The gaping hole in the New York Times' NCAA story: Race

A Glaring Omission

The New York Times Sunday Magazine featured a long article this weekend about the transformation of college sports now that college athletes are allowed to earn money off their name, image and likeness (NIL). In particular, the Times warns of potentially troubling unintended consequences as a result of this change, which I’ll get to in a moment or two. To back up, following years of litigation against and dogged resistance by the NCAA, the latter rather suddenly relented in July 2021, after a Supreme Court ruling a few weeks earlier on a separate NCAA matter convinced the Association that it could no longer deny athletes their NIL rights.

In the subsequent eighteen months, many nervous insiders and observers have been rueing the emergence of a money besotted Wild West. While the NCAA scrambles to create guidelines to help college athletics departments navigate this new terrain, an unruly and unsettling bidding war has ensued for high profile athletes, especially in football and men’s basketball. Some of them are now pulling down seven figure paydays while still in school, in exchange for sponsorship deals and other related activities. The NCAA still does not allow schools to pay salaries to athletes directly (though that day is itself probably not far off). But schools intent on sustaining elite programs are now in an economic arms race to organize so-called NIL collectives and other instruments. These new entities are necessary to ensure that athletic boosters can funnel enough money to athletes to keep their programs competitive.

As a result of all this, what happened for decades under the table is now occurring very much in broad daylight - sights like a college athlete driving around campus in an $80,000 vehicle.

That latter sight is the image atop the Times article, in which the star of the University of North Carolina’s Men’s Basketball team, Armando Bacot, is seen in a blue Audi Q9 SUV. Bacot anchored UNC’s surprise run to the national championship game in 2022, before the Tar Heels fell to Kansas. Before July of 2021, athletes like Bacot, now a senior, typically left UNC for the NBA, so they could start making money playing the sport professionally. But Bacot, a college standout, is considered by many a borderline NBA player. And in the new NIL era, he has new options. Bacot could stay for his senior season at UNC and work on improving his game and his professional draft stock. At the same time, staying in school no longer precluded making real money. Indeed, according to Bacot’s mom, Bacot has lined up endorsement deals worth perhaps half a million dollars, all while he’s still a college student and probably more than he would have made had he gone pro either in the United States or overseas.

Back to those unintended consequences. According to Bruce Schoenfeld, the story’s author, Bacot’s good fortune could unfairly be coming at the expense of other UNC athletes in less lucrative sports. Why? Boosters and donors who previously could only support their favorite schools by giving money to the school’s athletic department general funds can now give money directly to players in their preferred sports. So, while high profile basketball and football players rake in the cash, programs like field hockey will be starved for funds.

Indeed, this juxtaposition of the windfall accruing to basketball players like Bacot, and the potential loss of opportunities and resources to athletes in UNC’s dominant field hockey program (a sport only played by women at the collegiate varsity level), anchors the story. And it’s a deeply problematic framing, as I tried to explain on Twitter yesterday.

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

1) This @nytimes magazine article about NIL is framed in an insidious way. It's a handful of (almost entirely) Black athletes hoarding almost all of the money, and doing so at the expense of college athletes in other sports...

nytimes.comStudent. Athlete. Mogul?Now that college players are allowed to cut sponsorship deals, some of them are raking in the money — but at what cost to the rest?

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

2) which happen to be overwhelmingly white. A key pivot of the article is the disparity between how much high profile athletes like @UNC men's basketball's star center, Armando Bacot, makes compared to its star field hockey player, Erin Matson, notwithstanding the amazing success

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

3) of that program, which won 10 titles during the 42 year tenure of its legendary head coach Karen Shelton. The author asserts that Matson is the far greater player in context of her sport than Bacot is in his. And the reader is meant to understand that not only is this unfair

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

4) on its own terms, but that it reflects an unjust redistribution of resources away from worthy college athletes like Matson. What makes this juxtaposition more astounding is that the author does not bother to mention at all the far greater disparity in salary between

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

5) UNC's head football coach, Mack Brown, whose estimated total annual income is $5 million and the aforementioned Shelton, whose salary was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred thousand. In other words, you could much more easily and credibly write an article about the...

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

6) unfair transfer of wealth reflected in the pay gap between Brown - who has never won a *conference* title at UNC - and Shelton, and the implications for the undermining of athletic opportunities than you can about Bacot presumably making money that Matson is more deserving of

Jonathan Weiler @jonweiler

7) this is a good example of a story that is suffused with age-old tropes about perhaps well-intended but ultimately "unfair" attempts to redress past racial injustices, but without any conscious recognition that that's what it's doing.

The article notes that, historically, the high revenue generating sports at UNC and elsewhere - football and men’s college basketball - have helped subsidize the scholarships and other expenses on which programs like tennis, field hockey, golf, gymnastics and lacrosse typically rely. But, as I referred to above, it omits any mention of race in this account. In fact, those sports like tennis and golf are overwhelmingly populated by White athletes. And typically, the athletes good enough to play those varsity sports at places like UNC come from affluent families. Therefore, there has long been a stark fact about the nature of wealth transfer in college athletics. As a National Bureau of Economics Research Paper put it a couple of years ago, before the NIL era began - and as countless other analyses have found - “[t}he National Collegiate Athletic Association’s long-standing policy prohibiting profit-sharing with college athletes effectively allows wealthy White students to profit off the labor of poor Black ones.”

That this longstanding reality rated nary a single solitary mention in a long article devoted to questions of fairness and equitable distribution of rewards in college athletics is simply baffling.

There are other significant, related problems in the article. The people we hear from directly - coaches, athletics administrators and athletes - are almost exclusively White. The author spent time on campus with Matson, the field hockey star, and we learn at some length about her hustling to cobble together NIL deals (she’s made an estimated $50K in her final two years of college) as well her desire that her efforts serve a purpose beyond her making money. By contrast, if the author tried to talk to Bacot, the linchpin of the piece, for example, or his family, or any of the other referenced Black athletes, he gives no indication of that and none of them is quoted nor their thoughts reported except, very briefly, UNC wide receiver Josh Downs.

We also heard at length from Bubba Cunningham, UNC’s athletic director, who makes an estimated $1.25 million a year administering what the NCAA still insists is an education-first enterprise. Cunningham, who is White, played golf in college. For myriad reasons, therefore, he’s going to bring a particular perspective to the issues the article explores. That’s fine. But there is no good reason for perspectives like his to be essentially the only ones the article amplifies.

At one point, the author says “despite its success, Matson’s Tar Heel field hockey team can’t make enough money on its own to cover its costs: the scholarships, travel expenses, equipment and staff salaries, without which a varsity team can’t operate.” This has been true of most varsity teams for many years and has had nothing to do with whether players in other sports were getting paid, since that just started happening. The costs of their scholarships and other expenses have long been largely covered by a combination of student fees and other transfers from the athletic budget which, to repeat, gets a lot of its money from the sports that the Armando Bacots of the world play. In fact, if there is a “mogul” on UNC’s campus, it is the aforementioned football coach, Mack Brown. His $5 million annual compensation dwarfs what any other employee at the university makes, field hockey coach included. At other schools, head football coaches are now making in excess of $10 million a year. Schools can justify that as necessary to compete in that particular marketplace. But you can’t pretend that those salaries are irrelevant to the question of who gets what in college athletics. Indeed, those salaries are as big as they are in part because the departments paying them have never had to worry about paying the players who help generate those massive salaries.

In other words, the suggestion that UNC Field Hockey’s inability to cover all of its expenses is new and attributable to the economic opportunities athletes like Bacot now have is perverse. On top of it all, the article never provides any real evidence at all that the diversion of booster money is actually affecting non revenue-generating programs. A couple of people the article quotes hint at the possibility. But that is all. Notwithstanding that lack of evidence, the article says UNC faces “pending disaster.”

The recent and coming changes in college athletics are momentous and they absolutely merit a serious conversation about the consequences for athletes, other college athletic stakeholders and universities more broadly. But any serious accounting of the tradeoffs and consequences those changes might bring is impossible without attention to the realities of race that have long been so central to the enterprise that is big time American college athletics. The Times’ failure to even acknowledge that is a frankly astounding omission and a disservice to its readership.