It's not often that I have occasion to praise House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.), but his plan to hold hearings Wednesday on college football's Bowl Championship Series is a good one. There's a reason, after all, that every other major sports championship on Earth is resolved through a playoff rather than by an awkward combination of decisive games and a computer formula. Should this really be the top priority for the United States Congress? Of course not. But consider the alternatives. Oversight by the executive branch has been off the table ever since George W. Bush's inauguration, when the GOP congressional leadership's former zeal for trumped-up "scandals" morphed into an almost comical lassitude.
The other option, of course, is passing laws. Under present circumstances, that's a dangerous enterprise. Three kinds of bills get through the Republican-controlled House: ones written by corporate lobbyists, giant tax cuts for rich people, and efforts to finance tax cuts for rich people by taking stuff away from poor people. It's not a pretty sight.
Improving college football is about the best we could expect from this crew. While they're at it, though, they might want to consider peering at the elephant in the room, college sports-wise. I watched a bunch of games last weekend on networks like ABC, CBS, and ESPN. Rupert Murdoch owns three separate channels dedicated to college sports, one each for the Atlantic, Pacific, and Central regions. With Comcast digital cable, you can get all three. You can also pay extra, as my roommate has, for the ESPN College Game Plan package that broadcasts up to six different games simultaneously. Needless to say, neither ABC, its subsidiary ESPN, nor CBS, nor Fox, nor Comcast, are amateur enterprises. They're professional, profit-making machines run by well-compensated executives. So are the corporations that advertise during the games, the agencies that design the ads, and the marketing people who decide which games to advertise on.
But of course they are. College football is a big business, attracting huge quantities of viewers and, with them, huge amounts of money spent on trying to reach those viewers. There's an opportunity to make money in this neighborhood and so, naturally enough, everybody gets in on the action.
Everybody, that is, except the people doing the work: the players.
Getting people to perform valuable work on your behalf without pay is a neat trick, and the administrators who have pulled it off deserve a tip of the cap for cleverness. To play professional football one needs, in effect, to put in three to five years playing college football first. The college teams, however, have formed a cartel through the NCAA that prohibits all of them from paying their players, thus shutting down the market mechanisms that in normal fields allow people who perform valuable services to acquire wages for their trouble. In theory, the idea is that these are amateur athletes, but nothing about the competition in which they're engaged has any suggestion of amateurism beside the basic fact that the workforce isn't getting paid. In any industry outside of sports, this would be regarded as intolerable.
Steve Sailer's old idea for essentially getting colleges out of the sports business and instead simply letting them license their names and logos to what would be, in effect, teams in a professional junior league has some appeal. On another level, it's needlessly complicated. Politicians could simply force or pressure schools to break up their no-wage cartel and compete for their players' services on an open market. Outside of sports, after all, there's nothing unusual about a university paying a student to perform some work. Undergraduates regularly get jobs in libraries and administrative offices or as research assistants for professors. Graduate students work as teaching assistants for low-level courses. The people who do these things get paid, the same as anyone else performing useful labor on behalf of the university. Why should athletes be any different?
The exploitation of college football (and, to a lesser extent, basketball) players is perhaps not the single most pressing issue facing the country. Nevertheless, as noted before, the Republican-controlled congress has no intention of doing anything genuinely useful, but does seem to include a reasonable number of sports fans. The GOP is also not well-known for affectionate feelings toward the pointy-headed intellectuals who run America's colleges and universities. Even better, they like -- or at least claim to like -- free markets. So why not take a stab at rectifying this small-but-real injustice? What could be more in keeping with the pseudo-populist orientation of the modern Republicans than ending the exploitation of jocks by the tweed jacket set? If Representative Barton can find it in him to start thinking outside the box, I just may need to give him more favorable mentions in future columns.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
