The NCAA Blind Sides Poor Athletes

The Blind Side is a heat warming movie about Michael Oher, a black boy without family or home who is befriended and ultimately adopted by a wealthy white family.  The makers of the movie make several important claims, that nurture is more important than nature, love is colorblind, and that religion and athletics are two of the few bridges between white and black America.  A minor point is that the NCAA thought that a white family befriending an athletic black boy might be an NCAA violation.  In a wonderful interview by Robert Birnbaum (RB), Michael Lewis (ML), the author the book, The Blind Side, delves into the role of the NCAA in restricting the access of the poorest of black athletes from a ladder of upward mobility through college education (identity theory.com, "Michael Lewis 2.0").

ML: I didn’t feel outraged by it watching it [subversion of NCAA rules] up close. Because...while it’s outrageous in theory that this happens—that people can go and subvert the rules of the NCAA—the rules themselves seem to me to be a little screwy. First, the rules that kid lived by his whole life...what basically the NCAA is saying to this kid is, “Society completely cheated you for the first sixteen years of your life. Failed you in every possible way. No family, no love, no upbringing, no structure, no schooling. Nothing! And so we are going to make sure that that sticks.”...

ML: It’s a corrupt regulatory system—it's worse than you know. What happens is that there is a career to be had as an NCAA investigator, and what you do is go to work for the NCAA—like a career with the Securities Exchange Commission: you go to work being the cop, and then you get hired for a fancy salary working for the school interpreting the rules written by the cops. And so it becomes this little incestuous world that justifies itself in all sorts of ways. And its main purpose is to serve as a figleaf for what has become professionalized college athletics. The tutors at Ole Miss were very blunt about this. They watched the regime that the football players were in; they said that they give them a speech when they arrive: “You are employees of a corporation. You are not college students. You are employees of a corporation. You are just not paid.” [laughs] I think the harm that is done by the hypocrisy is greater than the harm that would be done just by throwing open the doors and saying this is the way it is. People have so obsessed with football at the college level, and it is such a money maker—it’s not just a money maker for these universities: in some cases the school would have trouble surviving without the football team. So let’s just acknowledge this. Let’s acknowledge it in the way we acknowledge professional baseball players were once indentured servants and they shouldn’t have been—these people have a market value. They are poor people who desperately are in need of realizing their market value—let’s be fair and honest about it.

RB: Right, they are all not going to the NFL.

ML: The vast majority will not go to the NFL. These are the numbers—there are a million high school football players in the country, roughly fifty-five thousand of them will play college football. And a thousand of those will have some kind of professional contract, of whom just a couple hundred will make enough money to have careers. So you are talking about a winnowing process that’s brutal. However, the whole system is premised—not the million to fifty-five thousand—but of those fifty-five thousand college football players, there is some large number of them who are sustained by the hope that they are going to be professional football players and are not making other provisions for themselves.

Michael Lewis believes that college athletics will eventually evolve into an organization that gives more to its employees. 

RB: So even in those years when they are in college, they could get some vocational guidance, and get some compensation—

ML: —and it will all work out. I think what will happen is someone will come along who won’t buckle under the pressure and will say, “Okay, we’re going to get a good lawyer and take care of them and break the system.” Because it’s outrageous. It is outrageous. Essentially what you have now is thousands upon thousands of poor black kids coming from the most horrendous kind of destitution, exploited briefly for three or four years and led to believe that they might actually make a career playing football and then thrown back on the street with absolutely nothing to show for it. And the flip side of that is what an opportunity to at least make a dent in the social problem. There are not very many points of contact between white America and black America. Here is...you can be cynical about sports, about football, but you can’t argue that white people aren’t interested in those black people playing on the field when they are playing football. Why not use that for some greater purpose? Instead of forbidding the rich white boosters for so much as taking the black football players to lunch, why not insist that they not only take them to lunch but they give them an internship and pay them well in the off season and teach them about their business? The minute those kids cease to be football players, they are of no interest whatsoever to those white people anymore. That relationship should be cultivated rather than denied.