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Perspective | College sports’ real criminals: Those getting rich under the guise of ‘amateurism’
>>It’s going to take more than an FBI investigation to correct this problem. It’s going to take “Congress or the President,” mediator Kenneth Feinberg said. For the past several years, Feinberg has watched the NCAA intractably resist any attempt to deal fairly with athletes, while pocketing sums such as the $1 billion a year the athletes attract in broadcast rights fees for March Madness.<<
>>The key to any meaningful collegiate sports reform is to do away with this fundamentally dishonest “spirit of amateurism,” which is the root of so many NCAA ills, and creates the black market in the first place. It’s nothing more than a fig leaf for pervasive corruption. Take away the incentives for bribery, kickbacks and money laundering. Open the market, and settle on a fair metric to compensate the revenue-producing athletes, with the help of a mediator such as Feinberg. But that of course won’t happen voluntarily, because it would mean NCAA athletic directors must agree to take less. A lot less.<<
>>It’s going to take more than an FBI investigation to correct this problem. It’s going to take “Congress or the President,” mediator Kenneth Feinberg said. For the past several years, Feinberg has watched the NCAA intractably resist any attempt to deal fairly with athletes, while pocketing sums such as the $1 billion a year the athletes attract in broadcast rights fees for March Madness.<<
>>The key to any meaningful collegiate sports reform is to do away with this fundamentally dishonest “spirit of amateurism,” which is the root of so many NCAA ills, and creates the black market in the first place. It’s nothing more than a fig leaf for pervasive corruption. Take away the incentives for bribery, kickbacks and money laundering. Open the market, and settle on a fair metric to compensate the revenue-producing athletes, with the help of a mediator such as Feinberg. But that of course won’t happen voluntarily, because it would mean NCAA athletic directors must agree to take less. A lot less.<<