Slippery Screen: Players Watching Video on their Own Time

A couple of football players said it was easy for them to come to my 8 o’clock economics class because they’re already up watching football videos.  If these football players (and their coaches) are rational economic agents then they should choose how much video to watch by weighing the benefits and costs.  Since it’s become easier to watch video, via technological improvements such as Hudl, we would expect them to be watching more video.

 

Of course, NCAA rules say that coaches cannot ask their players to spend more than 20 hours per week on sports.  They cannot ask—that’s the key phrase.  According to the NCAA’s survey of college athletes, football players in division 1 spend, on average, 42 hours per week on football.  Division 3 football players clock 33 hours per week.  Players of other sports and both genders clock a little less time but only a little less.

Kenyon’s football team and all of its competitors subscribe to Hudl, which allows teams to more easily trade film, which is a nice example of network effects.  High school sports teams also subscribe, which allows, for example, military dads and moms serving abroad to watch their kids play sports. Lowering the cost of watching video, making it easier for teams to trade videos and expanding viewership all sound like good things, right?

For the most part, we think they are, so we should all be happy.  In the jargon of economics, lowering the cost of watching video increases social surplus.  Indeed, most of the athletes themselves are happy with how much time they’re spending: only 21 percent of division-1 football players wish they spent less time on athletics, and only 11 percent of division-3 players.  Similar sentiments are expressed by players of other sports. 

Are there reasons why college athletes may be overindulging in colleges sports, consuming a bit more than is economically efficient?  We think so.  And, technological improvements, like Hudl, could make the inefficiency a bit larger, despite providing large net benefits.

Coaches may subtly—or not so subtly—put pressure on players to spend their own time doing things like watching videos.  For example, a coach at a division-1 school recently described his players saying “The good ones, they spend an extra two or three hours a week looking at tape so they can get better.”  What player doesn’t want to be viewed as a good one by his or her coach?  Given that the upcoming football game may be salient to players than an upcoming exam, little nudges could have big effects on the allocation of their time.

 

And, there is the possibility that technological improvements like Hudl spur an arms-race that makes players worse off.  It might be that everyone would be better off stringently imposing limits on the amount that players watch video.  After all, the NCAA rules were originally adopted to solve this sort of problem.  The recent NLRB ruling on the Northwestern case sites the amount of time that players watch film as one of the reasons it thinks that the players should be viewed as employees.

We think that innovations like Hudl are a good thing, making most of us better off.  But, coaches, parents and faculty should be wary of players getting too much of a good thing.