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Stop Giving College Athletes Million-Dollar Locker Rooms. Start Paying Them
Big-time college sports programs pour money into absurdly luxurious amenities because compensating players is off the table
By Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal
Aug. 18, 2017
The video weirded me out.
I saw it in early August, via the Players Tribune, Derek Jeter’s slick, for-athletes, by-athletes digital clubhouse: a video of the University of Texas football team’s inaugural visit to its brand-new, gut-renovated, super-duper, state-of-the-art…locker room.
“I told you, on the very first day…I said we would take care of you, that we would be a players-first program,” Herman says. “And this is one step along the way. So boys: enjoy.”
With that, Herman dramatically opens the doors, like Bob Barker pulling back the curtain on a free Buick.
The kids immediately go bonkers. They’re so thrilled and appreciative. It’s like a combination of Christmas morning and that “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Oprah Winfrey bombards her audience with Ralph Lauren cashmere sweaters, turkeys and Ugg boots.
The locker room is indeed fantastic. There are flat-screen displays, stainless-steel fixtures, sleek lighting and plenty of Longhorn burnt orange. The lockers themselves are nicer than my first apartment. As a package, the place has more in common with the deck of the Starship Enterprise than any wooden-bench stink-cave of locker rooms past.
When I was a teenager, I would have lost my mind to inhabit a locker room like that (not that anyone was asking). And this is precisely the idea. All over the country, big-time college-athletics programs are putting on their glam boots and investing in luxury amenities—fancy locker rooms, performance centers, living quarters, even sleeping pods for a midday nap.
This luxe-ification is done, of course, in the name of competitiveness: specifically, attracting recruits and satisfying players so that a college can keep up in the multibillion-dollar universe of football and men’s basketball. Austerity has long since left the building. If you aren’t offering this stuff to kids, the theory goes, your opponent will. (Texas reportedly showed off its locker room to potential high-school recruits before its actual roster got an unveiling, which kind of tells you all you need to know.)
To be fair, Texas isn’t the first college team to bedazzle a locker room—Texas Tech just opened its own upgrade at a reported cost of $1.6 million—and a bedazzled locker room isn’t so crazy anymore. A few years back, the University of Oregon unveiled a football complex (largely bankrolled by Nike honcho Phil Knight ) that looks like a Bond villain’s lair and includes a barber shop, farm-to-table dining and a coaches’ hydrotherapy pool. (The cost has been reported to be $68 million, but in fairness, it does have Brazilian wood floors and foosball tables from Barcelona.)
More recently, the University of Central Florida, which finished 6-7 in football last season (a bright uptick from a 0-12 campaign in 2015), unveiled a plan for an athletes’ village that would include, among other flourishes, a “lazy river”—one of those winding amusements you might find at a water park.
Yup: a lazy river.
‘It’s fun to imagine coaching legends like Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler introducing their football teams to a lazy river.’
Look: You and I could spend the whole day laughing at the absurdity of this stuff, because a lot of it is absurd, especially if, like me, you spent your college days sleeping on a secondhand futon and microwaving ramen noodles. It’s fun to imagine late coaching legends such as Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler doing a locker-room unveiling for the Players Tribune or introducing their football teams to a lazy river. They would likely have ordered the lazy river drained on the spot. (Then again, Bo and Bear would probably be making $9 million in 2017, so who knows?)
Times have changed, aggressively.
“The question the public ought to be asking is: What does the spending have to do with higher education?” says Gerald Gurney, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma who spent nearly two decades in the athletic department there and now serves as president of the Drake Group, an organization devoted to defending “academic integrity in higher education from the corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports.”
“When you look at the centers with laser tag and beach volleyball and barber shops and fancy locker rooms,” Gurney says, “there seems to be no semblance to being a student at a university.”
As with billion-dollar TV deals and megabucks coaching contracts, these luxury athletic facilities signal something fundamentally askew about the economy of big-time college athletics. Professionalization has almost totally arrived: The perks for college teams can be more sumptuous than the ones for pro clubs, and salaries for top college coaches rival those found in the NFL and NBA. But schools remain resistant to writing a check for the one group actually doing the work out on the field: the players.
“It’s obvious hypocrisy,” says the former college basketball star Nigel Hayes, a University of Wisconsin graduate who just signed on with the New York Knicks. “People say there’s not enough money to pay players. Yet there’s enough for all the lavish amenities so they can get players to commit to their schools and make even more money.”
Before anyone dismisses Hayes—and yowza, does the college-sports establishment do a sadly robust job of dismissing the viewpoints of college athletes—know that the economists agree with him. The system is cracked.
Colleges “spend money on everything but what a normal market would have to spend money on, which is the players,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and the author, along with Gurney and Donna Lopiano, of “Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong With College Sports and How to Fix It.” “It just seems like a no-brainer that [this is] what’s going on.”
Let me beat you to it: College athletes can get scholarships, and that isn’t a small thing when a full ride at a four-year school can be worth well over $200,000.
But in an era in which networks pay close to $1 billion a year to televise March Madness, college football is expanding into lucrative playoffs, and coaches with shoe deals scoot through the clouds in private jets, the notion of scholarships as fair trade starts to feel quaint. It’s comical to watch the NCAA and its membership try to justify this arrangement in the legal system and the court of public opinion. Schools that tout their futuristic performance complexes and celebrity coaches suddenly sound like they’re back on a crab grass field in the late 19th century, rhapsodizing about gentlemen amateurs and the flying wedge.
The Oregon Ducks players’ lounge includes flat-screen TV monitors and videogame
Because make no mistake: These luxe locker rooms and performance centers are a form of compensation, directly correlated to the nonpayment of athletes. With no obligation to share revenue with talented players but eager to attract them to campus, schools simply channel money into other forms of seduction.
Rodney Fort, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, calls the current environment a “wonderful example of what happens when a market is restricted from doing its job and people still need to move things economically to their highest-valued use.”
“You can’t pay the players directly, at least not aboveboard,” says Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago. “So you overdose in complementary recruiting devices, and that includes building the biggest, most luxurious facilities.”
This is why the Texas locker-room video weirded me out. I don’t doubt for a second that the Longhorns love the new digs or that Coach Herman adores his players and was psyched to show it off. But the manner in which it was unveiled—like a gift, rather than as an indirect payment for actual money to which these players, their predecessors and their replacements may very well be entitled—makes it feel like a shiny diversion from the warped economy behind the curtain.
“I’ve seen lots of people label [such spending] as ‘gold plating’—they do it because they can,” says Fort. “That really distracts attention from actual physical workings of a nonmarket process trying to do what a market process does.”
(It isn’t a perfect comparison, but the college-sports perks-o-rama reminds me of the rapturous coverage a few years ago for tech companies offering workers free cereal and ping-pong tables because they wanted to keep them happy as they worked grueling hours. It took a while for people to come around to the idea that maybe free cereal masked some serious work-life issues. And at least those techies were getting paid.)
A lot of college sports fans don’t want to hear any of this. Despite some terrific reporting on the inequities (the Washington Post’s Will Hobson has been sublime, as has my Journal colleague Matthew Futterman), we’re still caught between eras—between our current hyper-professionalized age and a romanticized vision of college sports. Oklahoma’s Gurney, whose career has straddled both eras, says that the life of a college athlete in 2017 has little in common with the life of one in, say, 1985.
But this doesn’t stop the blowback when players raise the topic of compensation—or any other disagreement with college athlete life. Here the fancy facilities actually get used as a cudgel: Quit whining, you pampered babies!
Consider the reaction earlier this summer when Josh Rosen, a quarterback at UCLA and an economics major, deigned to suggest in an interview that playing a major college sport today isn’t wildly compatible with a well-rounded academic life.
“Football and school don’t go together,” Rosen told Bleacher Report’s Matt Hayes. “They just don’t. Trying to do both is like doing two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL.”
“Any time [a] player puts into school will take away from the time they could put into football,” Rosen continued. “They don’t realize that they’re getting screwed until it’s too late. You have a bunch of people at the universities who are supposed to help you out, and they’re more interested in helping you stay eligible. At some point, universities have to do more to prepare players for university life and help them succeed beyond football.”
Rosen’s comments provoked a thoughtful and nuanced debate about what it means to be modern-day student-athlete.
I’m just kidding. He got clobbered.
Rosen was pilloried by the college sports establishment—as lazy, as an ingrate, as a spoiled brat unable to balance his academics and the carefree life of a major college quarterback. Never mind that, as CNBC’s Jake Novak pointed out, the National Labor Relations Board has found that current college players are spending between 40 and 50 hours a week on football in season—a full-time job by any standard. Never mind that college athletic departments have been criticized for steering student-athletes to easy course loads—or, terrifyingly, nonexistent, fabricated ones. Never mind the invisible hand of the NFL and NBA in perpetuating the system—fat and happy pro leagues, waiting to cherry pick what is effectively an unpaid minor league.
Never mind that Josh Rosen is in college, and that questioning the system is supposed to be part of, you know, college.
“Shut up and play” remains the uninspired diktat for a college athlete in 2017. Embrace the trade-off, get your education and keep your objections to yourself. (Pro athletes are somewhat liberated, but “Shut up and play” is a strong force in pro sports as well, as the current debate over the national anthem in the NFL suggests.)
I know what you’re thinking: OK, Journal clown, you’re good at pointing out the flaws with the system, but what’s the fix? Any compensation solution would be complicated and entail side effects, and the courts would probably need to be involved. But the University of Chicago’s Sanderson says it may be simpler than I think: “The right solution is to simply pay the kids. Let the market work. If it results in ‘only’ 50 Division I football schools, because the other schools can’t afford a quarterback, that’s fine; the rest can be programs where the ‘student-athlete’ is actually a student.”
If that free-market approach isn’t palatable to the public, Sanderson suggests a solution in which schools with big-time programs contribute (perhaps via a tax on revenues) to a general fund that would allocate an equal amount of money per player. That money could be drawn from by players (the vast majority of whom never make the pros) to finish college, enroll in an M.B.A. program, start a small business or pay medical bills.
Meanwhile, the luxury spending will undoubtedly continue. I doubt that college athletes will stay silent, however. They see what’s going on; the imbalances are too obvious. The fact that the Texas locker-room video appeared on the Players Tribune was pretty rich, given that it’s designed to be a means for athletes to tell the unvarnished truth. Earlier this year, the site published an essay from Nigel Hayes entitled “Don’t Just Shut Up and Play” in which Hayes rejected the idea of athletes keeping quiet and quoted James Baldwin : “The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
In 2017, you don’t even have to go to class—or the stadium—to re-examine where college sports are going. You just have to go to the locker room. It’s amazing in there.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
Big-time college sports programs pour money into absurdly luxurious amenities because compensating players is off the table
By Jason Gay / Wall Street Journal
Aug. 18, 2017
The video weirded me out.
I saw it in early August, via the Players Tribune, Derek Jeter’s slick, for-athletes, by-athletes digital clubhouse: a video of the University of Texas football team’s inaugural visit to its brand-new, gut-renovated, super-duper, state-of-the-art…locker room.
“I told you, on the very first day…I said we would take care of you, that we would be a players-first program,” Herman says. “And this is one step along the way. So boys: enjoy.”
With that, Herman dramatically opens the doors, like Bob Barker pulling back the curtain on a free Buick.
The kids immediately go bonkers. They’re so thrilled and appreciative. It’s like a combination of Christmas morning and that “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Oprah Winfrey bombards her audience with Ralph Lauren cashmere sweaters, turkeys and Ugg boots.
The locker room is indeed fantastic. There are flat-screen displays, stainless-steel fixtures, sleek lighting and plenty of Longhorn burnt orange. The lockers themselves are nicer than my first apartment. As a package, the place has more in common with the deck of the Starship Enterprise than any wooden-bench stink-cave of locker rooms past.
When I was a teenager, I would have lost my mind to inhabit a locker room like that (not that anyone was asking). And this is precisely the idea. All over the country, big-time college-athletics programs are putting on their glam boots and investing in luxury amenities—fancy locker rooms, performance centers, living quarters, even sleeping pods for a midday nap.
This luxe-ification is done, of course, in the name of competitiveness: specifically, attracting recruits and satisfying players so that a college can keep up in the multibillion-dollar universe of football and men’s basketball. Austerity has long since left the building. If you aren’t offering this stuff to kids, the theory goes, your opponent will. (Texas reportedly showed off its locker room to potential high-school recruits before its actual roster got an unveiling, which kind of tells you all you need to know.)
To be fair, Texas isn’t the first college team to bedazzle a locker room—Texas Tech just opened its own upgrade at a reported cost of $1.6 million—and a bedazzled locker room isn’t so crazy anymore. A few years back, the University of Oregon unveiled a football complex (largely bankrolled by Nike honcho Phil Knight ) that looks like a Bond villain’s lair and includes a barber shop, farm-to-table dining and a coaches’ hydrotherapy pool. (The cost has been reported to be $68 million, but in fairness, it does have Brazilian wood floors and foosball tables from Barcelona.)
More recently, the University of Central Florida, which finished 6-7 in football last season (a bright uptick from a 0-12 campaign in 2015), unveiled a plan for an athletes’ village that would include, among other flourishes, a “lazy river”—one of those winding amusements you might find at a water park.
Yup: a lazy river.
‘It’s fun to imagine coaching legends like Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler introducing their football teams to a lazy river.’
Look: You and I could spend the whole day laughing at the absurdity of this stuff, because a lot of it is absurd, especially if, like me, you spent your college days sleeping on a secondhand futon and microwaving ramen noodles. It’s fun to imagine late coaching legends such as Bear Bryant or Bo Schembechler doing a locker-room unveiling for the Players Tribune or introducing their football teams to a lazy river. They would likely have ordered the lazy river drained on the spot. (Then again, Bo and Bear would probably be making $9 million in 2017, so who knows?)
Times have changed, aggressively.
“The question the public ought to be asking is: What does the spending have to do with higher education?” says Gerald Gurney, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma who spent nearly two decades in the athletic department there and now serves as president of the Drake Group, an organization devoted to defending “academic integrity in higher education from the corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports.”
“When you look at the centers with laser tag and beach volleyball and barber shops and fancy locker rooms,” Gurney says, “there seems to be no semblance to being a student at a university.”
As with billion-dollar TV deals and megabucks coaching contracts, these luxury athletic facilities signal something fundamentally askew about the economy of big-time college athletics. Professionalization has almost totally arrived: The perks for college teams can be more sumptuous than the ones for pro clubs, and salaries for top college coaches rival those found in the NFL and NBA. But schools remain resistant to writing a check for the one group actually doing the work out on the field: the players.
“It’s obvious hypocrisy,” says the former college basketball star Nigel Hayes, a University of Wisconsin graduate who just signed on with the New York Knicks. “People say there’s not enough money to pay players. Yet there’s enough for all the lavish amenities so they can get players to commit to their schools and make even more money.”
Before anyone dismisses Hayes—and yowza, does the college-sports establishment do a sadly robust job of dismissing the viewpoints of college athletes—know that the economists agree with him. The system is cracked.
Colleges “spend money on everything but what a normal market would have to spend money on, which is the players,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and the author, along with Gurney and Donna Lopiano, of “Unwinding Madness: What Went Wrong With College Sports and How to Fix It.” “It just seems like a no-brainer that [this is] what’s going on.”
Let me beat you to it: College athletes can get scholarships, and that isn’t a small thing when a full ride at a four-year school can be worth well over $200,000.
But in an era in which networks pay close to $1 billion a year to televise March Madness, college football is expanding into lucrative playoffs, and coaches with shoe deals scoot through the clouds in private jets, the notion of scholarships as fair trade starts to feel quaint. It’s comical to watch the NCAA and its membership try to justify this arrangement in the legal system and the court of public opinion. Schools that tout their futuristic performance complexes and celebrity coaches suddenly sound like they’re back on a crab grass field in the late 19th century, rhapsodizing about gentlemen amateurs and the flying wedge.
The Oregon Ducks players’ lounge includes flat-screen TV monitors and videogame
Because make no mistake: These luxe locker rooms and performance centers are a form of compensation, directly correlated to the nonpayment of athletes. With no obligation to share revenue with talented players but eager to attract them to campus, schools simply channel money into other forms of seduction.
Rodney Fort, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, calls the current environment a “wonderful example of what happens when a market is restricted from doing its job and people still need to move things economically to their highest-valued use.”
“You can’t pay the players directly, at least not aboveboard,” says Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago. “So you overdose in complementary recruiting devices, and that includes building the biggest, most luxurious facilities.”
This is why the Texas locker-room video weirded me out. I don’t doubt for a second that the Longhorns love the new digs or that Coach Herman adores his players and was psyched to show it off. But the manner in which it was unveiled—like a gift, rather than as an indirect payment for actual money to which these players, their predecessors and their replacements may very well be entitled—makes it feel like a shiny diversion from the warped economy behind the curtain.
“I’ve seen lots of people label [such spending] as ‘gold plating’—they do it because they can,” says Fort. “That really distracts attention from actual physical workings of a nonmarket process trying to do what a market process does.”
(It isn’t a perfect comparison, but the college-sports perks-o-rama reminds me of the rapturous coverage a few years ago for tech companies offering workers free cereal and ping-pong tables because they wanted to keep them happy as they worked grueling hours. It took a while for people to come around to the idea that maybe free cereal masked some serious work-life issues. And at least those techies were getting paid.)
A lot of college sports fans don’t want to hear any of this. Despite some terrific reporting on the inequities (the Washington Post’s Will Hobson has been sublime, as has my Journal colleague Matthew Futterman), we’re still caught between eras—between our current hyper-professionalized age and a romanticized vision of college sports. Oklahoma’s Gurney, whose career has straddled both eras, says that the life of a college athlete in 2017 has little in common with the life of one in, say, 1985.
But this doesn’t stop the blowback when players raise the topic of compensation—or any other disagreement with college athlete life. Here the fancy facilities actually get used as a cudgel: Quit whining, you pampered babies!
Consider the reaction earlier this summer when Josh Rosen, a quarterback at UCLA and an economics major, deigned to suggest in an interview that playing a major college sport today isn’t wildly compatible with a well-rounded academic life.
“Football and school don’t go together,” Rosen told Bleacher Report’s Matt Hayes. “They just don’t. Trying to do both is like doing two full-time jobs. There are guys who have no business being in school, but they’re here because this is the path to the NFL.”
“Any time [a] player puts into school will take away from the time they could put into football,” Rosen continued. “They don’t realize that they’re getting screwed until it’s too late. You have a bunch of people at the universities who are supposed to help you out, and they’re more interested in helping you stay eligible. At some point, universities have to do more to prepare players for university life and help them succeed beyond football.”
Rosen’s comments provoked a thoughtful and nuanced debate about what it means to be modern-day student-athlete.
I’m just kidding. He got clobbered.
Rosen was pilloried by the college sports establishment—as lazy, as an ingrate, as a spoiled brat unable to balance his academics and the carefree life of a major college quarterback. Never mind that, as CNBC’s Jake Novak pointed out, the National Labor Relations Board has found that current college players are spending between 40 and 50 hours a week on football in season—a full-time job by any standard. Never mind that college athletic departments have been criticized for steering student-athletes to easy course loads—or, terrifyingly, nonexistent, fabricated ones. Never mind the invisible hand of the NFL and NBA in perpetuating the system—fat and happy pro leagues, waiting to cherry pick what is effectively an unpaid minor league.
Never mind that Josh Rosen is in college, and that questioning the system is supposed to be part of, you know, college.
“Shut up and play” remains the uninspired diktat for a college athlete in 2017. Embrace the trade-off, get your education and keep your objections to yourself. (Pro athletes are somewhat liberated, but “Shut up and play” is a strong force in pro sports as well, as the current debate over the national anthem in the NFL suggests.)
I know what you’re thinking: OK, Journal clown, you’re good at pointing out the flaws with the system, but what’s the fix? Any compensation solution would be complicated and entail side effects, and the courts would probably need to be involved. But the University of Chicago’s Sanderson says it may be simpler than I think: “The right solution is to simply pay the kids. Let the market work. If it results in ‘only’ 50 Division I football schools, because the other schools can’t afford a quarterback, that’s fine; the rest can be programs where the ‘student-athlete’ is actually a student.”
If that free-market approach isn’t palatable to the public, Sanderson suggests a solution in which schools with big-time programs contribute (perhaps via a tax on revenues) to a general fund that would allocate an equal amount of money per player. That money could be drawn from by players (the vast majority of whom never make the pros) to finish college, enroll in an M.B.A. program, start a small business or pay medical bills.
Meanwhile, the luxury spending will undoubtedly continue. I doubt that college athletes will stay silent, however. They see what’s going on; the imbalances are too obvious. The fact that the Texas locker-room video appeared on the Players Tribune was pretty rich, given that it’s designed to be a means for athletes to tell the unvarnished truth. Earlier this year, the site published an essay from Nigel Hayes entitled “Don’t Just Shut Up and Play” in which Hayes rejected the idea of athletes keeping quiet and quoted James Baldwin : “The paradox of education is precisely this: that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
In 2017, you don’t even have to go to class—or the stadium—to re-examine where college sports are going. You just have to go to the locker room. It’s amazing in there.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com