The NCAA recently signed a 14 year, $10.8 billion dollar media rights deal for March Madness. Millions of fans tune in to the biggest collegiate sporting events, while thousands of others buy tickets and attend the games. For decades, the NCAA and its member schools have been making millions of dollars off the work of college athletes, and until recently, the amateur economy of campus sports has gone relatively unchallenged. Even now, the NCAA's rules against allowing players to be paid are supported by a majority of Americans, and many justify this clear injustice by arguing that college athletes are already getting the most valuable compensation possible: a "free" education.
10.8 million dollars for a media right deal might seem like a lot of money, but when you look at the amount of sponsors that are willing to put money into these intercollegiate sports tournaments, it might be understandable. Everything about the NCAA March Madness tournaments is branded. Ads from big companies like Coca Cola, AT&T and HP are constantly played during the broadcasts of the games. And it’s not just the NCAA making a lot of money of off the work of these athletes; also the schools are making exorbitant amounts of money. For one of our case studies we looked at some stats from the Northwestern University. The National Labor Relations Board found that Northwestern’s football team $235 million in revenue between 2003 and 2012. (Pepperman & McDonough, 2014) Another interesting statistic is that in 1996 a premier college athlete earned $500,000 dollars of revenue during his career. (Lemons, 2014) When we take into account the inflation that number today would be closer to $750,000 dollars. There is nothing inherently wrong with sporting events making a huge amount of money. The troubling part is, that in this billion-dollar college sport industry the players don’t receive a