Monday on Fox Sports 1’s “Undisputed,” NFL Hall of Famer and Fox Sports 1 analyst Eric Dickerson took aim at the NCAA amid reports that prominent college basketball teams have been paying players.
Dickerson, who was part of Southern Methodist University’s pay for play scandal in the 1970s and 1980s, said the NCAA is “slavery” because white men are making money off the backs of the athletes who receive free housing, free education, food and more for their play.
“The NCAA, they’re the biggest hypocrites of all because this has been going on for decades, even before I started playing football, basketball,” Dickerson explained. “[The] NCAA exploits not just black kids, white kids, Asian kids, anybody who plays anything basketball, baseball or football-related because they make all the money and the kids aren’t allowed to make money.”
He continued, “You have to understand a lot of these kids come from broken homes … that’s their way out, and all of a sudden you have to go to college for one year — now, I know that’s an NBA rule, but I feel like the NCAA is right there, ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back. You give me some, I give you some.’ It’s a way for them to really exploit those kids. And what are they going to say? ‘Well, we give him a scholarship and housing.’ ‘Oh, thank you, master. I appreciate that for me getting the housing and something to eat. It’s more to it than that because they’re making all of the money.”
Dickerson then took his “thank you, master,” comment a step further.
“It’s just so frustrating to see how the NCAA has exploited all of these kids. And I just feel like they are the biggest criminals in the world, and all of this starts at the top. All of this starts at the top. I gotta just say it: All these white guys sit up there making all this money off the backs of the black and white players, they do, for basically, it’s slavery. It really is slavery,” said Dickerson.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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