Our ep on Ed O'Bannon's NCAA lawsuit touched on this:

the 2 revenue sports — football and men's hoops — generate billions of dollars in revenue for the NCAA and the biggest conferences; the players are MOSTLY Black men at unis that have almost no Black male students otherwise. https://twitter.com/alexandbre/status/1334244243796324352

>50% of the players of Black men; <5% of the undergrad populations are.

The NCAA's yearly operating budget is literally paid for by the revenue generated from the men's basketball tournament every March.

so at any given time, the most well-known undergrad at one of these schools is a Black male student, at universities that are otherwise terrible at enrolling and graduating Black male students.

Those numbers are for the Power Five conferences, by the way.

But yes, the Black men who ARE on those campuses make those universities a ton of money, and they're playing even during a pandemic because the universities and the NCAA wants that money.

And, of course, those players are unpaid.

and they aren't just unpaid, but people will flip tf out at the suggestion that they should be paid.

nevermind that medical care for the injuries they accrue as players become their responsibilities once they are no longer "student-athletes."

...will these universities and the NCAA assume the costs of any COVID-related disabilities these players might end up with because they're required to live and stay in dorms on campuses that are otherwise shut down?

relatedly: https://bit.ly/2I7AZ6d 

Aside, but this was one of the wildest things about the way folks fawned over the coach in CHEER. She was clearly exploiting these kids in a dangerous sport that generates no revenue. It seemed to make a lot of the power dynamics pretty plain.

Also, don’t let the hypervisibility of Black athletes fool you: you’re talking about 80–100 Black student-athletes concentrated in football, basketball (women’s and men’s) and track.

But a large university might have two dozen sports teams; the VAST majority of whom are white.

When you think about the hundreds of athletes on a big campus who play lacrosse and tennis or baseball or softball or swim or fence or do gymnastics, you find an ecosystem of athletic scholarship programs that are functionally set aside for well-off white students...

...and that are paid for/subsidized by the money generated by the Black athletes in the revenue-generating sports.

Black athletes who are treated as provisional students and told they should be grateful for the opportunity to play for State or whatever tf.