Does the NCAA tournament exploit black athletes?

Does the NCAA tournament exploit black athletes?

By: Devona Walker
Thu, 03/26/2009

Once a year, America gets it — a big, bad case of March Madness. And while it is nice to see the sheer talent and heart of the nation's best college players facing off for the final bragging rights of the season, it also brings a nagging feeling to many African Americans.

We watch the celebrity coaches, the Nike ads, the Gatorade logo plastered across the screen, all of them making billions off these "student" athletes. (Read about President Obama's tournament bracket.) Meanwhile, we all know the dismal graduation rates many of these universities consistently report. It's become such a persistent black eye for the NCAA tournament, that recently it started threatening to strip universities of scholarship funding if they don't get their student athletes' scores up. Next year, it says it just might ban from the tournament altogether some of the schools most notorious for underperforming academically.

Kind of reminds me of how Major League Baseball handles its steroids problem. Just enough reaction to make it appear as if it is doing something. Never once admiting its own culpability in the problem. The idea that "student" athletes underperform academically goes right back to the plantation, to the farm, and that is partly built by the NCAA.

“I love basketball. But watching the spectacle of March Madness always makes me a little bit uneasy,” said Scott Burroughs, of Seattle. “It’s a plantation and you should not be working for free. They work in a billion dollar industry, and all they get are a free pair of shoes out of the deal.”

Burroughs watched the first full weekend of games with friends at a sports bar in Madrona, an upscale Seattle neighborhood. He is a 6-foot-7-inch black man, who once played college ball himself. He is now in the process of getting a microbrewery off the ground. While he does not believe the solution is paying student athletes money to play, he said it’s hard to ignore the racial implications. Sometimes it's hard to watch when commentators begin sizing up players as if they are product as opposed to 19-year-old kids.

“The whole ideas is that it’s sold as this great way to get an education. And they do everything but throw roadblocks in the way of getting that education,” Burroughs said.

New America Media reports that in the late 1990s, economists calculated that top caliber student athletes individually generated roughly $500,000 for their schools. That number, of course, has increased over the years. And that number does not even take March Madness into consideration. The six-year contract the NCAA has with CBS is worth $11 billion, according to New America Media.

The vast majority of these student athletes are black. By comparison, the vast majority of these coaches — many of whom are bringing home comfortable seven-figure salaries — are white.

This year revenue from the NCAA basketball tournament is expected to grow 30 percent.

I don't want to begrudge American universities strong athletic departments. Nor am I arguing for paying student athletes to play. My only real problem with student athletes is that they are treated much more like athletic property than students.

Early morning practice schedules, cocoon-like athletes-only dorms, arduous playing schedules, enormous travel schedules and post-season tournaments that routinely conflict with things like mid-terms. And those are just the institutionalized contradictions. If you consider the relationships that develop between the coaching and university staff and the individual student athlete, it goes from suspect to obscene.

Low graduation rates for these student athletes, especially black student athletes clearly reflect how they are viewed and what is expected of them. It also tells you something about how these kids are being recruited.

“Each year the most disturbing information in the graduation rate study is the disparity between the graduation rates of Arican-American and white football student-athletes," Richard Lapchick, of the University of Central Florida, wrote in his new study on NCAA men's basketball tournament teams. “While the graduation rates for African-American student-athletes have improved, the disparity has persisted for years.”

There is another disparity at play here. Often graduation rates are worse at universities with some of the most competitive athletic departments.

Of the 65 tournament teams, about 32 percent had Academic Progress Rates of less than 925, the cutoff at which the NCAA can start to penalize the school and begin stripping it of up to 10 percent of its scholarship money.

Schools in this year's NCAA basketball tournament reporting the lowest graduation rates for basketball players of any race: Cal State Northridge at 8 percent, Maryland at 10 percent, Portland State at 17 percent, Arizona at 20 percent, and Clemson at 29 percent.

Twenty-five men's tournament teams had a gap of 20 percentage points or more in graduation rates for black and white basketball student athletes.

Devona Walker is TheLoop21.com's senior reporter/blogger. She writes the Post-Race? blog.