The Battle for Equity in College Sports
Both teams in this game play hard. The Hawks and the Knights meet for a late year basketball game and it has all the spectacle you would expect from a matchup of two talented teams. The starting lineups are announced, the shaking of hands occurs. There is hard physical play, with coaches on the sideline motivating their players and calling out strategy, all of it soundtracked by the squeaking of shoes on hardwood. If you closed your eyes you might think that you were seeing a regular season NBA game in a smaller arena. The big difference between this setting and a game at the Scotiabank Arena, besides the attendance, is that these players aren’t paid, they are students at Humber College and Fleming College respectively.
College athletes in the U.S. have seen a huge change in how their athletics are compensated. With the Supreme Court ruling,
years of restrictions on athletes receiving compensation for their name, image and likeness (NIL), from third parties such as sponsors have been lifted by the National College Athletics Association (NCAA). College athletes now have the ability to profit from their stardom with sponsorship deals as well as other freedoms previously unavailable to them. For example, student athletes who are also artists or musicians have the ability to perform under their own name and receive compensation for that art.
Will Ulmer, an offensive lineman for Marshall State and a country singer said that when he heard the news about the NCAA dropping their NIL rules “I was ecstatic honestly, because like I said I had to market myself as a stage name and I couldn’t use my social media platforms to promote my music so it was pretty big for me just to own my art.” Previously whenever he performed it had to be under a stage name, and because his social media was under his actual name he couldn’t use it to promote any shows or new music. When asked if his music could lead to sharing the stage with an artist, Ulmer said that “ If I could open for anybody it would have to be Hank Jr. that’s my all time favourite.”
These changes to NIL laws have wide ranging implications. Throughout the history of college sports, players who have broken the rules against receiving gifts or compensation from third parties have been suspended or had their trophies and accomplishments erased, while entire teams have had their championships removed. One such example is Reggie Bush, who won the Heisman trophy for most outstanding College Football player in 2005 at USC, but eventually had the achievement vacated for receiving gifts from sports agent Lloyd Lake and Lake’s partner Michael Michaels, one of which was a limousine ride, and all of which would be legal under the current NIL rules. Bush released a statement after the Supreme Court ruling stating that he had attempted to contact the NCAA about reinstating his accomplishments and statistics and received no help. Bush stated that “it is my strong belief that I won the Heisman trophy solely due to my hard work and dedication on the football field and it is also my firm belief that my records should be reinstated.”
Catching up with the game, The Humber Hawks are up 59–44 at half. To be expected, this Humber team has six National Championships in its past, and a strong roster. Humber’s bench is productive and they have DeQuon Cascart shooting eight of nine from the free throw line.
The push for change in college athletics has its obvious motivations.
, about what Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association made in that year combined. The main difference is that those leagues pay their players, many of them millions of dollars a year. Another number influencing change in college sports is that,
, fewer than 2 per cent of NCAA athletes go on to play professional sports, so many never get paid to play the sport that they devote their time to. Those NCAA football players, the stars of the collegiate athletics business, are still at risk for degenerative brain disease, even if they never play a game of pro football, because of the head impacts they take on during their college career.
The brain damage from head impacts is something ex Western University varsity football player Jeff Brooks knows all about. Brooks grew up playing football and was one of the best players in his London, Ontario high school. He was later recruited with a scholarship to come play at Western University, but when he arrived to the team it was a different story. “In high school, I was told by some coaches, we’ll see you in the CFL. And obviously, that was great to hear. And when you come out of high school, basically no matter what school you go to, you come out of high school, [you are] usually one of the top players on your team. So you kind of come with this chip on your shoulder. And then you hit University and it hits you like a brick wall, and you’re like, oh, crap, no, I’m a nobody here.” This realization was tough to stomach. Jeff went from being a starter on his high school team to not playing more than two games a season until his third year. This allowed him to focus on other things though, and forefront of his mind was how hits in football affect players brain function and capabilities.
“In one of my final years of playing a former teammate who had moved into research actually started the study and what he did was he reached out to a local Toronto based company that created these accelerometers. So they’re little devices about the size of the domino that went up into the cushions of our helmets, so we couldn’t feel them or anything. And they would monitor every single head impact or impact of the helmet.” This led Brooks to what would eventually be the focus of his Masters and PhD studies, learning how hits to the head impact football players. His Bachelor’s degree was in Physics so it was right up his alley, studying the physics of his favourite sport. “So I think over the six year period, we collected about 210,000 head impacts. And, my PhD thesis was examining the effects those head impacts had on the player’s brain function.”
All this data lead to some real findings. “I collected reaction time measurements of their eyes, which was kind of an insight into how their brains were functioning. And through our analysis, we showed that basically every head impact slows a player’s reaction time down by like a very small amount, like one 100th or one 1000th of a millisecond. But then when you add up the fact that they take, some players will take 1000 to 1500 hits over the course of the season, that slows them down. I think it’s about five milliseconds, which is significant enough to cause the difference between a good play and a bad play, like you get beat on a fade, or whatever instance you want to put in for an example there.” Brooks now works for a concussion education and prevention non-profit that looks to bring solutions for how to make football more safe for players of all ages. Some of those solutions include banning tackle football until the age of 14, modifying practice regimens and other ideas.
“I still love the sport, I just think there can be changes made to it. And it’s more getting through to some of the more hard headed or old school people, whether it’s coaching or fans or whatever, that we can still preserve the game. The greatness of the game, but with some simple changes there can be a lot more longevity in your playing career and safety for kids especially.”
While Brooks had no plans to be a professional athlete once he reached Western, he is thankful for the opportunity it gave him, to play a sport he loves and research it for a living. But he knows that there needs to be change to keep this sport alive for future generations. Without major changes to the very nature of hitting in football, the risks will at some point be too much for parents to sign their kids up to play.
This struggle for safety in Football could be said to mirror the struggle for compensation and respect for collegiate athletes in general. The entrenched power of the status quo batting away any threats to its domination from a new idea of what sports can be.The other side of the struggle is the attention that athletics takes away from the academic ventures of universities and colleges. Football is the engine of College Athletics, and takes much of its funding with it. Jeff Brooks estimated that 90 out of 110 football players on the active roster had scholarships, which takes them away from other male sports, and in a larger sense it takes them away from other programs at the school, be it medical research, historical studying, and just general academics. As Dr. Julian Spallholz, a distinguished professor of nutrition and biochemistry at Texas Tech. said in “The System:The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football” “ Athletics has gotten so disproportionate to the rest of the economy and to the academic community that it’s unbelievable. The students pay more tuition. The faculty pay for not having a pay increase. And the football coach gets a half-million raise. I think that speaks for itself doesn’t it?”
The story of collegiate sports is one of inequity. While programs with large football or basketball teams bring in millions of dollars to their school, it is not evenly distributed and largely ends up back in the hands of the teams who produced that wealth. This wealth is also not distributed to the players who are the star of this grand spectacle. Though their tuition is covered,
, and several schools have had extensive problems with academic misconduct, for example, Oklahoma State
, all organized by the athletic department. A Sports Illustrated investigation revealed both that previous revelation as well as the fact that “Four players and two former assistants told SI that they had teammates who they believed were functionally illiterate even after attending (Oklahoma State) for multiple years.”
The NIL laws represent a step forward for college athletes, and while Canada’s colleges don’t have the same commercial appeal, there is still desire to see athletes treated well, taken care of financially, physically and mentally, and improve these sports so that future generations will continue to play and excel at them. College Athletes in Canada put their bodies on the line, sacrificing time from their studies and personal lives to play for a school that cannot even give them a full scholarship for their effort. This leads to players going to the NCAA, with a study by
estimating that some 2000 Canadian athletes move to America to pursue collegiate sports every year.
The Humber Hawks crack 100 points late in the 4th Quarter and end up winning by a score of 109–74 over the Fleming Knights. The competition was fierce, the fans were excited, and the whole venture is likely profitable for Humber (though they do not disclose how much money Athletics brings in to the school) but after all of it, students go home and attend their end of semester studies. They have the pressure of professional athletes but without the salary, and with the added stress of being a student. No matter how dominant any team is, they still have battles to fight outside the arena that they cannot win alone.
