As conversations continue to heat up around whether NCAA college athletes should be paid beyond their scholarships, former Michigan standout Chris Webber and former Indiana star Isiah Thomas made some provocative comments when addressing the topic on TNT's "Players Only."
While discussing the structure of the NCAA with revenue generating sports like football and basketball, Thomas started the conversation comparing scholarships to "indentured servant contracts" where salaries are capped at wherever the athlete's scholarship is set without taking into consideration the amount of money the school receives as a result of the college athlete's talent.
"What the NCAA has become and what it is right now and how the contracts are basically structured, they're indentured servant contract(s)," Thomas said. "You really give up your name, likeness, so forth and so on and you're not paid for it. At some point in time, they were able to sell you on scholarship and education being a thing that you basically were compensated with, but revenue has continued to rise and we all understand this as NBA players because right now in college, their salaries are capped."
Thomas continued saying it's "unpaid labor" based on how much revenues in football and basketball have increased ahead of the "salary cap" represented by what players receive in return.
"When you look at the increase in revenue over a period of years, you've got billion-dollar (television) contracts, but you've got unpaid labor, or if you want to say their scholarship is their compensation, then their compensation has been capped at a certain level so it's really uneven," Thomas said.
The conversation shifted when Webber weighed in while offering a solution to the structure of the NCAA.
“(The NCAA) is a total scam," Webber said. "I say put 10 percent of all profits into a stipend and give it to college athletes. It’s not about giving them another hundred dollars. My grandfather grew up on a plantation. I don’t know if people know what that is, but the premise of the plantation was that next year will get better. We’ll never let you see the books. We’ll never let you see how much cotton you pick. This is just how much you’re worth. College and speaking to the great Bill Russell, we had a conversation and basically he said college is slavery. College is that, and so I love that I'm going to be part of this conversation big time."
Thomas agreed, drawing parallels from the business model of a plantation to the NCAA.
"NCAA, their business model is based on a plantation business model," Thomas said. "And it’s probably the only plantation that’s allowed to exist legally in the United States right now."
