The three-week-long basketball extravaganza is the NCAA’s billion-dollar cash cow. In 2022, when Kansas defeated North Carolina, 72-69, to grab the title, it was the most-viewed NCAA Men’s Championship game ever telecast on cable TV, and last years’ tournament averaged a whopping 10.7 million total viewers. (Several of the networks that televise the tournament share a parent company with CNN.)
Yet, beneath the glitz and glory of March Madness lies a darker reality. Division I men’s college basketball players, as a group, still face staggering precarity and lack proper remuneration for their work.
The history of the game itself suggests that the sport’s racial demographics have shaped the tolerance for this status quo. As of 2018, an NCAA database showed that the majority of Division I men’s college basketball players were Black. Historically speaking, the final shift away from amateurism coincided with what African American sociologist and activist Harry Edwards dubbed the “revolt of the Black athlete,” a surge of activism that included boycotts and protests at hundreds of colleges across the nation.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Division I NCAA athletes in revenue-generating sports like football and basketball (growing numbers of whom were African American) became amateur in name only, as their performance in sport became inextricably connected to their compensation. In 1967, the NCAA ruled that athlete scholarships could be taken away from players who voluntarily withdrew from sports. In 1972, they repealed the freshmen ineligibility rule, which barred football and basketball players from playing in their first year of college. The following year, they replaced four-year scholarships with one-year renewable grants tied to athletic performance (a practice that remains the case today). Nevertheless, NCAA and university officials continued to stress that ballplayers were students first and athletes second, but definitely not workers.
As I explore in my book, the case of Spencer Haywood and his fight against the NBA’s four-year rule, which stated that players could not enter the college draft until they were four years beyond their high school graduation, shone a spotlight on these racial and labor dynamics. A star Black player for the University of Detroit, Haywood left college early to join the Denver Rockets, as the American Basketball Association’s (ABA) first-ever “hardship case.” (The ABA was a rival to the NBA from 1967 to 1976, when the two leagues finally merged.)
To get a leg up on recruiting the most talented college players, the ABA instituted a “hardship clause” in 1969 so that its teams could sign underclassmen before they became eligible for the NBA draft. In other words, college players could be drafted early if they could demonstrate financial hardship, and this was easy to prove for most African American ballplayers at the time. Meanwhile, the NBA’s four-year rule remained in effect.