College basketball is reeling, so here’s how to finish it off completely

Hit it in the paycheck and keep hitting it until it gives up.

College basketball is at a point in its history where its political system is failing, its former strongmen are weak, and its future appears to be chaos and flames with no endgame in sight. It’s natural that at this point, then, that former United States secretary of state Condoleezza Rice appears. Scams ending in disaster are her specialty—not small ones, but big ones like amateurism, the Iraq War, and the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.

The NCAA hoped the selection of Rice would boost the credibility of the NCAA in a time when its chief cash cow — college basketball, or more specifically the NCAA tournament it sells to television for billions of dollars — is disintegrating beneath a wave of FBI investigations, declining TV ratings, and an outflow of talent to the NBA and elsewhere.

Note: Those billions of dollars are tax-free because the NCAA is classified as a 501 (c)(3), a non-profit. So are the major conferences in college basketball, football, and every other major college sport, allowing the bulk of college athletics revenue to pass through untouched by federal or state authorities. Consider declaring yourself a college football team on your taxes. If UCF and Alabama can claim national titles this year, why not you existing as a non-profit? College athletics is amazing.

For the NCAA and its head, Mark Emmert, the committee’s report and Rice’s presence would hopefully add gravitas, credibility, and a real seriousness to the NCAA’s attempts to “fix” college basketball. That they thought this in the first place is proof that suckers, dead bodies, and trash are all recession-proof industries on multiple levels of society. The committee’s report released yesterday flopped, doubled down on amateurism, and produced nothing much beyond Rice saying “We need to put the college back in college basketball.” (No really, that’s what she said, in public, without laughing.)

The only real desirable change in amateurism will be its death. It will die — but exactly when is still a great question. Its time of death will depend on the steady hands of two forces that don’t always play well together: The free market, and the ability of workers to effectively demand what is theirs from their employers through the channels available to them.

The market is already tearing college basketball apart, and with reason. Labor is more valuable than in other team sports like football, meaning there are simply fewer people who can do the top-level work of playing basketball at an elite level, all playing on smaller rosters than, say, an 84-person college football roster. It is the lower case, black market version of the NBA’s labor market: Exclusive, expensive, and extremely competitive.

Shoe companies, agents, and middlemen can thrive in a way they don’t in other college sports because of that labor’s value. They can do that even in a black market like that for college athletes, because they’re so much harder to find that even a depressed, covert market for their talent still pays well. (And should! Not many people are 6’10 and can hit a three-pointer on earth, much less in the United States.)

And if those players don’t like the prices and um — let’s call them “benefits packages” at college programs, then they will go to Europe, or to wherever they have to go to find it. The Rice Committee blamed “corruption” in the sport for its problems. That is a very strange word to use to describe “being outbid for the services of your employees,” but you do you, committee members.

The push for change will most likely have to come from the players. For years, the suggestion has been for players to strike in one form or another. The ideal spot for it would be the Final Four, where the number of teams is small, the spotlight is as big as it will ever get, and the players involved might be able to organize successful. The rationale: stick a spike in the heart of the NCAA’s most valuable property on national television in front of the largest possible audience, and then see how scared the invested parties get.

That could happen. The players would also pay a brutal price for it in the short run, losing scholarships, and receiving very little in the way of public support from fans or the media. (As the NFL found out this year: Protest is always a lot less popular than anyone thinks.) The coaches would be in a terrible situation, caught between signaling support for players, immense pressure from their employers, and the resulting recruiting fallout. In a strike situation, networks would be facing three hours of dead air and the loss of millions of dollars in ad revenue.

Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images

A strike is dramatic, but there is a third player here: Corporations. These sponsors of college basketball are not well-equipped for conflict, and that can work in a lot of different ways for someone looking to cripple amateurism. In college basketball, shoe companies have already worked inadvertently to erode a lot of the hold the sport has over its talent. The relationships recruits have with Nike and Adidas last a lot longer than any recruit’s relationship with their school: If a five-star recruit signs with a Nike-affiliated AAU team, for example, there’s a 70 percent chance he stays with Nike for his entire career. The college is temporary, but the player-as-advertisement can be nearly permanent.

In other words: James Harden gets $200 million to wear Adidas because he is James Harden, not because he went to Arizona State. And if companies involved in college basketball start to feel for a second that college basketball is a middleman with unacceptable transaction costs for the companies — i.e. if James Harden had a way to promote his talents anywhere else for less trouble — they would cut college basketball out of the equation with a head-spinning quickness.

For the purposes of torching amateurism to the ground, the blueprint has to involve those corporations. To be clear: They don’t lead, and don’t make moral or political decisions. But they can and should be led into the fight — by their noses and profit margins, if necessary. It takes very little to put fear into them: A few percentage points on profit, or maybe even the dreaded falling marketing awareness among the youth demo, and they will wobble away from supporting an already wobbly partner in the NCAA.

The NCAA just needs to be made toxic enough to be a liability for its partners. That might be easier than people even think, particularly with youth-obsessed shoe and apparel companies. In this particularly woke moment in sports history, does any shoe want to be the official symbol of Emmert’s paycheck, and not the choice of rising talent cheated of their market value? The person or people who can make that linkage in the college basketball community will have knocked out a support column of amateurism and brought corporations into the fight whether they wanted to be there or not.

Once they get into the fight, companies will take the quickest, most profitable, and controversy-free route out of that fight. Now that requires a special player or a special team working at a special moment, but big changes always do. And if someone can make that escape path run right through amateurism, and not the players? That will be it. It’s not an easy task, especially because public opinion almost always falls to the side of institutions. That is especially true in college sports, where a player may be on campus for four years, but the fan sticks around for a lifetime.

But if they do? It’ll be over in one swift trampling in the direction of whatever’s next.