Editorial: Moneyball

Way back when, in the days before TV, Grinnell was a rival of Iowa on the football field, Iowa State played Drake in the Missouri Valley Conference, and Amos Alonzo Stagg dominated the Big Ten for the University of Chicago. They were student athletes giving it the old college try. So they are today at Grinnell and Buena Vista, where they do not play for pay. The Chicago Maroons are no worse off for dropping out of the Big Ten in 1939, when President Robert Hutchins decided that big-time college athletics and academics were incompatible. (Chicago continues to affiliate with the Big Ten Academic Alliance.) Drake today plays non-scholarship football, and maintains a tremendous pharmacy program alongside a fine law school. Buena Vista offers athletics as part of a well-rounded student experience, but it does not make money at sports. Sports are an inducement to enrollment on the way to earning an education. President Hutchins saw the future. It’s not about education. It’s about TV revenue, and paying coaches several million dollars per year in Ames or Iowa City, and consolidating that power among an elite few — the Big Ten, the Big 12, the ACC and SEC. It’s only right that if Caitlin Clark can fill the house and draw a national audience, she and her teammates deserve a cut of the action. Something beyond a phys ed or art degree. So the NCAA and the power conferences struck a deal to avoid a worse verdict in court. They agreed to pay $2.8 billion for exploiting young men and women for money the past decade. They will assess 60% of that cost to schools like Drake and the University of Northern Iowa, which play Division 1 basketball — even though 90% of the exploitation was done by the power conference schools. The power conferences will eat 40%. Who gets paid and how? Details are murky about the lacrosse program and other money-losing sports. If the football coach and his players get paid, where does that leave the women’s volleyball team? Or the wrestlers who crouch in fear of their sport being dropped? The lesser Division I schools like UNI will be hard-pressed to make due. The NCAA wants Congress to give it stronger monopoly power to protect its revenue franchise. The president of Notre Dame said he fears for the bankruptcy of college athletics. It went bankrupt awhile back. Penn State did everything it could to protect its football money machine when a sex abuse scandal erupted in the locker room. It should have been busted to D3 non-scholarship. But what would you do with Happy Valley and 100,000 pining fans? You could say the same for Ohio State. They get protection for the Saturday audience. It’s a racket. Who expects that an athlete could graduate playing for three different colleges in four years? The transfer portal, the licensing rights, the magnificent coaching salaries, the royalties from the Tiger Hawk logo, it all adds up to big business that actually is incompatible with a classical interpretation of scholarship. If anyone thinks that Hawkeye or Cyclone football revenue helps float a geology student, they have probably spent too much time tailgating. The NCAA does not deserve an anti-trust shield. Somehow we must carve out a place for the power schools and their professional athletes. We love our Saturday gladiator fest like anybody else. We went nuts for Caitlin Clark along with the rest of the country. What the NCAA is not doing is carving out a place for student athletes at Drake or UNI, or at Division 2 scholarship institutions. They get cheated. So do the athletes on the transfer treadmill hoping without a diploma for a chance to grab a pro look. The money drives the exploitation and the settlement. Most important, it keeps the NCAA in collusion with the big-money schools over the others. Meanwhile, Beavers play for the thrill of the game. They are not on TV. They get scholarships for science and grants based on need. Many are first-generation college students. That’s where we should be putting our money. Grinnell doesn’t care anymore whether they win or lose, but they play an exceedingly entertaining style of basketball. It should be on TV. On second thought, better that it is not.