Opinion: A harsh reality lies beneath the glory of March Madness

Editor’s Note: Theresa Runstedtler is a historian of race and sports. She is the author of the recent book “Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA.” The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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It’s March Madness, an American institution. Fans from across the nation watch with bated breath, hoping that their favorite college teams advance to the next round and that their brackets aren’t busted by the unexpected win of an underdog squad.

The three-week-long basketball extravaganza is the NCAA’s billion-dollar cash cow. In 2022, when Kansas defeated North Carolina, 72-69, to grab the title, it was the most-viewed NCAA Men’s Championship game ever telecast on cable TV, and last years’ tournament averaged a whopping 10.7 million total viewers. (Several of the networks that televise the tournament share a parent company with CNN.)

Yet, beneath the glitz and glory of March Madness lies a darker reality. Division I men’s college basketball players, as a group, still face staggering precarity and lack proper remuneration for their work.

The history of the game itself suggests that the sport’s racial demographics have shaped the tolerance for this status quo. As of 2018, an NCAA database showed that the majority of Division I men’s college basketball players were Black. Historically speaking, the final shift away from amateurism coincided with what African American sociologist and activist Harry Edwards dubbed the “revolt of the Black athlete,” a surge of activism that included boycotts and protests at hundreds of colleges across the nation.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Division I NCAA athletes in revenue-generating sports like football and basketball (growing numbers of whom were African American) became amateur in name only, as their performance in sport became inextricably connected to their compensation. In 1967, the NCAA ruled that athlete scholarships could be taken away from players who voluntarily withdrew from sports. In 1972, they repealed the freshmen ineligibility rule, which barred football and basketball players from playing in their first year of college. The following year, they replaced four-year scholarships with one-year renewable grants tied to…