Zion Williamson, the former Duke basketball star, after his shoe was torn open during a 2019 game against the U. of North Carolina at Chapel HillStreeter Lecka, Getty Images
On a college basketball court in February, an 18-year-old’s shoe ripped open. Normally, that’s no big deal. Except the teenager was Zion Williamson, the Duke University phenom. And the shoe was a Nike product.
Everything went haywire. “Shoegate” got relentless media coverage, and the next day, Nike’s stock finished down 1.1 percent — roughly equivalent to a $1.1-billion loss, The Atlanticreported. Essentially, a teenager upset an industry, at least for a little while.
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Zion Williamson, the former Duke basketball star, after his shoe was torn open during a 2019 game against the U. of North Carolina at Chapel HillStreeter Lecka, Getty Images
On a college basketball court in February, an 18-year-old’s shoe ripped open. Normally, that’s no big deal. Except the teenager was Zion Williamson, the Duke University phenom. And the shoe was a Nike product.
Everything went haywire. “Shoegate” got relentless media coverage, and the next day, Nike’s stock finished down 1.1 percent — roughly equivalent to a $1.1-billion loss, The Atlanticreported. Essentially, a teenager upset an industry, at least for a little while.
I’m trying to raise the public temperature on this issue. Shame is a powerful motivating force in America.
It’s the perfect example of how corporations exploit the “unique and immoral amateurism of college sports,” argues Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, in a report he issued in March as part of a series of investigations into college athletics. Williamson, known for his sensational dunks, was a cash train that corporations hopped on, the report says. But if the teenager had suffered a career-ending injury when his shoe broke, executives would still have pocketed the profits they’d already raked in, whereas Williamson wouldn’t have earned a single paycheck.
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Murphy’s second report, released on Thursday, focuses on what he calls the “lack of academic integrity across college sports,” which “may be the most insidious piece of a broken system.” “Student-athlete” is a misnomer, Murphy said in a news release, because a lot of the students playing big-time college athletics are being cheated out of an education. (The National Collegiate Athletic Association did not respond to a request for comment.) Murphy spoke with The Chronicle about why he wants to “raise the public temperature” around college athletics and what it would take to alter the status quo. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What compelled you to turn your focus toward college athletics?
I’m a big sports fan. I watch a lot of college sports. I’ve noticed how much bigger this industry has gotten in the last 15 years. I’d hear these stories of kids being impoverished, of not having enough money to allow their parents to come watch them play basketball games, and all these adults were getting filthy rich. It just felt so wrong to me that these big-time college coaches were making a fortune off of the free labor of these children.
And it’s not lost on me that the majority of the athletes at big-time Power Five programs are African-American. Almost all the coaches and all the administrators and all the sports-company executives are white. This is a civil-rights issue. The injustice of not sharing the money with these kids is compounded by the fact that many of them don’t get an education. The NCAA has rigged their metric of graduation to make the situation look a lot rosier than it is. In particular, once again, it’s the African-American students that are getting hurt the most. Their graduation rates at Power Five schools are much lower than their peers’.
The first report you issued mentions the “unique and immoral amateurism of college sports.” How did you arrive at that conclusion?
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Let’s be totally clear. This is a $14-billion industry, and that’s a conservative valuation, that is made possible only by the performance of these student-athletes. And they get almost none of the money. If you look at the Power Five schools, there are 4,400 coaches that are getting paid more, collectively, than the scholarship value for 45,000 athletes. Tell me how that’s justice. This is not an amateur endeavor.
So what do you see as the best method of intervention?
Both of these reports point to different paths forward. In the first report, I’m making the case that the NCAA should come up with a process of compensating student-athletes, at least at the programs that are making the most money. It’s just a fairness issue to me, that if these kids are being treated like commodities, in order to make money for adults, then they should share in the benefits.
The second report talks about the fact that the NCAA’s defense, which is the existence of the scholarship, is not much of a defense at all. Many of these kids are not getting an education. At some of the basketball programs that made the tournament this year, one or two of those kids will graduate. The remainder will not. So the other thing that can happen is the NCAA and these schools could get more serious about these kids’ education. Why on earth do we let these programs become such behemoths, so that these kids are spending 60 hours a week on athletics? That’s immoral to me, if they’re not getting compensated for it. The schools and the NCAA need to get these kids back in the classroom and curtail the enormous amount of time that they’re being forced to play sports.
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As you were saying, the NCAA is making billions on the status quo. It seems as if there’s no real logical incentive for the organization to get kids away from the playing field. So how do you compel a multibillion-dollar industry to change its ways, especially when there’s that much money involved?
I’m trying to raise the public temperature on this issue. Shame is a powerful motivating force in America. My hope is the NCAA and these schools recognize what they’re doing is wrong, and they voluntarily change their ways. Second, of course, is the potential for court action or legislation. The NCAA monopoly over college sports is being contested in courts today. Down the line maybe there will be support for legislation that would tip the balance toward the students and away from the industry. I don’t know that there’s support for that legislation today. But that’s in part because I don’t think people know what’s really going on.
The caveat to all this — I come at this as a sports fan. I come at this as someone who knows that athletics is a really productive force in American life. I benefited from playing sports in school, at a high-school level. I’m not trying to paint with too broad of a brush here. I think there’s some really awful things that are happening to many kids inside the NCAA. But I also know there are plenty of student-athletes that are getting a great deal.
Through this process, did you learn anything that surprised you?
One of the things that I didn’t know is that the NCAA came up with its own measurement of graduation rate. I started looking into this a year ago. The first meeting I had with the NCAA, they told me student-athletes at NCAA schools graduate at a rate higher than non-student-athletes. Boy, that sounded really impressive to me — until I found out the NCAA didn’t like the way the federal government calculated graduation rates because the federal calculation showed that student-athletes are graduating at lower rates than their peers. The NCAA just made up their own measurement of graduation. I didn’t know that.
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What would it take to introduce some type of legislation?
Legislation on this subject is really hard. It is. I’m not saying I won’t try to go that route at some point. I think the best route is for the NCAA to change, because it’s the right thing. I think the court process is the more likely problem for the NCAA. If the courts ultimately rule that the NCAA is a monopoly, then they have to come to Congress for an antitrust exemption. And if they need a bill passed by Congress in order to stay in existence, then all these issues are forced to be put in front of a Congress and there’s a chance for a real debate.
What do you think will happen if the problems that you’ve outlined aren’t fixed?
A lot of people will get more and more filthy rich. I think the divide will increase between students — who are increasingly impoverished as costs go up and the compensation remains nil — and the coaches. Coaches’ salaries are spiraling out of control. The shoe companies and the online-gambling companies are making more money than ever before. So the haves will get richer and the kids, who are often the have-nots, will get poorer.
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.