Sure. I just had this discussion over a cup of coffee with the resident sports nut here at the office. I’m not saying that nothing is wrong. Something clearly is. I’m saying that it has to be dealt with from the top down, from the NCAA down to the boosters who funnel cash to these kids with no fear. The solution is NOT to make it a professional sport.
I have a couple problems with this. First, the Pell Grant is a program of the fedeal government, so it can’t really be counted as compensation. Second, the college gets to determine what the value of tuition, room and board is. Most important, though, is the fact that players are forced to accept their compensation in kind, in goods provided by their employers.
Too late. It’s already a professional sport. The only question now is how the players will be compensated.
If you want to make it an amateur sport, then universities will have to give up any and all profit from ticket sales, TV licensing, licensed goods, and any other revenue source.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it a professional sport. High Schools sell tickets to their football games, that doesn’t make the high school player a professional. The system works as is, it’s not likely to be changed.
Who does it work for, exactly?
If high schools were earning millions through licensing and other sources, it would be a different story. If high school coaches were paid million, it would be another story. Heads of “amateur” ventures don’t get paid like college coaches.
You’d have to be joking to say it “works as is.” It doesn’t work at all except as a way to profit from the labor of players without fair compensation. And there will continue to be scandals as people find ways to give athletes some kind of compensation under the table.
Why do you keep coming back around to this? You have not established that a full-ride scholarship, free room and board, free medical care, free travel, free physical training, etc. are not “fair compensation”. All that is more than fair. Now, if you want to talk about controlling the flow of money, and how universities have to use it, we can. But a college player on scholarship is in no way being used unfairly.
There’s no requirement for players to sign to play at a school, yet they keep on doing it. At Ivy League schools they don’t even get scholarships, but yet they play there anyway.
Paying players won’t stop cheating, unscrupulous people will always try to get an advantage.
We can’t assess fairness because collusion prevents market forces from determining what the universities are willing to pay. I’m not a free market nut, but in this case the iron grip of the NCAA obscures any semblance of player value. Maybe that is a good thing. The socialist in me thinks it’s all dandy since the have-nots (or rather have-less) are getting more than they are worth while the haves get less. On the other hand the capitalist in me thinks it is unfair that those who contribute more get less than they deserve.
Then again, it is quite possible that all of them are getting screwed and even the have-less are getting lower than what the university would be willing to pay.
If what the players were getting really was “fair,” then they wouldn’t need restrictive rules on the flow of money. The fact there is value to be had through other means is proof of added value that the NCAA prevents from being realized.
All compensation is unfair when the NCAA colludes to set caps on compensation across the board. Only when individual athletes can bargain freely for compensation and the schools are required to compete with each other on compensation packages can fairness even be contemplated. Only when athletes are free to solicit deals without losing eligibility can fairness even be contemplated. For a start, basketball and football players should be at least as free as baseball players to pursue deals. Only when schools are barred from enforcing ridiculous publicity contracts can fairness be contemplated.
It is not an issue of “flow kf mone.” So long as colleges are earning revenue based on players’ performance, the suggestion that this is an amateur endeavor is a farce. Athletes should be treated no differently than any employee of any revenue generating enterprise.
“Fair” is a nebulous concept when applied to prices (or wages). WHat is fair or unfair is the process not the result. If players could shop their talents they may actually make less than a scholarship, but that would still be fair, as would getting more. What is fair is being able to get paid what you are worth in an unrestricted market, not a colluded market.
Please define “fair,” for the purposes of this discussion.
And as I have already shown, in most cases Minor League Baseball players make less than the NCAA scholarships are worth.
You make a hell of a lot of assumptions about your “fair” market.
How many fair markets have alumni donations paying for buildings and coaches?
How many rely on a captive audience of students and alumni, year in and year out?
The rooting spirit for the alma mater?
Shit, How many minor league ballclub’s are getting donations from fans, above and beyond ticket sales?
You seem to think you can have you cake and eat it too, that the business and the money won’t change. Right now the college system is a separate entity from the pros in people minds; the National Championship is relatively the same as a Superbowl ring. You turn it into a blatant feeder system, you turn the National championship into the Triple A championship, the leading money winner on the Nationwide Tour, and yet you still expect the same profit.
That is becauses Minor League baseball contracts are not subsidized by under-paying football players.
That isn’t proof of anything. All that says is that B is greater than A. It makes no indication of the inherent fairness of B. For all we know A is also unfair or more likely, an irrelevant number.
You are not making sense. How a university achieves revenue is irrelevant. All I’m saying is that we can’t know whether the compensation is fair or not. The value of a player has been declared by fiat via the NCAA – not by market forces. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe it is not.
The rules might have a purpose, but that purpose is not because the players are already fairly compensated.
If you remove the rule and the players can generate more money then the rule is suppressing wages thus making the wages unfair. If they remove the rule and the players manage to earn the same amount, then the wages are fair. My point is that the rule itself obscures any ability to assess fairness.
How is it irrelevant? You seem to think paying the players would be somehow separate from the entire economics of NCAA football. People want to pay them, let them be paid, everything will be fine. College football will be exactly the same only the players will have money.
What if you lose half the fan base? Lose the majority of your TV revenue?
What if becomes a second tier sport like AA Baseball?
What if all the alums conclude “If the school has enough money to pay players, they don’t need mine”
Where is the money coming from now?
You seem to be ignoring the potential for the wages to drop. Or the potential for wages to spike for a few years, but the net effect is to kill the golden goose. That’s why I keep coming back to minor league baseball. Ask yourself, why can the NFL and NCAA Football coexist as huge money making empires, but MLB and minor league baseball cannot?
College athletes do get stipends for living expenses above and beyond the scholarships and room and board they get. At the U I work at there was some controversy about a story in the school paper which claimed the stipends were being abused. The school chose not to investigate the claims. These stipends are in addition to the clothes, backpacks, etc. that the school provides.
Athletes get free dorm rooms and they get preferential treatment from student housing. It has happened many times durning my time here that there are more students than dorm rooms so the extras get shuffled off to motels until space opens up. Athletes never are at risk of this. They are paired up with other athletes in their rooms. If there is an odd number on the team the odd man out gets assigned a random roommate. As this is the official term it has led to the term “random” being used pejoratively by athletes to describe non-athletes.
Athletes also get to go on trips around the country and stay at nice hotels all for free. The football team also gets put up in fancy hotels on the days before home games.
I have had numerous professors and secretaries complain to me that they are under constant pressure from officials in the athletic departments to raise the grades of failing athletes to keep them academically eligible.
They guy whose office is next to mine was on athletic scholarship at a well known east coast school and he was told not to worry about his classes when he started. He passed every class without going to any of them. He got to see the whole country and got a free degree.
Athletes get preferential treatment form admissions. They get to use facilities that are off limits to everyone else. They get special tutors that work only with athletes. Athletic recruits get wined and dined on the school’s dime. I’ve seen this include trips to bars (the recruits were underage of course) and to strip clubs.
And they leave school with no student loans.
These and other problems will go away when you dispense of the farce that they are student-athletes. Stop pretending that they’re there to be students. Drop academic qualification requirements. Just fucking pay them to do what they’re really there for. If they choose to take free tuition in exchange for their service, let them defer actually attending classes until after they’ve finished with playing.
Then what you are suggesting is that wage suppression is a necessary condition for revenue – which is inherently unfair.
I get to make millions of dollars, but you only get to make 10 cents. If I pay you more the entire economy collapses and I don’t make money and you don’t make money either. I think the term is “exploitation.”
No, what I am suggesting is that characterizing it as “wage suppression” is inherently biased. Especially when the closest comparison to theoretical minor league football, is the current minor league baseball system, which is not a huge money maker for the players.
What I’m also suggesting is that it’s not as easy as saying, just pay the players let the fair market work it out, when the entire system is built on the idea of amateur athletics. The fair market that makes you think these kids would make money is an artificial, black market. You think they will make money because of their worth on the black market. You have no clue what their worth or the worth of NCAA football would be within a true fair market.
It’s like you’re saying, the fair market value of pot is $300 an ounce, which means if we legalize pot we can grow it in our gardens and be millionaires. Yes, pot is bought and sold at $300 an ounce, but the price is determined because the overall illegality creates an artificial market. Just like these kids are worth money, but it’s the overall ideas of amateur athletics, and state pride and alma mater, that create the artificial market. You start tearing that stuff down, you don’t know what you will have left.