Basic NCAA Premise: Poor Black Men Should Disproportionately Pave the Road for White Intercollegiate Athletics Participation

NCAA Executive Director Mark Emmert has characterized a pay model as fatally flawed in college athletics and embraces that football and men’s basketball foot the bill for all other intercollegiate expenses. Recalling an event he attended featuring Emmert, Everett Glenn noted, “When asked by parents and supporters of college’s non-revenue generating sports how they might help those sports, Emmert responded ‘buy tickets to the football game.'” This attitude has one disturbing generality: Black men from poor backgrounds continue to disproportionately fund the athletic access of White collegians coming from middle and upper-middle class families.

During the 2013-2014 athletic year, Blacks comprised 62% (Whites only 31%) of the full-ride athletes in revenue generating sports, football and men’s basketball, in the Power 5 conferences. Actually, Black participation numbers at the professional level, NFL (67%) and NBA (77%), indicated that Blacks on full-ride football and men’s basketball scholarships are more talented and creating more revenue as a group than their White counterparts. In non-revenue generating sports (those receiving financial benefit from the input of football and men’s basketball), Blacks comprised only 12% of the full-ride athletes, Whites 70%.

Ideally, race would not matter. However, the Black male student-athletes who are disproportionately filling the collegiate coffers that benefit other student-athletes tend to come from impoverished backgrounds and the predominantly White beneficiaries tend to come from much higher socioeconomic backgrounds. According to the most recently available US census data, the income of the median Black household is under $35K with over 27% below poverty, non-Hispanic White more than $58K with less than 10% below poverty. Beyond the impact on current living conditions, these earning differences inhibit wealth accrual for future generations.

Abundant food is in the fallow ground of the poor, But it is swept away by injustice. | Proverbs 13:23 (NASB)

This ancient wisdom provides insight into helping currently socioeconomically disadvantaged or impoverished people groups. One must approach interactions with the understanding that the solution lies within the people. The role of those who come alongside is not to fix problems but to free people from that which is not right. Sometimes that injustice will lie within a system (e.g. discrimination or exploitation). Often too, though, injustice will lie within individuals or the collective people group (e.g. destructive beliefs or behaviors). Those who want to help people leverage their own unharnessed resources must pay attention to both forms of injustice.

Scenario 1: Your friend invites you to go bowling. As the guest, he kindly lets you go first. As you step to the line, you see that there are two instead of 10 pins. You ask your friend to hit the reset button. “Why?” He replies, “It’s all good.” You shrug. His rules. You knock down both pins. Your friend goes next, he has 10 pins. You bowl your next frame and get to bowl with seven pins. Your friend goes again and he again gets 10 pins. You laugh and hope the jokes over but see that this time you only have three pins. You look at your friend who seems to think everything is normal. By the time the first game ends, you realize that you have only seen a total of 40 pins.

Scenario 2: A company hires you for a position and tells you up front that you are expected to travel to 65 locations across the United States. Your base pay is $50 per hour? It sounds like a fair deal until you find out that you only make a percentage of your base salary depending on the location. One of the 65 locations pays you several dimes over $50/hour. At all the other locations, though, you only make 18-69% of your salary or $9-$34.50 per hour. After the first year of working for the company, you have averaged earnings of $20/hour.

These scenarios are not pure analogies but simple images of what it looks like to have 3 to 8 out of every 10 Black individuals missing at 64 of the 65 Power 5 campuses across America. LOUISVILLE is the exception. On average, these campuses are missing 6 out of 10 Blacks. METHODOLOGY