The Shame Of College Sports Analysis

In The Shame of College Sports, Taylor Branch approaches the widely discussed topic of paying college athletes with a plethora of convincing arguments containing historical evidence ranging from the origins of the NCAA’s deliberately ambiguous terms like “student-athlete” to the legal disputes over player likeness in popular video games. Branch starts by recalling several well known college sports scandals to set up an explanation of how the real scandal is how the NCAA justifies its exploitation of college athletes with it’s two core argumentative pillars, amateurism and student-athlete. In order to explain why these terms came into fruition, he guides the leader on a storytelling journey of how the NCAA transformed itself from an unauthoritative, …show more content…
Branch then spends the majority of the rest of the article explaining in depth examples of legal disputes between the NCAA and its athletes regarding worker’s compensation, likeness, scholarships, royalties, legal representation, and their amateur status. He comes to several conclusions, but I will focus on how the NCAA’s stance on player’s property rights is paradoxical, and that there is still no way for players to determine their value to their university, so all three of these need to be reformed in order to create a system capable of paying players. In this essay I will be explaining why I agree with Taylor Branch’s argument from an ethical perspective, but why specific aspects of his argument won’t translate practically into real world change.
Though the NCAA property rights waiver is inherently paradoxical and prevents players from being compensated for their athletic accomplishments, getting rid of the waiver completely would create an overabundance of technical problems surrounding how players should be paid. All NCAA athletes must sign the property rights waiver to be eligible to compete in an NCAA sport. When speaking to Hausfeld, Branch lays the …show more content…
Personally i think the concepts of amateurism and student-athletes are complete nonsense constructs made up by a bunch of greedy men trying to expand their profit margins. I totally understand the appeal of pushing down others to make more money, especially when there’s so much leverage, but that should only be attempted in competition. These “student-athletes” don’t have a means to fight back because they are kids with no tools to fight back. Having stated my opinion however, I think it would be extremely hard to devise an effective payment structure for college athletes. First, a lot of the existing leveraging infrastructure the NCAA has fortified itself with would need to be torn down, which I don’t see happening. Then if players suddenly have property rights or assigned values, new controversies over the fairness of the payment structure will arise. Football and Basketball will become a mess of resentment and corruption. All of the marginalized sports, especially most women’s sports will definitely be treated unfairly. I am left torn because I can’t realistically imagine a complete solution to this problem. That is probably why nobody seems to be able to figure it out