NCAA Throwball Championship Game: Clemson v. Alabama

There are a couple of ways to look at this game and if you’re as Throwballed out as I am after Wild Card Weekend (way to go Packers) or your sentimental favorite got blown out in the Semis (sorry State) I can understand why you bring to it the same attitude that I’ll be bringing to the State of the Union and the 2 Debates this week, namely that anything important that happens I can read about tomorrow.

I’m kind of puzzled by the fact that the Tide are 9 point favorites over the Tigers what with them having an undefeated season, but I attribute that to the prejudice of sports writers who think the SEC is all that and a bag of chips. Umm… no. The ACC is no cakewalk and did I mention undefeated?

The great strength of both teams is their defense, the Tide is ranked 4th and the Tigers 6th nationally but while the Tide has a Running Back (Derrick Henry) who, well, runs (2,061 yards in 359 carries for an average of 5.7 and 25 TDs), the Tigers have a dual threat Quarterback (Deshaun Watson) who runs (1,032 yards in 187 carries for an average of 5.5 with 12 TDs) AND PASSES! (303 completions and 12 INTs in 444 attempts for 68.2% and 3,699 yards, an average of 8.3 with 31 TDs).

It hardly seems fair when you consider he’s just a sophomore, but add to that the Tide’s QB Jake Corker has been decidedly vincible all season and the fact that the Tigers also have a Running Back (Wayne Gallman) and a Wide Receiver (Artavis Scott) and it appears rather lopsided, but not in the way most people are predicting.

It’s not that I’m rooting for the Tigers, just that it’s always a pleasure to see the Tide get their asses kicked.

So that’s one way to look at it. Another way is this-

Everyone Is Set To Cash In On The National Championship Game, Except The Athletes Playing In It
by Lindsay Gibbs, Think Progress
Jan 11, 2016 5:07 pm

On Monday night, top-ranked Clemson will take on Alabama in the NCAA College Football Playoff National Championship Game. If history is any indication, the game will attract a sizable audience: Last year’s championship game on ESPN drew 33.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched program in cable history.

As always, the match-up will feature coaches and executives who are rolling in riches alongside athletes, those who are risking their physical and mental well-being on the field, who are paid nothing at all.

It’s nothing new that NCAA amateurism takes advantage of the so-called student-athletes, but the inception of the College Football Playoff (CFP) last year — and the $7.3 billion, 12-year contract ESPN agreed to for the rights to air the games — has made the scheme’s stench worse than ever.

Here are a few of the most notable statistics:

• Last year, bowl games paid out over $500 million to schools and conferences.
• Power Five conferences each get paid $51 million in revenue from the CFP, and an additional $6 million if one of their teams makes it to the playoff semifinals.
• ESPN is charging $1.3 million for 30 seconds of ad space for the championship game on Monday night.
• The NCAA made nearly $1 billion in 2014, including an $80.5 million surplus.
• Alabama’s head coach Nick Saban made a $7.1 million base salary this year. He has already earned $425,000 in achievement bonuses this season, and will earn $100,000 more if Alabama wins on Monday night. His assistant coaches made a total of $5.2 million this year, and as of the 2013-14 season, his support staff made $2.66 million.
• Clemson’s head coach Dabo Swinney made a comparably meager $3.3 million base salary this year, but he has already earned $875,000 in bonus money, with another $100,000 possible if Clemson wins. His assistant coaches made $4.4 million this season, while his support staff made $2.48 million.
• Only 1.6 percent of college football players make it to the NFL.

But you know, it’s really much worse than that-

College sports exploits unpaid black athletes. But they could force a change.
By Donald H. Yee, Washington Post
January 8

(W)e need to stop ignoring the racial implications of the NCAA’s hypocrisy.

After all, who is actually earning the billions of dollars flooding universities, athletic conferences, TV networks and their sponsors? To a large extent, it’s young black men, who are heavily overrepresented in football and men’s basketball, the two sports that bring in virtually all the revenue in college athletics. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that 57 percent of the football players and 64 percent of the men’s basketball players in the six biggest conferences were black; at the same schools, black men made up less than 3 percent of the overall student population. (In recent NFL drafts, five times as many black players were taken in the first two rounds, where the perceived best players are picked, as white players.) Athletics administrators and coaches, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly white.

So by refusing to pay athletes, the NCAA isn’t just perpetuating a financial injustice. It’s also committing a racial one.

The bargain the NCAA makes with football and basketball players is fairly simple: You play games, entertain fans and make us money, and we’ll give you a scholarship, experience, training and exposure you need to make it to the pros.
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It’s hard to imagine that football and basketball would be as wildly popular as they are now if they had never integrated. Or, for that matter, as lucrative. The amount of money generated by football and basketball in the “Power Five” conferences (the Pac-12, SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12) has exploded in the past half-dozen years.
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This enormous flow of cash is carefully kept away from football and basketball players, but coaches, administrators and other staff members get to bathe in it, even though many big-time athletic departments still lose money overall.
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And for the most part, the people getting paid are white. Since 1951, when its first top executive was appointed, the head of the NCAA always has been a white man. Of the Power Five conferences, none — dating back to the 1920s — has ever had a nonwhite commissioner. A 2015 study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that 86.7 percent of all athletic directors in the NCAA were white.

The demographics of head football and basketball coaches are similar. At the start of this college football season, 87.5 percent of head football coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision were white. In the 2013-14 season, 76 percent of head basketball coaches in Division I were white.

The money generated by football and men’s basketball also goes to subsidize “non-revenue” sports such as soccer, equestrian, field hockey, rowing, swimming, gymnastics and golf. Virtually all of those programs lose money, and most of the men and women playing those sports are white. But at least the subsidies are allowing other athletes to compete at a high level, not funding lavish salaries for executives.

Why is this business model — unpaid labor, mostly by black athletes, generating riches for white administrators — still tolerated?
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Instead, the NCAA’s member schools are moving to distract them. The Post recently reported that Clemson’s new football facility will have a miniature-golf course, a sand volleyball pit and laser tag, as well as a barber shop, a movie theater and bowling lanes. The University of Oregon had so much money to spend on its football facility that it resorted to sourcing exotic building materials from all over the world.
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For talented football and basketball players, the NCAA’s bargain is increasingly a bad deal: They are making enormous sums of money for everyone but themselves.

Yes, the scholarships received by football and basketball players provide an economic benefit. However, they come with onerous restrictions and no promise of an education. The 2013 Penn study found that black male student athletes graduated at lower rates than other black men at 72 percent of institutions with big-time football and basketball programs — and lower than other undergraduates overall at 97 percent of them.

At many schools, football and basketball players are forced into contrived majors in which they have no interest. Take a look at the football and basketball rosters of most Power Five schools, and you’ll find two or three majors that seem unusually popular among athletes — often interdisciplinary programs that make it easier for academic advisers to pick classes for athletes that fit the team’s schedule. Players are also often dissuaded from taking classes they’d prefer. One of my former clients, a fine student, once expressed interest in a class that happened to conflict — in an insignificant way — with a football matter. He was strongly discouraged from taking the class, and since coaches control playing time and scholarships, he didn’t want to risk angering them, so he didn’t enroll in it. If athletes want to transfer, NCAA rules often punish them by prohibiting their participation in their chosen sport for one year.

The few players who go on to NFL or NBA careers give up years of potential earnings to play for free in college, risking injury in the process. Most athletes, of course, don’t make it to the pros.

No other large-scale commercial enterprise in the United States treats its performers and labor this way.
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Paying players would cost money, of course, but with billions in TV revenue coming in, it shouldn’t be impossible to find a way to spend some of it on labor instead of on exotic woods for new training facilities.

Personally I think Big Time Throwball programs should operate under strict budgetary caps especially for coaches and administrators. Basketball too, though the programs are not nearly as large or expensive. Fifty percent of the excess revenue should be divided into equal stipends for all team members (no stars) and the other 50 invested in less popular programs like, yes, Field Hockey.