Category Archives: Misc

Both the NFL and NBA are looking like they’ll be locked out next year. Collective Bargaining Agreements expire for both leagues (and already have in the case of the NFL). The NFL, though, probably won’t miss any time. Everybody is rolling in money in the NFL, it’s at the height of it’s popularity, and profit sharing keeps most of the owners happy. They’ll figure it out when the prospect of everybody losing money looms closer.

But the NBA is a mess. Contracts have gotten out of control, players get way too much guaranteed money, and most owners don’t make any money. In fact, the majority of franchises lose a good amount, and one team is owned by the league. Unlike the owners of NFL teams, the threat of no NBA won’t be scaring the majority of the owners, because they would have been losing money anyway. So something is going to have to change.

The owners have recently been leaking that they want to force players to spend two years in the college game before coming to the NBA, which makes sense to me, and reflects the trends of the other major sports. But it’s debatable: some have argued that the NBA is getting free training out of the NCAA, and denying the right of a 19 or 20 year old who is ready to play in the pros his chance to do so. Again, it seems fair to me, but that’s not the point. The point is, we don’t know what’s “fair”/”just” here. I’ve been reading about justice as a concept lately, specifically on deconstruction as a tool to examine what we think is just as a society. Still reading? Great. That line of thinking basically holds that justice is an undefinable, unachievable urge that manifests itself in how we organize society, a reflection of ourselves, and that we can figure out more about that sense by looking at how we treat different groups. /end summary.

(Above: Kobe Bryant, who entered the league straight from high school, and John Wall, who had to play a season for Kentucky before enjoying the same privilege.)

What’s interesting to me is that arguments for or against forcing future pros staying in college tend to compare sports leagues, which obviously makes some sense, but it ignores the larger economic analysis by pigeonholing all athletes into one category. Our sense of justice is satisfied so long as all athletes are treated the same way, but doesn’t necessarily require that athletes be treated the same way as other professions. People compare the NBA owners’ proposal to the existing systems in the NFL and the MLB, both of which (sort of) require college players to stay for 2-3 years before turning pro (the MLB will draft you out of high school into a farm league, if you want, but if you go to college you have to stay for 3 years). So, because other athletes are forced to go to college for a few years, we are okay with potentially forcing the same on basketball players.

But why don’t we compare this profession to OTHER professions that people enter? Would it be fair to require amateur work of qualified individuals before they can “turn pro” on an essentially arbitrary basis? For the sort of athlete who is seriously able and fully capable of entering the NBA after high school, we would presume they gain nothing from college in terms of education: they don’t need what they learn in college if they could already be drafted, though it might improve their draft stock by allowing them to mature, a calculated economic decision that they, one could argue, should be allowed to make for themselves. Conversely, the teams should calculate the risk of signing an immature player themselves, and factor that into their decision regarding who to draft: indeed, they do this already with players from college. High school players are essentially skilled laborers, being told that they must enter a training facility and work without pay (though likely on a full scholarship), creating value for the training facility (untaxed revenue for the college) but seeing no fruit of their labor personally for two years. Is there another economic market where we are okay with forcing laborers into this situation?

(Above: Cam Newton, who played for free [maybe] and helped make Auburn more than $60 million last year.)

This point is, as I’ve mentioned, fairly debatable in the context of athletes: Do basketball players benefit from going to college instead of straight to the NBA? (plenty of examples pointing in both directions) Does “basketball” as a nebulous concept benefit by having better NCAA players for longer? These are the questions people ask in the debate. What they don’t ask is: Do the majority of NBA owners, who are white, and the heads of college programs, who are white, benefit from forcing black athletes to work for free for two years before being allowed to profit from the value they achieve for their employers?

That last rhetorical question obviously betrays the conclusion I’d like to draw: We treat athletes differently than other professionals when we consider what is “just” in their treatment. The debate over whether we should force black 19 year olds into creating value for predominantly white owners and provosts of colleges is not one of race, but of economics. It seems “just” that athletes merely be treated like other athletes. There is a tension here, but I don’t know what else to say about it. The way the public debate on this topic has played out thus far (granted, its been only a few days), it seems clear that our society has a different sense of justice when it comes to athletes. Athletes who are predominantly black.