University of Georgia running back Todd Gurley, once a Heisman Trophy frontrunner, was suspended by the NCAA for four games for the offense of being paid “more than $3,000” for signing his autograph to football memorabilia over the past two years. When this purported scandal broke, two leading sports news websites covered the story by writing about why the story wasn’t worth covering.
They had a point, not just about the Gurley story but about the larger genre of reporting on alleged violations of the NCAA’s rules against pay for college athletes. The players are barred from almost any compensation beyond their scholarships, including pay from third parties like autograph brokers.
Deadspin and SB Nation were both tipped off to the Gurley story by Bryan Allen, a memorabilia dealer offering what he said was evidence of Gurley signing for pay. Neither site ran a story until after the NCAA investigation went public, and when they did, both ripped Allen and told their readers they don’t feel that paying college athletes is any kind of scandal. (Neither named Allen; he was identified later by ESPN.)
“[T]he purpose of this website is not to enforce the NCAA’s insane bylaws,” SB Nation’s Spencer Hal and Steven Godrey wrote. “On the contrary, we’re all for players making money, and are thus editorially supportive of those bylaws’ erosion.” And in a Deadspin post, headlined “The Todd Gurley Snitch is a Spiteful Memorabilia Dealer,” Timothy Burke and Barry Petschky referred to the “scandal reporters” who typically break such stories as “the NCAA’s mall cops.”
“Mall cop.” “Hall monitor.” Read enough about college sports and you’ll encounter these terms, used to disparage reporters from Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and other mainstream outlets who uncover pay-for-play stories, a staple of serious sports journalism for decades. Sometimes this is purely sour grapes, from fans of the programs that get busted and don’t want to see their star players suspended. But in other instances — such as the objections raised by SB Nation and Deadspin — the “NCAA hall monitor” idea is part of a larger critique of a particular kind of investigative sports journalism. These stories reveal “corruption” in college sports by uncovering rule violations without questioning whether the rules are just or even legal.
“You end up writing a breathless piece condemning the actions of one person selling their name, image or likeness for a profit, and then turning around and without irony writing about the cool variation on the uniform that’s for sale this week on the school’s website,” Hall said in a recent interview. He is SB Nation’s editorial director and the founder of its college football blog.
Though the Gurley suspension story wasn’t broken by the news media — multiple outlets passed on Allen’s tips, as he seemed to be motivated by a business dispute with Gurley, who plays for the third richest college football program in the country — the established names in sports journalism aren’t shy about pursuing similar stories. Sports Illustrated, in particular, devotes significant resources to investigating tales of “corruption” in college sports. (Two SI writers often on this beat, George Dohrmann and Pete Thamel, did not reply to email requests for interviews.)
Though the American public as a whole is firmly against paying college athletes, important voices in the media, the academy, and the legal world have turned against the NCAA and its vision of “amateurism” for the athletes. Elite opinion, at least, has come to view the NCAA the way Michael Kinsley described Wall Street and Washington: “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal.”
The NCAA’s way of doing things might not be legal for much longer. Marc Edelman, a law professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College, is the author of a 2013 law review article arguing that NCAA rules against paying athletes are a violation of the Sherman Act, the cornerstone of US antitrust law. He thinks the case against restrictions on third-party pay, such as that given by memorabilia brokers or video game makers, is even stronger. Both types of pay are the subject of lawsuits currently pending against the NCAA.
Edelman credits new and social media with the recent spread of NCAA heresy.
“Until a few years ago, the NCAA was in a fabulous position to provide the only information on the legality of its business practices, through sports reporting, TV programming, and mainstream newspapers,” he said. “Nowadays, mediums such as Twitter and a wide range of blogs give the public access to experts in law and economics who are able to articulate a different viewpoint.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with reporting on NCAA rule violations, even if they’re violations of rules that don’t have much moral or legal authority. The important thing is context. The story shouldn’t be “Player X is getting paid.” The story should be about why he’s getting paid, how he’s getting paid, and why the pay needs to be handed off under the table.
SB Nation, which is owned by Vox Media, is among the best at providing that context. In April, the site published the apotheosis of its approach: “Meet the Bag Man.” SB Nation writer Steven Godfrey spent time with an unnamed “bag man,” a black-market booster for an unnamed Southeastern Conference school who gave cash and favors to college football players and high schools recruits.
“The Bag Man” is full of detail, like the recruit who needed his grandpa’s trailer fixed (for perspective, Georgia’s coach, Mark Richt, made $3.3 million last year). But just as notable are the details the SB Nation story doesn’t have: the names of any players who got paid, or even the cities where the deals went down. Godfrey wrote that he witnessed some of those deals, but his story didn’t include anything that could cost a college player his scholarship.
“Our decision editorially has been not to just look at the rule book and say, ‘Well, here’s something that violates the code,'” Hall said. “Our editorial mission has been to illustrate, pretty dispassionately I hope, the economy as it actually exists. That, to me, personally, is just much more interesting than journalism in service of amateurism.”
More publications should consider this context. Straightforward reporting on pay-for-play scandals might seem neutral, but it reinforces the NCAA’s position that athletes should be ashamed of earning money for their work. These stories reveal minor “corruption,” while directing the audience’s attention away from the plight of the unpaid athletes who generate billions of dollars in revenue for their schools.
Tony Biasotti is a freelance writer in Ventura, California. Find him on Twitter @tonybiasotti.