College Sports Exploits Unpaid Black Athletes. But They Could Force a Change.

By Donald H. Yee, The Washington Post

10 January 16

Disproportionately black football and basketball players are making disproportionately white administrators and coaches rich

n Monday night, college football will crown a new champion. In the process, a lot of money will be made.

No matter who wins, the University of Alabama’s Southeastern Conference and Clemson University’s Atlantic Coast Conference will be paid $6 million each. So will the conferences of the schools those teams beat to make it to the final. The organization that runs the playoff, a Delaware-headquartered corporation that’s separate from the NCAA, takes in about $470 million each year from ESPN. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney made $3.3 million last year and, as The Washington Post recently reported, his chief of staff makes $252,000; Alabama’s Nick Saban, the highest-paid coach in college football, made slightly more than $7 million, and the team’s strength and conditioning coach makes $600,000.

Some of the players are future NFL stars who will probably be rich one day, too: Alabama is led by Heisman Trophy-winning running back Derrick Henry, who set a SEC record for rushing yards and rushing touchdowns in a season. Clemson features gifted quarterback Deshaun Watson, also a Heisman finalist, and running back sensation Wayne Gallman.

The NCAA, though, insists that all of its players are student-athletes motivated only by love of the game and of their alma maters. So on Monday, they’ll be working for free. Most fans of college football and basketball go along with the pretense, looking past the fact that the NCAA makes nearly $1 billion a year from unpaid labor.

But after a year when Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country, and at the end of a season when the football team at the University of Missouri helped force the resignation of the school’s top two administrators over how the campus handled race-related incidents, we need to stop ignoring the racial implications of the NCAA’s hypocrisy.

After all, who is actually earning the billions of dollars flooding universities, athletic conferences, TV networks and their sponsors? To a large extent, it’s young black men, who are heavily overrepresented in football and men’s basketball, the two sports that bring in virtually all the revenue in college athletics. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that 57 percent of the football players and 64 percent of the men’s basketball players in the six biggest conferences were black; at the same schools, black men made up less than 3 percent of the overall student population. (In recent NFL drafts, five times as many black players were taken in the first two rounds, where the perceived best players are picked, as white players.) Athletics administrators and coaches, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly white.

So by refusing to pay athletes, the NCAA isn’t just perpetuating a financial injustice. It’s also committing a racial one.

* * *

The bargain the NCAA makes with football and basketball players is fairly simple: You play games, entertain fans and make us money, and we’ll give you a scholarship, experience, training and exposure you need to make it to the pros.

For decades, a lot of that money has been earned by black athletes. College basketball was transformed in 1966 when Don Haskins’s all-black team from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) defeated Adolph Rupp’s all-white University of Kentucky squad in the NCAA championship game. It was a momentous achievement, widely credited for helping desegregate college basketball, particularly in the South.

Similarly, a 1970 game between the University of Southern California and Alabama changed college football, after USC’s all-black backfield, led by future NFL star Sam “Bam” Cunningham, defeated Bear Bryant’s all-white Alabama team in Birmingham. The victory essentially forced Alabama to integrate its football program if it wanted to compete at a high level.

It’s hard to imagine that football and basketball would be as wildly popular as they are now if they had never integrated. Or, for that matter, as lucrative. The amount of money generated by football and basketball in the “Power Five” conferences (the Pac-12, SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12) has exploded in the past half-dozen years. The College Football Playoff will generate more than $7 billion from ESPN over a 12-year contract. Basketball’s March Madness will bring in nearly $11 billion from CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting over a 14-year TV and Web deal. Merchandising and licensing revenue reportedly exceeds $4 billion a year.

There’s so much money up for grabs that individual schools and conferences have created their own sports TV channels. Fans can watch the Pac-12 Network, the Big Ten Network — even the Longhorn Network, devoted to the University of Texas (which is reportedly guaranteed an average of $15 million per year from ESPN, even as the cable-sports behemoth loses money on the enterprise). And there’s millions more from ticket sales and stadium and facility naming rights.

This enormous flow of cash is carefully kept away from football and basketball players, but coaches, administrators and other staff members get to bathe in it, even though many big-time athletic departments still lose money overall. Larry Scott, commissioner of the Pac-12 Conference, reportedly makes more than $3.5 million a year. Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, makes more than $1 million. According to USA Today, nine athletic directors make more than $1 million each, and nearly 50 make more than $500,000. Football and basketball coaches too numerous to count make well into seven figures — including many still getting paid millions after they’ve been fired. Even bowl-game directors can make nearly $1 million , for administering a single game. These are figures for those at the top of the pyramid: Many schools pay assistant coaches hundreds of thousands of dollars; Louisiana State University’s football team just hired a defensive coordinator for $1.3 million per year.

And for the most part, the people getting paid are white. Since 1951, when its first top executive was appointed, the head of the NCAA always has been a white man. Of the Power Five conferences, none — dating back to the 1920s — has ever had a nonwhite commissioner. A 2015 study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that 86.7 percent of all athletic directors in the NCAA were white.

The demographics of head football and basketball coaches are similar. At the start of this college football season, 87.5 percent of head football coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision were white. In the 2013-14 season, 76 percent of head basketball coaches in Division I were white.

The money generated by football and men’s basketball also goes to subsidize “non-revenue” sports such as soccer, equestrian, field hockey, rowing, swimming, gymnastics and golf. Virtually all of those programs lose money, and most of the men and women playing those sports are white. But at least the subsidies are allowing other athletes to compete at a high level, not funding lavish salaries for executives.

Why is this business model — unpaid labor, mostly by black athletes, generating riches for white administrators — still tolerated?

Because most football and basketball players haven’t acted on the economic power they possess — and no one in the NCAA universe is eager to change that, either.

Instead, the NCAA’s member schools are moving to distract them. The Post recently reported that Clemson’s new football facility will have a miniature-golf course, a sand volleyball pit and laser tag, as well as a barber shop, a movie theater and bowling lanes. The University of Oregon had so much money to spend on its football facility that it resorted to sourcing exotic building materials from all over the world.

In some cases, officials have made small concessions to avoid bigger ones. When football players at Northwestern tried to unionize in March 2014, alarm bells went off in athletic directors’ offices nationwide. Suddenly, that June, USC committed to giving football players guaranteed four-year scholarships. Before then, scholarships were a year-to-year proposition, renewable at the discretion of the head coach. Some other schools quickly followed suit, lest they be put at a competitive disadvantage.

When University of Connecticut basketball player Shabazz Napier complained in April 2014 of often going to bed hungry, the NCAA passed emergency legislation allowing for expanded year-round meals for athletes.

The NCAA could have made these changes at any time — it didn’t have to wait for players to complain. Only when the free labor threatened to take action did the NCAA respond.

Action is still needed, though. For talented football and basketball players, the NCAA’s bargain is increasingly a bad deal: They are making enormous sums of money for everyone but themselves.

Yes, the scholarships received by football and basketball players provide an economic benefit. However, they come with onerous restrictions and no promise of an education. The 2013 Penn study found that black male student athletes graduated at lower rates than other black men at 72 percent of institutions with big-time football and basketball programs — and lower than other undergraduates overall at 97 percent of them.

At many schools, football and basketball players are forced into contrived majors in which they have no interest. Take a look at the football and basketball rosters of most Power Five schools, and you’ll find two or three majors that seem unusually popular among athletes — often interdisciplinary programs that make it easier for academic advisers to pick classes for athletes that fit the team’s schedule. Players are also often dissuaded from taking classes they’d prefer. One of my former clients, a fine student, once expressed interest in a class that happened to conflict — in an insignificant way — with a football matter. He was strongly discouraged from taking the class, and since coaches control playing time and scholarships, he didn’t want to risk angering them, so he didn’t enroll in it. If athletes want to transfer, NCAA rules often punish them by prohibiting their participation in their chosen sport for one year.

The few players who go on to NFL or NBA careers give up years of potential earnings to play for free in college, risking injury in the process. Most athletes, of course, don’t make it to the pros.

No other large-scale commercial enterprise in the United States treats its performers and labor this way.

Change, however, could come rapidly and fairly easily. If even a small group of players took a stand and refused to participate — imagine if they boycotted or delayed the start of Monday night’s championship game — administrators would have to back down. There’s too much money on the line, and no one could force the teams to play against their will. The schools and the NCAA would simply have to renegotiate the bargain with football and basketball players.

Paying players would cost money, of course, but with billions in TV revenue coming in, it shouldn’t be impossible to find a way to spend some of it on labor instead of on exotic woods for new training facilities. Fans would get over the end of the NCAA’s “amateur” status, just as they have accepted pro basketball, hockey and soccer players competing in the Olympics.

Former University of California and NFL linebacker Scott Fujita (whom I represent) recently told me: “The current model will only be ‘broken’ for as long as the athletes themselves allow it to remain that way. There’s no governing body that’s going to fix it. It must be the players. And as more players realize the power they can wield, and once they can organize around the common purpose of the change they seek, that’s when things will begin to shift.”

It’s time for those supremely talented young football and basketball players to help themselves to a better future.

The Polluters the Paris Treaty Ignores

By Julian Spector, CityLab

10 January 16

International shipping and aviation emit as much as entire wealthy nations, but they’re not bound by the COP21 deal.

ith the Paris climate talks coming to a close, participating nations are hashing out the details of how to hold each other to their carbon reduction goals and finance the whole transition to a cleaner world. Non-state actors are present, too; 400 cities signed a Compact of Mayors to set and track climate goals. And financial institutions have made big commitments to shift investment away from fossil fuels and better disclose climate-related business risks.

But there are two particular industries that must factor into any plan to cut carbon and yet aren’t directly represented in the current COP21 talks: international shipping and aviation.

They’re both big. International shipping produces 2.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to all of Germany. Meanwhile total aviation yields about 2 percent of global GHGs, and international flights account for 65 percent of that figure. These emissions won’t be covered by reductions being discussed at COP21, because they don’t happen within the boundaries of any specific countries. They’re also projected to rise dramatically by 2050.

Two major obstacles stand in the way of resolving emissions from international shipping and aviation. The first is procedural: those industries are not bound by the Paris climate deal. The second is practical: the world currently lacks a promising technology to replace carbon-based propulsion systems, as well as a promising alternative to carbon-based fuel.

The limits of COP21

The acronym-laden gathering of 196 nations in Paris is administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That’s the organization created in 1994 to rein in greenhouse gases before they caused dangerous climate interference. The UN agencies charged with overseeing the environmental impacts of international transport are the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

The ICAO has said that next year at its assembly the group will decide on a global market-based measure to reduce carbon emissions. (Meantime airlines have acted on their own; in 2009, the International Air Transport Association industry group pledged to improve fuel efficiency 1.5 percent each year until 2020, when emissions will peak, and to halve 2005-level emissions by 2050.) And the IMO has set an energy efficiency requirement for ships built in 2025, but not an overall carbon emissions target.

The parties at COP21 could include language to direct those organizations to cut emissions from international shipping. But, as Politico reports, that requires a delicate balancing act: many of the maritime nations most threatened by rising sea levels also rely on shipping and air travel for their economic health. As of Thursday evening, the draft text for the Paris treaty did not contain the words “shipping” or “aviation.”

Technological challenges

Even if world leaders could determine carbon cuts for these industries, significant advances in technology and deployment would need to happen to make them possible.

Electric cars are growing cheaper and more accessible by the day, but electric propulsion doesn’t seem likely for international transit. When you’re out at sea or up in the air, you can’t stop to plug in and recharge your batteries. Additionally, air travel is extremely sensitive to the weight of an aircraft, and the batteries needed to power a long flight will weigh too much for the foreseeable future.

The industries can cut some emissions by looking at fuel efficiency, but not a lot. Airlines already did the more attainable upgrades in that regard during the fuel price spike of 2008, says environmental consultant Suzanne Hunt, president of Hunt Green LLC. Fuel prices impose the largest cost airlines face (up to two-fifths of total costs), so they have a strong incentive to trim their demand wherever possible.

The shipping industry doesn’t face the same pressures, because in most cases the company hiring a ship to transport cargo pays for the fuel required, says Galen Hon, who manages the shipping efficiency operation at the Carbon War Room, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates market-based ways to reduce carbon emissions. That means the ship owner doesn’t feel financial pressure to improve efficiency, unless customers start factoring in environmental qualities when they select a transporter (Carbon War Room developed a tool to do just that).

In both shipping and aviation, then, the most significant carbon reductions will come from adopting different fuels or propulsion technologies.

The green future of aviation

In his ambitious roadmap for decarbonizing society by 2050, Stanford engineering professor Mark Jacobson calls for all new aircraft to fly on liquid hydrogen by 2040. That’s what rockets burn, and if you want a rundown of the fantastically difficult requirements of a volatile fuel that must be kept at -423°F, head to NASA. The Soviet Union successfully flew an experimental hydrogen-propelled airliner called the Tu 155, so it can be done; it just can’t be done economically.

Part of the expense and time involved in creating a new generation of jet fuel is the safety requirements, Hunt says. That’s why she thinks the most likely non-fossil fuel for planes will be biofuels, which can be grown sustainably and poured into existing aircraft fuel tanks.

“There’s absolutely no margin for error, so the safety precautions for flying are really rigorous—it can take them many, many years to bring new technology into the airspace in terms of the aircraft,” she says. “One of the reasons people are so excited about aviation biofuel is that you don’t need to change the airplane or the engine.”

These biofuels typically derive from oils or fats (from plants or animals), or sugars. These are processed into hydrocarbons that function much like oil, but with the potential for much less carbon emission than conventional fuel (the accounting for this is very complicated, and some biofuels are more greenhouse gassy than others). More importantly, three types of biofuel have already been approved for blending with jet fuel for aviation and have entered into commercial use.

But just because they’re allowed doesn’t mean there will be enough of them. The biofuel industry, still quite young, needs to scale up to compete with traditional fuels, and so far the investment just isn’t there. Once it is, biofuel manufacturing will consume more raw ingredients, which calls for more farmland to grow them. If that takes away land from food production it creates tricky justice questions; if manufacturers use leftover materials from other industries, it might be hard to meet the global demand. The key is doing it at scale and at a price that airlines can actually pay.

“It’s really, really hard to make large quantities of sustainable biofuels for aviation,” Hunt says. “The industry is very much in its infancy and very capital intensive and it’s competing against the most powerful industry on the planet, oil.”

All hands on deck to clean up shipping

Electric propulsion has been gaining steam for smaller ships, but not for large cargo haulers. That’s because currently, electric generation on large ships tends to be a few percentage points less efficient than conventional propulsion, and those few points add up to a lot of money on a long voyage, says Hon of the Carbon War Room.

In the short term, then, carbon savings will come from efficiency upgrades to the hulls and rotors of ships. Some companies are turning back to wind power: the German company SkySails, for instance, produces large kite-like sails that attach to ships and give them a boost. A spokesperson for the company says they have installed the sails on five ships and that, in good wind conditions, they can save 30 tons of CO2 emissions per day. (Since winds don’t always blow steadily, the average comes down to two or three tons per day.) These can work well for bulk carriers—ships with large tanks for transporting grains or ore—but not on container ships, which carry almost all non-bulk cargo.

Again, the big carbon cuts will come from switching fuel sources. Ships burn what’s called bunker fuel, which is the heaviest, sludgiest oil left over when refineries distill gasoline, butane, and other useful hydrocarbons. Since it’s less refined, it’s also cheaper. And since ships burn it out at sea, the effects are less visible to the landlubbers who might be writing environmental policy.

The New York Times recently profiled the first container ships to run on liquefied natural gas, which burns cleaner than bunker fuel, especially in terms of particulate matter and acid rain-producing sulfur dioxide. But this approach doesn’t look like it will provide much of a net gain in greenhouse gas reductions, due to the technical requirements of running the ship and the possibility of methane leaks. It’s also expensive, because like liquid hydrogen, the liquefied natural gas must be kept at extremely low temperatures.

Then there’s nuclear. The U.S. Navy has successfully run naval vessels on nuclear power for decades, so that technology is totally feasible and does not burn fossil fuels. A handful of commercial ships ran on nuclear, but it never caught on widely. With civil shipping, the security risks are higher: What if Somali pirates didn’t just capture hostages but a nuclear reactor? There are also environmental concerns about what to do with the waste and what happens if a nuclear vessel sinks. And there are more expenses up front, with savings on fuel costs coming over time.

The most likely clean fuel for shipping might be biofuels or fuel cells, Hon says. Biofuels offer the same benefits and drawbacks as they do for airplanes—they don’t require technological changes to the craft, but they’re hard to source at scale. Fuel cells connected to electric engines would be a clean way of producing energy—they use chemical processes, not combustion, to provide the needed electrons.

“None of these technologies are viable right now,” he says. “Efficiency is totally possible with net-negative costs, that’s what we’re trying to figure out how to make happen sooner.”

The first hurdles

Since international transportation is, well, international, any policies to clean it up need to be global in scope. If the European Union passes a strong law for lowering emissions from international flights, airlines could just divert air travel to other places with more lenient approaches to carbon. And a patchwork of different policies in different nations will make global travel exceedingly complicated.

A worldwide carbon tax could go a long way to driving cleaner performance from ships and aircraft and increasing market pressure for alternative fuels. Michael Gill, director for aviation environment at the International Air Transport Association, says the aviation industry supports the ICAO developing a global, market-based regulation to cut carbon from flying, but they’re wary of a carbon tax: that might constrict the growth of the industry. Instead, he’d like to see a carbon offset scheme that includes incentives for switching to cleaner fuels.

If nations do want to act on their own, they could do a lot worse than ending subsidies for fossil fuels. A working paper by researchers at the International Monetary Fund estimated global post-tax subsidies for energy—mostly coal, natural gas, and oil, with a tiny sliver going to electricity—at an astounding $5.3 trillion for 2015, or 6.5 percent of global GDP. Stopping direct budgetary support for fossil fuels would be a logical place to start.

“Getting rid of subsidies for mature industries would be something you’d think would be palatable for liberals and conservatives alike,” Hunt notes.

It’s still possible, if unlikely, that some language about international transportation will make it into the final Paris treaty. Even if it doesn’t, there can still be progress. A successful deal at COP21 will generate political momentum for the ICAO’s next meeting in September 2016, says Gill. And the IMO will work on reducing emissions at a meeting in April, says Hon.

Environmentalists may well say that timeline isn’t fast enough. But that sounds like more of a testament to just how quickly the COP process has accelerated in the last few years. As recently as 2009 the question was: “Will the world ever forge a meaningful climate treaty?” Now we’ve advanced to asking: “Once we get the deal, how soon can international transit follow suit?”