countless athletics directors nationwide, the players’ compensation is no longer commensurate with the value of the business itself.
Most college football fans went to college, which means their critical-thinking skills are strong enough to know that the game they love has never been that pure. In 1937, when UT lured legendary coach Dana X. Bible away from Nebraska for an annual salary of $15,000, the Legislature had to give university president H. Y. Benedict a raise to ensure that he was not paid less than the football coach. And A&M’s 1982 hiring of Jackie Sherrill, for more than $200,000 a year, may have been the first slide on the slippery slope of football coach salary inflation.
A more crucial turning point came a decade earlier, in 1973, when four-year athletics scholarships were abolished in favor of one-year renewable scholarships. That meant your school’s running back was no longer a college student who just happened to play football but a football player who’d be given the opportunity to attend college each academic year as a perk of being on the team. This is what Michael Oriard, the author of Bowled Over, calls “the NCAA’s transformation of student-athletes into athlete-students,” though even the term “student-athlete” was itself a pure PR invention, dreamed up by the NCAA under executive director Walter Byers in the fifties.
Another watershed moment was the 1984 Supreme Court ruling that enabled the College Football Association, the now-defunct organization that negotiated TV contracts with networks for the universities, to pursue its own TV rights, independent of the NCAA (those rights are now with the schools and conferences). NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma kicked off the era of TV riches, even as Justice John Paul Stevens wholly bought in to the myth of college football. “The identification of this ‘product’ with an academic tradition differentiates college football from and makes it more popular than professional sports to which it might otherwise be comparable,” Stevens wrote. “In order to preserve the character and quality of the ‘product,’ athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class, and the like.”
In other words, pretending that it’s not a brand is college football’s brand. This is precisely why Johnny Manziel makes people uncomfortable. It feels like it should matter that athletes like Manziel are no longer truly part of the college experience, but they haven’t been for years. They are employees who help make the university what it is, just like the professors or the chancellor. Fancy cars, courtside seats at NBA games, photos backstage with Drake—it may be unsettling to see Manziel already living the life of a pro ( which he can do thanks to his family’s money ). But that’s what he is: a pitchman for the Texas A&M brand and an unpaid source of programming for CBS and Disney.
NCAA president Mark Emmert, now a beleaguered figure, inadvertently revealed the cynicism of the student-athlete model when ESPN’s Darren Rovell asked him last season if it was fair that A&M was selling so many number 2 jerseys on the strength of Manziel’s fame.
“It’s not just that it’s a number 2,” Emmert replied. “It’s a Texas A&M number 2. I can’t parse out the value of the number on one side and the university on the other. They go together. So A&M can enjoy the advantages of having this spectacular athlete play for them and ticket sales and filling the stands and being on TV more, and then he’s going to go out and play in the NFL and they don’t get anything for that. I could also say, ‘Shouldn’t they have a share, having groomed him for the NFL?’ ”
Emmert’s not wrong that A&M is doing for Manziel as much as Manziel is doing for A&M, but, um, no. The Aggies should not have a share. Even after just one season, the economic imbalance between the two sides is still too huge for Manziel to ever owe them a penny. Does Ryan Swope owe A&M any of his $115,788 signing bonus, perhaps the only money he will ever make from playing football? The question now should not be, Did Johnny Manziel break the NCAA’s rules? Rather, it should be, Why doesn’t everybody break the NCAA’s rules? What’s called for here is civil disobedience. What’s called for here is, “I am Spartacus.” Imagine this scenario: on December 8, just after the bowl lineups and BCS bids are announced, every college football player in the country signs an autograph for $1, then turns themselves in (or better yet, tweets out the evidence). Do they still get to be student-athletes? Would there still be college football? They’re all Spartacus. They’re all Johnny Manziel.