I cannot assail Ekow Yankah's excellent counterpoint to my original premise regarding NIL and college sports. He does a skillful job articulating a larger and older issue—that higher education has been sidestepped (if not outright subverted)—by big-time athletics. That has led to an unfortunate cheapening of the cherished educational experience for many Division I athletes. There is a hardened cynicism that now pervades the college sports industry.
But at this point, the only solution to that is radical surgery to remove some or all of athletics from higher education altogether—to build out minor leagues for football and basketball and stop tying those enterprises to our universities. I don't see America going for that— I believe we as a people would rather wrestle with the dilemmas that are presented by major college sports than terminate major college sports. We like seeing athletes wear the jerseys of our alma maters or favorite teams. We like returning to campus to watch them play. We are willing to make intellectual compromises on what the games mean in relation to the educational mission—and let's face it, the schools want us there buying merchandise and tickets and pledging donations to the business school. And so we persist in this flawed venture.
In doing so, we have to make the flawed venture as close to fair for all stakeholders as possible. Not just the rich (overwhelmingly white) coaches and administrators, but the athletes as well. The math stopped making sense a long time ago, and the demographics and optics have caught up with the scam. It was no longer a defensible system when a coach made $10 million a year and players risked their eligiblilty for $500 handshakes from alums, so NIL changed that. Getting the underground economy of player payments above the table at least improves the honesty of the enterprise, if not fully addressing the equity.
As I believe Mr. Yankah would agree, the ultimate goal is a generation of athletes that are both compensated and educated. A generation of athletes who use their sport to better themselves—for the short term and for life—instead of letting their sport use them. We aren't there yet, not by a long shot. But NIL is a step toward addressing the most glaring inequality of the college sports system, and it's a long overdue one. There will be continued trial and error. This is an undertaking built on achieving progress, not perfection. We should keep going.