As many sports fans — especially those of college sports — will know, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a multi-million dollar corporation, if not a multi-billion dollar corporation, and it makes almost all of its money off high-profile elite athletes who receive as much attention as a post-VMA Miley Cyrus. However, if any one of those athletes decides to profit from their celebrity-like status, the NCAA will come down on him or her like a sack of hammers.
This is where people like me and many others sports fans around the country get upset. The NCAA has no problem making a profit off of a high-profile athlete whom people pay to see but has a major problem with an athlete selling his or her jersey, which belongs to the athlete?
Take the situation with Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel. The reigning Heisman Trophy winner was investigated by the NCAA for supposedly getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for signing autographs during his trip to Miami during last season’s Bowl Championship Series National Championship. He was found to have violated the “spirit” of the NCAA rule, and was suspended for the first half of the Aggies’ season opener against Rice University.
Had Manziel been suspended longer, not only would he have had suffer a loss of his season, but his team would have suffered the loss of their leader, and the Texas A&M fans that paid to see Johnny Manziel play football would have suffered as well.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but if something belongs to a student athlete — an autograph, a jersey with the athlete’s own number on it, or some other game-worn item — shouldn’t that athlete decide what to do with it? Someone else should not decide what student athletes may do with their possessions.
Now don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the NCAA should go as far as directly paying its student athletes. They’re not professionals — not yet — and for the most part, they’re getting a free college education to play a sport.
But to tell me it is OK for the NCAA to make money off of a player, whether it’s by selling the players’ jerseys in sporting goods stores or by using players’ names in video games (which is what the new NCAA Football 2014 game is doing), and not give that student-athlete at least a portion of what the NCAA makes is ridiculous. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this some form of copyright infringement?
Take it from me, a member of the school’s cross-country and track-and-field teams. Whenever we get together for the pre-season NCAA signing, agreeing to the rules and regulations of the NCAA, we sign a contract that basically states that student athletes can only focus on school, our sport, and our side job.
That means no playing any fantasy football or baseball with a money prize for the winner, no poker games with your friends — nothing that the casual college student can take part in.
Honestly, it’s like a student athlete can’t go two steps without worrying about breaking an NCAA rule. Heck, I’ve probably violated three NCAA rules just by writing about it. But, as we all know, the NCAA has no problem making money off of a star student athlete, illustrating the true hypocrisy of the institution.
The Manziel case and many others show us is that the NCAA has been caught red-handed in hypocrisy, and the organization has tried to cover its tracks. When ESPN pointed out that the NCAA can profit from the sale of a player’s jersey, the jerseys came down from the NCAA website the next day.
It’s obvious that the institution is setting itself up for failure. Not only does it have so many rules and bylaws in place that student athletes can’t keep track of them all, but there are so many that the NCAA itself can’t follow the rules.
There is some talk now about the organization reviewing its standards for amateurization. Hopefully when that happens, the system will be reformed and cases like Manziel’s will die out for good.
The hypocrisy of the NCAA
August 28, 2013

The Manziel case has reopened the discussion of the NCAA’s treatment of its star athletes.