Problems with the inefficient committee

Sometimes I watch the way people choose to deal with problems, and it makes me take a second and third look at my own approach to such things. Perhaps, for that reason, it’s a good thing we have examples of “interesting” approaches to problem-solving.

Last week, the president of the United States gathered a “committee” to “solve” the NCAA.

I have long imagined the folks who run college athletics sitting in meetings for years talking about how they could slow-play the whole amateur athletes-as-employees issue because, despite the fact that most of them probably believed paying athletes for their name, image and likeness was a good thing, they also feared it was a genie best left in the bottle.

Then the courts got involved, and NCAA leaders were forced to act. They moved too slowly and in the wrong direction, and we’re left with what we have now. I do find it interesting that while the college athletes at the center of being paid are those whose sports generate the revenue—football and men’s basketball—the lawsuit that hastened the unraveling was filed by a swimmer in Texas, an athlete from a non-revenue sport.

That said, there are so many things that need to be addressed to “fix” what ails college athletics. At its core, the NCAA, whether people like it or not, was like a large corporation with a group of non-profits attached to its major revenue operations.

Football and men’s basketball generated large revenues, mostly through TV contracts, and that revenue was used to allow male and female athletes in all the other sports to earn scholarships and get a college education. You knew the education part of this wouldn’t last forever and that money would shake things up. So here we are.

I find it interesting that anyone thinks Congress can fix this. Even more intriguing is the president believing he is going to “fix it in one week with an executive order.” Those folks can’t even figure out how to do their day jobs efficiently.

The sad part of this “committee,” for me, is who was on it. In my opinion, the issues with college sports go far beyond football, yet those major revenue sports get all the attention. The powers that be, at least in public discourse, seem to believe that figuring out how to better pay those major-revenue sport athletes will fix all the problems.

There are way too many underlying issues to count, but the more they focus on football, the more they miss the fact that there will be collateral damage. Who is making sure that the women’s soccer team, the track and field athletes, and yes, the swimmers still have scholarship opportunities?

So they convene a meeting, and the headlines are two guys—Nick Saban and Urban Meyer—lecturing us about how education is being lost because of NIL collectives. Is this supposed to be a joke? Those two guys were using NIL collectives under the table before they were legal.

Now, with their multimillion-dollar broadcaster deals, they get to tell everyone else—who, whether it can work or not, are headed down this road trying to level the playing field against coaches like them—that they’re doing it wrong.

Ironic.

If we want to do this, do it right. It’s not going to be fixed by politicians or by executive order. It’s going to get better when you bring women, softball players, volleyball coaches, small schools, and all those with a stake into the dialogue and decide whether you’re primarily about paying football and basketball players or still focused on providing educational opportunities.

I was never necessarily for or against paying college athletes, but I always felt that the goalkeeper on a college soccer team should be able to put her name on a clinic in her hometown during spring break and be paid for it. That’s NIL.

This was always going to be a slippery slope because the main headliners on this presidential committee were already paying for play. Now a few more schools get to join in, and they don’t want to lose their seat at the table. I’m not sure how this ends.