William Watson: Universities should not do pro sports

University of Manitoba Bisons, Manyang Tong floats the ball off the glass and in for a basket over University of Alberta Golden Bears Nate Waldron in Edmonton. Photo by Greg Southam/Postmedia

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“I went to a fight the other day and a hockey game broke out” is an old joke from the 1970s, when there was almost a fight a game in the National Hockey League. Now there’s less than one every five games, so the joke has less currency.

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But you might replace it with “I went to a professional football game the other day and a university appeared” — though dimly, off in the mist, as if through a beer glass, darkly.

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It’s a joke that to date applies only in the United States. Because of a series of court decisions in that country, star university athletes can now make big bucks. The bottom-ranked player on Sporting News’ list of the 30 highest-paid college footballers of 2025, a Notre Dame running back, made $1.5 million, more than Notre Dame’s president (who is a priest and in any case gives his money to his order). 

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University sports started with students playing games intramurally, for fun. Then schools started playing each other, with professors and others volunteering as coaches. McGill and Harvard played two rugby games in 1874 that are usually credited with bringing intercollegiate football to the U.S. Not until 1901 did the Harvard Athletics Association, independent and alumni-funded, first pay a coach. By then Harvard — Harvard! — had already won three national football championships.

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Over time, as alumni accumulated, incomes grew and radio and then TV increased coverage and money flowed into the mass-appeal college sports. Leading programs have long compensated players with “full rides” in terms of scholarships and board and, beyond that, as occasional scandals have revealed, cash, cars and other delights — these last always under the table, since college athletes were supposed to be amateurs. The hypocrisy of major programs making major money off their amateur athletes has been a main motivation for reform, a.k.a., turning athletes into pros. In fact, as noted by two heavyweight Harvard economists, David Cutler and Edward Glaeser, in a recent study of how universities have survived for nearly a millennium, on balance U.S. college sports lose money. 

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To date, most new above-board payments have been for “NIL,” which stands for “name, image and likeness,” though in many cases they are far from nil. Quite reasonably, a California court ruled in 2019 that an athlete’s NIL should be theirs to profit from and many now do. Schools are also beginning to share the revenues sports bring in, paying athletes directly. And easier rules about transferring from one school to another mean there’s now effectively a free-agent market for players. The University of Michigan won this year’s men’s national basketball championship with a starting lineup of five transfer players. 

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Cutler and Glaeser trace the evolution of universities as guilds of professors in the late Middle Ages all the way down to today. Their theory is that there’s a fluctuating tension between the professoriate and the people put in charge of the money so as to keep the professors from dissipating it. (The theory works better in the U.S. context: here the education minister runs everything.) 

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In this view, tenure came along — relatively recently — as a way to attract the quirky intellects who make for good researchers (these two good researchers say) without having to pay market salaries for them. Through the years, professors’ control over universities ebbs and flows as the money people are more or less adept at raising funds. “As Gilded Age philanthropy massively increased the scale of college building,” Cutler and Glaeser write, profs were content to cede power to boards.