What do the white, female mayor of a Hallmark program's fictional Town of Hope Valley and Duke basketball sensation Zion Williamson have to do with one another? Actress Lori Loughlin, who stars in the popular TV program When Calls the Heart, has been implicated (with others) in a college admissions bribery scandal, and Williamson (dunking ball in photo) is not getting any of the Blue Devils $34 million in basketball revenue. Time magazine senior writer Sean Gregory says the scandal is connected to a bad odor polluting college sports.
Gregory writes that hard-working athletes deserve the spots at elite universities instead of the kids whose parents (like Loughlin) paid for fraudulent tests and fake athletic profiles. "(L)et’s not ignore the scandal’s connection to another noxious stink polluting college sports," he writes.
It's a fact of life in college athletics that major revenue sports like football and basketball help fund non-revenue teams like tennis and gymnastics that do not attract large ticket-buying audiences. Gregory says that instead of college athletic departments redistributing wealth, they should just pay the athletes. Which is ridiculous because the non-revenue sports could be starved for funding and dropped.
Plenty of progressive media are demanding pay for college athletes, and Gregory plays the class envy angle by distinguishing between the races of those on the revenue teams and those on the non-revenue teams. So much for Dr. Martin Luther King's color-blind society!
Gregory writes that 55 percent of men’s basketball players at the Power 5 conference schools (the Big 10, Big 12, ACC, SEC and Pac-12) are black and nearly half of the football players are black, unpaid players — many from low-income families. They're subsidizing teams where 48 percent of the men’s players in the power conferences are white and just 12 percent are black.
Other sports are even more exclusively white, like men’s water polo (82 percent) and women’s rowing (75 percent). Just 2 percent of men’s water polo players and women’s rowers at big conference schools are. It's a one-way street for Gregory, where demands for equality are only aimed at the sports where whites are in the majority.
Not only are these non-revenue sport athletes mostly white, but some of them are ... w-e-a-l-t-h-y, and no doubt privileged, too. That's troubling enough, and Shaun R. Harper, a management professor and executive director of the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center, attempts to strengthen Gregory's case:
“This scandal is an example of corrupt, rich, mostly white parents benefitting off the work of, in many cases, poor black unpaid football and basketball players whose athletic talents actually qualified them for admission. This is an example of systemic racism.”
Angela Reddock-Wright, an employment lawyer in Southern California who represents higher education clients, said of the admissions bribery scandal, “This is an opportunity for colleges and universities to look themselves in the mirror. Make sure the athletes making lots of money for the schools are taken care of.” But if too many of football and basketball players are "taken care of," it could threaten the existence of the non-revenue teams, including the minority students on those teams as well.
Gregory asks, "So now, more than ever, isn’t it time to just pay the players?"
Is it? The bribery scandal has been exposed and the guilty will hopefully be punished. So why does this criminal activity heighten the case for athletes, of any race, who agreed to accept scholarships, to now be paid like professionals? Did any fake water polo players take a scholarship away from a starting point guard or cornerback bound for the riches of pro sports?
