Strong interest in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament has arrived again, in the form of higher TV ratings for early-round games for CBS and Turner Broadcasting networks.
Surely
those networks where NCAA grabbed around a billion dollars in rights fees – and marketers who spent tens of millions of dollars on those networks to gain big TV opportunities -- have seen the
value.
But what about the college players themselves? Nada. Zip.
In fact, the five-year-old Ed O’Bannon case against the NCAA is starting up again, with oral arguments for the
NCAA’s appeal of a federal judge’s decision to allow college players to be compensated.
Traditionalists want college athletics to maintain its so-called amateur
status as long as it can. Of course, TV viewers know the score -- that top-performing college athletes who only spend one or two years in college before going professional will make many millions.
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Many traditionalists might still wonder why people are moaning that college athletes also want to get a piece of that billion or so TV dollars that go to individual colleges
through the NCAA.
Perhaps we should look deeper, beyond those select few top-end athletes that will be quick multimillionaires to those average players who will have little
chance of making career-defining paydays. Many are not talking up these athletes making big career money, but more modest compensation in the form of a “trust fund,” for example.
Still, you can’t imagine much of this O’Bannon case discussion will be bandied on-air during March Madness on CBS or Turner. This kind of money doesn’t have
starting-player qualities; it will instead stay on the end of the bench.