Ten years ago, Taylor Branch wrote an Atlantic essay titled “The Shame of College Sports.” Branch expressed what was already a rapidly forming consensus: that college sports were exploitative, and the solution was to unleash the market forces that the NCAA had artificially curtailed. “The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel,” he argued, colluding to suppress fair market wages.
Now that we are living in the world they have created, they deserve some time to see how the system works. Perhaps they will consider it a success. But I suspect otherwise. I believe marketization of college sports will not solve the very real harms caused by the system, and that real reform will require just the opposite: socialization.
In the short time since the NCAA allowed NIL deals, this is already evident. The market value of college athletes is overwhelmingly concentrated in football and men’s basketball.
Salaries for administrators and, especially, coaches in moneymaking sports have swollen to indefensible levels in recent years. Just over the last week, the football-coaching market went completely haywire. Michigan State offered coach Mel Tucker a staggering contract worth $95 million over a decade, not including a country-club membership and recreational access to a private plane.
If, on the other hand, you don’t subscribe to libertarian assumptions about markets, you might object. The new world of college athletics is more lucrative for a handful of players and a handful of coaches, but no better for the rest.