Bent or broken?

In yesterday's online edition of USA Today BIG Ten conference commissioner Dan Beebe said that: "There's a lot of motive to make some fundamental changes . . . more sweeping changes than we've probably seen in the past,", addressing the current NCAA scandals evolving in Football (f.e. Ohio State) or Basketball.

While this is certainly interesting, I wonder what he actually means by that. Are NCAA officials willing to finally change the rules or are they just going to make monitoring and sanctions even more powerful? As economists have pointed out (Brad Humphreys, University of Alberta), the NCAA might have been able to enforce their rules because there was whistleblowing going on among the member universities. If one university violated recruiting rules, a competitor who knew about the violation called NCAA officials. This maight have taken place in the case of USC, Boise State and Ohio State.

Now let us ask the following crucial question: Is it surprising that "scandals" like Ohio State emerge? From an economics point of view it clearly is not. Players will be willing to violate the rules because they know that scholarships are not even close to their marginal product where their salaries should be. Colleges, on the other hand, can raise revenues and success on the field of play by giving players illegal incentives to join their program. By not paying athletes colleges can extract rents and act like a monopoly. Is it really necessary do force players to sell championship memorabilia in order to get a fracture of what they actually deserve in terms of salaries? Is this really a violation worth prosecution?

The NCAA rulebook states that athletes are meant to be "amateurs". Anybody can seen that a collegiate football or basketball player is everything but an amateur. So why not rethink the approach and adjust the rules? It might be time to do so.