Keep pay-for-play out of high school sports

Hurray for the Horned Frogs!

The Texas Christian University team, aka the Horned Frogs, notched one of the most satisfying victories of any team on the first big college football weekend on Aug. 30—satisfying, at least, for fans who take a dim view of the big money takeover of what was once an amateur sport played by student athletes.

The Frogs played against the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, a public-college football program that a few months earlier had paid $10 million for the first year of a $50 million five-year contract to hire America’s most famous football coach.

The coach is Bill Belichick, whose claims to fame include winning more Super Bowls than any other coach, being caught cheating and fined $500,000 in what became known as the Spygate scandal and having, at age 73, a 24-year-old girlfriend with the physical and performing attributes to attract a surfeit of media attention.

All of that made the UNC-TCU game at North Carolina’s Chapel Hill home field a sports and news media extravaganza attracting big-name ex-jock commentators and saturating pre-game and game coverage.

How did that work out for the team with the $50 million coach? The Frogs defeated (whipped, clobbered, thumped, embarrassed) Belichick’s Tar Heels 48-14. 

Elsewhere that weekend, in a game that featured two of the biggest spenders in college sports, the “poorer” team won. No respectable Wisconsin Badger fan could cheer for Ohio State, but a few might be pleased that the Buckeyes, with a mere $20 million roster, defeated the Texas Longhorns, whose player payroll is estimated to be around $40 million.

That is what it’s come to in the age of NIL—a college game between two teams with players paid a combined total of roughly $60 million.

The acronym NIL was coined when it became accepted that college athletes deserve the right to receive compensation for their ability and hard work and the promotional use of their name, image and likeness.

The concept is valid, especially in the case of colleges and universities whose athletic programs generate millions in revenue derived from the performance of their athletes, but it has been corrupted into a system in which athletes are paid to play and schools compete to hire the best players.

The likes of Texas and Ohio State can offer high-school recruits seven-figure pay packages.  The money comes from corporations, wealthy donors and business ventures created with the stated purpose of compensating athletes for endorsements and appearances but in reality is paying them for playing.

Combined with the NCAA transfer portal, which allows athletes, including many represented by paid agents, to advertise their availability and transfer to other schools without losing eligibility, NIL functions like free agency in pro sports: The highest bidders get the best players.

The system rewards powerful education institutions in major markets. Their fans get to cheer for exceptionally talented players who in effect are professional athletes. Meanwhile schools with smaller athletic programs struggle to compete on the field and in the NIL fundraising trenches.

The ethos of amateur athletes competing as loyal standard bearers for the schools where they attend classes is starting to look something like a discarded, soiled and torn jersey.

The NIL influence responsible for that is trickling down to high schools. Many states, including Wisconsin, permit high school athletes to be rewarded in some way for their name, image and likeness.

The idea that a 15-year-old quarterback should be concerned about the promotional value of his name, image and likeness and maybe even profit from it is alien to a youth sports world that preaches unselfish team spirit that thrives amid the disciplines of athletic competition as character-building values. Yet the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association encourages it with a policy approved in May that allows high school athletes to participate in NIL activities.

The policy does have strict rules—no agents, no school affiliations, no images of school uniforms. 

There is also a rule that states compensation cannot be linked to a student’s athletic performance.

WIAA rulemakers no doubt felt they had to say that, even though it is quite pointless because the underlying reason for NIL’s existence is to reward individual school athletes, in one form or another, for their performance in games.

With Wisconsin’s public school open enrollment system, it’s not hard to imagine the parents of a particularly gifted student athlete acting as agents shopping around for the most NIL-friendly school.

The WIAA should change course and prohibit NIL activities before they infect high school sports with the same virus that is affecting the health of college sports.