The NCAA just got a bit richer this year, signing a new contract with CBS Sports and Turner Sports for $10.8 billion dollars over 14 years. This contract is a 41 percent increase over the mammoth deal the NCAA signed back in 2001. It is also going to expand the tournament field to 68 teams, from the original 65. This is not the total annual revenue for the league. Instead, it simply represents the television rights to air March Madness each year.


The league also has a $55 million three-year contract with ESPN for the womens basketball tournament and 21 other NCAA championships. Beyond that, it is also attempting to sell the rights to 60 other national national championships. To make a long story short, the NCAA is making money, hand over fist, and it's all because it has the biggest, baddest, most entertaining product that "hoods" across America can produce.

As a finance scholar and businessman, when I hear that someone is working to "sell" something and get money in return, I think about free enterprise and capitalism. I think about the fact that someone (that someone being the NCAA) is working overtime to ensure that they get fair market value for the product they are offering to the world. These ideas of free enterprise also translate to college basketball coaches, many of whom earn as much as $4 million per year, with salaries on par with NBA coaches. In fact, the NCAA earns more money during its post-season tournament than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball. These are all the symptoms of a professional sports league, and some argue that college athletes should be paid for their work.

What I find most amazing is that for some reason, no matter how high the money gets, we are convinced that athletes and their families should not get their share. We somehow feel that a scholarship is worth the trade of millions of dollars in human capital that is being sold in the free market without the athlete being able to take part in that sale. We sell the images of athletes on videogames, billboards, jerseys and television commercials, yet in some cases, the athlete's mom is sitting at home in a housing project. Let's be clear, and you are getting this from a man who has written books about the importance of a college education: A college degree is not of equal value to what the typical Division-I NCAA player is giving up to his bosses. To give you simple math, if you were to take the $771 million per year that the NCAA earns off March Madness, each player would earn an average of nearly a $1 million for the NCAA tournament alone. I think that $25,000 in free tuition isn't quite a fair deal for someone who brings millions to the pockets of money-hungry coaches and administrators.

The athletes may want to consider legal action to remedy this problem. In the mid-1990s, assistant coaches filed a class-action lawsuit to fight the fact that their salaries had been unfairly capped at $12,000 per year. The NCAA used a similar argument to illegally constrain their pay, stating that the work of assistant coaches was part of a broader academic mission and that free tuition and other perks should be suitable for the work they were doing. You see, the NCAA has long been able to hide behind a questionable academic mission in order to justify economic exploitation. The coaches won the lawsuit, and now assistant coaches are earning several hundred thousand dollars per year. Athletes may want to consider following suit (pun intended), and the black community may want to engage in action to fight this massive wealth extraction that comes out of our families every year. Each year that the NCAA fails to compensate players and their families, the black community sees several $100 million in lost income. This is not something that can be afforded by a group of people that already has a family wealth level that is one-tenth that of whites, and unemployment that is nearly double that of white Americans. Yes, the issue is a racial one, because many of the super-stud athletes we watch on Saturday mornings are African American, and many of them come from poor families.

Perhaps it's time to reconsider the college sports model and aim for something better. At the very least, we need to start finding independent oversight options that will ensure that athletes are being properly educated. During my last 17 years teaching on campuses with big-time athletics programs, I've found that the academic oversight for athletes can be questionable, with faculty members even playing a role in keeping athletes from getting the education their parents believe they are getting. Without saying any names, I can recall witnessing an egregious ethical violation being overlooked by faculty to ensure that the athlete would be able to stay on the court for a big game. To this day, I am firmly convinced that this former athlete still reads on a third-grade level.

This abuse must stop, and it will only stop if we stand up and stop it. I encourage all athletes, former athletes and all Americans who believe in the importance of educational achievement and economic equality to educate themselves and their loved ones on these issues. We will be the victims of abuse and exploitation for as long as we invite the abuses to take place. Please sound the ALARM.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the Athlete Liberation and Academic Reform Movement (ALARM). He is also a faculty affiliate at the College Sport Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To have Dr. Boyce's commentary delivered to your e-mail, please click here.