Excerpted from INDENTURED: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Aganst the NCAA by Joe Nocera and Ben

Strauss permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. Copyright © Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss.

PROLOGUE

''WHY DO THEY HATE ME SO MUCH?''

Ryan Boatright was in trouble with the National Collegiate Athletic Association even before he played his
first game as a freshman point guard for the University of Connecticut Huskies.

Boatright had arrived at UConn in the fall of 2011from Aurora, Illinois, a town of two hundred thousand
an hour west of Chicago, with a per cap- ita income that ranks it 261st among Illinois cities. His mother,
Tanesha Boatright, was a single mom struggling to raise four children; her job as a customer service
representative for a health care company earned her a paycheck that was not much better than
minimum wage. Her father had been a well-known local track coach, and she'd run track herself in high
school, before she got pregnant with Ryan when she was seventeen. It was obvious early on that her son
was also athletically gifted; despite his lack of size-he never grew taller than five foot ten-basketball was
his game, and both he and his mother came to see the sport as his ticket to a better life, not just for
himself but for his family. When he was thirteen, he at- tended a basketball camp run by Tim Floyd, then
the basketball coach at the University of Southern California. Floyd became so enamored with Boatright
that he offered him a scholarship on the spot. (Floyd resigned a few years later, after being tarred by a
recruiting scandal.) At East Aurora High School, Boatright started as a freshman; three years later, as the
team’s senior point guard, he averaged over 30 points a game and was named Illinois’s co–Mr.
Basketball.

Like many top high school athletes, Boatright also played for a local Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team.
His coach, Reggie Rose, the brother of Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, was a long-standing friend of his
mother’s, and over time he became a father figure to Boatright. During a particularly stressful period in
the Boatright household, Rose got Ryan out of Aurora, taking him to California, where he spent several
days working out with other good players—another thing the best high school players commonly do.
When Tanesha bought a used car, a 2008 Chevrolet Impala she needed to get to her job, Rose helped
her with some of the payments. And when Boatright went on his recruiting visits—he made four trips in
all, including one to the UConn campus in Storrs, Connecticut—Rose covered the cost of an additional
plane ticket so that Tanesha could go too. Most people would view these as acts of generosity, a friend
helping out a friend with fewer resources. But the NCAA, which had been tipped off about the money
Rose gave Tanesha, saw them as potential—nay, likely—violations of its “amateurism” rules. That’s
why Boatright was in trouble.

Since the early 1950s, the NCAA has served as the powerful overlord of college sports, with one central
tenet: that college athletes, whether gymnasts or quarterbacks, must be unpaid amateurs, for whom
sports is little more than a sideline to their academic pursuits. As the NCAA puts it in its bylaws, “Student
participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from
exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.”
The NCAA’s long-standing insistence that amateurism is the “core value” of college sports has always
been more than a little hypocritical— as has the idea that the NCAA was somehow preventing (as
opposed to enabling) their exploitation. Has there ever really been a time when the athletes in the so‑
called revenue sports that are the focus of this book—football and men’s basketball—weren’t expected
to put their sport first and their studies a distant second, while helping to bring glory and money to their
school? Has there ever been a time when college athletes weren’t at some level exploited? Long before
coaches made millions and the NCAA turned its annual basketball championship into the financial
windfall known as March Madness, critics have complained about the pervasive commercialism of
college athletics.

But with the NCAA now generating over $900 million in annual revenue; with athletic conferences
owning their own lucrative all-sports cable networks; with coaches making $5 million (Jim Harbaugh,
Michigan football) or $7 million (Nick Saban, Alabama football) or even $10 million (Mike Krzyzewski,
Duke basketball); and with ESPN paying $7.3 billion over twelve years for the rights to the new college
football playoff, the idea that the players who make all this possible should not much more than a
scholarship isn’t just hypocritical. It’s offensive. An economist named Dan Rascher, who is a character in
this book, estimates that college sports in its totality generates some $13 billion, which, incredibly, is
more than the most lucrative professional sports league in America, the National Football League.

Before we go any further, a few facts: More than 460,000 NCAA athletes participate in twenty‑four
sports across its three divisions. Supporters of the status quo like to point out that the system as
currently constructed maximizes opportunities for the largest number of athletes—think of all the
scholarships for tennis players and swimmers. Our book is focused on the 15,000 athletes playing top-
level football and nearly 5,500 in Division I men’s basketball, because they produce the revenue that
pays for everything from those expensive football coaches’ salaries to track and field scholarships.
Indeed, most schools’ athletic department budgets remain separate from central administration. But
while the college sports establishment squeezes every last dollar out of their marquee athletes—
weekday night games, schools jumping from conference to conference, and a rash of corporate
sponsors—they must remain amateurs, while a little more than 5 percent of them go on to careers in
the NBA or NFL.

The NCAA has consistently refused to acknowledge this hypocrisy; instead, it has held tightly to the
centrality of amateurism, even as it has encouraged the commercialization of college sports in every
other way imaginable. And over the years, it has enforced its amateurism rules with a Javert-like
zealotry. Until very recently, athletes could receive nothing for playing their sports beyond their athletic
scholarship, plus a Pell Grant if they were poor enough to qualify. (As this book details, the NCAA has
recently allowed schools to add a stipend to cover the “full cost of attendance” beyond the
scholarship itself.) Anything else these athletes receive that the NCAA deems to be the result of their
skill or fame, no mat‑ ter how inconsequential, is considered a violation of its rules and is there‑ fore
punishable.