Pay the players?

You can count on finding a cluster of students in the Bassett commons room in front of the television for the latest big game.

I’ve learned that most Duke students are big sports fans. My “Anthropology of Sports” class, unlike some others I teach, always seems to have a wait list. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only member of the Duke community who spent too much time on the couch watching bowl games over the holidays.

As everybody knows, college sports has become a big business, a golden goose for some college football and basketball coaches routinely make more money than the presidents of their universities. Coach K takes home a good deal more than his ostensible boss, President Richard Brodhead, and at least 20 times more than your average Duke professor. He earns it in the big money and publicity he makes back for the University in ticket sales, licensing rights, television contract cash and more.

No network has ever paid money for the rights to broadcast a cultural anthropology lecture.

But one pet peeve of mine is that student-athletes themselves don’t share in the giant profits of the college sports-entertainment complex. Sure, football and basketball student-athletes get scholarships, but that’s nothing compared to what they bring in revenue as the stars of the show. Like the accused in some Stalin-era show trial, those Ohio State football players had to give shame-faced public apologies for the supposed crime of getting tattoos in exchange for some of their old trophies and memorabilia. It’s hypocritical that the NCAA punishes student-athletes for accepting perks when everybody else seems to be profiting from college sports cash.

We’re supposed to be a country committed to free enterprise. Here at Bassett we have students day-trading and playing online poker from their rooms. Why shouldn’t college athletes get something like market value for their labor and talents? The NCAA is strangely like some old Eastern European socialist bureaucracy with its Byzantine rules, restrictions and self-serving insistence that college athletes must be the only amateurs in the plush, high-rolling world of big-time college sports.

Most Division I players, of course, do not go on to careers in the NBA or NFL, and they tend to come from poorer families than other college students. They could use some sort of stipend in addition to the scholarship. That would be small return for the money and excitement they generate in bringing us the gift of March Madness and the college bowl season.

As Charles Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds professor of public policy, economics and law, shows in his forthcoming book, “Big-Time Sports in American Universities,” we should recognize that college sports are a gargantuan commercialized enterprise instead of pretending otherwise.