Sky Views: The US college sports system sucks in poor, young black men and rips them off

Hannah Thomas-Peter, US correspondent

It is March Madness in the USA - when the best college basketball teams face off in an intense tournament.

But it always makes me reflect on a different kind of madness.

Put simply, it's this: America's university sports system sucks in young, disproportionately poor, often black men and rips them off.

US college sports, overseen by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a billion dollar business.

It is also the pool from which professional leagues like the NFL and the NBA draft their players.

With few exceptions, young athletes who want to make it must go through the college system.

Their recruitment to a successful college will help that school and the NCAA earn tens of millions of dollars in ticket and kit sales and media rights.

And that's not even counting the priceless contribution to a school's reputation for sporting prowess, which in turn attracts more students, more talented recruits, which in turn helps earn … yep … more money.

The coaches of basketball and football teams in these places are often the highest paid employees in the state, earning millions of dollars each.

Know how much student athletes earn as a result of their talents and contributions?

Nothing.

It is not allowed.

They must remain, in name only, "amateurs".

Not only is it the NCAA rules that they cannot be paid while colleges earn millions from their labour, but they can't even profit from their own names, image or likeness.

As they play for free, risking injury just ahead of the sporting prime of their lives, they can't sign a t-shirt, accept individual sponsorship deals, or benefit commercially while they are part of the NCAA.

Many can't even get a side job in order to earn some extra dollars, not that they would have time on top of training and school demands.

To me, this is, objectively, exploitation.

America's university sports system sucks in young, disproportionately poor, often black men and rips them off

And it's not about the stars who make it big, who survive what amounts to a brutal farming system for human beings.

It is about everyone else who gets chewed up and spat out and left behind.

NCAA 2018 research shows that of the 73,063 players recruited to play top level college football that year, just 253 were drafted to the NFL.

That's 1.6%.

Basketball is even worse.

18,712 young men were recruited, but just 50 of them were drafted, a rate of 1.2%.

Of course there are those who don't go on to play their chosen sport professionally who will say the NCAA provided a path to a world class education and opportunities they would never have previously thought possible.

But many of the players in the college system will reflect something else entirely.

In basketball and football in particular, young, often black men from low income families have described arriving at university and lacking the means to feed themselves, let alone being able to benefit from a free education.

The least lucky might even get injured and, depending on which school they go to, have scholarships and healthcare benefits revoked.

If they can't play, they're not valuable, right?

Calls for reform are growing.

But the solutions available to the only system in the world that melds commercially lucrative elite sport and university educations are not immediately obvious.

There is a marked absence of leadership on this from the NCAA, an organisation whose basketball division has recently been under federal investigation for corruption.

Basketball mega-star LeBron James is speaking up.

James, who is so good he very unusually skipped college and went straight to the NBA, put it like this: "I do know what five-star athletes bring to a campus, both in basketball and football.

"I know how much these college coaches get paid.

"I know how much these colleges are gaining off these kids ... I've always heard the narrative that they get a free education, but you guys are not bringing me on campus to get an education, you guys are bringing me on it to help you get to a Final Four or to a national championship."

I'm an outsider when it comes to matters of American sport.

I've never played basketball or American football.

Frankly I'm still trying to learn the rules of both.

But I can see the NCAA, very clearly, for what it is.

It is presiding over racial and economic injustice on a grand scale, and it should be ashamed.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Martha Kelner - Horse racing has a breath of fresh air in Bryony Frost