The article references, among other things, the large salaries commanded by coaches as indicative of an unfair trend where the college or university is seeing large financial gains due to the success of one or more of their teams. This idea is absolutely absurd, and goes against everything that the NCAA, but more importantly going to college stands for.
It’d be silly for me to sit here and say that all college kids are poor. My own experience at Colorado College showed me as much. I’ll admit that I was jealous of some of my classmates who had access to a seemingly limitless bank account, but at the same time my loving parents supported me for almost all of college. That support allowed me to do the fun things college kids are supposed to do, but it was nowhere near the level of some of my peers. But I digress: the point is college kids should be poor.
Because of lax rules and enforcement, on the part of both schools and NCAA, athletes receive some type of “aid” through various mediums every year. And it’s pretty obvious that the majority of cases, and the most severe ones, come from men’s basketball and football. These are the most popular college sports and therefore have a much higher economic standing. Interestingly enough, those are also two sports that lack good (or in football’s case any) minor professional leagues. Basically, Division 1 in those sports is the minor leagues, and young athletes know that, which is why they don’t feel any remorse in taking money from wherever it comes. Because they feel they should be paid.
That gets to the heart of the problem, and it’s the same reason why there is a lockout in the NFL right now. Don’t get me wrong, the one thing that aggravates me most about the NFL is the attention it receives even during its offseason, but it just goes to show how much it means in dollars and cents. In the football world, summer dawns with a cloud of confusion and uneasiness.
The word I’ve heard tossed around the most is greed. The owners are being greedy, the players are being greedy, hell, everyone’s being greedy! But I think it’s deeper than that and it goes down to something that’s been ingrained in our societal consciousness over the last two decades.
We’ve become a nation of expecters. NFL players are looking around and seeing that baseball players and basketball players earn more money than they do, even though the NFL’s profit margins have been rising steadily. So they expect more money. The owners look at the fabulous salaries and bonuses commanded by other titans of industry and expect (because after all they do own the team) to keep a higher share of their profits. And as the entire nation sits here and whines during an economic recession, expecting things to get better overnight, something about the character of being American is lost.
I remember asking my grandfather once what it was like to live in the Great Depression. To summarize, he said it sucked. But that really wasn’t his point, it was this: you didn’t sit around and whine and complain and cry that the President wasn’t fixing the economy. Let the papers do that – normal people had to make do with what they could. Let’s not forget that in the same time period, the practice of Jim Crow was very much alive through the South and many other parts of the country. I’m not black, but I found it downright insulting when Adrian Peterson compared the modern NFL to slavery. If there is some kind of after life, rest assured Frederick Douglass is waiting there to slap Peterson in the face.
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| Does it look like this man expected anything? |
Now, I do genuinely feel bad for a good number of NFL players. What they do is incredibly dangerous, and as we learn more and more about the human brain, it stands to reason that they should receive financial aid for health care after their playing days. But because of the nature of the sport, football rosters are huge, and most of those guys don’t make a lot of money. That being said, I still don’t feel bad for anyone – professional athlete or not – that was living outside their means when the economy turned. You were living on expectation. You bought a house on loans with a mortgage based on the expectation (in reality allusion) that more money was inherently coming your way.
The feeling of being wronged is often a mask for greedy expectation. Have we been wronged by what’s happened to the economy over the last few years? Absolutely not. People that were living in their means took a hit, but they can live with that, because for the most part they’re still fulfilling their life’s goals. They’re OK. Maybe some of them adjusted their lifestyle; maybe some of them are going to settle for something less in retirement.
But that’s not the majority of people. It takes more than a few years to climb out of a recession, and it will probably take several more to clean up the 14 trillion dollars of debt were in. Was this week’s ruling supposed to shock anyone? Pick up a history book about our courts and you will find, for the most part, that our legal system supports the Goliath, and not the David’s. In the end, if the players concede it will probably be viewed as a vain and greedy move by the owners to make more money. And that’s true – but the overarching point is that the act of conceding removes the players from the class of expecters.
If they concede, they’ll show they at least have the decency to recognize they have a job at time when roughly 26 million people don’t. They’ll recognize that their job is to play a sport! The operative word there is play! I am by no means absolving the owners of guilt; on the contrary, it is painfully obvious that it is entirely their fault. But social awareness is a good thing. It may not be the players’ fault, but would having no football next year be better for the country? Just as well, student athletes need to recognize their fortune in receiving a free (or mostly free) college education, not seek ways to earn money because “I’m making the college money.”
If you take a look at our social history, our labor history, for the most part you’re going to find that the battle between those with less and those with more has raged since the dawning of this nation. And while there have been historic victories on the part of those with less, its clear even today that our capitalistic society favors those with more.
There’s something uniquely American about making the best out of what you can and feeling blessed about what you have, rather than feeling wronged about what you have not. At the end of the day, the NFL is such a large economic beast because of regular people. Regardless of should be and shouldn’t be, the fact is NFL players only make what they make because of fans. There is nothing uncommon or new about what the owners are doing, and sure, that doesn’t make it right. But if the players can swallow their pride, they’ll avoid what happened to baseball players in 1994.
They’ll avoid being cast as the greedy expecters. They’ll avoid looking like a bunch of rich guys that took a whole year of football, and a Super Bowl, from the country just to be richer. And sure, if that does happen, they’ll be bitter because as I said, it is all actually the owners fault: they’re the ones that locked the players out. But regular people won’t see it that way and that’s the bottom line. Because we watch, you guys make all this money – so in the end who is being wronged? We are.
Sports make it easier to get through tough times. That’s why Franklin Roosevelt ordered the MLB to continue during World War II. We couldn’t expect the owners to do the right thing – they wanted to shut down the league because a great number of its stars volunteered or were drafted into the services. Luckily, the country had FDR. I’m not suggesting President Obama get involved with this, far from it. I’m just trying to point out that we should never expect the inordinately wealthy to do the right thing, or have any semblance of social consciousness when it comes time to assess profit margins.
So many professional athletes, football included, come from a childhood where expecting was just plain silly, save those who grew up with the silver spoon. One would think that this would allow some of the players to remove themselves from this situation and perceive how it appears to regular people. But that’s not the case, at least, not until we stop having greedy expectations about what is due. We’re not “due” anything. We need to remember that our American character derives from being an immigrant nation – a nation of people who came to this land and realized what a privilege it was. We need to be grateful always of what we have, and not lament what we don’t. That’s what it means to be American.
Sources: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/news/story?id=6566975
http://bbsvaluetour.ning.com/profiles/blogs/black-in-time-a-moment-in-our-438
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