The NCAA or an alligator stuck in the mud
The NCAA loves to prove how blatant it can be. As an organization it stubbornly steers itself away from any detour that could make it even suggestively progressive. Refusing to pay players is one thing, but punishing players who receive endorsements, punishing players who were loosely promised to maybe receive endorsements, punishing then even the idea that players could, should, be paid, it’s a whole other level of shouting from the mountaintop how committed you are to antiquation.
As an organization, a corporation really, that strives to nip progression in the bud, to stomp it out like one would a bunch of butterfly cocoons were they so inclined to destroy the prospect of something beautiful (a talent, a career, opportunity) emerging, the NCAA is fond of enforcing that strict mandate of not rewarding its charges financially while also swiping most of the money they could do it with for itself.
In policy changes the NCAA released last week, in what I feel will be a canonical memo (honestly, when has a memo ever gone right?) the organization exemplified these two truths at once.
Because, first, the proposed plan required anyone interested in an agenting career to have a bachelor’s degree. This part of the memo was so buried, nearly a footnote, and offhand that at first it didn’t seem an addition. It’s a good way of hiding things, not just in plain sight but framed in a way that makes them seem fixed in hindsight. Anywhere else this would be a huge policy change, but as a corporation with a history of applying the rules rather than governing itself according to them, the NCAA can offhandedly slip in something with hugely economic, personal and representational consequences as casually as if it were introducing a new colour scheme for the basketballs to be used in future tournaments.
College is expensive everywhere, but in the States it is a new, privatized echelon of cost. Especially when it comes to the schools the NCAA affiliates itself with. Not that there’s anything in the memo about that, of course, but if you were angling for a job where your primary clients would be coming through top-tier NCAA affiliated institutions, and you yourself needed to take a test invented, facilitated and graded by the NCAA once you’d done the requisite 4 years leading to your degree, would you not feel a bit better about your odds if that degree came from a school under the all-seeing Sauron-style eyeball of the NCAA?
It is not mental aerobics to land here, if anything it is a lazy loop in the insular system the NCAA strives, also lazily, but fiercely, like an alligator stuck in the mud, to sustain.
The approach is as primordial. To assign additional value to applicants hoping for an NCAA Agent Certification because they were financially able to obtain a bachelor’s degree is aligning their worth with inherent privilege. Not to say there aren’t people who are able to get through college on their own, through scholarship, loans, savings, some combination of those things, but overall the value of a bachelor’s degree does not equate exactly to talent or experience when it comes to the ability to be a good or successful agent—qualities themselves that are not mutually exclusive. Rich Paul did a better job of nailing this point, specifically when it comes to whether a 4 year education can impart ethics or you’d just have a con-artist on your hands who spent a semester getting better acquainted with Italian Neorealism cinema.
The end result of this cowardly—because it is, sneaking in something that big without even making an attempt to introduce it as the main thing in what was otherwise a bunk announcement of a new fake test the NCAA wanted to introduce as a clambering attempt on its waning approval and control in sport—policy change is less diverse, dynamic, and varied representation at the professional level of agents. That’s just the way the system is set up. By determining who can afford to even get there and who can afford to disrupt the getting there (only Rich Paul, as it turns out), the NCAA stays in stasis, fixed to its own points of self-enforced power.
Well it didn’t work, not all the way anyway.
Whether via Rich Paul’s op-ed, responses from NBA players, general responses from media to the memo overall, or because it is a company that hates confrontation more than change, the NCAA amended its agent certification requirements, nixing that post-script of a policy change. Candidates who want to apply for agent certification through the NCAA can do so without a bachelor’s degree, so long as they are certified by the NBPA.
Requiring agents who want to scout, liaise, interact at all with college players to obtain any certification from the NCAA directly only serves the NCAA. Players never see a cent of that certification money, money that’s what, like paying a dollar for one of those souvenir stamped pennies at theme parks and implies the organization is applying it to upholding stringent player-protection rules, that the certification itself isn’t meant to keep shoulders already rubbing closely together even tighter, to keep anybody who doesn’t get that out. Paying for access to player’s potential careers is not itself a bad thing, but if the NCAA wants to require that of hopeful agents then it should require that of itself. Any step away from that continues to chart the organization’s progression in plodding circles.
The whole thing is still so dumb, and has been made dumber by the way the NCAA has gouged itself. Their willingness to remove something that stood to affect so many so profoundly shows how callous their inconsideration.
Sometimes I think the only thing worse than no thought given to something is instead the bare minimum of thought expended. When someone cares so little about something that they can’t even be bothered to half-ass it, but maaaaybe quarter-ass it. Like, these guys couldn’t even give it a few days stuck in a boardroom all together to flesh the thing out a bit? Choke down some ubiquitous corporate catered lunch wraps and offer up some pathways as to why it was a necessary decision? It wasn’t even an idea they could stand behind for how panicked and amateur their removal of it. Maybe that’s what makes me so mad, most of the time, when it comes to the NCAA. Because they aren’t just ignorant, or cowardly, greedy, self-centred, self-serving, it’s that they have the means, easily, to solve all of these problems with the barest of efforts. Monetarily, through access to all the correct channels of education, talent, support, they could listen, benchmark, implement overarching and well-researched, truly progressive policies and all it would take would be a couple old dudes asking their secretaries to make a couple calls to get the ball rolling. The way it would serve athletes would be beyond measure, for how far-reaching into their futures. And it would serve the donks at the top! Financially, probably better than it is now. Empowerment, models not based on scarcity methods, drive revenue. You start giving out those kinds of assurances and you have an even bigger, future revolving door of hopefuls waiting to get in.
But ignorance is a kind of control. Keeping people in the dark, keeping them out, striving only to sustain the thing that serves a few in the way that it always has. There’s a comfort in that kind of stagnation, it’s reptilian, cold-blooded, but it calms, mitigates, weakens.
The glimmer of hope in this is the same thing the NCAA draws its strength from. Not having kept up, not having branched out, to destabilize something like that is, as was proven at least a little this week, not difficult. That doesn’t mean the entire thing gets dismantled, but you see how little pressure it can take from a few big names. What I want is for those that can afford it to give them trouble. To press publicly when the organization tries to slink around and shore itself with half-measures when overhauls are needed. Evolution is slow, but environmental pressures have always sped it up.