College football if O'Bannon wins the lawsuit

The Game Room
61

Are you being serious? Those are not licensing bodies. Those are employers. Anyone is free to become a professional athlete provided that they can find someone who’s willing to pay to watch them play. There’s no licensing procedure.

So if Donald Trump wants to set up a new professional football league, he can do it, and he can damn well hire anyone he wants. He doesn’t have to look for people who are licensed to play football.

(The only exception might be boxing—I have a vague idea that some state governments require you to apply for a license from the government in order to fight.)

They (arguably) gave him his compensation for what he did while he was a student. (I argue that they didn’t, but let’s put that aside for the moment.)

That doesn’t mean that they should have the right to demand he sign a contract that allows them to sell jerseys with his name on it or films in which he appears for the rest of eternity without ever compensating him. Every time the University of Tennessee sells something in which Manning’s name or image appears, Manning should get a royalty.

(With some exceptions—a purely historical documentary or book about Tennessee football, for example that Manning happens to appear in just because as a factual matter he played for the team. The difference is whether the person is buying something because it’s a University of Tennessee football thing or whether because it specifically has Manning’s name, identity, image, likeness, etc., on it.)

And, really, the Payton Mannings of the world are a red herring. It’s really all about the rest of the players who don’t make it to superstar professional status. There are people suffering all kinds of ailments today—joint injuries, brain injuries—all caused by their college football careers—who are essentially broke, but their universities can make money off their identities.

But let’s ban lifetime contracts of adhesion like these and let the players bargain for just compensation and see what they can get. I’d like there to be a College Athletes Association that negotiates with the NCAA over this kind of licensing.

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If you want to place colleges in the role of “employers” then they should be held to even higher standards of conduct with their “employees.” As the dominant entities in their industry, they should be held to higher standards in negotiating terms than agreeing to fix wages among themselves and offer such blatantly one-sided contracts (to a largely poor and ill-advised pool of potential “employees”). But I don’t think they’re employers, they are schools offering an activity and offering such activity should only require that a person be a student in good standing; it’s a ridiculous stretch to believe that said offer automatically assumes control of every manner of a student’s financial life.

A law firm can endow a scholarship for a promising law student and even pay him a stipend and engage him in an internship. The school will hold that kid up as a role model for every other potential student considering the school. Universities are not in the amateurism business except when it is convenient for them to be so, it would appear.

Since the model was constructed on an illegal premise, maybe schools should reconsider being in the sports business at all. The Ivies don’t seem to have much of an endowment problem even though the games are lightly attended and yet they probably offer more intercollegiate sports than the football factories. (Side note: I have to come back for a moment to a stunning earlier argument that an Olympic model for college sports would be bad because Northwestern or Yale might win the national championship. I’ve been asking myself for two days why this would be a bad thing. Are only the Alabamas and Oklahomas allowed to win titles?)

True, the Ivies are special and certain schools, particularly in the SEC, depend more heavily on football revenues than those in, say, the Big 10. But competitive strength is already strongly correlated to sports and donor revenues, that recent New Mexico-Western Kentucky title game notwithstanding.

Bottom line is that probably nothing earth shattering changes. There will just be a new element participating in an increasingly commercialized arena.

(My apologies for not handling the quote editing function very well. In no way did I intend to misrepresent Zakalwe’s arguments and I hope I haven’t)

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And you’re free to work for any law firm that will hire you as a lawyer. Oh, not admitted to the bar? Damn.

He sure can! Hell, he can recruit kids right out of high school if he wants. Wonder why he doesn’t?

Ummm…yeah, that’s exactly what it means. Again, if I invent something during work hours tomorrow, my company has the rights to it FOREVER. I’ve received my compensation, which I agreed to when I signed my employment agreement. That’s the way it works.

Speaking of red herrings…nice appeal to emotion there. Not that I disagree that more should be done for those guys (hell, I live in a major college football town, I KNOW some of them personally), but they also aren’t generally the guys generating any revenue for the University either. Their “royalties” wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. For most of them, you’d need a good Web search or a serious fan to even know they played.

So we’re back to a pro league with a player’s union and a CBA. Didn’t I say that back around Post#27?

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Seriously? So what’s the equivalent of the bar exam in the NBA? Are all those Americans who are playing in Europe or anywhere else suddenly not professional?

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Yes, and that’s the difference between the practice of law and sports. States regulate the practice of law and require you to obtain a license through a state-sanctioned licensing body before you can practice law. And once you’re licensed you can sell your services to anyone who is willing to pay your price. And if all the law firms collude to dictate your maximum compensation, they will be in violation of antitrust law. And the licensing body is a neutral party that is regulated by the State. See how that’s completely different from football?

You tell me. Whatever the reason, it’s not because they are waiting to sit for an exam given by the State Football Players Board of Licensing.

You don’t understand how that’s not at all parallel? They’re not capturing rights in your IDENTITY forever. It would only be somewhat more equivalent if they required you to sign away all your rights in your future work in the field for the rest of your life, even after leaving their smoky. And that contract would be struck down as unconscionable. Schools should not be able go capture the right to commercially exploit a person’s identity beyond the time that they employ him or her – and that’s only if they recognize him as an employee rather than a student-athlete.

Let them collectively bargain for their compensation as employees with labor protections and see what they can get. (Or prohibit the NCAA from being a de facto cartel in the market for athletes) If it’s nothing, then so be it. But identity rights contracts of adhesion that are perpetual should be illegal.

So we’re back to a pro league with a player’s union and a CBA. Didn’t I say that back around Post#27?
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If we agree, then what are we arguing about? Any sports entity that generates revenue is already a professional league and should have to bargain with the players over compensation.

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If anybody’s salaries should be regulated and capped, it should be the coaches, who are usually the highest paid employees of their states. You could grant all 85 scholarship football players at Alabama a $30,000 annual stipend for half of Nick Saban’s salary.

But winning with Alabama’s “amateurs” is just too fucking important to consider doing that, I guess. And it’s not really about providing scholarships in other sports or raising money for a library wing, in the end it’s all about beating the other school because the fucking boosters won’t stand for anything else. How much a couple of kids on the field get from the boosters or from signing autographs or from the school itself won’t matter a hill of beans once the game kicks off; from that moment on it’s just about beating Rival U.

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Coaches are grown, professional men being paid to do a job that will in turn bring the school a lot of money.

To me, the obvious answer is revenue sharing. The kids deserve money. The money can be paid in both stipends as well as a trust, available upon graduation. The stipends also need to be reflective of the cost of living. Someone playing for UCLA/USC needs more money than someone in Stillwater or Tuscaloosa.

Another possibility that I could get behind - one that also challenges the amateurism notions would be for kids to start negotiating the terms of their scholarship offers. Typical, run of the mill athletes would only get the plain vanilla benefits but the Johnny Footballs and Andrew Lucks of the world would be compensated accordingly via “stipends”. It really would be sports league-lite as inevitably a cap structure etc. would have to be placed to promote parity.

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Another question: is the money divided equally among all of the players, or do the “stars” have a right to more?

What about the TV contracts for the smaller sports? Yes, they exist - watch a Comcast or Fox regional sports network; they’ll show the occasional women’s volleyball match, wrestling dual meet, or softball game. (They’ll show baseball as well, but in some parts of the country, the college baseball programs actually turn a profit.) The conference-based networks will also show things like gymnastics meets.

How about ESPN’s / CBS College Sports’s contracts, especially for NCAA Championships? Are the athletes entitled to a share of that money? (This could be a problem for ESPN, as I am under the impression that it has one contract with the NCAA covering all of the championships it airs, including women’s basketball, men’s ice hockey, baseball, softball, wrestling, men’s lacrosse, and men’s and women’s soccer.) The NCAA would have a serious problem with this, as it uses the men’s basketball TV contract money for various things, including giving quite a bit of it back to the schools based on how their conferences did in the previous six tournaments.

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Those are great questions. Though just because there is no easily discernible answer doesn’t mean that a court won’t order somebody somewhere to come up with a starting proposal.

Maybe the school can state right up front what portion of television schools an individual or sport will receive, make it part of the recruiting package. School A may say to a volleyball recruit, “we apportion 2.5% of all television revenues (last year $XXX quadrillion) for payments to the volleyball team, as decided by the team itself in its manner of choice.” To the hotshot football recruit, “we allocate 38.7% of tv revenues (last year, blah blah) to the football players, who for the last three years have decided to divide it up equally. We also have local business owners with endorsement opportunities, you may already have been contacted by some of them.” (snicker)

These are not insurmountable obstacles, they are dealt with every day in the commercial sector – which includes just about everybody. Universities are in the business of training professionals, they should be able to handle negotiations like these.

Of course, the shit hits the fan the first time an All-America RB transfers to his school’s rival because he was made a better offer there. :smiley:

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Of course, there’s the one-year sit-out you have to take into account…and in a case like this, it would apply to all sports, not just football. (There is a provision in the NCAA Division I bylaws (and I’m pretty sure Divisions II and III have similar rules) for a “one-time-only” exception to this, but (a) the school the athlete is currently attending can veto the request, and (b) the athlete still cannot play football (if going to an FBS school), men’s or women’s basketball, or baseball for one year. I have a feeling the school would veto any waiver of the sit-out rule in this situation.)

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This should be found illegal as a form of collusion.

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Including high school sports?

74

Yes.

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Or maybe. I’ll have to think about it.

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So are college athletes, except for the fact that no one will allow them to be paid. Coaches, on the other hand, are often state employees and have been granted special dispensation by the states to circumvent their standard pay structures. Had all of the states stuck together and enforced their policies without exceptions, we would have coaches making $150,000. You don’t see the hypocrisy here?

77

Any attempt to rationalize the American college-sports monster runs into a paradox:

The finest entrepreneurial minds in the world, working on the problem over generations, have been unable to figure out a way to make large amounts of money off of young athletes at a developmental stage of their careers, with one exception: American colleges and universities.

Elsewhere, minor league and D-league professional sports aren’t that big of a deal. Sure, minor leaguers can fill up a small stadium at reasonable prices. Always have, always will. But they don’t pack 100,000-seat arenas at premium prices and generate huge licensing fees and national and international TV contracts.

Unless they play at American colleges. Then, the sky is the limit.

Why are colleges so successful? First, they exploit the natural rooting-interest people develop from attending (most of us) one and only one college. Second, they exploit the deep-seated association, especially in Southern and rural states, between the state university and the state itself (which often has no major-league professional teams.) Third, and most important, they operate independently of the major professional leagues. Players don’t get shuffled from one team to another in mid-season like professional D-leaguers. For the most part each player commits to one team and unless he is a top star or a transfer stays there for three or four years. This makes it much easier to sustain rooting interest.

If you openly professionalize college sports, if you adulterate the connection between the teams and the universities, if you eliminate eligibility standards and transfer rules, you destroy the factors that make it successful. Yes, the players will be in a better bargaining position, but there will no longer be anything worth bargaining for. The best players will sign huge contracts with major-league teams, play in obscurity for a couple of years in a D-league, like baseball minor leaguers, and then get promoted. The second-tier players will play in the D-league for peanuts, wash out, and have to work for a living like everyone else. The third-tier players and the non-revenue players will have nothing, not even a scholarship.

Which is why I predict minor changes, at most, from this lawsuit. There may be a few tweaks around the edges–maybe the NCAA will stop using player names and likenesses. We will, I predict, eventually see small stipends. But the house of cards isn’t coming down any time soon. Too many people benefit from it (coache$, university fundraisers and administrators, female and non-revenue athletes and coaches, marginal players, fans and merchants in rural and small-town areas, TV networks) and not enough people are hurt relative to the alternative of minor-league professional football and basketball.

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I don’t think the law particularly cares about any of those issues you mentioned. If a ruling screws the whole system up, that the NCAA’s problem.

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I don’t think a few of the athletes making good green will change the average fan’s perception and level of support even a little bit. We make fine noises about the sanctity of amateurism in college sports but when that whistle sounds none of you are gonna give a happy crap that the quarterback gets a nice check from a booster club every month. You’re just gonna want him to score on the other team’s nicely compensated defense.

The programs that care most about winning and participating at the highest levels of financial involvement will continue to dominate college football. The schools have been conducting an illegal operation all along without even needing to.

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There is however nothing then to prevent him from being drafted and paid by the Green Bay Packers, just as players who play for the Kane County Cougars are drafted and paid by the Chicago Cubs while they develop their skills.