Rant About the NCAA

In the news today was Ohio State and how it is vacating all of its wins from last season.  There are often stories in the news about people and schools being punished for breaking the NCAA rules.  Here are my thoughts on the NCAA rules.

Should anyone be surprised that a lot of the top teams are cheating the system?  If there were no rules against paying players, the universities would offer up lots of money to the top players so that their teams would be better and so that they would bring in more money.  There is a strong economic incentive to pay players.  

I think the NCAA is a weird system.  For football and men's basketball, there is a lot of public interest and so a school's team in these sports will generate a lot of revenue.  The rules then say that the profits don't go to the players but just go to the university; the players can't so much as parlay their fame and make money on the side; basically the NCAA is saying that not only will the schools keep the lions' share of the money, the players under no circumstances will make a lot of money in any other way.

As a student at a university, I would be somewhat happier if that money was pumped back into the academic system so that the average student didn't have to pay as high of tuition.  As I understand it, however, the money actually goes to the other many NCAA sports on campus.  In virtually all cases, no other sports programs make a profit.  In part, this is because a very small percent of people on campus actually care about those programs.  The big winners in this system are the athletes.  They get full-ride scholarships and they get to play their sport of choice for free.  It seems to me that most anyone would rather do that then work a crummy college job to pay their way through school.  I don't agree with this.  From an economics point of view, it's equivalent to the average student paying higher tuition so that these athletes can get a sweet gig.  With all due respect to those people who are NCAA athletes, I don't want to pay your tuition.

I feel that college sports should be privatized.  College and serious, high-level sports are two different things.  College sports is basically entertainment consumed by the masses, not just college students.  The United States is one of the only countries in the world that mixes school and sports we do; personally, I think the rest of the world has it right.  I believe the college sports money should go to those who actually earn it: the football players and the men's basketball players.  As for other sports, why can't the athletes themselves pay their own way?  In a privatized system they could be subsidized by sponsorships (like the Olympic athletes.)