The charade in college basketball
STOP the pimping. Big-time college basketball and football are professional to the point of predation as universities and the media make billions off "amateurs" who cannot get paid. It is time to drop the hypocrisy and pay the players.
The latest reason has been provided by the University of Kentucky. It hired basketball coach John Calipari away from Memphis, paying him $31.65 million over eight years. His total compensation involves a web of millions of dollars in agreements the university has struck with shoe, athletic-apparel, and soda companies as well as marketeers of broadcast rights.
The athletic department says (as UConn Final Four basketball coach Jim Calhoun recently asserted in his famous tirade defending his $1.6 million salary) this is no problem because it is self-sustaining, sucking nothing away from educational resources. University of Kentucky President Lee Todd behaved less as a CEO of higher learning than as a stupefied gnome counting his treasure.
"If you have a coach who's charismatic, who can really help the marketing image of the university, he will generate more money for us than the differential pay that we've had to go up to in order to get him," Todd said.
So Calipari gets millions because universities bank on millions more from companies that make billions more still from unpaid amateurs who model gear on TV and ring up baskets on scoreboards that flash more ads and sponsorships than Times Square. Many of these amateurs are African Americans playing their way out of poverty, only to stay in relative poverty as they caddy the Caliparis into their country club memberships.
The student athletes do this for mere room and board, but football coaching salaries in the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences average $2.2 million, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The highest-paid employee of any private college in the nation is University of Southern California football coach Pete Carroll at $4.4 million. Basketball coaches in the SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, Big East, and Pacific 10 conferences average $1.2 million a year, according to USA Today.
In Kentucky's case, Calipari gets $31.65 million, two new cars, and the country-club membership of his choice without having yet won an NCAA championship and leaving behind mediocre NCAA graduation rates at Memphis and UMass. Meanwhile, the University of Kentucky is reeling from $33 million in budget cuts over the past two years, last year eliminating 188 jobs and forcing a tuition increase of 9 percent. Proving how things rot from the head down, Todd last year took a $95,500 bonus.
But this is less about picking on Kentucky than cracking the illusion of the student-athlete. USA Today this week reported the 2009 NCAA basketball tournament generated $591 million in television and marketing revenues. Sales of college sports apparel are $4.3 billion a year. In the last two years, 37 schools sealed multimedia-rights deals worth $1.7 billion, including $110 million each for Ohio State and Nebraska and $80 million for UConn.
The University of New Mexico and San Diego State allow casinos as advertisers and sponsors. Kansas has a $27 million apparel agreement with Adidas. Maryland, just like any NBA team, sold $25 million of arena naming rights. On the same page as its coverage about this, USA Today had an ad for the ESPN college slam-dunk and three-point shooting contest, sponsored by State Farm,
Yet the players cannot touch these billions swirling around them. Recruited for scholarships given to them less for study than to be a stud, if these players accept so much as a figurative candy bar from a booster or talk to a pro agent too soon, they are drummed off campus. Ask former UMass star Marcus Camby. And we know how so few of the biggest programs graduate so few athletes.
That is textbook exploitation. Sports gear sales and media deals would make the Fortune 500. It is sad enough how the recession further exposes the gulf between klieg-light sports and dim budgets for the classroom. But if we're to remain addicted to college sports, at least pay the players. America is outraged Wall Street went wild, GM got lazy, and Bernie Madoff made off with billions. But when colleges teach Pimping 101 at the Final Four, what do you expect?
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
