College football is still recovering from the shock of former University of Georgia quarterback Carson Beck’s $4.4-million agreement with the University of Miami. Beck has, as of last week, signed a deal that well exceeds what most rookie quarterbacks receive in the National Football League. While Beck at his best was an effective player for Georgia, he would hardly have been the top quarterback prospect had he chosen to enter the NFL draft.
There is no doubt that the advent of formal player payments is having a huge effect on college sports.College football has not seen anything like this before. Only a few years ago, collegiate athletes were forbidden to have compensation past scholarships, tuition, room, board, and laundry. Any other payments (called “under the table”) broke National Collegiate Athletics Association rules, and violations could land programs on NCAA probation.
(Note: Most of us who competed in NCAA Division-I sports did take something “under the table.” Live with it, readers.)
There is no doubt that the advent of formal player payments through name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals—along with a transfer portal in which athletes are free agents all of the time and can transfer from one institution to another without having to sit out a year—is having a huge effect on college sports. Coaches must now re-recruit many of their players to keep them from jumping ship and moving to other programs that are dangling more money in front of them. Coaches like the legendary Nick Saban, as well as Tony Bennett, whose University of Virginia Cavaliers won the NCAA basketball title in 2019, have retired in part because they did not want to negotiate the present athletics landscape on campus.
Because NIL is only about four years old and is constantly shifting, it is still difficult to declare any long-term patterns in college sports or in athletes’ relationships to the universities that sports teams represent. Furthermore, while many athletes are now receiving financial compensation over and above their athletic scholarships, they are not yet employees of the institutions whose names are on their uniforms. There are legal implications that go with that. For now, such players are still “student-athletes.”
But make no mistake: The presence on campus of athletes whose salaries dwarf what their professors, administrators, and even some coaches are making is going to influence how these different groups relate to each other. When Carson Beck tools around the University of Miami next fall in his famous Lamborghini, university personnel will deal with him differently than they would an ordinary student, and even more so than they would have done in the pre-NIL years. (And, had an athlete in previous years driven anything close to a Lamborghini, one can bet that NCAA examiners would soon have been searching for rules violations.)
One area in which we might expect to see changes is how universities discipline student-athletes for alleged sexual assault on college campuses. It is one thing for a university to discipline or even expel someone accused of such a crime, but it is quite another when the person accused is the highest-paid person on campus, and the university has a direct investment in him.
To understand this issue, one must understand the frenzied atmosphere on college campuses when it comes to accusations of rape and sexual assault. In 2011, the Obama administration announced it was expanding the scope of Title IX of the Educations Amendments of 1972 governing sex-discrimination on campus. The purpose of the policy was to make it easier for women to get universities to bring disciplinary procedures against males accused of sexual assault and rape. The upshot of the changes, according to KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, authors of The Campus Rape Frenzy, was to turn campus judiciary proceedings into kangaroo courts in which the accused was guilty until proven innocent.
It is one thing to discipline someone accused of a crime, but it is quite another when he is the highest-paid person on campus.Much has been written about the atmosphere on campus where accusations of sexual assault are concerned. Yet perhaps the most famous case came before the Obama Title IX change, when, in 2006, a black stripper named Crystal Mangum accused white members of Duke University’s lacrosse team of beating and raping her. Not only did the Durham County district attorney charge three players with rape, but the story became a major issue in the nascent campus sexual-assault debates, with activists from the Duke University faculty, administration, and student body leading the way. Future North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, who in 2007 was the state’s attorney general, ultimately dropped the charges that year, and the accuser herself recently admitted that she fabricated the accusations.
The Duke case spurred interest in part because the accused were athletes, a class of students who have long been targets of accusations from campus activist groups. As activist professor Lisa Wade wrote in 2017,
Growing evidence suggests that in some instances, administrations protect athletes named as perpetrators of sexual assault. A survey of 440 colleges and universities found that staff or administrators sometimes discourage victims from reporting, downgrade an assault’s severity, delay proceedings while athletes finish their season or graduate, or simply fail to follow up altogether. When athletes are found responsible for sexual assault, they may suffer only trivial consequences.
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Colleges and universities have a problem in the form of a perverse incentive: Because of the relationship between higher education and sports, protecting their athletes is akin to protecting the institution itself.
Remember that, when Wade wrote those words, NIL was nonexistent. There were no athletes on campus being offered six and seven figures to play. Given current and evolving college-sports realities, it is even harder now to imagine that any university will anxiously investigate someone in whom it has invested millions of dollars.
A current case at the University of Florida puts this point into perspective. Basketball coach Todd Golden, whose Gators currently are highly ranked nationally, was recently accused of sexual misconduct in a Title IX suit brought by female students:
The formal Title IX complaint against Golden obtained by The Alligator includes allegations of sexual exploitation, sexual harassment and stalking. The complaint alleges that over a year, Golden specifically aimed these behaviors toward UF students.
The claims regarding sexual harassment, which could also include sexual exploitation, cited unwanted sexual advances on Instagram, requesting sexual favors, sending photos and videos of his genitalia while traveling for UF and various occasions of stalking.
There was allegedly more than one occasion in which Golden was taking photos of women walking or driving and sending those pictures to the subjects involved. Various stalking incidents also included Golden showing up to locations where he knew the women would be.
As of this writing, the university has not finished its investigation, and Golden continues to coach. He has brought a proud basketball program back to national prominence, and Florida has much riding on his success. Given the accusations—and, legally, they are only accusations right now—one is surprised he was not suspended, and one wonders if a regular faculty or staff member would get this kind of benefit of the doubt. (Golden strongly denies the allegations.) Now imagine if Golden were the star of the football team making even more than his $4-million salary. Would the university’s inclination to treat him with kid gloves be more or less pronounced?
The NIL revolution in college sports is in only its infancy of blowing up the old structure. It clearly is creating a new class of college athletes, however, and we await its effects on universities’ already existing cultural problems.
William L. Anderson is professor emeritus of economics at Frostburg State University and a senior editor for the Mises Institute. He has published in Public Choice, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The Independent Review, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and many other journals.