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.