Exploiting Profit-Athletes: The NCAA and an Amateurism That Never Was (with Dr. Richard M. Southall)
When:
—
Venue:
373 Euston Road
*This is a hybrid event (In-person/Online)
Dr. Richard M. Southall, Professor – Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, University of South Carolina / Director – College Sport research Institute
The university sport system administered by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States is one of the most successful such systems globally, in terms of spectator interest and revenue generation. A fundamental operating principle of the system is that the “student athletes” are treated as amateurs, and hence are not paid, whilst at the same time the human resource structure built around these unpaid “student athletes”, notably coaches and administrators, are paid as professionals, often on a par with the salaries paid in the North American professional sport leagues. In this presentation Professor Richard Southall, drawing on his book (with Mark Nagel, 2023) The NCAA and the Exploitation of College Profit-Athletes: An Amateurism That Never Was, presents a critique of the NCAA system.
Professor Southall will address the following key issues:
“During the past decade, how the college sport industry treats Power-4 Conference[1] football and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s basketball players (the designated revenue-producers referred to by Southall and Weiler (2014) as profit-athletes[2]), has garnered increased scrutiny and critique. While “big-time” U.S. college sport has always been accused of hypocrisy and corruption, a record number of legal challenges and calls for substantive reform have taken center stage during the past decade. In Exploiting Profit-Athletes: The NCAA and an Amateurism That Never Was we argue the central unaddressed issue in U.S. college sport is acknowledging that profit-athletes’ are employees, which would require abandoning NCAA hegemony that contends profit-athletes are actually “student-athletes” who are fully integrated into universities’ academic communities and have more academic success than “regular” students.
Unquestionably Power-4 U.S. college sport has adopted business practices that mirror those of “professional” sport organizations. Much like professional leagues around the world, the NCAA’s business focus is increasingly global. A recent example of this was the 24 August 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic held at Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Fans of two Power-4 teams – Georgia Tech and Florida State University – filled the stadium to capacity. This event was indicative of the scale and scope of U.S. college sport, which is a multi-billion-dollar industry with international reach.
[1] Power-4 conferences include the: Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big Ten Conference (Big10), Big XII Conference (Big XII), and Southeastern Conference (SEC).
[2] A profit-athlete is a college athlete whose market value is greater than the value of an awarded grant-in-aid (GIA). According to this definition, profit-athletes are almost exclusively Power-4 football and D-I men’s basketball players.
Our book situates the exploitation of Power-4 profit-athletes as a logical outgrowth of the business practices of the Power-4 college sport industry. My presentation will focus on how the college sport enterprise continues to disproportionately suppress the value of a Black male profit-athlete college sport labor force, and how the mechanisms of control that are brought to bear in regulating that labor force have resulted in a racialized reality in which Black male profit-athletes are disproportionally exploited and harmed.”
SPEAKER:
Introducing Professor Richard Southall:
Dr. Richard M. Southall is a Professor in the Department of Sport and Entertainment Management at University of South Carolina (USC). He earned a B.A. (English - summa cum laude) from Western Colorado University, and an M.A. and Ed.D. (sport administration) from University of Northern Colorado. He is Director of the College Sport Research Institute (CSRI), which sponsors the annual CSRI Conference on College Sport and the Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics.
He has disseminated his research in more than 100 commentaries, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles, and has given more than 150 invited or referred presentations.
Dr. Southall was a consultant for the plaintiffs in the 2009-2016 O’Bannon v. NCAA litigation. In addition, he has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation.
He is co-author/editor of Introduction to Sport Management: Theory and Practice (3rd ed) and Exploiting College Profit-Athletes: The NCAA and an Amateurism That Never Was
Contact name:
Sean Hamil