Should Our Black Scholar Athletes Give Up Their Opportunities

Troy Rolling
Troy Rolling

Should Our Black Scholar Athletes Give Up Their Opportunities

By Troy Rolling


Frederick Douglass once said, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." Words to live by. That means we will not stay silent when organizations dress up a bad deal as justice and ask Black kids to pay for it.


The fight started with the SCORE Act, a college sports bill meant to bring order to the chaos around NIL, transfers, athlete compensation, and conference rules. It had bipartisan support, including from some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who had voiced support for it, before politics swallowed the conversation. Then came the boycott demand.


The NAACP has urged Black athletes, alumni, and fans to put pressure on Southern schools over the fight on voting rights and redistricting. The CBC then reversed course on SCORE. Not because the basic college sports questions had changed, but because of anger over the Voting Rights Act fight and the silence of college athletics leaders.


Separately, Senators Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz, along with Senators Eric Schmitt and Chris Coons, just introduced the Protect College Sports Act, which would let conferences pool their media rights under a new federally supervised structure. These are not small asks. They are demands that Black athletes in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi put their scholarships, their NIL earnings, and their professional futures on the line for a Washington fight that, when you look at the actual numbers, does not deliver what its backers promise. They are being asked to gamble their futures on somebody else's leverage play.


We will not stand by while that happens.


Nobody should pretend college sports are perfect. The system is messy, and athletes deserve clear rules, real opportunity, and fair treatment. That is why Congress got involved in the first place. But the answer to a messy system is not to hand Washington a giant new lever over the conferences that are actually creating opportunity for Black athletes and families. Black families across the South know what these programs mean.


They have watched sons and daughters earn full scholarships, get access to elite training and medical facilities, national exposure, and for many, a path to a professional career that would not have existed otherwise. The SEC's revenue model, the one this legislation would pull apart and redistribute through a federal board, is what pays for all of it.


Now here is where it falls apart. The boosters behind the pooling idea have promised a windfall, somewhere between $7 billion and $9 billion in new revenue, depending on whose projection you believe. An analysis commissioned by the SEC and Big Ten says that number is a fantasy. And history backs them up. After the Supreme Court struck down the NCAA's old game-pooling setup, the conferences tried a pooled arrangement once before, and it produced less money, not more. Schools pulled out, and the whole thing fell apart. So Washington wants to "fix" college sports by taking money from the programs that built the strongest platform Black athletes have ever had, and betting it on a theory no broadcaster has ever paid a premium for.


So who actually benefits? Not the athletes. Not the programs. Not the families in SEC country.


The Congressional Black Caucus wants you to believe it has earned the right to make this call. Its members will tell you they have stood in the gap on voting rights, on criminal justice, on economic equity. We do not have to pretend that record is spotless. The CBC has been wrong before, on crime legislation that devastated Black communities, on trade, on education, on Right to Life. Being right on Democrat politics does not make you right on every bill that comes along. History is full of well-meaning policy that delivered the opposite of what it promised.


The moral framing here is familiar. The policy underneath it is thin.


Douglass did not bow to institutions just because they claimed the mantle of justice. He asked the harder questions, he looked at outcomes, and he refused to let the language of liberation get used to dress up arrangements that served somebody else's interests. We are asking those same questions now.


When the NAACP calls for a boycott that puts kids' futures at risk over a media rights dispute, we ask who benefits from that pressure. When the CBC demands that a conference take its side on voting legislation as the price of political goodwill, we ask what that has to do with college athletics. When CBC members who once backed the SCORE Act now treat the same debate as a weapon in a separate political fight, we ask who pays the price. The answer is not Washington. It is Black athletes, Black families, and Southern programs turned into collateral damage in a fight they did not choose.


We will not pretend those questions have comfortable answers.


The Frederick Douglass Freedom Alliance stands with Black athletes in the South, not with the Politics of Washington D.C. that would sacrifice them to score a point. We stand for the scholarships, the programs, and the investments that generations of Black athletes helped build. We will unite with anyone who wants to protect those things. We will not unite with those who want to use them.


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