"The NCAA is corrupt, we know that. Sorry it's going to make headlines. But it's corrupt."
https://www.gq.com/story/lebron-james-ncaa
Also echoed here in GQ's Calipari story.
"And in February, Yahoo Sports published a report that documented players on more than 20 elite programs—including Kentucky—as accepting money, trips, or meals from agents. To the casual observer, these indictments became something of a scarlet letter attached to the nation’s top programs.
This scarlet letter, of course, is mostly sanctimonious bullshit. The NCAA makes $1 billion annually (most of which comes from the NCAA tournament television contract and is redistributed to member universities). And while most NCAA sports do not make money, the two “revenue sports,” football and men’s basketball, do. The star players who help generate that money are paid far less than their market values, getting compensated in scholarships, room and board, and living expenses. Specifically, it is this gulf between a player’s market value and what a university is permitted to “pay” him that creates the black market. NCAA president Mark Emmert said the FBI probe indicates “systematic failures,” but the failure seems to be more in how the system itself is set up."
...
"After he retired, Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, railed against collegiate sports, calling it an “airtight racket of supplying cheap athletic labor.” It’s a familiar American dynamic: Elite teenage basketball players, typically black, go to institutions of higher learning where they play for coaches, usually older white men, who are incentivized to attract the best talent they can."
https://www.gq.com/story/john-calipari-kentucky-profile
https://www.gq.com/story/lebron-james-ncaa
Also echoed here in GQ's Calipari story.
"And in February, Yahoo Sports published a report that documented players on more than 20 elite programs—including Kentucky—as accepting money, trips, or meals from agents. To the casual observer, these indictments became something of a scarlet letter attached to the nation’s top programs.
This scarlet letter, of course, is mostly sanctimonious bullshit. The NCAA makes $1 billion annually (most of which comes from the NCAA tournament television contract and is redistributed to member universities). And while most NCAA sports do not make money, the two “revenue sports,” football and men’s basketball, do. The star players who help generate that money are paid far less than their market values, getting compensated in scholarships, room and board, and living expenses. Specifically, it is this gulf between a player’s market value and what a university is permitted to “pay” him that creates the black market. NCAA president Mark Emmert said the FBI probe indicates “systematic failures,” but the failure seems to be more in how the system itself is set up."
...
"After he retired, Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, railed against collegiate sports, calling it an “airtight racket of supplying cheap athletic labor.” It’s a familiar American dynamic: Elite teenage basketball players, typically black, go to institutions of higher learning where they play for coaches, usually older white men, who are incentivized to attract the best talent they can."
https://www.gq.com/story/john-calipari-kentucky-profile