Trying to brag about the UW as a world class academic school, Reuven tried to compare the academic standing of #1 ranked NCAA football team, The Alabama Crimson Tide, to the academic standing our own UW Huskies with a football team at #4. Reuven picked the wrong campus … UA Tuscaloosa is the home of the Crimson Tide.
Historian Taylor Branch famously detected “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation” in college football. This officially “amateur” sport generates nearly $3.5 billion a year, but the young men who play the game–predominantly African American—don’t see a dime of it. Yes, they get tuition, room and board, plus lots of Nike, Adidas or Under Armour gear (making them walking advertisements), but they’re essentially free labor. We call them “student athletes,” but the athlete part always takes precedent over the student part.
There is another issue that Reuven might have considered: Racism.
As Time Magazine quoted, there remains “an unmistakable whiff of the plantation’ in the NCAA game.” While the UW administration has tried heartily to make the UW “look like” the United States, 40% of the African Americans on our campus are on athletic scholarship. If you are black kid on the UW campus, the first question your fellow students have is “what team are you on?”
Senator Carlyle comparison of the UW with UA Birmingham was actually reasonable. UAB is Alabama’s highest ranked academic school but it is so bad at making money at football that three years ago Ray Watts, the UAB president, decided to terminate the football program because it was financially insolvent.
The numbers really looked bad. Like UW, UA Birmingham is a well funded university, including a world class medical school that runs Alabama’s major health care system. UAB. like UW, makes money. However, the UAB had been subsidizing roughly two-thirds of the athletic department’s operating budget. CarrSports Consulting found that UAB athletic expenses would grow to $38.5 million by 2019 while revenue would increase by less than $1 million. Despite their best win loss record in a decade (6-6) and the team’s first taste of bowl eligibility since 2004, UAB became the first major college football program to shut down since 1995.
When football was cancelled, the town went wild in anger. The business community raised $27 million. The football program was saved. President Watts told reporters. “Without that additional support, we could not have maintained a balanced budget moving forward.”
The race issue is real at Alabama because UA and other southern state universities are trying hard to overcome their reputation of being schools for jocks. Time magazine tells a fascinating story of Brianna Zavilowitz, a Staten Islander with 2120 SATs and a 4.0 grade-point average, daughter of a retired N.Y.P.D. detective and an air traffic controller. Brianna, with zero interest in pledging and middling enthusiasm for football, chose to attend the #1 ranked Crimson Tide over University of California, Berkeley, or Columbia University.
Alabamians are now just 43 percent of the student body at UA. UA is spending $100.6 million in merit aid, up from $8.3 million a decade ago and more than twice what it allocates to students with financial need. UA has hired an army of recruiters to put Bama on college lists of full-paying students who, a few years ago, might not have looked its way. This is especially true at UAB where the athletes, largely African American, have pushed for an effort to recruit African American scholars to their school as part of the effort to restore football to Birmingham. A similar revolt happened at the University of Missouri. Black kids recruited to Husky stadium like rebellious gladiators brought to the Roman Coliseum, threatened to withhold their labor in solidarity with the Black Live Matter efforts by students.
Here in oh so white Seattle, the UW should think seriously about how we could balance athletic recruitment by a balanced, nationwide effort to recruit divers academically superb student scholars.
“African American representation on the field does not mirror that in the classroom. Non-Hispanic whites make up 58 percent of undergraduates while black students constitute only 14 percent. According to a 2013 University of Pennsylvania study on racial inequity in NCAA Division I sports, only 2.8 percent of full-time degree-seeking undergraduates were black men. By contrast, black men comprise 57 percent of college football teams, on average. At some universities it’s over 70 percent. At Mizzou it’s about 60 percent. Most college football coaches are white; only 11 of the 128 Division I head coaches are black; you can count black university presidents in Division I on one hand. A new report from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports shows that under 10 percent of head coaches in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision are black; 87 percent are white. The people in charge are white; the football workforce, whose success the university brass depends upon, is black. It was only a matter of time before a major college team decided to exercise its considerable economic power and refuse to follow orders. When the Tigers said they wouldn’t take the field, a chill surely went down the spines of power conference presidents from Ohio State to Florida State, Oregon to Clemson, the athletic boosters whose multi-million dollar business model depends on free labor, and the NCAA honchos determined to defend the “amateur” purity of college football from demands that players share the revenue.”
“…… Now imagine if football players at the University of Alabama decided to skip practice until they got a commitment from the administration to recruit more African American coaches? What if the University of Mississippi’s Rebels had refused to take the field while the state flag, with its Confederate emblem, flew over it? Or maybe football players in Florida could refuse to play until the Republican presidential candidates who keep homes in the state–Trump, Carson, Rubio, Bush and Huckabee–pledge that if they’re elected, they won’t deport the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. What if two of the CFB playoff teams won’t participate in the championship unless the NCAA comes up with a system to fairly compensate them for what is now unpaid labor reaping millions of dollars for everyone except the boys on the field?
Most young men don’t play football to advance social justice. They love the game; it gets them a full ride to college. A few of them–2 percent–may even go on to the sign fat NFL contracts. One white player who did not support the Missouri boycott told ESPN, “If we were 9-0 this wouldn’t be happening.” Fair enough. Maybe it takes a 4-5 team to risk their scholarships. Nevertheless, the Tigers took a stand. It worked. The college football industrial complex has now been shaken right down to its artificial grass roots.”
The UW’s coach, Chris Petersen, earning over $3 million a year, brags that he’s building a unique finishing school for athletically gifted young men. I know he is right. UW Coaches Romero (basketball) and Petersen are people we can be proud of. The problem is not the coaches, the problem is the system. There is a lack of a parallel effort to make the UW great by recruiting outstanding scholars, esp from the groups represented so well the athletic field. The truth is that, like all big time college athletic programs, the UW is a preprofessional program aimed at the tiny number of kids, disproportionately from underserved minorities, who aspire to the NBA or NFL. While a few student athlete exist and coaches Romero and Peterson do a lot for those kids, the program is all too similar to the baseball camps in the Dominican Republic. To get more insight you might read about the experience of Anthony Washington as a UW athlete.