FUCK The NCAA!!

By Michael – Louis Ingram, Editor -in- Chief

BASN Newsroom

 

PHILADELPHIA (basnnewsroom.com)  I’m sure to many this year’s edition of the Men’s Collegiate Basketball championship has been exciting: a number one seed down to defeat from the jump via a sixteen seed (respect UMBC) and upsets up the wazoo…

There’s just one small thing wrong with this year’s tournament.

It’s the same thing wrong with every previous tournament: the student-athletes are not getting PAID.

From the most recent data I could find (thank you, Shaun King) college basketball (via the NCAA) secured an $8.8 billion dollar television contract in 2015; and over $9 billion was garnered by schools representing The Five Families (Atlantic Coast Conference, South Eastern Conference, Big 12, Pac 12 and Big 10 – cue mandolins) that same year.

So while some people are afraid to lose their place at the table, it is time to say what everyone knows needs to be said:

 

FUCK the NCAA.

 

Never mind the pretense that the players are indentured servants playing their hearts out for dear old Wottsamatta U; or the announcers and hype men riding the jocks of a buncha kids who are starving (not to win, but to eat a decent meal) because Massa says you can’t get a baloney sammich  unless he authorizes it!

The mealy-mouthed explanation by apologists who will jump and say, “the kids are getting an education!”

 

 

Yeah, they’re getting an education, all right; how to get fucked up the ass…

Without Vaseline.

The head of this Pimp Cartel, Mark Emmert, speaks on this subject in a way you can’t ever imagine butter melting in his mouth, using every tactic and turn of phrase to justify not paying the de facto employees slingin’ it on the hard court and hundred yard plantations across this country.

With all these supposed intelligent people (of which we know at least a couple can count) the desire to design an algorithm which would facilitate such a process falls on deaf ears; but to use something as transcendent as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to justify the ‘slave’ status of so-called ‘student-athletes’ whose value lasts only as long as they are healthy…

 

 

Remember when former Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware broke his leg while millions watched that game nationwide? Everything about that incident screams ‘Workmen’s Compensation’; but Ware was fortunate that because that break happened on camera, Louisville was compelled to pay for it. Ware later left, transferring to Georgia State after having to sit out the 2013 -14 season.

This incident confirmed the NCAA’s spin the bullshit of ‘student – athlete’ because of an injury to a player in the 1950s – to avoid a potential WC situation. If you get hurt, sad on your Black ass-concussion protocol, after care – fugheddaboutit!

In the Dred Scott case, it was concluded that Scott was property, and must be returned to his place of ownership. the inability of Ware – and others to freely transfer had been stifled for decades, but coaches could leave when ever they wanted under any circumstance.

 

 

Brian Kelly, former head football coach at the University of Cincinnati, used slave labor to propel the team and raise his profile to such a level that he was offered the head coaching job at Notre Dame; and this muthafucka had the nerve to tell his charges (no doubt many whose parents he lied to re (‘I’ll treat him like he’s my son!’) he was out – and quit his position prior to a bowl game!

So Kelly gets to make Mo’ Money while the student-athletes eat welfare – cheese sammiches; and Gawd forbid a hungry kid asks for one of those sammiches in the wrong atmosphere! Ask Dez Bryant, who sat out an entire season for having lunch with former pro player Deion Sanders – only to be asked by a scumbag named John Ireland (then working with the Miami Dolphins) if his ‘mama was a ho.’)

 

 

The racism doesn’t stop there. When former Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel was called on the carpet for allegedly selling his autograph and other paraphernalia, the NCAA spanked little Johnny, with a penalty of – one quarter of football.

Not a year – one fucking quarter of ‘ball.

 

FUCK the NCAA.

 

The NCAA, a not-for-profit entity, makes about a billion yearly as a clearinghouse for the Five Families; and the Five Families could walk away and do their own thing minus the NCAA – and they would be powerless to stop them.

We know many players have been paid under the table. A film documentary entitled “Pony Excess” pointed out what the price of doing business in the now- defunct Southwest Conference cost Southern Methodist University in the 1980s.

 

 

Texas A&M and the University of Texas basically acted like pussies because SMU had outmaneuvered them for the talent they were used to acquiring; so they dropped dime and snitched on them like little bitches for doing what every major school had been doing. The result of their getting caught? Total revocation of scholarships, financial levies – ultimately a ‘death penalty’ – almost guaranteeing the school will likely be unable to do any ‘business’ at that level ever again, money or no money.

So as all this cash is flying around, and schools are taking the indentured servants on junkets around the world to play sports while giving less than a fuck about their emotional, scholastic and financial needs, the occasional trinket, like scraps from Massa’s plate is supposed to suffice…

While the organization justifies their greedy and disgusting logic in citing legal precedents like Livers v. NCAA and Vanskike v. Peters, the undisputed truth is the student-athlete is but three-fifths of a human being; and that three-fifths better have their ass out there on dat plantation!!

Anyone who would use an amendment involving slavery to justify not paying student – athletes…is a low-life muthafucka.

 

 

I would contend, however, that Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 set this standard before a football thrown or basketball dribbled. Even before the prejudice went from protest signs to dollar signs, the fucking fix – was in; because you are considered fucking property by the highest court in the land for the basest of purposes.

The cherry atop this shitty sundae comes via a case based on obvious acts of outright thievery (O’Bannon v. NCAA, where a players’ image was taken without his permission and used on a video game), adjudicated in favor of O’Bannon by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who concluded that over a thousand NCAA cartel/schools violated anti-trust laws.

 

 

In spite of the fact EA Sports  paid $40 million to O’Bannon and others in a settlement, what should have been a window toward properly compensating student-athletes was slammed shut by the same court.

 

 

Before I go, chew on this: in 2014, University of Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier led the Huskies to the Men’s title. Lost in the post game bullshit was Napier’s unvarnished truth as the senior answered questions to which he and his teammates don’t get enough food to eat – because they can’t afford it; but about 80,000 “fans” saw that final at an average of approximately $500 a ticket!

 

 

With forty million in gate receipts earned that night, you couldn’t break off a little sum-sum for the slaves?

Whatever excuse you wanna come up with, it will always revert to – pay the athletes; any other reason to justify maintaining a status quo…is Bullshit.

 

FUCK THE NCAA.

 

always outnumbered…never outgunned.

basneditor@basnnewsroom.com

cartoon credit to eric d. graham