Here's the presentation that accompanied the lecture This Is The End.

1. Amateurs No More
JRN 589 / 450
This Is The End
Prof. Hanley

2. This Is The End
“Can you picture what will be/
So limitless and free /
Desperately in need of some
stranger's hand/
In a desperate land” – The Doors
(1967)

3. This Is The End
“The new era of college sports did
not announce itself subtly.
Instead, it came in the form of a
ransom note from an agent you’ve
probably never heard of and a
player most people even in his
own market wouldn’t recognize.”
– Dan Wolken, USA Today, April
29, 2022.

4. This Is The End
Wolken is referencing the
matter of Isaiah Wong, a Miami
(Florida) men’s basketball player
who allegedly threatened to
enter the transfer portal
because another player on the
team received a better name,
image, and likeness deal than
he did.

5. This Is The End
Welcome to the brave new
world of a fully professionalized
and transparent collegiate
athletic structure.
So much for Walter Camp’s
participatory joy.

6. This Is The End
The Wong matter reveals the
chaotic aftermath of the June
2021 U.S. Supreme Court ruling
that rapidly set in motion the
names, images, and likenesses
gold rush for collegiate athletes,
particularly in football and
men’s and women’s basketball.

7. This Is The End
Wong allegedly issued his threat
after billionaire booster John
Ruiz offered his teammate Nigel
Pack a better NIL deal, which
included $800,000 in licensing
fees and a new car.
Pack is one of 100 or so Miami
athletes Ruiz is paying.

8. This Is The End
Wong later walked back the
threat, saying his agent made it
without his authorization and that
he planned to honor his
agreements with Ruiz and Miami.
Parse that statement for a
moment in the context of the
history of amateurism in the U.S.

9. This Is The End
That statement could be from a
NBA, WNBA or NFL player, with an
agent seeking a better deal for the
player by leaking information to
the media.
But it came from a player who is
considered to be only the second-
best player on the team.
Blame the NCAA, say critics.

10. This Is The End
“First, the NCAA continues to
insist that it is an organization for
amateur sports, thus avoiding the
contractual obligations and
collective bargaining processes
that ensure professional leagues
run smoothly. Second, the courts
have basically said that the NCAA’s
attempts to regulate these things
through its rules are illegal,” wrote
Wolken.

11. This Is The End
A small fraction of collegiate
athletes in major sports (i.e.,
revenue sports) are earning what
Pack and Wong are pocketing in
their deal with a billionaire. Still,
tensions are brewing.
“If NIL deals were in effect before
and schools were offering money,
I probably would have chosen
football,” said Oregon Olympian
and NCAA Champion Micah
Williams, a sprinter, in a USC
Annenberg Media story.

12. This Is The End
That sense of unfairness is
beginning to surface among
athletes who compete in non-
revenue sports.
“I think football and basketball get
a lot of recognition to begin with,
and as a woman water polo player
we don’t get that opportunity as
much,” said USC water polo player
Grace Tehaney in the Annenberg
story. “It’s a little unfair.”

13. This Is The End
USC water polo player Brooklyn
Aguilera said that “while NIL deals
could bring more awareness to
her sport, only the most
influential players on the team are
offered deals, such as Olympian
and redshirt sophomore Tilly
Kearns,” according to the
Annenberg Media story.

14. This Is The End
“It’s not really about if you’re
good or not, it’s more about who
has the bigger following,” Williams
said in the story. “[NIL] sucks
because the U.S. doesn’t make
track or other sports a big thing
because they’re not flashy or
whatever… you work your butt off
and you’re like ‘Damn, I see
football players making ten, thirty,
forty, fifty grand.’”

15. This Is The End
Annenberg Media’s Christian
Borden wrote in his story that
“Williams demonstrates the
frustrating reality of NIL deals: no
matter how elite one may be at
their sport, deals based on
popularity will never give all
athletes the justice they might
deserve.”

16. This Is The End
And so it goes.
NIL, once thought to be the
solution for collegiate pay for play,
has evolved quickly something
else entirely.
Not everyone is happy about it.
Just ask college football hall of
famer Aaron Taylor.

17. This Is The End
Taylor, a two-time All-America
lineman who graduated from
Notre Dame in 1994, posted a
video on Twitter that has been
watched more than one million
times since it appeared on April
30, 2022.
He blasted the adults in charge of
collegiate sports for failing to
manage the NIL situation.

18. This Is The End
“What’s taking place right now
behind the scenes in the NIL world
is despicable,” he said. “And it’s
dangerous and irresponsible.”

19. This Is The End
“This ain’t about the kids getting
theirs,” he continued. “Student-
athletes have always deserved the
bigger piece of the pie. This is
about the adults in the room. It’s
always been about the adults in
the room, which is how we got
this sham notion of amateurism in
the first damn place.”

20. This Is The End
The “sham notion of amateurism”
accurately compresses the history
of collegiate sports beginning in
the 19th century.

21. This Is The End
Let’s review that sham.
Think first of the antecedent: the
British model of amateurism,
based entirely on a
misinterpretation of ancient Greek
athletes. In short, the concept of
amateurism was based on a
fiction.

22. This Is The End
Add to that the weaponization of
amateurism by the British to keep
working class athletes from
participating.
Now export that concept of
amateurism along with the
juvenile novel Tom Brown’s
Schooldays and the ideology of
Muscular Christianity to the U.S.

23. This Is The End
Embed that structure into a
rapidly industrializing U.S. within
the elite class attending colleges
in the east and insert the
commercial imperative through
the center of it by popularizing
one sport - football.

24. This Is The End
Even though it was widely known
that some football players weren’t
students in the classic sense by
the 1890s, Walter Camp and his
supporters maintained publicly,
while knowing the truth privately,
that the men were just ordinary
students. They were not. Football
players were older, bigger, faster
and stronger than others on
campus.

25. This Is The End
The formation of an umbrella
organization – later to become
known as the National Collegiate
Athletic Association - to oversee
collegiate athletics in 1906
marked the first step toward
creating a structure to defend
collegiate sports from criticism.

26. This Is The End
That structure and the
overwhelming popularity of
football blocked the truth about
the commercial nature of
collegiate sports.
The 1929 Carnegie Report
revealed details about the sham
to no avail.

27. This Is The End
Throughout the 1950s,
conferences and the NCAA began
to reluctantly concede reality,
offering pay-for-play, but this
tactic remained concealed behind
the invention of the phrase
“student-athlete” and athletic
merit scholarships.
The founding schools of the game,
however, no longer wanted to be
part of the sham and withdrew
from big-time football.

28. This Is The End
The cloak masking the big lie of
amateurism began to show signs
of lifting in the 1960s-1990s as the
Olympics and other institutions
recognized the fragility of their
articles of camouflage and opened
their sports to professionals.
The NCAA, meanwhile, doubled
down on its fiction, maintain that
collegiate sports would whither
and die if seen as professional.

29. This Is The End
But anti-trust lawsuits in the 21st
century finally delivered the blows
that washed away what many had
known for more than a century:
big-time collegiate athletes were
pros in all but name.
The NCAA conceded defeat in
2021 and let loose the rough
beast of NIL. It is not enforcing its
own rules barring the use of NIL in
recruiting.

30. This Is The End
While student-athletes may cheer
the chance for a NIL deal, and
threaten to hop to the transfer
portal if they don’t, coaches and
administrators are fleeing.
NCAA President Mark Emmert is
leaving his post next year. Jobs are
going unfilled.

31. This Is The End
Modify a line from Macbeth, Act
Five, Scene 5, when Seyton told
Macbeth that the queen had died.
Swap out “the queen” for
“amateurism”:
Amateurism, my lord, is dead.
It’s dead in collegiate athletics and
may soon be dead in
interscholastic sports as well.

32. This Is The End
We started with the Greeks, so
let’s end the seminar there, with a
line from a question posed by the
Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
“What next, sang Plato’s ghost,
what next?”

33. This Is The End