In addition to the ill-treatment of their ability to receive funding, sports organizations also have taken advantage of athletes. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, is the overseeing body over athletics at the collegiate level. College sports is now a booming business, and the NCAA reaps the benefits. According to Jonathan Beer, “For the NCAA, March Madness is its most profitable business, earning roughly $900 million in revenue. The media companies signed a 14-year, $10.8 billon deal in 2006” (Beer, 2015, para. 5). People making money off of sports is just fine; the real problem is that the chief money-makers don’t make a penny. This is because, as Mark Richt, president of the NCAA, says in his interview for the PBS documentary, …show more content…
To begin, some teams have privately funded their own stadiums much like the Jets and Giants did in New York, and it can be done even at lower levels of professional athletics. Ted Roelofs illustrates that the West Michigan Whitecaps, Class A affiliate of Major League Baseball’s Detroit Tigers, built their stadium without any public money (Roelofs, 2014, para. 3). In addition, legislators have attempted to regulate the power for sports organizations to receive subsidies, but these efforts have failed and require more bipartisan support. However, both actions have been in the minority, so there is much to be desired from both organizations and representatives in response to the …show more content…
It has to be able to put its own interests over their favorite teams. This might mean losing your favorite local team to another city, but if every single city in America rejects exploitative plans, everyone benefits from an equitable system. The same goes for the NCAA: people have to realize the injustice that college athletes face in college sports and take action towards educating others. Another alternative would be urging representatives or individuals with legal capabilities to illegalize the practices and rules of the NCAA. All of these solutions require that the public has a legitimate interest in fixing the problem, and that will be the biggest battle of all. Convincing the public to act towards causes that have relatively minute effects on them (especially the fight for student-athlete rights) will be difficult for reformers. Thus, public service announcements and more media coverage on major news services could be the first step to changing the