With over 1000 participating colleges and almost half a million young adults under its umbrella, the National Collegiate Athletics Association pledges to inspire and support its “student-athletes.” But with scandals, backroom deals and huge stacks of money piling up in various sports, we have to wonder if the NCAA really are who we thought they were.

The NCAA has shown immense dedication to men’s college basketball and its March Madness tournament. The massive revenue from the Big Dance usually trickles down to executives in suits rather than to the players. But where there’s money, there tends to be greased palms. No one knows that fact better than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so when wire fraud convict Marty Blazer offered the FBI his services as a college basketball informant in 2016 in exchange for a lighter sentence, they were interested. 

One of the accusations against Blazer was for paying college athletes to employ him as a financial expert. Not only is this bribery wrong, but it exploits college athletes. With minimal income, athletes should not be coerced into participating in high-level schemes. The FBI used Blazer’s experience to fund a plot to funnel players into corrupt management agencies, then arrested anyone who accepted. Auburn University assistant coach Chuck Person was booked for accepting $91,500 to send players to the FBI-backed agencies. Emanuel “Book” Richardson, formerly an assistant at the University of Arizona, pleaded guilty to accepting thousands of dollars. Those two are just the beginning of a long list of cooperating coaches charged after the investigation. 

Fortunately for the progress reports of involved FBI agents, the scheme did reveal a ton of corruption unrelated to itself: most glaringly, the misdeeds of shoe companies like Adidas, which poured money into basketball teams in exchange for brand loyalty. The University of Louisville, at the behest of coach Rick Pitino, arranged bribes from Adidas to pay recruits to play for the school. According to the NCAA’s rules, that’s very illegal. Accepting money made the players ineligible by removing their amateur status.

The prosecution in the case was tasked with making a violation of NCAA rules a federal crime. Prosecutors told the jury that because Louisville had a legal right to demand that their players were eligible, so making players ineligible by paying them was fraud. Basically, the argument was that when Louisville employees asked Adidas to pay players to go to Louisville, Louisville became the victim of a federal crime. In true college basketball fashion, Pitino’s coaching career recovered and he now coaches at St. John’s University. After the investigation, the NCAA took action to reduce the influence of the massive recruiting showcases run by corrupt shoe giants.

“For other sports, you go to showcases for college coaches. For golf, it’s kind of different because there are tournaments [instead]. It’s a huge part of how [any] coach perceives you,” senior and Truman State University women’s golf commit Kylie Secrest said. “It’s a matter of monetary expenses because some of them can be far away. There’s also tournament fees involved.”

Showcases don’t just require payment from families in order to give a boost to recruits. Their importance gives organizers immense power. When scores of valuable, talented, potentially naive teenagers gather together, shady dealers flock like hyenas. The power of the shoe dealers and the presence of ruthless conmen allowed the showcases to become havens for corruption.

As absurd as an FBI-led bribery ring sounds, it still fails to match the unbelievable plotline of a recent college football scandal. Turmoil within the NCAA has led some to compare it to the “Wild West.” Much like the mythologized “cowboy culture” of the American West, the current culture within college sports is one of non-compliance. 

Take the University of Michigan, for instance. The top of their website might have a button for reporting misconduct, but they failed to report the vast, illegal scouting web used for multiple years by the University’s football team to steal play calls. It’s unknown whether top brass such as Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh knew about the scheme, but the school’s inability to keep tabs on its staffer Connor Stalions — the scheme’s ringleader — is highly questionable. While employed by the university, Stalions ran a mildly illegal vacuum cleaner business, kept a 500-page manifesto on his lifelong goal of leading the program and may have disguised himself as a coach at Central Michigan University to steal signs. If you leave the stove on, don’t be surprised if you come home to a kitchen fire. The NCAA is still investigating the scandal, including evidence that it was funded by a school booster and that linebackers coach Chris Partridge tampered with evidence. Even if the school faces discipline, the scheme’s success over multiple years will go down as just one example of under-policing in the world of college sports.

While the Michigan scandal may be renowned as one of the NCAA’s most infamous scandals, it definitely wasn’t the only one in recent years. For example, the Varsity Blues college scandal took college sports by storm in 2019, where a multitude of families sent organizer William Rick Singer a combined hefty sum of 25 million dollars. Parents submitted their silk-stocking money to Singer’s now obsolete tax-benefiting, fake non-profit fronts, Key World Foundation and The Edge College and Career Network. In turn, Singer bribed coaches at top universities and colleges to admit these wealthy children into their programs on the fake pretense that they played college sports. Not only did Singer utilize his expertise at bribery, but he went to great lengths to cover up allegations and questions that had the potential to gut his career or the athletes he sponsored. All good things do come to an end though, for Singer’s scheme was shut down by the FBI, who labeled this scandal with the codename, ‘Operation Varsity Blues’. 

The media was galvanized by the news of the operation, reporting on various ousted athletic directors, coaches, families, and conspirators who had participated in the scheme. Justice may have been served to the wealthy but nonsensical connivers, but higher education and college sports were struck severely. The operation exposed the intricacies of wealthy privilege, which is a problem that is intertwined with the NCAA. 

Not all affluent families use bribery to swiftly stick their children in college, but the wealthy do have a leg up in finding their way to higher education. Students from the richest 1% of families receive a boost in college admissions, 24% of which is due to athletic prowess. Rich families ultimately have the resources to produce athletically gifted children due to increased access to equipment, travel and extra training.

“If you play golf, you [probably] have a little bit more money. That’s pretty obvious. People always [say] that’s a rich kid sport. It’s expensive to be good at any sport, but especially golf,” Secrest said.

While socioeconomic status is not a major factor in specific admissions cases for athletes, it does contribute to involvement in sports— and that translates over to campuses. With contributions from parents and a plethora of funds, rich-kid athletes not only have a myriad of opportunities in sports, but they are better supported in a college environment. Even when there’s no bribery occurring, money still finds a way to get into colleges by way of sports.

The base and model of the NCAA is amateurism, which means athletes are supposed to be participating in collegiate sports for the enjoyment and fun of it — not for money. In fact, the NCAA makes athletes sign an amateur contract to make sure of their intentions with college athletics. They make it clear that, in their eyes, collegiate athletes are not by any means professionals who deserve payment for their contributions. However, college sports have turned highly competitive, meaning there is no way for athletes to receive a spot on a college team if they are not incredibly talented at their sport. The NCAA will need to continue to make changes if they want to create a fair and encouraging atmosphere for their athletes. 

Further complicating student wealth, some athletes have been given opportunities to participate in NIL (name, image, likeness) collectives. Athletes can earn money by posting on social media accounts, signing autographs, coaching camps and lessons, participating in advertisements and other business ventures. The NCAA had a history of profiting off athletes, and they still do, but NIL deals have been incredibly successful for student-athletes who are finally being compensated for their efforts. 

Pressing for liberation in college athletics, former student-athletes launched a lawsuit against the NCAA. Through Johnson v. NCAA, the plaintiffs argue that athletes should be treated as employees rather than students, receiving at least the federal minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). NIL gives some athletes more substantial opportunities than others, for there is a difference in marketability depending on skill level and charisma. The contributions of athletes that may not be as marketable as others are still worthy, but they aren’t compensated as well. Johnson v. NCAA is leaning in the favor of student-athletes because they deserve to be paid for their hard work, but this could lead to the fall of the NCAA and college athletics. 

“Ohio State has a big NIL program. When I get there, they’re gonna set me up with a manager and get me started. Athletes deserve to be paid especially when they are working hard and deserve it,” junior and Ohio State University softball commit Siena Snyder said.

Students might be finding more ways to enrich themselves, but they still aren’t keeping up with the universities themselves, who have been making big bucks off of conference realignment, the shifting of conferences to secure maximum media rights money for schools — even if it means that all of their athletes have to become a different kind of cross-country traveler. Among the four power conferences, the Big Ten conference will have eighteen schools and the Big Twelve conference will have sixteen; meanwhile, the Southeastern Conference will include Midwestern schools and the Atlantic Coast Conference will have schools on the Pacific Coast. Somehow, the conferences that are supposed to teach math and geography can’t count schools or identify regions. There used to be five power conferences, but the Pacific Twelve Conference got raided by the others and is now satirized as the Pac-2, after the two schools that haven’t yet jumped ship. All’s fair in love and the funding arms of public universities.

Added scrutiny has been given to Southern Methodist University (SMU), which will transition to the ACC. The school agreed to forgo all media rights money for nine years in order to gain entrance, which is why the SMU athletic director had to defend his program against allegations that they bought their way in. They must now replace the 8 million dollars per year that its past media rights deal with the American Athletic Conference was bringing in. Even though they aren’t buying anything, they still lose $72 million. Of course, that’s wholly unsurprising because SMU has a long history of leveraging bribery to win at football — the only difference is that whatever’s occurring now is legal.

The NCAA has not retained its original promise to inspire and support student-athletes, but they have turned to corrupt methods of money-making, somewhat resembling a cartel, allowing the wealthy and powerful to benefit at the expense of others. However, by talking about the issue, we can encourage NCAA reforms, so students, parents, coaches and programs take accountability for their actions. 

While college athletics are captivating and impassioned, bringing in hordes of fans, our unconditional love for the game means an unconditional money stream for the media companies and universities who sell our attention to advertisers. It’s the perfect scenario for greedy athletic directors, ambitious coaches, fanatical boosters, and shady dealers. The NCAA’s longtime insistence that it needs to preserve an air of amateurism to survive has turned out to be categorically false. The shameless cash-grabbing in college sports can be attributed to one fact: no matter how corrupt it gets, we’ll never be able to quit it.