There's a lot of money to be made off March Madness. At $122 billion, the amount of spending the NCAA's annual basketball tournament generates is equal to Iceland's GDP. That total includes $614 million in TV advertising, $300 million in NCAA merchandise, and $185 million in corporate sponsorship. So why aren't the athletes paid?
Joe Nocera is Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times.
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Comments [1]
Joe Nocera, who has never played or coached in college athletics, and who has never been an administrator of college athletics, makes himself a bigger and bigger idiot every time he opens his yap on this topic.
He is completely obsessed with with the money "made" by the NCAA on the mens' basketball tournament.
The simple fact is that NCAA tournament revenue is shared with all particiapting schools; a very few colleges operate self-sustaining athletic programs (some indeed do), but even in in those cases where athletic programs do manage to turn a "profit" (it is little more than an operating surplus, and hardly a "profit"), those schools are in turn supporting 20 or more non-revenue sports in which the student-athletes are getting scholarships but not playing in front of 75,000 fans. Women's volleyball and softball. Rowing, wrestling, lacrosse, tennis, gymnastics.
Nocera complains about too muc "work" and "professionalism" in mens' basketball and football; and his solution is to make those athletes in those sports EVEN MORE PROFESSIONAL, with collective bargaining agreements, agents and player unions.
Joe Nocera has proven one thing to me; if you have a viable and wortwhile enterprise, and you want to totally screw it up; just ask a New York Times columnist about how to run it.
You really have to sort of work hard at it, to find someone as audaciously idiotic, as Joe Nocera.
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