Does Texas A&M Exploit Its Players? Johnny Manziel, Meet Lance Pavlas

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Much ink has been spilled all summer and all year about Texas A&M's Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, Johnny Manziel. And as rumors have surfaced about Manziel allegedly skirting NCAA rules by virtue of payment for autographs signed, a debate about the supposed exploitation of athletes college athletes has reared its annoying head once again.

The complaint about athlete abuse seems to go like this: players such as Manziel generate millions in revenues for the schools they play for, not to mention for the NCAA. The latter in mind, it amounts to ‘slavery' that the schools and the NCAA that profit so handsomely from guys like Manziel don't allow those same athletes to cash in on their skills and fame while in school.

Furthermore, and far more compellingly, it's often asked why great business minds like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell of eponymous Dell Computer, and Bill Gates of Microsoft fame can clearly borrow against future business earnings while in college, but great athletes can't publicly cash in on their athletic achievements. Something is surely amiss? Not so fast.

For one, can we as college sports fans acknowledge what is quietly, but unquestionably true? Specifically, can we admit that just as it's proven impossible for Constitution-defacing politicians and judges to keep money out of politics, efforts to keep money from reaching college athletes have failed.

The reason why is incentives. Where there's talent there will always be profit-seeking agents and fame-worshipping boosters sniffing around, money in hand. Though sports pundits who should know better often say different, the players at football and basketball schools are not suffering - not by a longshot. Everyone's got their story, and more realistically stories, about the cars driven by football and basketball players not just at the top schools, but even at mid-range ones.

It can't be stressed enough that money always and everywhere finds talent and fame. Athletes who participate in the revenue sports at Division 1 schools are not toiling for the minor stipends that the NCAA allows. Some in the punditry naively wail about how schools must provide an income to players who generate so much revenue for the school as a way of mitigating the influence of agents and boosters, but if they get their way those same agents and boosters will still be handing out favors and funds, this time on top of the doubtless meager wages offered by schools. Relax, the money is finding the players who are quietly doing just fine. This should be seared on everyone's brain.

But assuming a payment plan for players is institutionalized, the pay will most likely be low, and with good reason. To understand why, we need only reference Lance Pavlas.

Pavlas is largely forgotten now, but to A&M fans in the ‘80s he was once viewed as a certain savior. Quite unlike Manziel who was somewhat lightly recruited, Pavlas of Tomball, TX was highly coveted by coaches across the country. That A&M landed him was a major coup, and the arrival of his letter-of-intent papers on National Signing Day surely excited A&M fans.

But as readers can perhaps guess, Pavlas never measured up to the enormously high expectations that arrived with him when he matriculated to A&M. As college football fans know intimately, "nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent," to quote Calvin Coolidge, and the fields of top teams around the country are littered with talent that never matched expectations.

The above deserves prominent mention in light of all the whining in the media about revenue-sport athletes allegedly being exploited by their schools and the NCAA. For one, no one forces these players to toil for the University of Alabama, Ohio State, or USC, and for two, the odds of much-garlanded and highly recruited athletes amounting to much once they reach the college field is rather slim.

As college football fans can painfully attest, flameouts like Pavlas are the norm among top recruits. It's quite simply hard for coaches to judge talent, and more important, desire in high school kids, and this must be remembered when discussions about the Manziels of the world take place. Manziel and athletes like him are the enormously rare exception to the Lance Pavlas rule. Over-emotional pundits loudly bemoan "exploitation" at modern "plantations" when stars like Manziel and others can't at least publicly earn the money they'd like to while in college, but if so, would they similarly agree that the myriad players who never measure up should pay the cost of their scholarships back when they don't pan out? Should top colleges demand that unsuccessful recruits not mention that they attended University of Texas and Florida State when the go searching for jobs?

It's so easy to talk about how athletes get a bad deal when they sign that Florida Gator LOI, but the greater truth is that no matter how they play while in school, they get to carry around a marketable name for life. They also get to do this while playing a sport which they love. What about the universities that take major financial risks on them? The scholarship given out is at least lost for the year such that another potential star can't fill it; a missed recruit often resulting in lost jobs for coaches, not to mention lost revenues for the school in question. Thinking about the Gators a bit more, they'll carry around the Aaron Hernandez blemish for decades.

And as evidenced by the unspoken truth that money and favors are everywhere at top football and basketball schools, it seems the NCAA's only unspoken rule is "Don't get caught and we won't bother you." To presume otherwise, that the NCAA is blind to the myriad fringe benefits of playing for top college football teams today, is willful blindness on the part of everyone.

All this must be remembered in light of the Manziel controversy. Yes, it seems odd that he can't cash in, but it's time to remember the huge and costly risks colleges take on athletes who never pan out on an annual basis in return for the few players who do. Johnny Manziel, meet Lance Pavlas.

 

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Political Economy editor at Forbes, a Senior Fellow in Economics at Reason Foundation, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading (www.trtadvisors.com). He's the author of Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank (Encounter Books, 2016), along with Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You About Economics (Regnery, 2015). 

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