Patrick T. McCormick: Hands off college sports, Mr. Baumgartner

By Patrick T. McCormick

Rep. Michael Baumgartner proposed the Restore College Sports Act the morning after March Madness ended because he opposes the concentration of money and talent in juggernaut teams that has so rigged the game that Cinderella franchises like Gonzaga can no longer score upsets and rise to the final rounds. The stranglehold powerhouse teams have on college sports have destroyed its magic, provided by the exciting possibility of underdogs scoring victories.

His solution to the unbridled dominion of powerhouse teams is to regulate college athletics with a new federal agency led by someone handpicked by the president and to have this agency impose salary caps on coaches and redistribute profits earned by the sport’s top players to the whole community of college athletes. One hardly knows where to begin objecting to this fairy tale .

Let’s start with a Republican on the House floor calling for a new federal regulatory agency even as Congress idly watches the executive branch take a blowtorch to every such body and trample congressional authority over these offices. Why would a Republican-led Congress cheering on the massive dismantling of federal regulatory powers in the EPA, FDA, HHS, and IRS and happy to surrender its own regulatory control of international trade champion federal regulation of college sports?

Then there’s Baumgartner’s suggestion that the very president crippling every federal regulatory agency by selecting administrators who are notoriously incompetent or hellbent on destroying these bodies should handpick the head of his proposed government takeover of the NCAA. Do we believe the person waging war on free speech and dissent on American campuses will protect a level playing field in its athletic courts and coliseums? Should we trust the autocrat bullying our universities and raiding our campuses to referee its sports?

And what about the offensive irony of a free-market Republican wanting to cap salaries on America’s most successful college coaches and redistribute the millions in profits being raked in by top student-athletes under the new NIL rules? Baumgartner proposes these strangely progressive moves to redress the growing chasm between powerhouse schools dominating NCAA sports and the “little guy” college teams no longer able to compete with these behemoths.

But where has this passion for forging a level playing field with economic regulation been for the last half century as American CEOs saw their incomes rocket skyward by 940% while ordinary workers got a piddling pay raise of 12%? Where was this concern for underdogs unable to scale the ranks of success as 40 years of Republican deregulation, tax cuts and trickle-down economics made it all but impossible for America’s poor and working class to get ahead? No Republican in living memory has proposed addressing our ballooning economic divide or restoring the American dream by economic regulation. Why apply salary caps and profit sharing to college sports and nowhere else?

Could it have something to do with the currently unmentionable topic of race? Is redistributing the profits of the top earning college athletes more tenable because they are mostly people of color? No Republican suggested redistributing the skyrocketing incomes of U.S. CEOs as they climbed to 200 times that of ordinary workers. Was that because 92% of the Fortune 500 companies’ head executives are white? Does forcing the top college basketball players to share their sudden profits seem OK because 70% of them are Black? Or is this scheme acceptable because 60% of the NCAA’s 500,000 college athletes with whom these profits would be shared are white?

Blacks make up 16% of college athletes, and now that this slim minority is punching way above its weight in NIL profits there is a cry to share the wealth with the vast majority of players who are white. This would be a redistribution of wealth away from highly talented people of color toward a white majority of less gifted and celebrated players.

Such redistributions of wealth toward whites are not new in America. Slavery, Jim Crow, the Homestead Acts and post-WWII housing policies all redistributed massive amounts of wealth away from people of color. Still such redistribution is wrong, and obscenely so when done in the name of fair play and creating a level playing field.

If Rep. Baumgartner sees the grotesque concentration of wealth as a threat to fair play, let him reconsider renewing Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and instead follow Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in targeting America’s oligarchs, not its college athletes. Patrick T. McCormick, of Spokane, is a retired professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University.