Despite the COVID-19 outbreak among Rutgers football players, the Big Ten Conference still plans to … [+]
As the National Collegiate Athletic Association continues to petition Congress for special rights to operate their businesses free from antitrust and labor laws, some NCAA member colleges continue to make the kind of poor decisions that exemplify why intercollegiate sports requires more, rather than less, judicial oversight.
Among the worst offenders in their recent decision-making include some of the large, public universities within the Big Ten Conference—college football’s longest standing organized football conference. In the latest of a bizarre series of events involving this conference, conference leaders yesterday announced a 10-game college football schedule, even though some Big Ten member schools are planning to offer most of their fall classes on Zoom rather than in person, due to the risk of COVID-19.
The Big Ten colleges’ decision to proceed with fall football, even while drastically cutting back live courses, is almost certainly driven by the desire to maximize revenues generated from their own sports television network. The Big Ten television contract is no doubt a lucrative source of revenue for schools that are part of the conference, and it helps to allow them to pay athletic directors and head football coaches many millions of dollars in annual salary.
Nevertheless, to date, some of these Big Ten teams have not been able to so much as run summer practices without COVID-19 outbreaks among their football players. At last count, approximately 28 Rutgers University football players have tested positive for COVID-19. And, yet, the Big Ten Conference just scheduled Nebraska University to travel to New Jersey and pay Rutgers is roughly four weeks’ time.
It is also noteworthy that the college football players themselves were not instrumental in the decision to restart college football during the COVID-19 pandemic. To the contrary, many college football players in the Big Ten Conference conference have publicly expressed their opposition to the lax way schools in their conference are addressing athlete health and safety—coming across more like the adults in the room than some conference coaches and athletic directors.
Astoundingly, even the legal departments at some of Big Ten Conference colleges seem to recognize that offering college football during the era of COVID-19 is a risky proposition, but are doing so anyway. For example, the Ohio State University so much recognizes the dangers of offering fall football that they are requiring their football players to sign their “Buckeye Pledge,” which reasonably can be construed as an attempt to get the players to waive liability should they fall ill from the virus.
None of these recent decisions by the Big Ten Conference are a good look for the conference’s leadership, especially in the aftermath of the conference’s arguable blind eye toward sexual abuse scandals at at-least three different Big Ten schools (Michigan State University, Ohio State University and Penn State University), and a football coach’s arguable role in causing a recent player death at a fourth school (Maryland University).
Furthermore, the Big Ten Conference’s decision to proceed with college football despite the current challenges related to COVID-19 only highlights the commercial motives that underlie decision-making in both the Big Ten Conference and the NCAA overall. And given the undeniable revenue-maximization goals of both Big Ten schools and many others in the NCAA, it becomes increasingly difficult to fathom why Congress should treat the big-time intercollegiate sports industry as anything other than what it has become—an commercial, rather than educational, pursuit.
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Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business and the founder of Edelman Law. He is the co-author of the Wisconsin Law Review article “College Football in the Time of COVID-19” and numerous other sports and education law articles.
