A hundred and fifty dollars worth of groceries.
That’s all it took for then-senior linebacker Donnie Edwards to be slapped with a one-game suspension right in the heart of UCLA’s 1995 football season.
A few days earlier, Edwards, an eventual NFL Pro Bowler and the team’s star defensive player, had done a radio interview in which he talked about how limited stipends for athletes left him and others with very little money for food after accounting for rent expense.
Shortly thereafter, the groceries appeared on his doorstep. Edwards claimed to have no knowledge of the groceries’ origins, but it was later found they came out of an agent’s pocket, and thus were termed an illegal benefit.
Then-freshman Ramogi Huma took notice. Edwards’ fellow linebacker had dropped weight upon arriving at UCLA – as it turned out, three meal swipes a day didn’t match his calorie intake from the five to six meals a day he used to have as a high school football player, and he and his teammates became even more frustrated with Edwards’ suspension for a seemingly petty offense.
That summer, after newly hired coach Bob Toledo informed his team that the NCAA prohibited UCLA and other schools from covering summer workout medical expenses, Huma knew something had to change.
“That was kind of the last straw,” Huma said. “That’s when I started talking to my teammates and also players from other schools that I had gone to high school with, and … that’s how it all began.”
What was to come, first in the form of a registered student group on UCLA’s campus in 1997 and later a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, was the National College Players Association, which today has student-athlete members from roughly 150 Division I college campuses.
At UCLA, the advocacy group has had a powerful lineage of representation for the Bruin football program, from former cornerback Alterraun Verner, to former punter Jeff Locke, to current quarterback Brett Hundley. As an active member in the NCPA’s Players Council, Hundley participates in a weekly conference call with Huma that covers a broad range of topics related to student-athlete well-being.
The NCPA also has several key victories to its name of late, including the September 2012 passage of SB 1525, commonly known as the Student-athlete Bill of Rights, which guarantees scholarships and medical coverage for student-athletes at California’s higher-profile athletic institutions who have been injured.
In recent months, however, the NCPA’s focus has shifted slightly to the hotly debated issue of player compensation and what defines an athletic scholarship.
Huma and the NCPA teamed up with Dr. Ellen Staurowsky, a sport management professor at Drexel University, to produce “The $6 Billion Dollar Heist,” a study released in March 2013 that attempted to estimate, based on revenue percentages for athletes in the NBA and NFL, the fair market value of Division I athletes in revenue-earning sports, as well as determine observed shortfalls of full-ride scholarships given to student-athletes.
“I think we’ve created a system that has presented athletes with situations that are very, very difficult for them to accept,” Staurowsky said of the NCAA. “Whether it’s endorsements or trust fund (student-athlete compensation), I think we need to be looking at this from a labor perspective, and really envisioning this as a system that has systematically denied athletes’ statuses as employees.”
The study found that UCLA, which brought in slightly more than $25 million in football revenues, and a little more than $8 million in men’s basketball revenues during the 2011-2012 school year, carried student-athlete fair market values of $109,510 and $293,946 per player, respectively. After factoring in cost of living for the average UCLA student, the study also found an average full-ride scholarship shortfall, or a difference between scholarship payouts and actual cost of attendance of nearly $3,400 per student-athlete per year.
Hundley claims the shortfall among athletes on scholarship stems from a high cost of living in Westwood, particularly with rent and parking, that isn’t paid entirely by stipend money.
“If you live on campus, you don’t get a stipend,” Hundley said. “If you live off campus, you get a stipend, but you’ve got to understand that rent is (high), so you may be left with $200 or $300 to buy groceries and do other things.”
The rising redshirt sophomore quarterback, while grateful for the scholarship money he receives, held that the shortfall has had a real impact on the lives of some of his teammates from low-income backgrounds, especially when part-time employment is not feasible given the day-to-day time constraints of football.
“Some players are running around here where they can’t do anything but stay on campus,” Hundley said. “Their parents may not have enough to give them, or if they are getting Pell Grants or anything like that, they have to give it to their parents to help them out in the first place.”
Shortfalls for UCLA athletes, though, could be eliminated sooner rather than later, after California Assemblywoman Cheryl R. Brown amended AB 475 in March. The bill, which was co-sponsored by the NCPA and now sits in the Committee on Higher Education, would grant student-athletes at California universities earning over $20 million or more in media and licensing revenues – namely Cal, Stanford, UCLA and USC – a yearly participation stipend of $3,600.
The NCAA, which could not be reached for comment after multiple phone calls and emails from The Bruin, attempted, unsuccessfully, to implement an annual per-athlete stipend of $2,000 last year.
While battles over player compensation and publicity rights wage on, and while the NCPA’s support on a campus whose average graduating senior was $18,000 in debt in 2011 remains unclear, Huma insists that regardless of the outcome, the aesthetics and atmosphere of collegiate sports will be left untouched.
“Everything would change, but nothing would change,” Huma said. “Everything would change in terms of fair treatment of college athletes, but nothing would change because the Rose Bowl’s still going to fill up on home games, Pauley Pavilion’s still going to fill up on home games and people will still be rooting for their favorite teams.”