Students, Athletes, Unions, and Reality, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #361 | @MDWorld

April 7, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment

A lot of people atr up in arms about the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling in favor of the Northwestern University footballers that wished to form a union. Of course, part of this reaction is due to the fact that the unions have allowed themselves to be painted as Communist, or at least as radicals bent upon destroying our economy and our way of life. You’d think that after a century and a half, Labor would have found a response to this nonsense.

Another part of this is deeply rooted in fantasy: a belief that collegiate football has something – anything – to do with academics, education, life preparation, and becoming a good citizen. By definition of the Rabid Right, a union member is anti-American and thus can never be a good citizen.

I won’t defend unions. They should be doing that themselves. Suffice it to say that without unions the next time you bite into a hot dog, you might chomp on somebody’s thumb. But I will defend the Northwestern University footballers.

College football is about one thing, and one thing only: raising money. The athletes recruited by colleges to perform aren’t there to learn philosophy, physics, engineering, medicine, or law, and you won’t find more than a handful of them earning such degrees. They are there to win games, please the alumni, and bring positive attention to the institution. According to ESPN, way back in 2008 the top 119 schools brought in more than $5.5 billion dollars in revenues. Expenses run about $5.3 billion dollars.

That leaves a profit of over $200,000,000 – back in 2008. Ticket prices have gone up since then. I apologize for having to use 2008 data; that was the most recent reliable data I could find by deadline and I wanted both revenues and expenses.

So, on average, each the top 119 college football teams brought in one and three-quarter million dollars of profit. As a return on investment, that sucks. Wal-Mart CEO Michael T. Duke wouldn’t pull his head out of his own puke for that kind of money. But for a university, that’s just the top of the iceberg.

The good will generated by the football program reaches deep, deep inside the alumni’s pockets. In 2011 America’s colleges and universities took in $31,000,000,000 in donations. For the zero-challenged, that’s thirty-one billion dollars. And a great deal of that is because of the athletic program – opinions vary, but it’s generally considered to be the largest slice of the pie by far.

There’s a whole lot of money for college to make off of the sweat, muscles and concussions of their athletes. Indeed, if collegiate football had been around during slave times, we might never have had the Civil War.

Since academics are not part of the equation – we can argue it should be, but that’s a different subject – the college football player is there for only one reason: to make a lot of money for the institution. That makes him an employee, and that makes the whole thing subject to NLRB decisions.

We give lip service to the concept of fair play. It’s time for universities and colleges to put their money where their mouths are.

Yes, that’s J.C. Leyendecker’s artwork up there.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.