Do not listen to athletic directors who say paying players means they'll have to cut sports

This is just propaganda aimed at fans and a thinly veiled threat toward athletes.

A new survey of approximately 100 athletic directors at Football Bowl Subdivision schools has revealed that more than 90 percent of them fear that allowing athletes to be classified as employees would “impact funding of non-revenue sports.”

The press release announcing this finding is written in a passive, garbled way because it’s coming from LEAD1, a membership association for athletic directors at the Football Bowl Subdivision level. This “news” is actually public relations/propaganda/lobbying/undisguised pre-emptive union-busting. It’s disgusting.

This “survey” is presented as a reaction to Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board who, back on Sept. 29, issued a memorandum that declared so-called “student-athletes” are, in fact, employees of their universities, meaning those at private schools (because the NLRB oversees employee treatment by private companies) are protected by the federal agency’s statutes that allow them to band together to negotiate for better treatment.

Let that really hit for a moment: An ASSOCIATION of athletic directors is sending a UNIFIED message meant to further their own interests, that …. uh, well … that … yeah ….. they … don’t want the athletes in their care to … yeah … band together to advocate for better conditions for themselves.

They hypocrisy would be stunning if we weren’t talking about college athletics. Since we are, it’s hardly even surprising. This is just how it goes.

I repeat, 85% of FBS athletic directors are "highly concerned" their players might receive improved "health and safety protections."

They just tweeted it out.

— Happiness Vampire (@nkalamb) November 17, 2021

What the athletic directors are really doing here, though, is classic union-busting by making a very unsubtle threat against some of the workers.

Though LEAD1 did not respond to my email seeking clarification on this, it appears this survey centers around comments Abruzzo made on Gabe Feldman’s podcast, Between the Lines. According to the LEAD1 press release, the vast majority of ADs polled “disagreed with a recent comment made in a podcast interview by … Jennifer Abruzzo that the employment status of college athletes would not significantly impact non-revenue sports, including those sports being cut.”

Except Abruzzo never went so far. Asked by Feldman to address the idea that non-revenue sports could be endangered, she says around the 25-minute mark:

“Yeah, I would hope that the consequence of the players rightfully being classified as statutory employees would not lead schools to spend less in other areas of college athletics.”

A few minutes later she says:

“I’m hoping that the impact, there won’t be a significant impact on other players in other sports.”

Abruzzo, who was nominated to her position by President Joe Biden, is choosing her words very carefully. Hope. Hoping.

That’s because she knows full well that ultimately whatever happens to non-revenue sports will depend on the people who get to decide what happens with those sports. And she’s hoping they do the right thing.

I made a request, through LEAD1, to speak with one of those concerned athletic directors, but never heard back.

But of course I’m not sure that there’s anything they need to add to what they’ve already said by allowing LEAD1 to send out this press release. The message is clear: You give athletes more power, we’ll take away your non-revenue sports.

They’re seeking to set the non-revenue sport athletes against the revenue sports athletes, exploiting a divide that already exists to some extent on many campuses.

LEAD1 is also appealing to the public here by attacking the part of college sports that has long been used to make the whole thing palatable.

Not nearly as many fans truly care about non-revenue sports (or else they’d make a profit), but they do care about the idea of non-revenue sports. It’s part of the way they justify their schools making $100 million off the football team while providing players with scholarships they can barely use (since they need to attend to the full-time job of football) and a few thousand bucks. College sports can be pure so long as there’s a few field hockey players and wrestlers on campus who are actually there to learn first and compete second.

The LEAD1 release also takes aim at the U. S. Olympic team, quoting CEO (and former basketball player and congressman) Tom McMillen as saying, “If these other sports are cut, our U.S. Olympic effort will be damaged as the majority of U.S. Olympians were sourced from our colleges and universities.”

What’s not addressed here — or most places — is why, exactly, it should be up to college football and basketball athletes to earn enough money so that their colleges can offer training grounds for U.S. swimmers and track stars.

Can you imagine anybody telling Elon Musk that he’s not entitled to the revenue he generates because it needs to be funneled to Amtrak? He would fly himself to Mars.

Obviously LEAD1 is just doing the only thing it exists to do, which is protect athletic directors at a particular set of schools.

But asking them their opinion on the inevitable change coming to college sports is a little bit like asking Kodak executives what they thought about new digital camera technology, what horse breeders thought of motor vehicles and what a cranky newspaper person made of that new-fangled internet. College sports as we know it is … evolving dramatically. Dying is too strong a word, because the people with the power will acquiesce and give away some of it rather than let the whole thing go by the wayside out of some duty to “amateurism” and the whole sham that allowed it to grow so unwieldy in the first place.

Those people, by the way, are these athletic directors. Any sort of serious survey of the chief executives within these departments might first ask: Would you be willing to take a pay cut to help re-balance your department’s budget in the event that some players become eligible to get paid?

Because athletic directors make a lot of money. In some cases they make close to what the university president earns — despite being in charge of a much smaller and less-lucrative business.

Athletic departments have also grown exponentially. Some of this is good: Employing more athletic trainers and academic support workers is a win for students. But a lot of it is simple bloat, meant to sop up all that extra revenue from broadcast contracts for football and men’s basketball.

Are athletics directors concerned about their own lost salary, or the work it will take to run a tidier department? It does not appear LEAD1 asked those questions.

Nor did it ask any of them whether they might take the EXTREME step of telling a football coach “no” when he asks for his coordinators to get a raise on their 7-figure contract.

The point is: Athletic directors are going to get to make these decisions. Nobody is forcing them into anything. They get to decide how to spend their department’s money. They set the priorities. This is how real businesses — ones that don’t benefit from having a cap on compensation for its primary labor — have to operate.

If these athletic directors are saying, “We will opt to cut non-revenue sports” then they should just go ahead and own that. They don’t, of course, because this isn’t about honesty.

Here’s the truth: The vast majority of college athletics departments operate without behemoth revenues from football and men’s basketball. Even at the FBS level, the vast majority of schools charge every student a fee that goes to support athletics and help balance the budget.

At lower levels (FCS, Divisions II and III), they make college sports work without revenue from TV contracts, or even from giant stadiums. McMillen says in the release “the financial model in college sports is unique given that football and basketball subsidize all of the other sports …” Which just simply ignores that the financial model at major schools is, in fact, an outlier.

Also, non-revenue sports don’t actually cost all that much to operate. At Penn State, according to the most recently available EADA report, the total cost to run every sport besides football and men’s and women’s basketball was $36.6 million out of a total budget of $148.9 million.

And that leaves out the fact that many of the athletes in those sports actually end up paying a significant amount in tuition.

Across the NCAA, non-revenue sport athletes generally receive partial or no scholarships. They pay lots of tuition! The partial aid and travel/coaching/etc. are costs on the athletic department's budget; the tuition is income on the school's overall budget.

— Patrick Hruby (@patrick_hruby) July 8, 2020

It’s unclear why LEAD1 only surveyed 100 out of its 130 members, but I’m holding out hope that maybe a few simply declined to take part in this charade because they’re busy actually figuring out a model for how this all might work in the future.

The solutions aren’t all that complicated, and they can make life actually better for all athletes — which is what an association of athletic directors should be concerned with, anyway.