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Missouri Shows College Football Players Have Power; Alabama Shows How They Might Use It

Protests at Missouri and profits at Alabama demonstrate that it's time for college football players to not only recognize their power but ask what they should do with it.
Kevin D. Liles-USA TODAY Sports

Just a few days before the Missouri football team threatened to boycott a game in order to exact institutional change, the New York Times ran a lengthy feature story about the improved educational stature of the University of Alabama. The gist of that piece was not exactly unprecedented, but the timing was intriguing, because the story revealed, among other things, that a college football team can serve a legitimate educational purpose by elevating the academic stature of the institution it represents.

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Alabama has become a different school since Nick Saban took the football program to heights not achieved since Bear Bryant's retirement in the early 1980s. Enrollment has increased by 55 percent in the past decade, according to Times writer Joe Drape, and two and a half times as many freshmen are now enrolled in Alabama's Honors College; Alabama is now top-five among public universities in terms of the number of National Merit and National Achievement Scholars. Maybe some of that growth has nothing to do with football, but it's not a leap to presume that a great deal of it does. Alabama's director of alumni affairs admitted as much to Drape, saying, "We understand that there are young people out there who first view us, or any other institution, through the window of athletics."

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This is not the first time such a theory has been explored. A few years ago, a Harvard Business School professor named Douglas Chung published a paper titled "The Dynamic Advertising Effects of College Athletics." Intrigued by the so-called "Flutie Effect" at Boston College in the 1980s, Chung found, unsurprisingly, that increased athletic success did have an impact on admissions numbers and applications, and that it significantly affected even students with higher SAT scores. Only by lowering tuition significantly or recruiting higher-paid faculty, according to Chung, would colleges see similar results.

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I've been thinking a lot about Drape and Chung the past few days, and how these ideas—the push and pull between athletes' rights and institutional success—are intertwined. There's been a lot of talk this week about leverage and about the overarching power of student-athletes in the wake of everything that's happened at Missouri, and this is undeniably true; dozens of others have noted, quite reasonably, that this would allow college athletes to push for greater rights and perhaps even provide a pathway toward real compensation for their labor in some form. But I think it could go beyond that. I think there's a way to use that leverage to push for the sort of accountability that would galvanize both sides of what's essentially become a political debate, and would allow the sport to maybe come a little bit closer to serving its educational mission.

TFW you have some great honors college enrollment news to share. —Photo by Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

The big question in Drape's Alabama story is raised by Dr. Allen Sack, a professor emeritus at the University of New Haven and a member of the Drake Group, which advocates for educational improvements in college sports. "Where is that money going?" Sack asks of the dollars pouring into a football program like Alabama's. "How much of it is going into laboratories and academics? Is it enhancing the reputation of the university? Nobody really knows those answers."

I would argue that we know some of those answers. In certain circumstances, as at Alabama, football can unquestionably enhance the reputation of a university. And so the truth is that both sides need each other.

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In an ideal world, this would lead to a symbiotic relationship between the athletes and the university; it would break down the wall between academia and athletics—a divide that has existed since the beginning of college football itself, back when Harvard president Charles Eliot fretted in the late 1800s that colleges were entering the entertainment business—and force programs like Alabama's to fully acknowledge that their athletic and academic missions should not stand apart from each other. That's where the athletes, so often trapped in the middle of this divide, can make a difference.

So much of this, after all, is about perception. Rarely has there been more public sympathy for the notion of college athletes getting paid; they can utilize this moment to push for reform in the way they're treated and financially compensated. There's still an overarching perception, however, especially among conservative critics, that football players care about little else but their own self-interests. Which is why athletes can also utilize this moment to prove that they're out for more than just short-term personal gain—that they're advocating for a system that can work for both parties.

Why shouldn't the athletes be pushing for answers to the questions Allen Sack posed to the Times? Why shouldn't they be the ones wondering where the millions of dollars they're generating is going, and whether it is enhancing the reputation of the university they're attending and the degree they've ostensibly come to that university to get? Why shouldn't they be the ones pushing for the concept of football not just bettering their own fortunes but bettering their entire university's fortunes? While they're pushing for a share of the money for themselves, why shouldn't they also be advocating for at least some of that money to go toward laboratories and academics, the things that might improve their long-term futures?

"Hey guys, where does all that money go?" —Photo by Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports

Imagine what Alabama might become without a football team. Imagine how it would affect the school's identity; imagine the hole it would leave behind. What the happenings at Missouri revealed is that athletes are coming to recognize the power they have, but what they do with that power is still very much in question. Maybe their best bet is to recognize that merely by asking the proper questions, they can begin to balance out the system in more than one way.