts are in our business. The media’s in our business. Everybody is in our business because it’s now their business. Any time everybody gets in your business, you have a crisis.

“We’re going to have change done to us if we don’t do it ourselves.”

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