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NCAA Basketball

Racial Paternalism and College Sports

Posted Jun 29, 2009 8:30PM By Clay Travis (RSS feed)

Filed Under: NBA Prospects, Campus

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Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an investigation that found just 26 major league baseball players and managers have college degrees. Twenty-six! That's out of a pool of a potential 1,042 players and managers. You want that in percentage terms, that's 2.5 percent. A staggeringly low percentage, even if you pull out all Latin American players (who don't have the same collegiate opportunities) from the equation. Yet, I defy you to find an article that utilizes this fact to make an argument that baseball players need better educations.

The same would hold true for tennis, hockey and golf. As a society, we don't care about the education of our athletes in those sports. In fact, what are the only two sports that we seem to care about when it comes to the education of athletes? Football and basketball. Which just so happen to also have the largest percentage of minority athletes. That's got me wondering, isn't our society guilty of racial paternalism when it comes to sports?

I think so. Put plainly, we don't trust a comparatively small pool of young black kids to make decisions about their professional sports futures, but we don't even blink when thousands of white kids head pro in sports without the slightest bit of education.

If I stacked every article ever written about the necessity of obtaining a college education, how many of them would focus on baseball? Any at all? Then think about how many articles you've read about the value of a college education when the players compete in basketball and football. Compare the two. It's shocking, right? No one ever -- and I mean ever -- questions the right of kids to sign baseball contracts directly out of high school. No talking heads ever pound their hands into a desk and wax eloquent about the need for a college eduction, millions be damned.

When I saw the pathetic percentage of major league managers and players with a college degree, the double standard was suddenly jarring. Unavoidable. But what was even more jarring was the silence. No one ever talks or writes about the dearth of major league baseball education. That's despite the fact that, every year, the basketball and football drafts, two and seven rounds, respectively, only select a little over 300 players for their leagues. The baseball draft, on the other hand, is epic -- more than fifteen hundred players will be selected before it's over. The vast, vast majority will never step foot on a major league baseball field. At least basketball and football draftees are immediately competing for the big contracts at the top levels of the sports. In fact, baseball alone selects almost five-times as many kids for their sport every year than basketball and football do combined. As if that weren't enough, given that basketball requires players be at least one year removed from high school and football requires three, neither of those leagues drafts an 18-year-old straight from high school. Baseball drafts hundreds every year. And no one utters a word of criticism about these kids forgoing their college education.

Why?

I think all we need to do is look at the racial make-up of the players in each of the four major league sports. Based on 2007 stats, 79 percent of NBA players and 65 percent of NFL players are black. The most recent numbers show that only 8 percent of baseball players are black and just 2 percent of hockey players are. Guess which sports allow 18-year-olds to come straight into the league?

But I'm sure that's a coincidence, right?

Look, I'm not saying that we as a society have decided that black athletes need to go to school and white ones don't. I don't think the decision is that simple or that most people make that decision consciously. After all, plenty of minorities support the guidelines put in place by the NFL and the NBA. You can even argue that the NBA and NFL draft systems make more sense than those put in place by the NHL and the MLB. Personally, I think they do. In fact, why don't all players get the right to go through the draft after their senior year like baseball players do? Give kids the right to see how much money they can make before they decide whether or not to go to college. As is, the NBA and the NFL require any kids who leave school early to do so without a parachute. Go pro and give up college forever, young man. Even if you don't get drafted. Talk about a draconian punishment. Every league should have a system just like major league baseball -- if a kid is good enough to get drafted at 18, give him the opportunity to take the money and pursue a professional career. Every contract in those leagues should then contain the language that if he fails at baseball, the team will pay for him to attend college.

But that's my prescription for an equalization of treatment across the board. What I think is the more interesting question is this: why does our society allow these disparate treatments and not think twice about it? Why have we set up a system where black kids playing in the NFL and the NBA are much more likely to have college degrees than white kids playing Major League Baseball or in the NHL? I think the answer is that our perception governs these situations. We think that young black kids should go to college and so the leagues (in cahoots with the NCAA) dictate this policy, making college a de facto minor leagues. We're willing, even eager, to allow it to happen in these sports but not in any others.

Again, why?

I don't claim to have an easy answer that every person is going to agree with, but I think it's a question that every fan should be asking of themselves. Why is it okay for NHL and MLB players to go pro without ever sniffing a college classroom, but it isn't okay for football and basketball players to do so? Is it simply because we want those players to play for our college teams, that we care more about college basketball and football than we do college hockey and baseball? Is that really a justification, these athletes should go to college because they entertain us when they put on our college's uniform? I don't think so.

I think this is about something deeper and more firmly ingrained in our national consciousness than anyone cares to acknowledge, I think the disparate systems are a vestige of racial paternalism. And what's the ultimate irony of today's system? We're ensuring that would-be white athletes get worse educations than would-be black athletes. For the people who claim that race isn't a factor at all when it comes to the disparate treatment, shouldn't they be outraged by the relative lack of education of NHL and Major League Baseball players?

I won't hold my breath waiting for the hue and cry of national outrage to swell up on a tide of indignation. The fact that you won't either should really make you reexamine why you don't care that only 26 major league baseball players have college degrees, but you think all basketball and football players should go to college.

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