Saturday, April 14, 2012

March Madness

              For this blog post, I decided to watch the video titled Money and March Madness. This video focused on what is called “March Madness’ which is “the period of the annual NCAA college basketball tournament, with the majority of the competition set in March”. (Dictionary.com) After watching this short video I am able to say with complete confidence that “March Madness” is completely media driven. The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) claims that 90% of its revenue comes from all the media and ticket sales from men’s basketball sales. In total, it produces about 700 million dollars a year.

                Sonny Vaccaro was an American sports marking executive. Originally Sonny set up a deal with Nike persuading college coaches to encourage their players to wear Nike attire, and in return they would be compensated for it. Although Sonny’s thoughts about the industry contradicted with his morals, he continued with his work anyway. Vaccaro believed that players would often get short changed, and that everyone seemed to be making money, but the actual players. With this being a true fact, Sonny eventually quit his job, and decided to fight against the industry. Today, Vaccaro’s thoughts remain the same. Basically college athletics are a commercial enterprise and players do not receive all the benefits that they should be. One athlete found out that years after his basketball career in school his image was placed in a video game. He was not asked permission or paid for the use of his image, and this is purely wrong.

Currently Sonny Vaccaro is working with top lawyer students to sue the NCAA. They believe the documents college athletes are forced to sign deny them of crucial rights, and scam them into a lifetime of not being recognized when they clearly should be. I personally am not a college basketball fan. I know very little of them game, and pay even less attention to media surrounding it. After being informed of the issues at hand, I stand strong next to Sonny’s decision to sue the NCCA and hope for the best. On the other hand, this is a media driven society, so I’m really not surprised that this is happening.

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