Calling Bullshit: The Truth about the NCAA’s Alleged Reforms
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.
Those were words disgraced Pittsburgh financial advisor Marty Blazer lived by. As a longtime money manager for professional athletes, and a veteran of the sleazy business of recruiting big time college stars as his future clients, Blazer knew the inner truths of the corrupt and corrupting world of amateur sports. Over the years, Marty perfected his form of grift by slipping envelopes stuffed with cash under tables in the country’s finest restaurants and night clubs, bribes known as “hot dog money”—the euphemism for untraceable cash that provided the title for my book, Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports.
In recent days, Blazer came to mind when a federal judge finally announced the terms of the much anticipated and much dreaded settlement in House vs. NCAA, a case brought by student-athletes claiming that the collegiate amateur system is an illegal and restrictive monopoly and that the players should receive a fair share of the massive revenues generated by college sports. The settlement was supposed to put the students on a more equitable footing, removing the worst abuses of big-time college athletics, enabling players to properly partake in the multi-billion-dollar bounty of the NCAA in a just and transparent way, for the first time ever.
In other words: bullshit.
A measure of the depravity of the NCAA and the dysfunction of the legal system is that Judge Claudia Wilkens apparently wants her conclusions to be read with a straight face. Start with the legal fees, awarding the lawyers $400 million in the settlement, weighed against the paltry sums granted to each of the specific student-athlete plaintiffs. The judge then considered the fearsome litigation risks the students supposedly faced if the case had gone to trial and they lost, despite the elephantine reality that the NCAA was conceding billions upon billions not to be fair or kind to the student plaintiffs — but because of the terror of losing at trial and having a jury award a much larger amount, or even worse having the case appealed to the hostile Supreme Court.
The total of the settlement is the impressive-sounding award sum of $2.6 billion paid out over a decade— virtually all for men’s football and basketball, with a small, sexist-sized percentage for women’s basketball. The total is to be spread amongst student-athletes with $22 million annually for each Division 1 school, as their cut of the proceeds from the vast fortune college sports reap every year. It sounds like a king’s ransom and an equitable slice of the take, until it is diced down to the specifics of the average per student per year, with strict limits on the number of kids on each school’s rosters and thus the potential expense for colleges, conferences and the NCAA. Under the judgement, virtually all of the real money will go to so-called revenue sports at money-spewing corporate schools like Alabama, LSU and Duke — negating the NCAA’s sham argument that it has long been protecting non-revenue sports and the alleged inherent virtues of athletics (many of those Olympic sports are now being cancelled as a result of the settlement).
While the headlines heralded a new era for the NCAA, the settlement was actually just another chapter in a quintessential story of 21st century American capitalism. Instead of a fair-minded settlement of the dispute, the court has perpetuated an enterprise rife with hypocrisy and corruption, an outcome that avoids real consequences for the NCAA or a true reckoning with the past theft of services, or the future billions.
Under the settlement, white-collar scammers manage to get away with an ongoing conspiracy, in a familiar refrain. Like big tobacco. Or big banks during the financial crisis. Or big pharma pushing oxy during the opioid crisis. Only now it’s the NCAA and college sports — a scam so sweet even Donald Trump wants in.
In Hot Dog Money, Marty Blazer’s story proved how the NCAA operated like a criminal enterprise. In 2016, on the verge of being caught for misappropriating millions from his celebrity NFL clients to finance terrible feature films, Blazer confessed his crimes to the federal government and explained how the underbelly of college sports really worked, in gruesome detail. Sent undercover by the FBI, Blazer offered bribes to coaches from the leading basketball programs in the country — Arizona, Louisville, Auburn and many others. Every single coach Blazer offered bribes with FBI money accepted the cash without hesitation, all agreeing to steer their players to Blazer’s fictitious financial advisory company in return. In effect, the coaches were trafficking the leading college players at the time, stars like Zion Williamson and Naz Reid and Collin Sexton. Blazer’s years-long investigation was inexorably rising through the ranks of college sports, aimed directly at head coaches like Rick Pitino, when the FBI’s own incompetence and corruption blew up Operation Ballerz, a mind-bending tragi-comic true story that offers of a voyage into the hall of mirrors that constitutes college sports and the NCAA.
As a result of Blazer’s investigation and the subsequent guilty pleas and trials, which lead to yet another college sports scandal broadcast live on ESPN, the doom of the NCAA appeared even more certain and imminent. Then came the Supreme Court decision in a case called NCAA vs Alston in 2021. Presented with an opportunity to appraise the business practices of the NCAA’s amateur system, the Supreme Court made it clear that the antitrust exemption for college sports was certain to be overturned the next time an appropriate case appeared before the court.
“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” Justice Brett Kavanagh wrote in Alston. Price-fixing is price-fixing is price-fixing, Kavanagh said, especially when the price the NCAA fixed for athletes was zero. Kavanagh noted of the billions made by the NCAA, “These enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student-athletes. College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives take in six and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student-athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African-American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.”
Name, Image, Likeness, or NIL, was the NCAA’s attempt to reform in the wake of the Blazer scandal and the Alston case — the desperate act of an organization pleading for more time like a man standing in front of a firing squad begging for a final cigarette. Thus the new language of NIL entered the lexicon of college sports, a variety of gang slang with lingo like transfer portals and booster collectives suddenly foisted on fans as star players collected millions and the worst excesses of amateurism appeared to be finally abolished, with kids finally getting paid.
But Blazer could see that NIL was just another attempt by the NCAA to avoid taking responsibility for student-athletes, creating a system even more susceptible to cheating and corruption than amateurism. Under the old amateur sham, scamming financial advisors like Blazer were able to make millions from a star kid, with endorsements and side hustles for life insurance policies and kickbacks from agents and sneaker companies, a reality that NIL did nothing to address.
In professional sports like the NBA and the NFL, agents and financial advisors are required to be registered and monitored, providing at least a simulacrum of oversight for athletes navigating the treacherous waters of big-time sports. Financial literacy is a fundamental need for players making tens of millions of dollars, engulfed in a universe of scheming advisors and hangers-on looking to cash in. But there is no comparable protection in college sports, most especially under the guise of NIL. Instead, kids are expected to deal with all kinds of shady good ‘ol boy car salesmen and slimeball boosters on their own, with no institutional or legal support, a system that functions fine for top level stars like Cooper Flagg and Caitlin Clark, but that leaves lesser teenage mortals to their own devices.
As the judge in House vs. NCAA should have known, NIL is truly the wild west, as the cliché goes, the despicable negligence of the NCAA offering technicolor proof of the organization’s amorality. Hot Dog Money illustrated that awful reality, with the real conversations about players and their futures happening behind closed doors in bars and casinos, with coaches and agents and the various money-hungry scammers that proliferate in big league sports conniving to monetize the stars as much as possible for their own benefit — whatever the pretense or rhetoric to the contrary. In matters as simple as buying a luxury automobile, or a new high-end watch, money secretly changes hands and kids are trafficked with no knowledge of the swirling powers profiting from their talents.
Since the inception of NIL, the NCAA has flatly refused to take any meaningful steps to protect kids from predators like Blazer once was, so it’s hard to conjure what role remains for the association, other that collecting billions for media rights in the same way a mobster extorts protection money from local businesses, while offering no actual protection — except from the mobsters themselves. The same is true for the NCAA insisting that students don’t qualify as employees of the colleges, despite the full-time daily grind of most players; colleges thereby save the vast expense of entering into an actual commercial relationship with their work force. Only a small percentage of college stars will ever play professionally, and an even tinier number will become wealthy, but the fate of the vast majority of student-athletes is a matter of indifference to the predatory NCAA. Health care, insurance, social security payments, and the many elements of an employment relationship that afford working people a measure of dignity—none are on offer to the kids, though of course the NCAA has generous packages available for its seven thousand employees in their impressive air-conditioned Indianapolis campus.
The joke only became more preposterous when the NCAA announced in early June of this year —trembling in fear on the eve of the looming House settlement — that it will yet again do all it can to avoid taking responsibility for the well-being and safety of students. Instead, the NCAA said that it was creating a new independent outfit that would be named the College Sports Commission. The CSC, as it will be known, will be headed by a former federal prosecutor. The new CSC will be designed to stop the various athletic conferences and colleges from cheating. A cap will be placed on the NIL money expended by schools under this new regime, allegedly to even the playing field amongst schools, so that the powers that run college sports will operate with integrity.
Sounds great except for this: it’s also almost certainly bullshit.
Underneath the charade — or the charade-within-a-charade — are the aptly titled Power Conferences, the elite schools who control the vast majority of the money in big time sports. The CSC is supposed to enforce the new NIL regime against the Power Conferences, a system that has corruption in the design much like the farce of NCAA amateurism investigations of the past that always punished the most vulnerable — specifically the players. To understand the role of the Power Conferences, consider Harvard-educated NCAA president Charlie Baker’s lame explanation for the creation of the CSC, citing the “rubric” of the “theoretical injunction” of the CSC’s “enforcement parameters” under the “third-party NIL system.”
If that sounds like nonsense, that’s because it is nonsense — deliberate and idiotic nonsense. The truth of this new arrangement is that the most powerful college conferences are whacking up the country into territories, the way the Five Families of the New York mafia once did, the Gambino and Colombo crime families now doing business as the SEC and ACC and Big Ten and Big Twelve. Like the mafia, they will police themselves, satisfying the institutional needs of the NCAA and colleges and the Power Conferences under the cover of plausible deniability. As the conferences realign, like crime families vying for power, the NCAA continues to lobby Congress to provide an antitrust exemption for the collegiate-sports-complex that is so amoral even Donald Trump has taken notice.
With college sports adrift in billions of dollars but possessing no sustainable plan to avoid the guillotine being constructed by the Supreme Court, paragons of virtue like Alabama senator and former football coach Tommy Tuberville and Texas charmer Ted Cruz have wondered about taking steps to protect the great southern racket that is college football. Should Congress enact an antitrust exemption for college sports, perhaps, or create a special class of non-employment for student-athletes to ensure they can be exploited in perpetuity by sleazy college officials in polyester slacks and their booster buddies?
For fans of college sports, the good news is that nothing much will change, apart from the games becoming increasingly indistinguishable from minor league versions of the NBA and the NFL. The players will get older and stronger and cruise around campuses in sleek SUVs, bringing a bracing dose of commercial reality to kids whose parents pay hundreds of thousands to gift their offspring the “big school experience.” Preening coaches will continue to pull in millions, patrolling the sidelines while the student-athletes create the “product.” Players will transfer and declare early for the draft and the billions will roll in like Alabama’s crimson tide. As ever, the surrounding economic ecosystem for kids trying to make NIL deals will be populated by men like Blazer once was, feasting like hyenas and alligators on the migration of a vast herd of wildebeests. Tragically, Blazer died of a heart attack in 2024, appalled by the NCAA’s refusal to address the truth of college sports.
If you’re unconvinced of the absolute farce of college sports corruption, behold the candle on top of the grift cake that is being lit by the greatest con man of the age: Donald Trump. Always eyeing the horizon for the next easy buck, like a leering obese card sharp with an orange comb over on a steamboat chugging down the Mississippi, Trump appears unsatisfied with his crypto scams and international resort extortions. Trump’s idea of the presidency seems to start with the premise that the entire country is his to gorge on, as the capo di tutti capi, or boss of all bosses.
The seriousness of Trump’s interest in college sports was expressed by him taking his most presidential of all initiatives: he golfed on it. Riding his personalized cart around Trump International with what passes for college sport’s leading authorities, a cavalcade of older white dudes like Notre Dame’s athletic director Pete Bevacqua and the SEC’s boss hog Greg Sankey, Trump kicked his ball out of the rough and wondered how he might intervene to ensure that college sports reflect his own morally bankrupt vision of American society. Above all, it is agreed by the gangsters running college sports, the industry must be exempt from judicial oversight or regulation — above the law, in layman’s language. As Trump contemplates an executive order on college sports, perhaps he imagines the revival of a version of his fraudulent Trump University on national TV taking the field against Alabama — or, better yet, Harvard, the apotheosis of the president’s lust to control every aspect of American life while chasing his boundless greed and narcissism.
As with all mafia activity, the Don — or the Donald — must get his piece of the action.
Like Marty Blazer would say: you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, not even the biggest bullshitter of all.
