Shabazz Napier is everything that the N.C.A.A. says it wants student athletes to be. And, on Monday night, the twenty-two-year-old senior scored twenty-two points while leading the University of Connecticut to a 60-54 victory over John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats for the national championship.
Napier grew up in tight circumstances in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and went to prep school on scholarship in order to qualify to play in college. He stayed at Connecticut after Jim Calhoun, the coach that recruited him, stepped down. He stayed through the school’s temporary ban from postseason play, in 2013, for failing to meet the N.C.A.A.’s academic standards. He was tempted to leave early to try his luck in the N.B.A. draft, but ultimately decided to stay in school. He was his conference’s player of the year, an All-America First Team selection. And his fine play in the tournament gave him the kind of visibility that is sure to raise his draft stock among professional teams in June. His story would be the one that the keepers of the college-basketball status quo would tell to young men across the country.
Except, there is a problem. Speaking to reporters earlier in the tournament, Napier said that while he had played for Connecticut—making money for the school, his coaches, Nike, and so many other stakeholders in the system—he had not always had enough spending money to buy food. It might have gotten lost amidst the excitement of the national championship, were the contrast between the image of a hungry student athlete and that of the immense profits made from his sport not so striking. Asked about the recent ruling that would allow members of the Northwestern football team to vote on forming a union, Napier called it “kind of great.” A reporter asked if he considered himself an employee. No, he responded, he was a student athlete, but one who felt stretched thin. He didn’t think college kids needed to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (he, of course, has been worth more than that to UConn over the past four years), just enough to eat. Napier seemed to mean that literally; he talked about hungry nights. “We’re definitely blessed to get a scholarship to our universities, but, at the end of the day, that doesn’t cover everything,” he said. Athletic scholarships, which are capped in value, do not necessarily cover all of the costs of attending college, meaning that players have to pull resources together in other ways. Those ways, of course, may not involve using their considerable celebrity to make money via related employment or endorsements. Napier talked about that, as well: “It may not have your last name on it, but when you see a jersey getting selled … you want something in return.” This is what a voice of reason sounds like.
We don’t often get to hear these kinds of voices. Normally, we hear coaches and university presidents and league officials explain how it all should work. Speaking to reporters on Sunday, N.C.A.A. President Mark Emmert said that he opposed the idea of college players forming unions in order to bargain for their rights. “It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics,” he said. Emmert has called for reform, including the need to address the shortfalls suffered by students whose scholarships don’t cover the entire cost of attendance. But after hearing Napier’s description of his college experience, maybe a blow up is exactly what needs to happen.
Playing basketball for Connecticut has surely been very good for Napier, but he and players like him should have another option than more or less giving their skills away for free while they get ready (or at least become eligible) for the N.B.A. draft, which currently requires a player to be at least nineteen years old and a full year removed from high school. Even the N.C.A.A. seems to agree. “I really think the N.F.L. and N.B.A. have been irresponsible in not providing other legitimate opportunities for kids that really don’t want to go to college,” Bob Bowlsby, the commissioner of the Big 12 Conference, said on Sunday, appearing before the press with Emmert. “There ought to be some other feeder system than the one that kids get forced into as a result of the profile of our programs.” Bowlsby was arguing, in principle, for minor-league basketball—or, at least, better minor-league basketball. The N.B.A. already has a developmental league, but because it offers low-paying contracts that are different from the ones offered to rookies that enter through the draft, it fails to attract the best high-school players.
If such an option were more appealing to aspiring pro-basketball players, the starting lineups for Monday’s title game would have looked very different. Most of Kentucky’s players wouldn’t have been there. Napier and some of his more talented teammates may have decided to go straight to a pro career, and likely would have had fewer hungry nights over the past few years. The players who really want an engineering degree, or else have always dreamed of going to frat parties, could still choose to play in college. But those young men would be making an active decision, rather than getting absorbed into a system that currently offers them no effective choice other than what color uniform they prefer to wear.
With the best players off earning a living, March Madness would look different: the action a little slower, the dunks a little less astounding, and the field-goal percentage somehow even lower. The games, however, would still be frantic and messy and, occasionally, amazing. Would there still be brackets, and betting, and a Thursday and Friday each spring lost to work? Would Buffalo Wild Wings go out of business? Would old gray-haired millionaires still donate money to their alma maters? It is hard to say. People still watch the College World Series and the Frozen Four, even with their diluted talent pools, but the audiences for these events, and the profits they generate, are much smaller. Left only with what would be genuine student athletes, the N.C.A.A.’s next television contract for the men’s basketball tournament would likely be worth less than the ten-billion-dollar deal it signed in 2010.
This isn’t the first time that the N.C.A.A.’s leaders have argued for a professional alternative to college basketball but, amid growing skepticism of—and legal challenges to—the amateur model, the idea is being offered with new urgency. Perhaps they recognize that the spectacle and the scope of Division-I hoops has outgrown an organization whose mandate covers thousands of young men and women who never inspire madness in anyone but their families and fellow-students. Of course, it is also possible that this idea—take the best players off our hands so we can focus on ultimate frisbee at Swarthmore—is a calculated bluff. As long as the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. refuse their obligations to develop talent, the N.C.A.A. can continue operating big-money machines like March Madness and the F.B.S.—all while castigating the professional leagues for being the source of the problem. The status quo is rigged to generate such magnificent profit—a windfall to universities, administrators, coaches, and corporations—on the backs of unpaid, unorganized labor; it’s hard to imagine that its beneficiaries really want to give it all up. If a call for new minor leagues is just a tactic to stall the mounting demands for player unionization and compensation, or to threaten fans with a doomsday scenario in which Kentucky and Connecticut basketball in their current forms would no longer exist, then the powerful interests in college sports may come to regret what they wished for. In a world in which young athletes had real choices, colleges would realize that they needed Shabazz Napier much more than he needed them.
Photograph by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images.
