NCAA As Cartel

Last weekend, I watched the Longhorns' opening game of the football season (roommate and many friends went to Texas) and they were playing . . . the University of Northern Texas. Now, yes, as amateur sports apologists have been pointing out to be all week, Texas is matching up against some legitimate opposition this week. Nevertheless, the NCAA football scheduling process makes a mockery of the concept of competition, as seen in statements like "My Georgia Bulldogs won a tune-up game against I-AA Western Kentucky on Saturday."

This sort of thing is why I think we should give less credence than usual to "competitive balance" accounts of why it's necessary to pay NCAA-level atheletes at sub market rates. Malcolm Gladwell gets into the whole debate over whether or not caps do promote balance, but it's obvious that in its major sports the NCAA doesn't even take rudimentary steps to ensure anything resembling balanced competition. They've just set a very low salary cap -- theoretically, $0.00 per year, though everyone knows every program cheats to some extent --so that university managers can reap the profits.

Comments

The NCAA's method of promoting parity is through the use of scholarship limits. Forty years ago, the wealthiest programs could offer scholarships to all of the best players. Now, each school can only have 85 scholarship football players. That results in some good players ending up at mid-major programs. Of course, Ricky WIlliams and Cedric Benson, the two leading rushers in University of Texas history, were both non-scholarship players. The Phillies and Dodgers paid for them to go to college.

Posted by Brendon | September 6, 2006 10:39 AM

The NCAA is unreformable. The pro/am structure has no choice but to be insupportably corrupt. Folks who support NCAA sports by spectating are bad people. (You may think that last sentence is sarcastic, but it's not, just a bit hyperbolic.)

Posted by Petey | September 6, 2006 11:06 AM

There's nothing wrong with NCAA sports that couldn't be fixed with the addition of minor league basketball and football. The whole problem is that the two biggest NCAA sports are actually minor leagues that the cartels won't pay for.

There's no reason to decry NCAAA baseball, or NCAA hockey, because those guys had a choice between advancing their sports careers on the fast track (the minors), or getting a degree while on the slow track. If football and basketball guys had a similar choice, everything would be peachy.

Posted by dj moonbat | September 6, 2006 11:17 AM

Competitive balance as the raison d'etre for the NCAA doesn't hold water. I take Brendon's point, but 85 scholarships? 85 football players means every team goes almost 4 deep at every position. What if the scholarship limit were 25? (Or better yet, if there were a stipended scholarship level with every team being able to award 25, then 60 tuition only scholarships?...)

Also, these one-sided tune-up games exist becuase of the financial imbalance in college sports. Non-elite teams schedule games against elite teams, knowing they will almost certainly be wiped out on the field, in exchange for a good financial payday. In other words, Texas pays North Texas handsomely for the privilege of beating them like a rented mule. It's great for Texas to schedule a patsy in its opening game, too, because a college team can be terribly out of whack its first game. I remember a few years ago Texas opened against N.C. State (a Top 25 program many years) and lost in an upset, thanks to three blocked Texas punts. That's the kind of thing that can go wrong in Week 1 in college football. Clearly Mack Brown learned from the experience.

Posted by Dix Hill | September 6, 2006 11:24 AM

This post is entirely misconceived.

The fact that Texas plays North Texas has absolutely nothing to do with competitive balance. College sports don't exist as a single league with all teams attempting to win a single champtionship, as is the case with the NFL or NBA.

In college sports, there are a variety of different incentives that the various programs compete with respect to. Some teams want to win their particular conference. Some teams want to win a I-AA championship. Some teams want to go to a bowl game. There are only a select few whose goal is to win a national championship. Teams find their own level in college -- Harvard ain't trying to win the Rose Bowl. And neither is North Texas. They are trying to win their conference -- maybe in N Texas's case, get into the I-AA playoffs. And being financial sound (with is the purpose for N Texas to play Texas, as noted above) allows them to do so.

Moreover, for teams that ARE trying to achieve one of the harder goals - winning a bowl or actually winning the I-A championship, there are SIGNIFICANT sticks that create a competitive balance. For one, getting to a bowl game requires a team to beat a certain number of I-A opponents. Secondly, the quality of opponents goes into whether a team will play for a national championship (both as part of the formulas AND as taken into consideration when humans rank the teams).

I'm surprised at the poor quality of this post.

Posted by Al | September 6, 2006 12:12 PM

Petey is exactly right.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | September 6, 2006 1:39 PM

Al is right. In NCAA men's basketball, teams formerly had an incentive to load their schedule with easy home games. The NCAA perceived this and changed the selection criteria for the tournament to emphasize strength of schedule relative to wins. Athletic departments scheduled accordingly, reflecting competition, in the sense that they acted rationally to maximize their chances of getting to the tournament.

Football differs from basketball in that it doesn't have a tournament. A school like Texas that wants to win a national championship is going to need a perfect record, or to suffer only one loss. Texas has decided to maximize its chances of this by, inter alia, scheduling North Texas at home. This, too, is rational and reflects competition.

The real complaint here is that fans are not well served by the incentives that induce athletic teams to schedule as they do in football. I agree -- the imbalance of play is one of the reasons why I don't watch or care for college football. This is a problem not with the NCAA's role as a joint venture, but with the specific way that they've decided to run the football aspect of the joint venture.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | September 6, 2006 2:48 PM

There is no NCAA Division 1 Football Champion. Never has been, never will be. Because its hard for some folks to get their heads around that, there have been various ways over the years to decide who the best team is at the end of the season . . . but in the end that's just bragging rights.

There will never be significant minor league football in the USA. College Football is too popular. Their franchises have large stadiums, good facilities, and are prepared to pay the coaching and support staff much more than a start-up league. The costs of running a football program are large. College football has a large and loyal fanbase. Very, very few 19-21 year olds end up going to the NFL early. It doesn't make sense for the NFL to have a minor league for college age kids.

That said, there are in fact professional opportunities other than college or the NFL. There is NFL Europe, various Arena Football leagues, the CFL . . . but for example, the minimum CFL salary is $32,000 a year. In Arena Football its around $20,000. A full ride at UT is basically worth $20,000 per year(not counting any cheating money). So its not really hard to understand why atheletes choose playing at a NCAA school. They are compensated similarly to what they would make in the private sector and play in vastly superior stadiums, with better coaching and support. They have a much more devoted fanbase, and gain contacts that can be used in their non-sporting careers. Its a much better deal than anything realistically possible in the private sector.

Posted by William | September 7, 2006 7:01 AM

Univ. of North Texas.

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