Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America's
much-beloved games of college basketball and football are being
threatened. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on
coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff and
lavish comforts for fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the
players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the
labor of young men of color many of whom come from disadvantaged
backgrounds cannot be justified; and yet, American society has allowed
this intractable problem to fester for more than half a century. Lured
by the glitter of untold riches, naive young players enroll year after
year in colleges and universities expecting the ultimate reward of a
highly paid career as a pro. Only a minuscule few will advance that far;
even fewer will reap significant financial rewards. Instead of educating
them, colleges and universities force them into full-time athletic jobs
in which their labor is shamelessly exploited.
Small wonder that outraged critics demand compensation for the players,
but these same critics only present vague answers when asked how such a
radical change would work. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster,
first published as Marching Toward Madness and now newly updated,
cites twenty-one reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, among them
the prospect that the player talent pool will be concentrated to even
fewer rich schools; recruiting wars will lead to more frequent scandals;
and the regulatory powers of the NCAA will exponentially increase. Worst
of all, pay-for-play will encourage schools to shirk even further the
imperative to educate the young athletes.
College Sports on the Brink of Disaster presents comprehensive reforms
to end cheating and corruption in college sports, to put academics
first, and to end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.
