College football is a mess. It has been a mess for a century, with reams of proposed reform in the wasteland of forgotten file cabinets. I was part of the reform movement for a while, writing that college football should be banned because it has nothing to do with academics. It doesn’t. But it is interwoven into the social fabric of colleges and universities. The games are pomp and pageantry and incredible athleticism and tribal fan lunacy. So I eventually gave up on any meaningful change in the sport.
Until the pandemic.
Out of catastrophe can come opportunity. With the season fundamentally half-canceled by the decision of the major conferences of the Big 10 and the Pac-12 not to play, now is the time to recalibrate the college football industry and confront the issues that players, previously shunted into silence, have brought up because of the repercussions of Covid-19: not just obvious health issues but compensation issues and racial issues and exploitation issues. None of this happens when the status quo of the season ticks on year after year. No one listens.
There are those who think the effort to fix college football is malarkey and sanctimony. It’s just sport. It’s just a game. “Game” implies something fun and benign. College football is a huge industry. The five major conferences bring in at least $4 billion in revenue annually.
Yet those who make the game, play the game, are the game, expose themselves to possible brain injury and crippling arthritis and now the pandemic, don’t receive a dime of revenue. The big programs make millions off them — the top 25 most valuable teams range from roughly $27 million in profit at Clemson University to roughly $94 million at Texas A&M University, according to a 2019 study. Head football coaches at Football Bowl Subdivision schools make an average of $2.7 million. Dabo Swinney of Clemson University, $9.3 million, Nick Saban of the University of Alabama, $8.9 million, Jim Harbaugh of the University of Michigan, $7.5 million. Everybody except the players. It is a system of serfdom unlike any not just in sports but in corporate America.
The N.C.A.A., perhaps the worst umbrella organization in history and dedicated to protecting the college football industry, keeps using the transparent fallback that players are compensated by the scholarships they receive as well as other ancillaries like trainers and tutoring. So what? The true value of a scholarship varies wildly, and it is no substitute for the money players generate.
The National College Players Association and Drexel University’s sport management department did a study showing that major college football and basketball players generated as much as $1.5 million each beyond the value of their scholarship. And this is from a few years ago.
The problem with this calculation is determining the exact amount, leading to endless disputes over revenue and profit and loss and the wholesale price of a hot dog. A simpler and quicker method would be to tie annual player compensation in the Football Bowl Subdivision schools to the salary of the head coach. As an example, let’s use Mr. Swinney’s $9.3 million a year at Clemson. Divide that by the number of players on scholarship, limited to 85 by the N.C.A.A., and you come up with an individual share of $109,412. Taking the average F.B.S. salary of $2.7 million, the player share would be $31,765. Since coaches’ salaries generally reflect the size of a program, the smaller it is the less a player makes. If a school thinks a player share is too much, lower the salary. There would be no exceptions for programs crying that they lose money. If that is true, drop football.
Compensation issues are only part of the college football mess. Because of the George Floyd killing and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, players are now talking about racial inequities. Thirty years ago I wrote the book “Friday Night Lights” about high school football in Odessa, Texas. I saw unflinching racism both shockingly overt and subtler: a double standard of expectation for Black football players versus white football players; the attitude that white players perform well because they work hard and Black players perform well because they are naturally gifted and often don’t work hard enough. Have these issues changed? A report commissioned by the University of Iowa in June and released last month found entrenched bullying and racial bias in the football program. Colorado State University stopped its football program this month after allegations of racism and verbal abuse.
Then there is the lack of hiring of Black head coaches. Out of 130 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, 14 of the head football coaches are Black. It is a disgrace at universities that are on the defensive because of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter and are preaching diversity and yet have done nothing in this arena despite years of criticism. Just do it.
This month 13 players from the Pac-12 came out with a list of demands before the conference season was canceled: player-approved measures to address not just Covid-19 but “serious injury, abuse and death”; 50 percent of profit-sharing conference revenues for every sport to be evenly distributed among participants; 2 percent of conference revenue to be set aside for financial aid for low-income Black students and community initiatives. Their voices are strong and have gotten attention. Another players’ group, We Want to Play, has members across all Power 5 conferences and has raised issues similar to those of the Pac-12 group, including the creation of a college football players’ association.
The Big 10 and the Pac-12 may be out, but the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12 are still planning to go ahead. It is not surprising, since many of the states advocating to play are the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees than traditional students and should be compensated.
The pandemic has provided a window. The absence of a normal college football season gives players a chance they will never have again. The 13 Pac-12 players said they spoke on behalf of dozens of others who raised similar concerns. They threatened to boycott over the virus, and they should continue to threaten boycott over the other vital issues they raised. You don’t need a union for that. You need more voices from every conference and every team to build national unity and fortitude.
You can play football without a coach. You can play it without fans or cheerleaders or mascots. But as far as I know, you can’t play without players.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of “Friday Night Lights.” His forthcoming book, “The Mosquito Bowl,” will focus on a group of football-playing Marines and World War II.
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