Sideline Cut: US college sport is gravy train with star players stuck on platform

When the USA basketball team made its publicity appearance at the London Olympics in 2012, members of the media jostled to get within ear-shot – and selfie- shot – of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Mike Krzyzewski, the head coach.

Only a small audience gathered around the area where Jim Boeheim, one of the grandees of American college basketball, sat and gave a fascinating riff on the team and the sport in general.

Boeheim has been head basketball coach with the Syracuse Orange for a staggering 39 years and on Sunday night, he will coach his team as they face North Carolina in the Final Four, which has become the romantic peak of the month-long NCAA basketball carnival.

March Madness in college basketball trails only the NFL play-offs as the most lucrative post-season franchise – last year, in generated $1.19 billion (€1.04 billion) in TV advertising alone.

The marvel – or scandal – of US college sport mirrors the stunned observation which the GAA frequently makes of itself: the only ones who don’t get paid are the players. The very best of them, of course, will: a scholarship to the powerhouse colleges of American basketball is the last step on a player’s journey to the NBA.

Sunday’s game has made it hard to ignore the fact that NCAA basketball has become, depending on your perspective, either a parody of the enshrined amateur ethos or an intolerable abuse of the supposed “stars” of the game. Both Syracuse and North Carolina are labouring under academic-athletic scandals.

Boeheim has had 109 career wins stripped from his record and was suspended for nine games this season as a punishment to NCAA investigations into infractions which Syracuse self-reported to its governing body in 2007. The cancelled wins applied to those achieved with teams fielding players who should have been ineligible for various infringements, from “academic misdemeanour” to failure to comply with drug-testing regulations.

Elite talent

The punishment means that Boeheim dropped from second to sixth on the all-time wins list. In addition, his programme lost 12 scholarships, no small thing in the ferocious recruitment practice for the small pool of elite talent. Syracuse opted to sit out last year’s post-season tournament.

But their advance to this year’s Final Four has been a huge surprise – and one the NCAA could have done without.

North Carolina, meanwhile, is still in the midst of a huge internal investigation involving some 3,000 scholarship athletes across a range of sports taking ‘paper classes’ – effectively fake courses – to maintain their academic grades and allow them to participate for the college.

Roy Williams has not been personally accused of any involvement and none of the players who will feature for his team tonight are implicated. But the scale of the investigation in a college revered for its basketball history makes it harder for the NCAA to dispute the loudening complaints that the notion of the "student-athlete" in an industry which generates close on a billion dollars has become shameful.

It is a quaint term; “student-athlete” and implies a superhuman adherence to both academic and sporting excellence of the part of its practitioners. And it offers a flimsy cover of the fact that in return for their scholarships, the athletes are effectively unpaid stars for as long as they are part of the programme. The best progress to the NBA.

The rest disappear into real life. Some prosper. But those who scraped in primarily to play basketball or football get nothing like the same college experience – or qualification – as the face-painted crowd of fellow students who cheer them on.

In a disturbing piece published the Atlantic in 2011, Taylor Branch made a convincing argument that it is time to end the sham of amateurism in the NCAA. He outlined how the term 'student-athlete', far from being a dreamy conceit, was a devious exercise in ambiguity.

Its power became evident as far back as the 1950s when a football player named Ray Dennison died from head injuries he suffered while playing for Fort Lewis A&M Aggies. His widow claimed workman's compensation which brought the question sharply into focus: did Dennison's death occur while he was effectively working for the college or was he merely playing a game; an extra-curricular pursuit? The Colorado Supreme Court found that the college was "not in the football business" and the claim was rejected. "Slavery analogies should be used carefully," Branch wrote in the most troubling paragraph of his essay.

“College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene – corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” – deprives them to the right of due process guaranteed by the Constitution – is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the Plantation.”

Branded shoes

And it is hard to not make that comparison when you watch the March Madness games. In recent years, Sonny Vaccaro, a former Nike agent who was instrumental in marketing sneakers through players – paying college coaches to have their players wear branded shoes – has become one of the most unforgiving critics of the way that the NCAA treats its student-athletes.

He argues that while the system of amateurism frees the colleges of any obligation of compensation to its athletes, it mitigates particularly harshly against disadvantaged African-American players.

The argument that some of these men probably wouldn’t have ever have made it to any college without their athletic prowess or that they get to participate in sport at an elite level doesn’t stack when compared to the millions of dollars the system makes through them.

Boeheim’s career spans the transition of college basketball from just that to the industry it has become: he made the Syracuse team of 1962 as a ‘walk-on’, meaning he wasn’t recruited as a scholarship prospect but was good enough to make the squad. After graduating, he decided to make coaching his life, decades before college basketball became the spectacle and financial behemoththat it is. Because tomorrow night’s Final Four game will be spellbinding.

Former players from both teams – Michael Jordan was recruited by Roy Williams – will sit in the crowd. It will look like what it is: an illusion, a pretence that these young men can play ball at such an absurdly high level and simultaneously live the life of a genuine student.

The trouble for hoops fans is that they put on such an extraordinarily brilliant show that it’s hard to look away.