It’s now the middle of March, and with it comes my favorite sporting event of the year – March Madness, the NCAA Men and Women’s Division I Basketball Tournament. In it, 68 teams from all over the country compete for the National Championship. The teams are split into four regions across the country, with each region’s teams seeded from numbers 1 to 16 (the top-ranked teams during the regular season are seeded at the top and play the lower-seeded teams). The overall winner from each region plays against another region-winner in the Final Four round, which is the semifinal. Currently, UCLA has the most title wins, with 11, and Duke, which won last year’s tournament, has the 3rd most with 5 titles.
What makes March Madness a truly unique sporting competition is how it allows both die-hard basketball fans, who have followed teams throughout the season, and casual fans to directly interact with the game and to take ownership of their favorite team. Fans fill out their brackets and compete with others to see who best predicted the tournament’s outcome. In my opinion, March Madness is the purest form of collegiate athletic competition. On any given day, any team has the ability to win, including the #16 seed defeating the #1 seed. Often, the only teams people watch for are the Cinderellas, teams who qualified for the “Big Dance” (the tournament) by overcoming big odds and are the teams nobody believed in. For example, with this year’s tournament, 14th seeded Stephen F. Austin State University defeated 3nd seeded West Virginia in the East region. Also, 15th seeded Middle Tennessee State University defeated the 2nd seeded Michigan State in the Midwest region. In fact, this is the first time that I can remember in which nobody in the entire country has a perfect bracket left after the first round. It’s these upsets which make March Madness so exciting and unpredictable.
Through watching all the March Madness games so far and following my favorite teams, I have begun to think more about the issue of college athletics and the debate over whether student athletes should be compensated for their work. When you consider the statistic that only 1.2 % of these student athletes will actually get drafted by a professional NBA team, you realize that the time and effort these athletes put into their sport will essentially go unnoticed. Because of the huge amount of publicity generated by these athletes for their schools, such as basketball and football, should athletes be compensated? Without the large amount of effort and hard work they put into completing a successful season, the coaches’ salaries would plummet and the school’s revenue would disappear.
However, others argue that athletes do already get fairly compensated, through things like specialized tutoring services and fully-funded athletic scholarships to attend college at zero or low cost. They also enjoy the fame their ability to playing their sport allows them to attain.
I advocate for a reformed NCAA system, in which student athletes are treated as professionals and are able to make financial deals that will help them make money, be it commercial deals or clothing deals. They should be treated like the professionals they are expected to play as, not as the amateurs the NCAA currently treats them as. Their status should reflect the amount of money they generate for their school and the coaches. This should also extend to all athletes in all levels of collegiate sports, from Division I down to Division III.
I think the issue of student athlete compensation is important to address, and I hope to bring it up in class this week with our speaker Sandy Barbour, Penn State’s Athletic Director. It will give me an opportunity to hear and learn about the issue from the perspective of an administrator who deals directly with the issue.
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