Over the last five months, I’ve written extensively for Gators Wire about all the challenges facing a college football season. I’ve discussed why I didn’t think, given the material circumstances and statements made by stakeholders with actual power to make these decisions as opposed to a lowly sports blogger like myself, a season would be feasible.
The primary reason I believed this to be true was that, over that period of time, nothing fundamentally changed about the reality of the situation. Not the state of the pandemic in the United States, nor the lack of interest from institutions and conferences in proactively addressing safety concerns.
But to conflate what has been painfully obvious for months with what was inevitable is, in this case, foolish. Because for all the reasons why COVID-19 makes a season an unlikely possibility, college football players could still have suited up this fall.
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Even accounting for the disastrous way in which the U.S. government has handled the pandemic response, the NCAA could have dodged this bullet long before the first discovered case of COVID-19.
Five years before, in fact.
In 2014, the NCAA lost a class action suit against former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon and other former student-athletes, who alleged that the association’s use of their image and likeness in NCAA video games was illegal. The NCAA had to pay out $42.2 million, and the ruling ended the successful NCAA Football video game series.
But the NCAA balked on the amateurism issue. Instead of using the court’s decision that such action violated anti-trust law as a catalyst to modernize the system and end the unsustainable model of amateurism, it paid its pittance without addressing any of the underlying issues that led to the problem in the first place.
Flash-forward to the present, and college football faces a serious dilemma. Experiments undertaken by professional leagues have demonstrated that some degree of a bubble is necessary for the operation of sports in a post-COVID world.
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But, aside from logistical issues a college football bubble would pose, such an arrangement would push the limits of amateurism. Asking players to leave campus (where they take classes, which are allegedly the priority) and spend months at a time separated from family and friends without compensating them for it while millionaire professional athletes make the same sacrifice would be dubious, to say the least.
If the NCAA had admitted back in 2014 (or in any of the years since) that it ran a professional sport, it would have been prepared, or at least more so, to handle the complications that have arisen due to the pandemic. Players would be compensated and have a seat at the table to discuss safety protocols that primarily affect them.
But it didn’t do any of that. And that shouldn’t be surprising.
After all, there’s a lot more money to be made in exploiting free labor than there is in blowing up that system of free labor for no reason, aside from ethics.
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That logic goes out the window in a time of crisis, however. The cracks in the system are showing, and it’s abundantly clear that the NCAA’s model of amateurism wasn’t at all prepared to handle a disruption of this scale.
The powers that be could have recognized this at any point in the last five months. Instead of twiddling its thumbs while professional leagues arrived at actual solutions, the NCAA could have followed their lead and worked to create a comprehensive answer while also compensating players and improving their standing in the future. Once again, it did not do that.
Granted, even if players secured the rights they deserve, such as compensation and organization, trying to pull off a season would be walking a tenuous line. But college sports wouldn’t be facing obstacles unique from the rest of the sporting world.
And when Saturdays this fall are occupied by the NFL, just remember that the NCAA has had literal decades to make its model more resilient to an event like this one.
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