A look at salary caps, steroids, and pay for student athletes

Although few people know it, the states of Nebraska and California have enacted legislation allowing colleges to pay student athletes, said Dennis Hutchinson, William Rainey Harper professor in the college and senior lecturer in law. For fear of NCAA sanctions, no colleges have ever taken advantage of the laws, Hutchinson, an expert in sports and the law, told the crowd at the 2005 Spring Classic at Gleacher Center on March 1. It would treat student-athletes like what they are, which is essentially employees of the university who generate a fabulous amount of revenue, he said. If you add all the hours a Division I college football player works, he’s playing for about $12 an hour. That’s an outrage, given the amount revenue generated by most college sports programs.

In an all-star panel on society and the sports world, Hutchinson joined Michael Herman, MBA ’64, Michael Klingensmith, AB ’75, MBA ’76, and Allen Sanderson, senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the college.

Herman, general partner of Herman Family Trading Co. and former president of the Kansas City Royals , praised professional football and basketball for leveling financial playing fields by sharing television revenue, instituting salary caps, and maintaining drafts that properly evaluate prospective players. Meanwhile, baseball continues to operate with great disparity in team revenue, a draft in which players are selected at age 17, and a farm system of 250 employees that brings perhaps one player to the Major Leagues each year, he said. I would say that is not a very good return on your investment, Herman said.

Klingensmith, executive vice president of Time, Inc. and former president of Sports Illustrated magazine, said pro sports franchises have increased tremendously in value in recent years, despite spending so much on players and often earning little revenue. Klingensmith recalled asking financier Irwin Jacobs if he was interested in buying a team. He said, ‘Absolutely not,' Klingensmith said. And this quote stuck with me. He said: Professional sports franchises are the most efficient mechanism ever devised to transfer money from advertisers to players.'

Sanderson, an expert in sports labor markets and economic impact studies, said he does not advocate steroid use, but asked the audience to carefully weigh the concepts of natural and fair in enhancing athletic performance. He cited swimmer Janet Evans, who won four gold medals at the 1988 Olympics by developing a secret slime suit. There are many ways we don’t have even competition, Sanderson said. We're coming very close to another technical frontier in this area. With cloning, now what’s humanly possible?

 

Phil Rockrohr