As the NCAA March Madness Tournament kicks off this week, my 21st podcast is with Joe Nocera, New York Times columnist and author of the new book, Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA.
Joe has been a highly respected business writer for the Times, was a columnist on the op-ed page, and now writes about sports business for the paper. When Sports Editor Jason Stallman sent a memo announcing Joe’s new duties, he wrote:
The biggest story in sports these days is the money that is sloshing through college sports, quasi-legal gambling, and professional soccer and football. It is the story of college players pushing to be paid like professionals. Now, to bring further power to that coverage, Joe Nocera, one of the country’s best business writers and one of the people who has helped us command that coverage, will be rejoining the newsroom to write a column for Sports about the business of sports.
I know a little something about money and college athletics as a supporter of Oklahoma State University’s football team.
Joe says in the podcast that big time college athletes are employees in all but name. “They are on campus solely to make money for the colleges. And I think they should get paid.”
Joe also said, “If one team decided to not go out for the Final Four and stay in the locker room, that would change the system. In about an hour.”
But, I wanted to get beyond Joe’s new sports beat in our discussion. I asked him the biggest problem facing American business today and he said, “income inequality.” We also talk about how to leverage “the cheapest energy on the planet,” by changing our education system to help students choose between college and trade school as their first post-secondary stop.
We need to upgrade and improve our education system. “Cheap energy trumps cheap energy,” and better preparing high school students to enter the job market means we have to give them a choice of post-secondary training which might be college but might be a trade school.
I first crossed paths with Joe in 1982 when he was assigned to cover my take-over attempt of Cities Service Oil Company (now CITGO) – a company that was 40 times the size of my company, Mesa Petroleum. We’ve kept in touch through the ensuing three-plus decades, and for this episode of the Pickens Podcast, we talk about those “shareholder activism” days as well as Joe’s new book about college sports and money.
Listen to this fascinating conversation by subscribing to my podcast on AudioBoom or iTunes and let me know what you think via Twitter @BoonePickens.