NCAA March Madness 2023:  How To Exploit Black Talent and Generate Millions While Doing It

Tip-Off

The referee tosses the ball in the air it’s tipped to a University of Maryland player—he passes it up the court to a teammate for a 3, swish and it’s good!!  And thus begins the start of the 84^th NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.  As I tuned in, I began to focus in on an anomaly that has always been there since I played Division III Basketball some 30 years ago.  It seems to me that nearly all the young men competing are Black men.  Of the 10 men who start the 5 on 5 game, in most cases, 8 or 9 of them are Black.  I know, this is far from a breaking news story, but I’m painting a picture here and this is only the first stroke of the paintbrush. 

The NCAA Tournament produced approximately $1.14 Billion in revenue in 2022, none of which, not one dollar is paid directly to its players, the student athletes.  Just for the sake of repeating, most of these young men appearing on the television screen are Black.  Hmm let’s see, so over $1 Billion is generated, the basketball teams are represented by mostly Black student athletes, and none of them are paid.  Wait a second, this method of profit generation absence of compensation to the very employees performing the labor sure sounds familiar to me.

Follow the Money—Always Follow the Money

Most of the profits generated from March Madness are a result of broadcast rights, ticket sales and corporate sponsorships.  This colossal money-making machine recently added a contract extension with CBS/Turner Broadcasting through 2032 worth a reported $8.8 Billion.  As for the extremely fortunate recipients of these bags of cash, this also gets very interesting as we shovel to deeper depths.

The coaches of the elite teams like Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan State and Tennessee have an average base salary of $6.42 million.  At the top of the heap is Kentucky’s John Calipari who earns a base of $8.5 million.  Now Calipari as you might imagine recruits a lot of young Black men hence the highest salary.  The compensation of the coaches doesn’t stop there.  In addition to their salaries, they are also paid in perks like private jets, corporate sponsorships from shoe companies, and other endorsements that supplement the multi-million-dollar base salaries.  And on the other side, we find Howard University’s head coach Kenny Blakeney (whose team made the tournament) making an estimated $268,000 per year.   

As the annual tournament begins, there are 67 schools with a “chance” to get to the final championship game (final 2 teams).  The tournament will last 3 weeks (the length contributing to its overwhelming financial successes) and each school that moves on past its opponent in each round receives a piece of the pie called a unit.  The unit is paid to the schools assigned conference directly.  The average unit is estimated at over $338,000.  As is the case with just about everything, the larger schools with the deeper pockets and what amounts to infinite resources have a far better chance of reaching the pinnacle and earning the most units.  Side note, Kentucky’s operating budget for 2022 was $5.6 billion.   

Although Historically Black Colleges and Universities are invited to the party, their chances of assembling a team with enough talent to make it to the championship game are practically none, zero, nil.  Isn’t it ironic that these talented young men who are Black don’t play for Black Colleges when there is such a thing?  No, it’s not irony at all—it is blatant outright exploitation of alarming proportions.

This situation reminds me of a quote by my hero Fredrick Douglass, “it is not well to forget the past”.  When we choose to remove ourselves from the past, we ultimately fall into the trap of socioeconomic practices of deception.  In other words, we’ve all been deceived and prejudiced to believe that anything concerning Blacks must be inferior and all things related to Whites, consequently, must be superior.  I know this to be true because I once viewed society through the same lens. 

As I was entering the winter and spring of my senior year of high school, I had begun to narrow my choices of the college I would attend.  Due to my biased understanding of the world and my ineptitude to seek and discover the buried truths, I implausibly eliminated all HBCU’s from my list of prospective colleges I would attend in the fall.  According to my conceived notions of success in academia, Black Colleges were substandard, second-rate, and deemed in my head uncompetitive when compared to White Schools.   I imagine this notion hasn’t changed much over the years with Black students—in fact, I imagine it has only grown more grotesque.  The bigger question is why my mindset was engineered in such a way in the first place?  Why did I consider a school with most of its population consisting of Blacks simply not good enough for me?  My reasoning—societal norms.

This belief had been instilled in me as far back as I can remember.  Blacks have always been perceived as less than, underprivileged, or “minorities” meaning, a racially distinct group that coexists but is subordinate to a more dominant group.  This message was fed to me daily; whether I was at school, watching television, taking a walk in a White neighborhood or a Black one; this is what was taught and uncompromisingly reinforced in too many ways to count.  With my own blatant biases towards my own group of people who shared my skin color, how can I now blame the student athletes who choose the White and more prestigious higher learning institutes over HBCU’s?

From a historical perspective, after being excluded and segregated against for so many years from the equal opportunities to succeed in America, who could blame Blacks for longing to be accepted into traditionally White schools and seizing the opportunity to be amongst the elite.  Yet, this dynamic has another layer to it—a layer that seldom is discussed, debated, or challenged.  Let’s examine the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa for a moment.  They currently boast a highly successful men’s football and basketball team with both ranked in the top 5 in 2022-23.  The football team is around 70% Black.  The basketball team, roughly 82% of them are Black players.  With an enrollment of 37,840, you would think the percentage of Black students would coincide or at the very least, closely resemble the demographics of its 2 cash cow sports programs that help to fund all the other sports in Tuscaloosa—which many of them involve only White student athletes.  Unfortunately, there are only 2,711 Black or African American students enrolled at UA.  This is less than 10% of the overall enrollment and again, compared with Blacks being 70% of the major sports teams that drive the revenue.  This is further evidence that the students on the basketball and football teams are there for one reason—to generate a profit for their sports programs, their coaches, their conferences, everyone but us.  In 2022, Alabama athletics generated a record $214.4 million and the head coach of the football team, Nick Saban made $10.95 million.  

What if Blacks decided to take their talents to HBCU’s instead?  

From top to bottom, HBCU’s are traditionally run by Blacks—Presidents, Athletic Directors, Coaches, Professors, and other vital roles within the university have people of color occupying these roles.  Remember that Black Colleges are a derivative of segregation—they were invented because Blacks couldn’t attend the White schools of higher learning.  But having our talent remain with our universities would mean a world of difference to all involved—we’d essentially be paying ourselves for our own talent instead of lining the deep pockets of others.  The movement could begin with one 5-Star, 4-Star, and 3-Star recruiting class choosing to forgo the traditional route and consciously loaning their skills to schools like Grambling, Hampton, Howard, or North Carolina Central. 

It must begin with a meeting of the minds, and continue with the type of blind optimistic solidarity that Black people haven’t collectively exhibited since the 1960’s.  Keep in mind, the athletes won’t be paid directly no matter where they choose to go to college.  They will unfortunately have to sacrifice the amenities furnished by the Power 5 schools who currently have a strangle-hold on college sports but they could capitalize on the ability to be compensated via NIL deals available to student athletes.  The sacrifices would be extraordinary, but these athletes could go down in history in the same manner as the athletes who first broke the color barriers in professional sports. 

In the initial stages, the Black Colleges would be at a disadvantage but as our top athletes continuously made the decision to attend HBCU’s, the money will be sure to follow.  The great news is that the precedence has recently been set.  Coach Deion “Prime” Sanders proved in his 3 years at Jackson State that we can recruit our best talent to an HBCU and that ESPN and other networks will pay top dollar to see the best athletes no matter where they play—even if it’s at an HBCU. 

It would undoubtedly take a concerted effort, but anything is achievable if Black folks could find a way to work together.  The millions and billions of dollars generated by the predominantly White schools in today’s model could certainly go to HBCU’s if the plan is executed properly. 

Of all the grievances that I find with the current system, none of them trouble me more than the hypocrisy.  Turn on a college football or basketball game, and you’ll observe thousands of White fans in the stands vehemently cheering on their alma matter and incidentally the Black athletes that have been recruited to spearhead their teams.  Some of these same people who show such deep affection and admiration during game time on Saturdays, have only vitriol, condemnation, and isolation for the same people from Sunday through Friday.    

They seem to root the hardest in the South—the same counties and cities where they fought to maintain slavery, rebelled against the US government when the idea of slavery was threatened, and later introduced Jim Crow laws to continue to further exacerbate their political and racist agendas.  The very states such as Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama that in every election choose to keep politicians, policies, and laws in place to further the agenda of the Republican Party are the very universities collecting the biggest share of the billions of dollars expended on the backs of our own athletes.  These red states and the alumni of these billion-dollar sports programs could care less about introducing, passing, or funding any legislation that would somehow assist Black people and people of color in general in the states that they reside.  Their goal—and if you dig deeper into their agenda, voting history, etc. you will see for yourself—is to keep Black people oppressed and to maintain their own positions of White power and privilege in America.  That way they can keep their children in the driver’s seat and the Black Athletes pushing the vehicle from behind. 

The NCAA, predominantly White schools, and their duplicitous methods of exploiting our talented athletes is 100% self-serving.  My hope is that one day they are exposed for the unscrupulous repressive tactics they’ve very openly displayed, and that people will one day recognize how integration in just about every aspect of its adaptation, including the integration of White colleges and universities, did more for Whites than any other civil rights legislation in history and did more harm to the Black Community than we could ever comprehend.