Cedric Dempsey died last April, which is a shame. It means we’ll never get the chance to give him the apology he so richly deserves.
Dempsey was the longtime president of the NCAA and the scapegoat for all that was wrong with college sports. In 2014, UConn won the national title and star guard Shabazz Napier used his postgame interview on CBS to talk about how he went to bed hungry. Dempsey’s fault.
The NCAA was filled will all kinds of arcane rules, dictating how much cream cheese a school’s cafeteria could offer a student athlete with his bagel. Dempsey’s fault.
Now, in everyone’s defense, the NCAA was rivaled only by FIFA in its corruption, hypocrisy and general powerlessness. And Dempsey was the man in charge.
And since he’s been gone, things have gotten so much worse.
It turns out, college sports needed all those nitpicky rules, because it’s filled with people who have been broken by their ambition and will do literally anything to get an advantage. If there’s a rule restricting the amount of cream cheese a school can offer, you can assume that a stud linebacker prospect came from a family that ran a dairy, and coaches were offering to buy cases of it to serve with meals.
Coaches want to win, and they know to do so, they need the best players. Every NCAA rule comes down to keeping them in check. For instance, coaches aren’t allowed to discuss recruits until they’ve signed with a school. It’s a silly, annoying rule. Once, Roy Williams mentioned that Brandon Ingram had committed to Duke, and UNC received a minor NCAA violation.
Why does that rule exist? Because if it didn’t, coaches would talk about nothing else. Every press conference or TV interview would be a chance to show the next high school star just how much he was needed at the school. After a player signs, they no longer need to be recruited, so we can take the gag off the coach.
While schools made millions of dollars off of their college sports teams and the athletes weren’t getting paid anything—that we know of—it turns out that folks who are good at sports are generally treated pretty well compared to the rest of us. There might have been better causes to get behind.
For instance, at the time Napier complained about going to bed hungry, the NCAA had a manual for student athletes explaining the various rules. Included in it was a chart, showing exactly when and where they had to go, depending on whether it was a game day, practice day or day off, to get fed. In other words—a helpful chart to show them where their free meal was coming from on any given day.
Athletes on the road were (and still are) given meal money. It varies from school to school but the consensus is that it’s about $28 on average. That might not seem like much to feed an elite athlete, but remember, they get two meals provided on game day. You’ve heard coaches talk about how the team looked at pregame meal, and at any postgame, while media does locker room interviews, assistants are bringing in bags of take-out food from a nearby chain restaurant for the postgame feast.
On campus, there’s the training table, which had unlimited snacks, and athletes who lived off campus, too far from the training table, got a stipend to cover their food. The boyfriend of one woman’s athlete from the era told me, “It was so much food. The two of us couldn’t eat it all.”
But if Napier wanted a late night calzone, he’d have to pay for it, like any other college student. So, he sometimes went to bed hungry. And as a result, UNC junior Seth Trimble can now buy the local Ben & Jerry’s franchise with the money he’s making.
Trimble is great, and he’s putting his NIL fortune to good use. I’m in no way impugning his character. But according to the company website, it costs between a quarter of a million and half a million dollars to start one, including a franchise fee of nearly $40,000. In just over 10 years, we’ve gone from starving student to local business owner, from college kid to the 1%. And that growth has come with no guardrails.
Originally, NIL was supposed to allow athletes to profit from their fame. The idea was to have them endorse products and get reimbursed. Remember when Chick Fil-A and other local businesses proudly announced that they’d signed a quarterback or point guard to an NIL deal? Probably not, because that era lasted all of 15 minutes, before greed and corruption turned it into a full-on bidding war.
Now, if reports are to be trusted, a conference champion quarterback can pull millions of dollars, along with a deal for relatives, in order to jump schools on the last possible day.
Dempsey’s NCAA made it difficult to transfer schools. And now, when a freshman returns for his sophomore year, the school proudly proclaims that it “re-signed” him for another year.
This isn’t an old crusty white guy saying that the kids shouldn’t get what they deserve. This is an old crusty white guy saying that guys who are good in sports have always gotten what they deserved, and then some. I’m saying there needs to be some type of control. Someone needs to be in charge.
Even if we all hate that guy.
