College Basketball: The New Plantation System? (Guest Voice)
College Basketball: The New Plantation System?
by Mark Nuckols
Acclaimed civil-rights historian Taylor Branch has an article “The Shame of College Sports” in the month’s The Atlantic./
The article mostly addresses the big money stakes of modern college sports, involving huge revenue streams as well as the careers of both athletic and academic administrators, and the not-so-petty corruption that accompanies it. Branch fleetingly employs a generic reference to slavery, and then much later to a “plantation mentality,” and briefly discusses the matter of race. But race is hardly the focus of his narrative. I think it should be. I have for years now referred to college basketball as “the new plantation system.”
I don’t follow professional or college basketball. Spectator sports bore me, with the sole exception of cycling, since I used to be an avid cyclist. In Europe, professional cycling used to be primarily a working man’s profession, a way for a handful of talented but otherwise unskilled young Frenchman and Italians to make a relatively unglamorous living as a “domestique,” pushing their team leader up Mont Ventoux. But putting in 150 kilometers a day on the bike was not how most French and Italian boys spent their days.
Query: how many Jews play in the NBA? My instinctive guess is, not many. What percentage of Jewish kids in America eventually attend and graduate from law or medical school? My instinctive guess is, probably quite a few. How many African-Americans play in the NBA? And what percentage of African-American kinds eventually attend and graduate from law or medical school? You may already see where I am going, but maybe the path I take to get there.
Let me propose a few raw numbers (and if your a basketball fan and know the exact numbers, please correct me, but I think I have the rough proportions about right). There are two dozen or so NBA teams, so let’s say in any given year there are maybe a few hundred players professionally employed playing basketball. Some of them make fantastic sums of money, maybe even a million dollars a year I’m told. many do not, and many do not enjoy particularly long careers. And I suspect that at most a hundred or so new players are offered employment by an NBA team.
Now the NCAA and its constituent college teams are the farm league for the NBA, as I understand. I will guess that there are maybe 50 or so college teams who serve as feeders to the NBA. So in any given year maybe a thousand or two college players enjoy an athletic scholarship, the various benefits of being a campus sports figure, and a slight but tangible chance at employment as a professional. So each year maybe a few hundred kids get recruited for these top-tier college teams.
Let’s assume there are another few hundred college teams that don’t offer very promising NBA prospects, but do offer at least financial scholarships, in return for be primarily an athlete first, and an academic student second. So let’ say there are some ten thousand such scholarships annually on offer.
So what have we got for any youngster hoping to parley his skill and passion for hoops into a going proposition, on an annual basis?
- maybe a hundred well-paying jobs, but likely of relatively short duration
- maybe a few hundred college scholarships that offer a shot at a pro basketball job
- a few thousand scholarships that offer little beyond a chance to get a bachelor’s degree, but at the potential risk of not getting a proper education
By my rough estimate, there are some one and half or so million African-American teenage boys, many of whom do not enjoy the benefit of having an MD or JD in the immediate family, but who are exposed to a continual siren song of the glories of college and professional basketball. I’m not Jewish, but it’s my guess that in an upper-middle class Jewish family, teenage boys are encouraged to imagine themselves as future lawyers or doctors; I’m not African-American, but I’m guessing that there may often b a vaccuum of career expectations and a vacuum of accurate information that makes the siren song of basketball glory more than merely appealing.
And America’s major universities, especially the one that occupy the top tier of basketball prowess and baskeball revenues, shamelessy exploit these kids. They exploit them to capture the huge revenues from TV and merchandising, and to satisfy the desires of students, faculty and alumni to have a winning team. It’s deeply shameful, but as far as I can tell, for these schools, those kids and their futures are literally dispensable.
Mark Nuckols is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He travels extensively. In recent years he has practiced corporate law in London and Washington, led an economic research team in Moscow, and advised on energy policy in Tbilisi. He strives to opine less and to understand more.
13 Responses to “College Basketball: The New Plantation System? (Guest Voice)”
Wow this article is terrible…
Here is my experience with basketball…
4 year scholarship.
1 year professionally overseas.
I’ve also coached a state championship team and officiated high level high school teams.
Let me first blow away some assumptions here.
The NBA is not the only place a player can make money playing basketball. A person can make a very nice living playing overseas, even in lower leagues (most countries don’t have just one NBA, but normally 3 to 4 levels where you can make a nice salary, much like baseball in the US).
Next, the NCAA D1 is not alone. There are numerous other levels in the NCAA, all offering full rides. There is also there NAIA and their thousands of scholarships.
Also, outside of the 100 or so big time NCAA schools that have fat tv contracts and shoe deals…college basketball is not a money making business.
Now, that we have that out of the way…lets talk about the one thing most people don’t appreciate…eligibility. You have to make the grades to keep playing. This means, if you want to follow the dream of playing pro ball, you have to at least get 80% or so of your degree class work done. You have no idea how many kids graduate because of that alone.
What that author doesn’t see on tv, while watching doped up racers peddle over a mountain, is that black kids on basketball scholarships do graduate from college. Some would have never attended college without the scholarship. Some would have never finished their schoolwork without needing to be eligible…
… I know this white kid needed it.
that all being said….
I do support paying college players something. The different organizations and levels can cap it much like they do the number of scholarships a level is allowed to give out per year.
OK, so let’s stipulate that there are an additional 100 or so opportunities annually that opn up to play basketball in Spain or Slovenia (when I lived in Ljubljana the one African-American player on the LJ Union squad was something of a local superstar.) And let’s say another hindred, two hundred jobs opn up annually to coach college basketball or to be a referee. For the tens of thousand of kids who forgo devoting themselves to preparing for a career in law, medicine, accounting, etc, there are still less than a thousand potential post-college jobs related to basketball, and as you say, in your case, it was a one year gig. What I see is a huge opportunity cost. You give up a chance at as secure professional livelihood in return for a one-in-a-thosand shot at what is most likely very brief glory and renumeration. And who profits? A bunch of largely white JD and MD and MBA graduates of these same schools that love watching their teams play basketball, but would in most cases never let their own kids think that a pro basketball career was something to aspire to in lieu of getting, say, straight As in theri high school AP classes in order to proceed to pre-med studies, med school and then medical practice, for example. So you played a year in Europe and you referee HS basketball. Do you know what you might have accomplished in life if you’d never touched a basketball (orplayed simply for fun) and devoted yourself to a more reliable calling? Just asking. And you’re one of the few to have actually made it, in b-ball terms. Opportunity cost is what I am trying to underline here, what many of these kids sacrifice, literally, so that Indiana U and the rest can having winning seasons.
By the way, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you had a good experience. I just don’t think your story is really typical. But I’m curious, where did you play? In Europe? What was that like? I never cared for the game, but as someone who loves Slovenia, I always followed LJ Union, which at the time anyway was a major contender in the European league, even though Slovenia’s a tiny country. There’s an interesting backstory to Yugoslav basketball, it really is a national obsession from the Vardar to Triglav. But they have an intirely different attitude to basketball and education than Americans do. (Oh, and I expect someone may say, well, what about Bill Bradley?)
Agreed the article is BS. What about the academic undergrads and graduate students that assist professors in research. Are they mental slaves on the plantation. Most athletes don’t make a dime playing in sports, scholarships give those who put in the effort a FREE degree. Those less fortunate own 5 to 6 figures in student loans. I worry more about them than pampered athletes…
Oh there are a lot of problems with the US educational system. But being a research asst in college is morely to lead to admission to grad or law or med school than playing ball. And I’m mostly speaking about the tons of kids who dream of b-ball careers who never make it to the NCAA in the first place, at the expense of other opportunities, more reliable ones. Gads, just how dumb are Americans?
If the schools would make certain that the student athletes really are student athletes who will graduate with the education the school is supposed to provide all of their students then the players have really earned something that will help them in life, pro career or not. Otherwise the article makes lots of very valid points. How many schools coddle their athletes academically to the point where they might as well have never attended a single class? If it’s one, it’s too many.
College sports corruption and exploitation accompanying big money? The author is no Leif Eriksson or Columbus, not with previous decades of the same.
I wonder what athletes in sports other than football and basketball, not to mention student-students, who might appreciate better support in pursuit of study, that academic, think of this. (Just kidding. Likely, it’s same as usual or always, also nothing new, really.)
“rudi,” yes, grad students (notably in teaching assistant situations, the classic case) get no athlete goodies (or celebrity), and claim they are exploited, to the extent some have organized (formed unions), and flirt4e some with “industrial action(s).”
Readers here should be thinking already of something similar, the plight of medical residents. They’re poorly paid, especially if effective pay is calculated based on real service hours worked (on-call hours in addition to marathon shift times). Aside from safety concerns, it nowadays is not rare to view residency conditions no longer as a harsh initiation rite, but cynically as cheap or “slave” labor, especially when low resident pay is considered, and the preeminence of money in medical care, and profits, is noted.
Wow, it is always discouraging to me to observe just how dim-witted Americans can be when confronted with an idea. A) the idea that college sports is corrupted is not new, and I refer to Taylor Branch’s article elucidating this not entirely novel thought. B) In fifteen years of reading the NYT opinion page, I’ve never seen Blow, Rich, Herbert or anyone else making my point above C) which is, the vast pools of black teenage kids annually who devote themselves to drams of a basketball career benefits the NCAA, the NBA, the networks, the shoe makers, and the fans by providing a pool of exploitable talent that’s largely uncompensated D) these kids pay a huge opportunity cost in terms of forgone alternatives and E) the fact that maybe 50 of them eventually get a year or two to play in a European league isn’t much in return for the tens of thousands of kids who end up without careers, skills or truly useful educations. And F) yeah, a few of them can coach HS or be referees, I don’t consider that any great result to boast of. G) It really is futile arguing with you people. Ugh, that’s the primary reason I left America, these arguments are entirely clear and obvious to nearly any educated European (excluding the Greeks and the Irish)
Again, the rough math;
40,000 black male 17 year olds with b-ball aspirations
300 top tier scholarships
-leading to a hundred NBA jobs
-and mabe 500 coaching jobs
-and 50 short term gigs in Spain or Slovenia
2000 second and third tier scholarships
- most leading nowhere, or maybe a HS coaching job
so you’ve got 47,700 kids who lose big
another 1700 who get something, but nothing like what they might have otherwise accoplished if they had had dreams of med school etc
400 who make a few bucks and enjoy brief glory
80 who get a decent payday, but in the long run much less than a doctor makes over his career
and maybe 50 who really cash in
How many middle and upper class Jews, Mormons, WASPs would tell their own kids that these are good oddds?
How many TV ads, shows, etc etc implicitly tell poor black kids without easy access to good information that these are terrible odds and they’re being brutally and cynically exploited?
I’ve never seen this argument anywhere articulated, I challenge any of you to find it for me and provide a link to it.
Mark, compliments for admitting that you don’t have much experience with basketball. Not everyone around here will ever admit to not knowing everything
I played in Germany. I had a nice career ahead of me, but completely lost my passion for the game as a professional. Thanks to my degree, I had a solid profession to fall back on. Oddly enough, my one year overseas is actually a very strong part of my resume. “Oh cool, a former pro player…he must be a good team player”. Granted, had a spent 10 years playing and had not invested or saved, I would have had a hard time finding a job. Also, you can get fired after your first game in Europe. No job security if you are not wanted by multiple teams. So there are of course drawbacks.
In Germany alone, there are at least 200 teams pro/semi-pro teams that hire foreign players. Most are only allowed 2 non-europeans, but most Americans get dual citizenship to circumvent that rule. I would say 90% of those team pay enough to make a good living, save…invest ect. That is Germany alone. Almost every country in Europe has a pro league… many in South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. There are not just 50 jobs overseas, but thousands.
What I think you are really missing is the value of sports….for all races and economic classes. I won’t get into that here, but i will address inner city black kids…ie, the people I spent a lot of time playing ball with…
The education systems in the US inner cities are a joke. The sub-cultures of these areas is dangerous and people that want an education are treated like lepers. These kids normally only have one parent at home and very few mentors to look up to. Sports are the only way these kids have out of the ghetto. Even if they survived high school, the educations they received have no value and they basically need to start from scratch in college. Many of these kids have to go to junior college to learn what they missed in high school because they would never stay eligible.
College basketball is an out for these kids…pro ball or not.
Well, I see there are more foreign jobs that I initially thought. But how long does the average player actually last? Three years? Five? And as againts the tens of thousands of black kids who forgo other opportunities, I still think it’s a tragedy. Now if the only alternative to b-ball is Thug Life, well OK let’s promote basketball. I’d rather that these kids had the same options in life that WASPs, Jews, Mormons and other Americans take for granted, intead of being the talent pool for sports promoters, where most of these kids end up with dead end jobs and diminished lives.