Historical Basketball League: Exposing The False Choice Between Education And Income

NEW YORK, New York -- The Madness of March is in full swing. High seeds have fallen, and brackets have been busted across the land.

The 68 schools involved in the NCAA Tournament represent big cities, rural communities, and everywhere between. Their recruits come from all 50 states and numerous foreign countries. But despite their differences, they are united by one fact: None of the hundreds of players who make the tournament possible will be paid a fair wage for their labor.

A distortion of this truth functions as the hallmark of the amateurism model of collegiate sports. The artificially fixed price of the kids’ labor — a college scholarship wherein more time is often spent practicing and playing basketball than attending classes or studying — is linked with youth and purity, imparting it with an allure that belies its reprehensibility.



The Historical Basketball League (HBL) wants no part of this model. Founded by sports economist Andy Schwarz with the goal of entering the college basketball market to influence a shift toward negotiated deals that are fair to both players and leagues, the HBL is designed to directly address the nasty truth behind America’s romance with amateurism.

In Schwarz’s words, the NCAA is an economic, price-fixing cartel: “The problem that every economic cartel has — and I use that in a sense of a group that fixes prices, generates profits and then shares the profits among themselves, which is what amateurism is — if you’re not letting the market distribute the profits, then you have to form a committee to distribute the profits, and there’s always an odd man out.

“Surprise, surprise, in America, it’s HBCUs.”

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) form a healthy portion of NCAA membership. Conferences like the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC) are made up primarily of HBCUs. However, according to Schwarz, in 2016 a Division I HBCU could account for only $950,000 in NCAA revenue across all sports, while a Division I SEC school would expect to see $41 million. For a Division II HBCU, that number is a paltry $37,000.

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