Season Obituaries: Wisconsin

Let's say I'm Satan (could be true). Let's say that, in a free moment between debauchery and rigged fiddle contests, I offer you a deal: your favorite basketball team could make the NCAA tournament every year, and you'll even make the Sweet 16 half the time, but you'll never, ever make a Final Four. Do you take the deal?


If you are an Alabama State fan, the answer is "do you want my soul, because that will still be fine." Even if you're the fan of a long-suffering major conference team--Northwestern, say, or maybe Penn State--the answer would probably be yes. Michigan State fans would understandably be far less sanguine about the deal.


Wisconsin won the NCAA tournament in 1940, then made one more tournament in the next 52 years (and none from 1947-93, or to put it another way, none from mid-Truman to early Clinton). Even after ending the long drought, Wisconsin was a middling program; Dick Bennett made it out of the first round once, and while that once was a Final Four appearance, that team only went 8-8 in the Big Ten. The Badgers went 60 years without a Big Ten championship.


Enter Bo Ryan: Three regular season Big Ten championships in ten years, Wisconsin's first post-Korean War conference championships. The Badgers won seven tournament games in its history (three in 1940, four in the 2000 Final Four run); Bo Ryan has won 14. Wisconsin made seven tournaments before Ryan's entrance; Bo has gone 10 for 10, and has only been on the bubble once (and they even won a tournament game that year).


But, there's always a but. Wisconsin has been a four seed or better four of the past five seasons, yet made the Sweet 16 only twice in that stretch (and no Elite Eight appearances). All four of those years, the Badgers lost to a lower seed (including losses to 10 seed Davidson and 12 seed Cornell). Wisconsin fans aren't dissatisfied, exactly--at least the ones with a memory that extends beyond the Bennett years--but there is surely some disappointment.


Much has been made of Ryan's ability to make something out of nothing in terms of talent, but that's always been a bit overstated. To be sure, Wisconsin doesn't recruit like Michigan State, much less North Carolina or Kentucky. Still, the Badgers have done all right for themselves over the years. From 2006-08, Wisconsin had six recruits rated four stars or better by Rivals, and many of their names will be familiar: Hughes, Bohannon, Leuer, and Nankivil, along with Rob Wilson and Jared Berggen. The Badgers made were ranked in the Top 25 for their 2006 and 2007 classes. There have been some hidden gems in those years, such as three star Jordan Taylor, but the backbone players of these quality Wisconsin teams had a pedigree; Ryan hasn't been recruiting scrubs.


That will be put to the test starting next year. After averaging two four star recruits per year from 2006-08, Wisconsin has averaged only one from 2009-11. That is not a death sentence (how many four star recruits does Butler get?), but it does mean that Ryan will be working with even less raw talent than usual. It also means that the ceiling might be a little bit lower; a Sweet Sixteen with the guys listed above may have been a letdown, while a couple of Sweet Sixteen appearances over the next few years might be tapping the team's full potential.


Much has been made about Wisconsin's style (every team has a chance to beat them with some hot shooting, since there are so few possessions per game) and their struggles away from the Kohl Center (real but overstated) as ultimate limitations. In other words, these failures are baked into the cake by Bo Ryan, and the style necessarily ends with disappointment in the tournament. I don't think Wisconsin is predetermined, Final Destination style, for tournament failure under Ryan. But suppose they were: would Wisconsin fans today take the deal offered by Mephisto in the opening paragraph? I'm sure they'd think about it a lot longer today than they did before Ryan arrived.

One Final Note on Jereme Richmond

The words "Developmental League" are peppered liberally throughout the twitterverse this afternoon (I deployed the slur myself), but I think that people should stop using the phrase pejoratively and recognize the D-League for what it's worth. 19 year old Jereme Richmond is perfect for the Developmental League. He's a very talented, very raw basketball player with (hypothetically) a not-terribly robust interest in higher education and a desire to improve his basketball skills. He can either stay in college (also perhaps hypothetically), or he can make a little money shuttling between Europe and New Mexico. That's a pretty decent life as a nineteen year old, and it comes with a small-but-not-impossible chance that he makes an NBA squad immediately.


(Sorry for the "all Illinois, all the time" start to this place, but between Weber rumors, the Richmond news, and Illinois being the first team alphabetically in the Big Ten it just sort of happened that way. Everything will even out over time.)

Big Ten Basketball Departures

Jereme Richmond has declared for the Developmental League Draft. The writing was probably on the wall when he was semi-suspended for Illinois's two tournament games, but now its official: Jereme Richmond will be taking his talents to Maine or Reno. Richmond was a McDonald's All-American (Illinois's first since Dee Brown) and made the Big Ten All-Freshman team this season, but his Illini career has to be seen as a massive disappointment. Here's Bruce Weber with a teeth-gritting pat on the back:

Jereme is an extremely talented player who helped us at nearly every position," Weber said. "His versatility and ability to impact the game in a number of different areas are skills that will help him greatly as he pursues his dream of playing professional basketball. We wish Jereme the best and thank him for all he has meant to the Illinois basketball program, from the time he committed as a high school freshman through his contributions this past season.

A guess: Richmond doesn't make the Weber family Christmas Card this year. This isn't a Darius Morris "testing the waters" declaration either; Richmond doesn't know where he's headed, but it's not Chambana. Illinois now loses four seniors and a freshman that played about 20 minutes per game. I can't see Bruce Weber's seat getting cooler next year.


Understandably, Illinois fans are a little skeptical that Richmond has made the correct decision, but (and this is speculation) there's a good chance Richmond wasn't going to be permitted to return next year anyway; the silence from the coaching staff as to the true reason for his suspension suggests academic problems that they can't technically comment upon yet. If so, Richmond is better off earning a salary somewhere than playing for a junior college in Nome.


Cullen Payne is no longer a Hawkeye: Payne played quite a bit as a freshman on Todd Lickliter's final version of the black and gold, but sat most of this year with sports hernia. As such, the loss will be felt a little less than Richmond's departure from the Illini, but he was a starter in the Big Ten as a freshman with (likely) three more years of eligibility, assuming he gets a medical redshirt for this season. He was also a ballhander, which Iowa isn't swimming in at the moment. Assuming he still wants to play basketball, he'll land somewhere in D-1. Black Heart Gold Pants with thoughts here.


Paul Lusk takes the Missouri State position: Assistant coaching positions are funny in basketball. Because there are only three of them per team, every coach is usually seen as essential for either recruiting or game preparation (or they're reviled by their team's fanbase). Teams lose assistant coaches, and life tends to go on.


Lusk was closer to Painter than most assistant coaches are, however, and was seen as something as a coach-in-waiting for Purdue should something happen. With Painter's re-commitment to the Boilermakers, that "something" is more hypothetical than it was a week ago. Hammer and Rails talks about the departure here; Boiled Sports breaks down some potential replacements here, with the caveat that Purdue probably isn't getting a guy like Dakich. Chances are they'll nab a guy no one has heard of, and he'll do fine. Or he'll be hated.

The Omnipresent Tournament

This isn’t going to be a “Butler wasn’t very good” or “UConn isn’t really the best team” essay. You’ll find those articles elsewhere today, no doubt, with people arguing to various degrees why those teams did or didn’t deserve to play in the championship game. They are invested in that question much more than I am.

More interesting, at least to me, is why we—as sports fans—put so much emphasis on tournaments as a way of testing a team’s ability. Ordeal by bracket is fully engrained into the constitution of every major American sport, and most of the minor ones. Yet while we love tournaments, we change the details in every sport. The NBA and NHL let almost everyone in, then play four rounds of best-of-seven series. MLB lets fewer teams in, plays a best-of-five series to start, then two rounds of best-of-seven series. The NFL uses a single elimination tournament, but some teams have to win fewer games than others. College basketball uses a single elimination tournament where (almost) every team has to win six games without losing any; college baseball teams are allowed to lose one game in their tournament. Bowling has an interesting ladder structure where better seeded players get multiple byes (the five seed plays the four seed, the winner of which plays the three seed, the winner of which plays the two seed, etc.)

The official reason for this variation is that no sport is the same, and that tournaments have to be fitted to the peculiarities of the game. Football is too strenuous for series instead of single elimination games, for example. I’m sure that’s true, but the tournament choices made in each league are peculiar, to say the least. College basketball uses a single elimination tournament, while the NBA uses best-of-seven series. Hockey follows the same pattern. Baseball is a sport with lots of variation from game to game—the best teams win only about 60% of their games during the regular season—but the opening round is only a best-of-five series. There is far less variation in the NBA, but the first round is a best-of-seven series nonetheless. The NFL has 32 teams and uses a bracket of 12; Division I has 120 college football teams and uses a bracket of 2.

There’s a cynical answer, which is also true, that playoffs are just as much about generating revenue as they are about finding champions. But that can’t tell the whole story, because even with that economic reality lurking in the background, we as fans invest these tournaments with legitimacy. By and large, these tournaments would not exist if we didn’t confer legitimacy; if we all stopped watching football after the regular season, the playoffs would just be a drain on NFL coffers. (I also find the exceptions to the rule interesting; I think most people treat college basketball conference season results as more important, at least in the major conferences, than conference tournaments. Why?) Tournaments might just be money grabs, but only because we consumers are offering our money for them. Leagues are giving people what they want to watch.

So why do we want tournaments? I have a few ideas, though I am probably missing others:

  

1.) Tournaments provide certainty as to which games are important. No league is headquartered in Lake Wobegon; some teams each season are below average. A few are awful. But we might not know which teams won’t matter, especially early in the season. We also don’t know which games will “matter” in the sense of telling us which team is truly the best (will this October Jacksonville Jaguars vs. Kansas City Chiefs game tell me anything about the best team in the NFL?) The tournament is a powerful signal: watch these games, because the league has guaranteed quality by filtering bad teams out. 

2.) Tournaments are shorter than seasons. Diehard fans will watch all season long, but lots of people aren’t interested enough to pay attention to the NBA from October to June, or MLB from April to November. Tournaments provide a condensed season within a season; a two month NBA season, a one month MLB season, a three week college basketball season. Beginnings of tournaments also provide convenient jumping-on points for casual fans that may never get involved if there was no playoff.

3.) Tournaments have one winner. Regular seasons can have winners, too, but there’s usually some room for interpretation. Who was the winner of the college basketball regular season this year? Ohio State was the #1 overall seed in the tournament, so they are a reasonable answer, but Kansas and Pittsburgh (just to name two) were plausible answers also. The question in this context also seems peculiar—how can a 30 game season have a winner when there are 340 teams and the vast majority will never play each other? In lots of sports, there just can’t be an answer; the regular season isn’t long enough (perhaps can’t be long enough) to give us enough data.

I think reasons 1 and 2 are valid, but number 3 is probably what really drives our love of the tournament. UConn won; no one else did. No interpretation is necessary. We have an answer, and we can look at Wikipedia (and maybe the NCAA record book) twenty years from now and find out who won the 2011 men’s basketball season.

Sports are as much about plot as they are about truth. You might make a movie with an indeterminate ending, but I doubt it would be popular (look how people wigged out at the blackout ending of The Sopranos—that’s how lots of people would feel if we didn’t have a winner at the end of seasons). Fans want sports to have a point, so the tournament becomes the point. The season had an end, and at the end, a good team won a set of games all good teams were trying to win. They were the champion. They overcame adversity and long odds and won when winning was important. The End.

Obviously, I’m skeptical, or at least won’t lose much sleep if the “who was the best team?” question has no clear answer. But what if investment in the useful myth of the infallibility of brackets what keeps leagues going? The English Premier League is plenty popular and uses only a regular season, but maybe all the above ruminations are culture specific. Maybe American sports leagues are in such competition with one another that a tournament-less sport is at a marked disadvantage against others (perhaps this explains the decline of boxing and horse racing through the years, though even horse racing has tried to implement a quasi-championship in the Breeders’ Cup). Paris was worth a mass; college basketball is worth a tournament.

Bonus Linkage! Brian at Mgoblog claims the NCAA tournament still works just fine, since the matchup is usually at a plausible pairing of the two best teams in the nation. I think this is a funny definition of working, where the tournament is useful only insofar as it confirms what we know from the regular season. It's not an additional justification for the tournament, besides from "it is fun." This may be enough. 

He also uses Kenpom a little too liberally here, since 1.) Pomeroy has changed his formula around to backfit tournament results in some cases (nothing wrong with that necessarily, if the formula becomes more accurate), and 2.) those teams rise in the rankings as they win their tournament games. The rankings of those teams after the season is not their rankings before the season. To the extent that tournament performance is just one more piece of evidence concerning a team's quality, that's fine. To the extent that it's being used to argue that the tournament confirmed what the numbers said all along, it's not fine.

Smart People Own Hammer, Spot Nail-Looking NCAA Arrangement

[Sorry for all the recent NCAA stuff, which will not be the focus of the site (I swear). But this is slow season for college sports, and since everyone else is writing about this stuff, I guess I will too]


The Becker-Posner blog is like porn for people with economics commentary fetishes. I'm not quite at that level, but I'm close enough to read the blog semi-regularly. Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize-winning economist; Richard Posner is a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. They are smarter than you or I.


Becker is wrong, however, when it comes to the NCAA, not because his conclusions are wrong (the NCAA is a cartel in some areas). Instead, he is wrong in lots of little ways--the kinds of errors that sneak in when someone is looking at a problem for the first time and don't realize that this ground has been covered several times over. 


I call it the "Why is there evil?" fallacy. When that question gets asked by an atheist to a religious person, you immediately know that the conversation is useless, not so much because the question isn't interesting, but because the question is so interesting that it has been hashed and rehashed for thousands of years. The sophisticated atheist and the sophisticated believer are dozens of intellectual "moves" ahead by this point. The philosophical and theological questions are subtler, more layered now. The fallacy doesn't make the atheist wrong (or correct); it is just a signal that the conversation will not be particularly valuable.


First, I encourage everyone to read Becker's piece in full.

The toughest competition for basketball and football players occurs at the Division I level. These sports have both large attendances at games-sometimes, more than 100,000 persons attend college football games- and widespread television coverage. As a result, many Division I schools with big time sports programs get many millions of dollars from their basketball and football programs. Absent the rules enforced by the NCAA, the competition for players would stiffen, especially for the big stars, as they would receive large scholarships and various gifts of cars, housing, and cash to themselves and their families. Payment to players, if competition for players were allowed to operate freely, would severely eat into the profits made by colleges from the big time sports

All is good until the last sentence. Competition for players wouldn't eat into profits, because, by and large, there are no profits. According to the author of the report which I just linked, "If you're not selling a bunch of tickets and you don't have a large alumni-booster base making contributions, and you're not in the right conference, you have very little chance of showing net positive revenue." There are lots of reasons for this, the most important of which is Title IX. That's not necessarily an argument against Title IX, especially if we think that gender equality in collegiate sports is more important than revenue production by athletic departments. Even the most popular women's sport, college basketball (the only women's collegiate sport with a national television deal) is a net drain on athletic departments.


The next biggest reason that there isn't much by way of profits is that, by and large, schools just don't raise that much revenue through sports programs. (Permalinks aren't available, but you can play around on the USA Today database for this). The Nevada sports department lost $800,000 last year, even though it receives almost $6 million from the government and another $2.3 million in student fees (that is, $40 a semester from every student that no one realizes because the tuition bill is so damn big anyway). Almost 60% of Eastern Michigan's athletic department revenue--over $15 million total--comes from "direct institutional support" (i.e., is subsidized). With that revenue, Eastern Michigan's athletic department had a $2 million "profit," but it's obviously a funny kind of profit. Take away the subsidy and EMU is $13 million in the red.


That isn't true of all schools, of course, especially those that make most of their money through ticket sales and contributions from donors. That would be all the Big Ten schools, for starters, along with most major conference schools (though there are exceptions). The top schools could probably squeeze somewhere else in the budget, such as coaching salaries and ancillary facilities. But this is a college sports universe in which only a few dozen teams are competitive each year, and in which only a dozen or so have any chance at a championship (and before the guffaws about how that's pretty much the situation today: Butler would not happen in this universe. VCU, with 78% of its athletic department revenue from student fees, would not happen in this universe. Boise State would not happen in this universe). Are college sports without Butler, VCU, and Boise State as competitive as college sports with those teams? Lots of professional sports leagues have decided that some level of competitive balance is necessary to preserve value in the league. It is not implausible that this is also true in the NCAA--perhaps more true, since preserving balance across hundreds of teams is harder than preserving it across 32. 


Then, there are the silly mistakes. Becker complains that the average graduation rate of black male DI basketball and football players is below 50%, while not noting that the graduation rate of all black males in college is 35%. In just about every demographic, if you take a student-athlete and a regular student from the population, the chances of the athlete graduating are better than the chances for the regular student. There's also the assumption that most athletes will see their compensation go up in a free system of compensation, which I've already argued is not likely.


There are similar problems with Posner's response to Becker, though I think his final analysis comes much closer to the mark:

College athletics would be less profitable for colleges if the student athlete market were competitive. If permitted, colleges would continue to agree to limit recruitment of athletes who could not satisfy degree requirements and to require athletes to attend classes and thus be bona fide students, because otherwise competition for the best athletes would tend to eliminate the “student athlete”; college teams would be largely composed of athletes who had no interest in or capacity to obtain a college education; awarding them a degree would be meaningless. The college would be engaged in a business unrelated to its academic mission and would thus have to pay taxes on its teams’ earnings. Worse, alumni donations to their alma mater, which are stimulated by the success of the college’s teams, would wilt if the teams were composed of non-students. If the University of Chicago bought the Chicago Bears, and renamed the team the University of Chicago Bears, would alumni of the University of Chicago write bigger checks to the University?  

For similar reasons, I don’t think eliminating the rule against paying student athletes would result in their being paid actual salaries. The concept of a student who is also a professional athlete would trouble alumni. I expect that instead the student athletes would receive exceptionally generous scholarships—scholarships that would yield more than the full cost of tuition and living expenses. But the sky would not be the limit, since, facing higher labor costs, college teams would be less lucrative 

A possible legal complication in repealing the rule against athlete salaries would be the salary disparity between male and female college athletes. The only really lucrative college sports are football, a male sport, and men’s basketball. Competitive salaries for college football and basketball players would vastly exceed those for other sports, including women’s sports. Paying lower salaries to women athletes could invite challenges under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which among other things forbids sex discrimination in education that receives federal subsidies. 

The strongest argument against eliminating the NCAA cartel is that it would make colleges and universities poorer, and this would be a social loss if one assumes (plausibly) that higher education creates external benefits. Of course the government could replace the lost revenues with subsidies financed by taxes. But while monopsony is inefficient, tax increases create distortions similar to those created by monopoly and monopsony.

Football Preview: Illinois

2010 Record: 7–6 (4–4), victory over Baylor in Texas Bowl.

Buy low, sell high. Ron Zook is a commodity trader’s dream (and not only for his intensity); every time his value seems to run a little low, his teams rebound. Every time expectations rise above the bare minimum, his price plummets. If only pork bellies were so predictable.

Fired after two and a half disappointing seasons at Florida and left to fester for the remainder of the third, Zook’s problem was never success in the major games—it was the Mississippi States of the world that led to his demise. Taking over an Illinois team that had cratered under Ron Turner, Zook’s first two editions of the Fighting Illini were little better than Turner’s last two, though there were signs that things were beginning to turn around. Arrelious Benn and Martez Wilson were only the two most prominent examples of Illinois’s newfound recruiting prowess under Zook (no one has ever doubted his recruiting ability). The 2006 team lost most of their games, but the losses weren’t quite so embarrassing; #1 Ohio State was given a fight in Champaign, Zook won his first conference game (and probably ended the John L. Smith reign of terror in East Lansing) and, for the first time in almost half a decade, Illinois at least looked like a major conference program, even if the wins weren't quite there yet.

Still, no one predicted what followed in 2007: 9-3, wins over ranked Penn State, Wisconsin, and Ohio State teams, and Illinois’s first Rose Bowl berth since 1983. Never mind that the Illini were destroyed by the obviously superior USC. 2007 was a success.

Buy low, sell high. The 2007 team lost Rashard Mendenhall to the NFL draft but returned much of the rest of the team. Despite improving statistically, the team slipped to 5-7 and missed the postseason entirely. These things happen; the close games that all seemed to turn out Illinois's way in 2007 ended as losses in 2008. With nearly the full team returning in 2009, there was plenty of cause for optimism. Sell high; Illinois slipped even further in 2009 to 3-9, with only a lopsided victory over Michigan salvaging the season. Juice Williams, Arrelious Benn, and most of what little offensive firepower existed would be gone following the season, either to the draft or from lack of eligibility.

Given all that, few expected much from the 2010 Illini, especially while breaking in a freshman quarterback and two new coordinators. Buy low. After a plucky losses to Missouri and Ohio State, Illinois stomped Penn State in Happy Valley, dominating in all phases of the game at a stadium that Illinois has enjoyed little success historically. After similarly lopsided victories against Indiana and Purdue, Illinois sat at 3-2 in the conference with three winnable games remaining.

Sell high. First there was the 67–65, triple overtime loss to Michigan. There’s no shame in losing to Michigan in Ann Arbor (even Rich Rodriguez’s Michigan), but that was followed with a loss at home to moribund Minnesota. Buy low: Mikel Leshoure fulfilled his manifest destiny, running west for 330 yards at Wrigley Field against Northwestern after an unprecedented ESPN Gameday appearance for the match between the in-state rivals. Sell high: two weeks later, Fresno State, the fourth best team in the WAC, defeated a listless Illinois team with a little help from an awful field and an iffy call or two. Buy low: A toss-up on paper, Illinois suffocates Baylor’s explosive quarterback Robert Griffin III and wins 38–14.

Given that history, predicting the 2011 Illinois season would be easier if the expectations were clear. The 2010 team was young, but that team also lost three players (Leshoure, Wilson, and Corey Liuget) likely to be selected in the first two rounds of the NFL draft. Still, the Leaders Division is the softer of the two Big Ten divisions this coming season, and with Ohio State’s gold pants related troubles, Illinois has fewer question marks at quarterback than any other team in their grouping. Even better, Illinois earned all four of their conference wins in 2010 by 20 points or more, while three of their four losses came by single digits (and the fourth was by eleven). No one is demanding conference championships from this team yet, but a little consistency would be nice.

Offense

Offensive Coordinator – Paul Petrino (2nd year): Illinois’s offense last year had a surprisingly large number of looks, especially considering that quarterback Nathan Scheelhaase was only a redshirt freshman. Despite the number of different formations and variations, however, the offense scheme was usually a traditional spread/triple option look (sometimes running the triple option Nebraska-style out of the I formation, sometimes using a more traditional veer look from the shotgun) with some easy passes mixed in for Scheelhaase to keep defenses honest. About 70% of plays ended up as rushes, though that number also includes sacks and scrambles that were intended to be passes. Look for that ratio to end closer to 60–40 this season with the loss of Leshoure and the development of Scheelhaase as a passer. Illinois finished an almost-exactly median 58th in the country on offense according to Football Outsiders, with a 49th ranked rushing offense and a 73rd ranked passing offense. Don't be surprised if those numbers flip this season with the overall ranking remaining similar, though an improvement through the air for Scheelhaase could loosen defenses on the ground as well.

Division I Athletes are Overpaid

Well, not all of them. Cam Newton probably wasn’t, at least officially. Jared Sullinger probably isn’t. When you give all scholarship athletes the same compensation, at least a few will fall on either side of the line. Your best coworkers (maybe even you!) are probably underpaid; your worst coworkers are probably overpaid. This is not unique to college athletes, though the problem is perhaps more severe because everyone gets paid the same amount; imagine how underpaid you would be if you made the same amount as everyone else at your office.

Just so that we are all clear: the question is not “should college athletes be paid?” They already are. Even if we strip away all the other ancillary benefits of being an athlete at a major school (job training; attractive girls (probably NSFW); social status; training tables), scholarships are payment from both the perspective of the school and the player. Providing a player a $25,000 scholarship is exactly the same as paying him $25,000 and requiring him to attend the university. This isn’t controversial (nor, I don’t think, is it controversial that players should have to attend the university for which they play). What is a little controversial—but only a little—is whether a scholarship is a true cost to the university, or whether the school can just “write off” the costs. Universities, like just about every other non-profit organization, want to make money. If colleges run at full capacity—which they do, because it doesn’t make sense to leave money on the table for no reason—a spot for an athlete means one less spot for a paying student. If the university would be getting $25,000 from that student, and they are getting $0 from the athlete, that is a $25,000 cost.

So the question is not whether athletes should be paid (unless you’re Ralph Nader and you think the answer should be "no," full stop), but how much should they be paid. Too often, the issue is framed as a percentage of the revenue: the NCAA gets $700+ million from the men’s basketball tournament, and athletes get only a slice of that. We watch basketball to watch the athletes—the argument goes—so why don’t the athletes get most of the money?

There couldn’t be a tournament without players, but there could still be one without these players. In fact, that alternate-universe tournament would probably be wildly successful, even if the quality went down (the value of the NCAA tournament wasn’t hurt much, if at all, by high school players skipping to the NCAA, and it doesn’t seem to be hurt much by players skipping up to three seasons). This is unique to college sports. If the quality of the NFL dropped significantly because, say, its best players left for the USFL or Arena League, the value of the NFL would fall precipitously. Fan loyalty to college teams seems to be different. College football and college basketball are not the highest level of the sport available. In fact, college sports are often several grades below the highest professional version; most NBA developmental league teams would be favored over most college basketball teams, and most USFL teams would be favored over most college football teams. Yet almost no one cares about the USFL or NBA D-league, and 100,000 people freeze their butts off in Ann Arbor, Columbus, and State College seven Saturdays a year. The equity is in the team, not the players.

Colleges would still need players, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of those. Most major college football teams have dozens of players willing to pay their own way to work their butts off and stand around on the sideline. Those walk-ons are still much better athletes than you or I; watching a game consisting entirely of walk-on players would be less entertaining than a current college game, but it would be a lot better than watching the local rec league game. DIII players, who understand they have almost no hope of ever playing professional football and are not well compensated through facilities or training tables, are not given scholarships. Club sport members pay thousands of dollars in addition to tuition to play their sport. It’s safe to say that some current scholarship players—no one knows how many, but I suspect a very large percentage—would be willing to play without scholarships, especially if need-based financial aid were available.

Still, this only tells us that the sport would still exist, and that it would still be popular; it does not tell us whether players are underpaid. In a perfectly free market for college football athletes, colleges would bid against one another for players, both through direct payments (wages) and ancillary benefits (facilities, nice campus, good weather, winning games, etc.). Because wages are limited to the amount the school requires for tuition, teams compete by pouring money into facilities and coaches to lure players. Presumably, many players would prefer to just have the cash, and in a free market, more money would be paid directly to the players than currently. This is, I think, what people mean when they say players are underpaid.

This assumes, however, that once money is freed for wages, everyone’s wages will go up. But scholarships are a floor as much as they are a ceiling. Jared Sullinger was one of the top recruits in the country, and just about every program would have been happy to reward him well. As in most other industries, the compensation of top college athletes would likely dwarf the compensation of everyone else (this happens in professional sports leagues as well, though minimum salaries prevent the lowest wages from falling below a certain level). I favor allowing players to accept endorsement money and use their own likeness, but even this is a solution likely to benefit the top athletes disproportionately.

I don’t think that most people who want college athletes to be paid (more) want a perfectly free market; what they want is scholarships, plus some extra spending money beyond the per diem players are getting currently, plus opportunities for outside compensation. These may be good ideas, but often the assumption behind them is that this is what athletes would likely be receiving anyway, if not for the NCAA. If I were the average football player at the average DI program, I would be awfully hesitant to test that assumption.

Bonus linkage! John Gasaway asks for an end to the self-flagellation here. The Big Ten Geeks point out that most of the proffered solutions to the problem are illegal (there's also the pesky legal issue that only male athletes would be paid, since women's teams are already a huge financial drain on athletic departments.) Antitrust law is not the friend of most of the crusaders. I still think the BTGs assume unnecessarily that players are undercompensated; I am obviously not so sure. Still, I think all our solutions are mostly the same, though I also think that some of the money that goes to coaches would end up going to players in a freer system. Teams pour money into coaching salaries because they need to spend it on something. If they could compete on players’ wages, coaching salaries would go down (or at least would not rise so quickly). No illegal collusion would be necessary. I just think that most of that money will end up in the hands of a few players.