As professors, we’re paid to read the tea leaves, and few days go by when the NCAA isn’t the topic of discussion (usually critical) along with cynical blogs, click-bait blasts and stinging lawsuits. For lack of a better phrase, this association of nearly 1,300 colleges and universities is equal parts enigma and polarizing lightning rod.
But while we’ve seen a lot of negative flak fired at the 109-year-old NCAA about financial windfalls, educational purview and debates on athlete compensation, there’s been little written about the coin’s other side.
So we wanted to ask, Has the objectivity pendulum swung too far? Is it possible to turn the blowtorch down for one day and emphasize the NCAA’s attributes? Can we write about holistic good (namely, that the organization helps more than 450,000 student athletes receive some form of financial assistance to attend institutions of higher learning) without appearing soft?
Maybe.
So, in honor of David Letterman’s retirement, we decided to present a top 10 list that shades the NCAA in a slightly different light:
10. The NCAA is the envy of the rest of the sporting world. While many of us critique and overanalyze the NCAA, the rest of the world wants to emulate the American model of elite athletic development. Why? Because the NCAA is an unmatched sport development engine for elite athletes. Just ask anyone who works with young athletes from Australia, China or Canada. The U.S. Olympic Committee doesn’t win anywhere near the 100 total medals it probably will score at the Brazil 2016 Summer Games without the NCAA.
9. The NCAA is the choice of many of America’s largest sponsors. One of us was just part of a research team (led by Ron Seaver of the National Sports Forum and Jim Kahler of Ohio University) that presented findings from a study that interviewed 50 sponsors. More than a third (34 percent) said collegiate sports give them the biggest bang for their buck in sponsorship. That was the No. 1 result in the findings.
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NCAA championships, like the Women’s College World Series, are among the top television properties in the U.S.
Photo by: AP IMAGES
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8. The NCAA is one of the top television properties in the United States. It is ESPN’s No. 1 programming focus, with significant annual dayparts allocated to football, basketball (both genders), lacrosse, baseball, hockey and softball.
7. The football playoffs, held for the first time in 2015, were an unequivocal success: big ratings, big visibility and big payouts for numerous schools that offer hundreds of scholarships. We understand the conferences and College Football Playoff run the proceedings, not the NCAA, but those are NCAA athletes scoring those touchdowns, so we’ll give the NCAA partial credit on this one.
6. The NFL, NBA and WNBA all appreciate the NCAA’s pre-developing of major brands like Marcus Mariota, Jahlil Okafor and Breanna Stewart. They also appreciate it was the NCAA who took on Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
5. If the NCAA were broken up (or didn’t exist), the economic laws of capitalism would reshape American sports in ways most practitioners can’t imagine, and, we’d argue, that would mean fewer resources, less structure, less control and less success for many. In short, sports would become much more privatized and access to sports more costly.
4. There is no reason for the month of March without March Madness. Seriously. There is no NFL; the NBA and NHL are winding through their seasons still, not yet to the playoffs; MLB is in spring training; and MLS is just at the early part of its season. Heck, even NASCAR has already run its biggest race of the year and is left pointing toward its late-season elimination series.
3. There are now less than three months remaining until college football returns to various stadiums (large and small). You (as an individual) may not like football, but mainstream Americans really like college football. If you doubt us, check the numbers.
2. Few places in America are better than Baton Rouge on a Saturday night. Or Collegeville (Minn.) on a Saturday afternoon. Or Grand Forks (N.D.) when the Fighting North Dakotans are playing ice hockey. Or anywhere in Iowa during a collegiate wrestling dual. Or Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina or Storrs (Conn.) when a basketball rivalry is heated. Or Utah when gymnastics is on.
1a. If it wasn’t for the NCAA, how often would Title IX have been discussed in the last 40 years? We dare say, a lot less.
1. Did we say that the NCAA was the envy of the world? Yes, we want to emphasize this and give it the No. 1 spot. Every day in meeting rooms of the 200-plus other jurisdictions of the world where a national Olympic committee functions, we hypothesize the NCAA is mentioned with a jealous tone, such as “All our top athletes go there,” or “If only our post-secondary system were like that.”
We know it is fashionable to bash the NCAA. It is big, slow-moving and bureaucratic at times; even overly ambitious. But at the coalface, we continually see excitement created with each 10-0 Harvard football team and with each upset by a Wisconsin of an undefeated No. 1-ranked Kentucky. And we see the joy on the face of every collegian who was told in high school he or she wasn’t good enough to play in college.
On the business side, we acknowledge there are issues with the operations and funding of college athletics, but we also ponder the alternatives. Would nearly half a million student athletes get to play high-level sports while being given the opportunity for a free (or reduced-cost) education without the NCAA? Would the high standing of colleges and universities in North American society drop by a noticeable amount if the NCAA didn’t exist? (We think it would.)
So we’ll end our rant here by asking a simple question for others to debate: Is it not better for fans to support universities (and show interest in higher education) than for them to shower approximately 140 professional team owners with more cash?
Discuss, and have your papers typed up by Thursday.
Rick Burton (rhburton@syr.edu) is the David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University and SU’s faculty athletics representative to the ACC and NCAA. Norm O’Reilly (oreillyn@ohio.edu) is the Richard P. & Joan S. Fox Professor of Business and chair of the Department of Sports Administration at Ohio University.
