Blue White Illustrated

Maybe it still is, to a degree. But attitudes are changing. Penn State's other potential first- round pick, outside linebacker Micah Parsons, announced in early August that he was forgoing his last two years of eli- gibility to prepare for the draft. The Big Ten hadn't yet pulled the plug on the season when he revealed that he was leaving, so it seemed unlikely that he would change his mind after the league reversed course in mid-September. Sure enough, Parsons held firm, even as other star players throughout the Big Ten such as Minnesota's Rashod Bateman and Purdue's Rondale Moore were rescinding their decisions to leave early and began returning to their teams. A decade or two ago, a decision by an All-America player to leave a team with legitimate championship aspirations would not have sat well with title-hungry fans. But after James Franklin reaffirmed in late September that Parsons would not be coming back, the online reaction I saw was muted. There was a lot of resigned acceptance, some lamentations over what might have been, and quite a few well wishes for a player who, despite en- joying only one season as a college starter, will most likely hear his name called in the first dozen picks of the draft next April. Most people seemed to accept that Parsons had simply acted in his best in- terests and that a lot of us would do the same thing if we were in his shoes. It helps, of course, that the terms of the debate over who owes what to whom have long been shifting in favor of play- ers like Parsons. And the pandemic has only accelerated that trend. Over the past eight months, we've seen stark illustrations of just how badly the NCAA and its member schools need the steady flow of revenue that their two moneymaking sports generate. It's been estimated that the cancellation of the men's basketball tournament last March cost schools about $375 million. The 350 schools in Division I had been expected to divide $600 million from the NCAA but instead received only $225 million. The cancellation of the football season would have had an even more dire effect on the balance sheets of schools throughout the Power Five conferences and beyond. According to an estimate by Washington University in St. Louis last spring, a full shutdown would likely cost the Power Five more than $4 billion. As we now know, the season has not been shut down. The Big 12, Southeast- ern and Atlantic Coast conferences never wavered in their determination to play this fall, and the Big Ten recently joined them, with the Pac-12 also set to return in early November. Conference officials will tell you that the decision to stage a season was driven by advances in testing capacity and by the desire of the players themselves to get back on the field. Both of which are true. But what's also true is that many of those schools can't weather a disruption in their football revenue without having to make major cutbacks. At Penn State, Intercollegiate Athletics imposed department-wide pay cuts this past summer ranging from 5 to 10 per- cent. Hopefully, those cuts will stave off the need for more-draconian measures, such as shutting down nonrevenue sports programs. But there are no guar- antees given the unprecedented circum- stances. One of Penn State's fellow Big Ten members, Iowa, announced over the summer that it was getting rid of men's and women's swimming and diving, men's gymnastics and men's tennis. Stanford, a school with a $27.7 billion en- dowment, is set to purge 11 varsity sports at the end of the 2020-21 academic year. And the NCAA itself has enacted severe belt-tightening measures, including fur- loughs for 600 Indianapolis-based em- ployees and a 20 percent pay cut for senior management. Those moves are a sobering reminder of the degree to which the entire institution of college athletics relies on the labor of players in its two revenue-producing sports. Some people would call it unpaid labor, but that's not really true. At Penn State, a year of in-state tuition costs $18,454. A year of out-of-state tuition is $35,984. Throw in room and board, and we're talking about as much as $36,000 in annual expenses for Pennsylvania res- idents and $53,000 for nonresidents. That's more money than most Penn State players will ever make playing football, and it doesn't include the life- time of increased earnings that their de- grees will bring them. Since 2015, when the first batch of Franklin-coached players left PSU, 26 Nittany Lions have been drafted. It's an impressive total, but it represents only a fraction of the players who have passed through the program under his watch. Even as Penn State grows more adept at developing draft-worthy players, most will leave University Park for the world GRAND FINALE Parsons played his last game for Penn State in the Cotton Bowl, winning Defensive MVP honors. Photo by Steve Manuel >>

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