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.