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For Players, the Road to the Final Four Means Lots of Time Away From Campus
The ever-increasing travel demands for college basketball players are a quandary for the NCAA, which rejects calls to share more of the sport’s revenue with athletes
By Rachel Bachman and Andrew Beaton / Wall Street Journal
March 30, 2018
Wichita State had plenty of incentives to leave the Missouri Valley Conference, its home since 1945. Its move to the American Athletic Conference before this season promised better competition and more exposure—along with hopes for the type of big-time bucks the MVC couldn’t offer.
Its men’s basketball team got an extra burden along with the move: five more travel days. The Shockers spent 39 days at away games or in transit in 2017-18, not including a three-day trip to San Diego for a first-round NCAA tournament game.
That’s a lot of time off campus for players that that college-sports leaders—facing probing questions about academics and amateurism—insist are students first, and then athletes.
“I think of it as over a month gone,” says Darron Boatright, Wichita State’s athletic director. “And that’s significant, and something we should consider and look at and monitor.”
Wichita State’s season is a window into the reality faced by the 351 Division I basketball programs, including the ones in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. The event begins Saturday in San Antonio with No. 11 seed Loyola against No. 3 seed Michigan before No. 1s Villanova and Kansas tip off for a spot in the final. This event is the climax in a busy calendar that has only grown more jam-packed for the players—and lucrative for the NCAA. Broadcast-rights fees for tournament games earn the NCAA most of its $1 billion in annual revenue.
Travel itineraries for eight top-25 teams, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal after public records requests, tell the story of students who spend extended periods of time out of the classroom and on airplanes or in hotels. They spend more than a month away from campus over the course of the season, often returning in the wee hours of the morning. And that’s in addition to the extensive time spent practicing, training, receiving medical treatment and playing games at home.
For Players, the Road to the Final Four Means Lots of Time Away From Campus
“It’s a huge problem,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in a news conference at the Final Four. Emmert said he worries about TV networks’ growing appetite for live-sports content and the ripple effects on athletes.
“We worry about it with these games, the tournament,” Emmert said. “How can you make it all fit and still not be utterly disruptive of that experience? It’s hard.”
Emmert and other college-sports leaders have rejected calls to share more of that revenue with the players who draw the eyeballs to the NCAA tournament. NCAA rules limit player compensation mainly to tuition, room, board and minor expenses. The boilerplate response is simple: Amateurism is a foundation for college athletics, and these athletes receive valuable educations.
Yet those same leaders have approved of the expanded seasons and longer trips that make it more difficult for athletes to be students and bring in more money every year.
NCAA rules limit athletic-related activities to no more than four hours per day and 20 hours per week. That does not include travel time.
Records show the extent of those travels. The eight schools reviewed by the Journal traveled an average of more than 42 days this season. For the schools in this weekend’s Final Four, the travel time only escalates—a welcome trip, no doubt, but with the potential to add another week to the schools’ respective tallies.
Those figures are only growing. The number of games per season has steadily increased in recent years. Travel time has spiked even more in the last decade amid a flurry of conference expansion and movement. More prominent conferences generally command higher TV-rights fees, which in turn funnel money back to member schools’ athletic departments. But the same shift has favored strategic peers over geographic ones, setting up more games with far-flung opponents.
The Wichita State Shockers spent 39 days at away games or in transit in 2017-18, not including a three-day trip to San Diego for a first-round NCAA tournament game.
“Playing college basketball is a full-time job,” says Orin Starn, a cultural anthropology professor at Duke who has suggested that his school drop down to Division III, a far more modest endeavor that offers no athletic scholarships. “The fact that games always take priority over class says a lot about the priorities of our universities right now.”
Teams in the Big 12 Conference, home to Final Four team Kansas, play an average of one more game a season than they did a decade ago and 4.6 more games than 20 years ago, according to data from Stats LLC. West Coast Conference teams play 5.2 more games, an 18% increase from the late 1990s.
Marcus Garrett, a freshman guard for Kansas, said his college basketball career brought “way more travel than what I expected.” He said he’s learned to coordinate with professors and get work done ahead of missed class time.
And more than ever, teams are traveling farther. West Virginia’s move from the Big East to the Big 12 nearly tripled its average distance from conference opponents. Wichita State’s new conference foes are about 76% farther from its campus than its previous ones.
Boatright said most of this season’s additional travel days weren’t due to the conference move. Some of Wichita State’s increased travel time this year was from the nine days it spent flying to and playing in the Maui Invitational, including a day off for players. Boatright noted that WSU turned down the chance to play another game in Maui.
The Journal’s analysis counted any time spent traveling as a travel day. Several itineraries, for instance, showed teams returning to campus from road trips in early-morning hours. The University of Houston team got back from a November tournament in Lynchburg, Va., at 2:45 a.m. on a Monday morning—and that was a charter flight.
In an NCAA survey of Division I athletes in 2015, men’s basketball players said they spent an average of 1.7 days a week away from campus and missed 2.2 classes. Among college students generally, research has shown a strong correlation between class attendance and grades.
Emmert says the NCAA is striving to address rising demands on players’ time. He noted that among other initiatives, the nation’s five most prominent conferences voted to give men’s basketball players three days off during winter break, a rule that takes effect next season.
Around the same time, NCAA members voted to start the season three days earlier.
Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com and Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
The ever-increasing travel demands for college basketball players are a quandary for the NCAA, which rejects calls to share more of the sport’s revenue with athletes
By Rachel Bachman and Andrew Beaton / Wall Street Journal
March 30, 2018
Wichita State had plenty of incentives to leave the Missouri Valley Conference, its home since 1945. Its move to the American Athletic Conference before this season promised better competition and more exposure—along with hopes for the type of big-time bucks the MVC couldn’t offer.
Its men’s basketball team got an extra burden along with the move: five more travel days. The Shockers spent 39 days at away games or in transit in 2017-18, not including a three-day trip to San Diego for a first-round NCAA tournament game.
That’s a lot of time off campus for players that that college-sports leaders—facing probing questions about academics and amateurism—insist are students first, and then athletes.
“I think of it as over a month gone,” says Darron Boatright, Wichita State’s athletic director. “And that’s significant, and something we should consider and look at and monitor.”
Wichita State’s season is a window into the reality faced by the 351 Division I basketball programs, including the ones in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. The event begins Saturday in San Antonio with No. 11 seed Loyola against No. 3 seed Michigan before No. 1s Villanova and Kansas tip off for a spot in the final. This event is the climax in a busy calendar that has only grown more jam-packed for the players—and lucrative for the NCAA. Broadcast-rights fees for tournament games earn the NCAA most of its $1 billion in annual revenue.
Travel itineraries for eight top-25 teams, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal after public records requests, tell the story of students who spend extended periods of time out of the classroom and on airplanes or in hotels. They spend more than a month away from campus over the course of the season, often returning in the wee hours of the morning. And that’s in addition to the extensive time spent practicing, training, receiving medical treatment and playing games at home.
For Players, the Road to the Final Four Means Lots of Time Away From Campus
“It’s a huge problem,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in a news conference at the Final Four. Emmert said he worries about TV networks’ growing appetite for live-sports content and the ripple effects on athletes.
“We worry about it with these games, the tournament,” Emmert said. “How can you make it all fit and still not be utterly disruptive of that experience? It’s hard.”
Emmert and other college-sports leaders have rejected calls to share more of that revenue with the players who draw the eyeballs to the NCAA tournament. NCAA rules limit player compensation mainly to tuition, room, board and minor expenses. The boilerplate response is simple: Amateurism is a foundation for college athletics, and these athletes receive valuable educations.
Yet those same leaders have approved of the expanded seasons and longer trips that make it more difficult for athletes to be students and bring in more money every year.
NCAA rules limit athletic-related activities to no more than four hours per day and 20 hours per week. That does not include travel time.
Records show the extent of those travels. The eight schools reviewed by the Journal traveled an average of more than 42 days this season. For the schools in this weekend’s Final Four, the travel time only escalates—a welcome trip, no doubt, but with the potential to add another week to the schools’ respective tallies.
Those figures are only growing. The number of games per season has steadily increased in recent years. Travel time has spiked even more in the last decade amid a flurry of conference expansion and movement. More prominent conferences generally command higher TV-rights fees, which in turn funnel money back to member schools’ athletic departments. But the same shift has favored strategic peers over geographic ones, setting up more games with far-flung opponents.
The Wichita State Shockers spent 39 days at away games or in transit in 2017-18, not including a three-day trip to San Diego for a first-round NCAA tournament game.
“Playing college basketball is a full-time job,” says Orin Starn, a cultural anthropology professor at Duke who has suggested that his school drop down to Division III, a far more modest endeavor that offers no athletic scholarships. “The fact that games always take priority over class says a lot about the priorities of our universities right now.”
Teams in the Big 12 Conference, home to Final Four team Kansas, play an average of one more game a season than they did a decade ago and 4.6 more games than 20 years ago, according to data from Stats LLC. West Coast Conference teams play 5.2 more games, an 18% increase from the late 1990s.
Marcus Garrett, a freshman guard for Kansas, said his college basketball career brought “way more travel than what I expected.” He said he’s learned to coordinate with professors and get work done ahead of missed class time.
And more than ever, teams are traveling farther. West Virginia’s move from the Big East to the Big 12 nearly tripled its average distance from conference opponents. Wichita State’s new conference foes are about 76% farther from its campus than its previous ones.
Boatright said most of this season’s additional travel days weren’t due to the conference move. Some of Wichita State’s increased travel time this year was from the nine days it spent flying to and playing in the Maui Invitational, including a day off for players. Boatright noted that WSU turned down the chance to play another game in Maui.
The Journal’s analysis counted any time spent traveling as a travel day. Several itineraries, for instance, showed teams returning to campus from road trips in early-morning hours. The University of Houston team got back from a November tournament in Lynchburg, Va., at 2:45 a.m. on a Monday morning—and that was a charter flight.
In an NCAA survey of Division I athletes in 2015, men’s basketball players said they spent an average of 1.7 days a week away from campus and missed 2.2 classes. Among college students generally, research has shown a strong correlation between class attendance and grades.
Emmert says the NCAA is striving to address rising demands on players’ time. He noted that among other initiatives, the nation’s five most prominent conferences voted to give men’s basketball players three days off during winter break, a rule that takes effect next season.
Around the same time, NCAA members voted to start the season three days earlier.
Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com and Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com