Ooops, mixed up my Dopers. Apologies, I tried to strike it but missed the edit window.
Nonetheless, I don’t think pointing out the risk of unintended consequences qualifies as fear-mongering. Free Agency in professional sports did have a massive effect on those industries. Whether it is a net positive or negative can be debated, but it was in fact a colossal change. I’m predicting this will have an even bigger impact…maybe for the better, but I think a lot of what makes college sports generally popular will be gone. We don’t know what will replace it.
Yeah it’s possible things will get worse. Things can always get worse! TM
But things aren’t great now and I don’t think there’s any certainty they’ll get worse. And the idea that the college sports industry might suffer doesn’t really cause many people to shed a tear. It’s like arguing that you can’t enforce wage laws on employers or some companies may go out of business.
And it’s okay if you mix me up with someone else, there are other “A” posters.
I challenge the statement that thing’s aren’t great now. The NCAA is most certainly a flawed and generally fucked up organization, especially in it’s upper ranks, yet on balance college athletics still aren’t a barren wasteland of pain a suffering like many folks here are implying. The animus towards the NCAA offices and executives seems to be totally clouding the discussion.
Today, there are 150,000 students getting athletic scholarships. Not all are full-rides, but on average kids are getting $20k per year. The full-rides are worth double to triple that at most major schools when you factor in room and board. If you’re a 4-year athlete who graduates you’re getting the cash equivalent of maybe $200,000. That’s real money plus you get an education that comes with a lifetime of increased earnings to boot.
Certainly for some players who are getting featured on ESPN every weekend, that’s probably them getting significantly underpaid. But not for most…most aren’t generating the equivalent amount of revenue even in the revenue-generating sports like football and basketball. You could say it’s a socialized program where everyone gets the same thing in spite of their relative contributions. Calling this “exploitation” is a absurd statement.
There’s of course the ancillary cultural benefits to the non-athletes on the campus and community. I’m not sure why these people keep getting derided in this thread. What are they doing wrong? Why would you take so much joy in seeing their preferred mode of entertainment taken away? Maybe you don’t value it…but how would you feel about someone gleefully celebrating the loss of a theater program, a music festival or some other beloved event that people care about? Honestly, the tone here is ugly, tribal and bordering on prejudiced.
People are casually attacking people who like college sports simply because a very small percentage of the athletes (who they can’t wait shit on for their entitlement and selfishness in almost every other regard) are probably unfairly compensated for their play? WTF?
Probably…but I laid on the snark so better safe than sorry.
If there was a theater for young people that brought in millions of dollars and the kids weren’t allowed to get a dime because they were student actors, and couldn’t work professionally because they were too young to be professional actors (in an alternate universe), yes I’d celebrate the demise of that system. Why shouldn’t I?
Zero, unless it includes actual dimes, or I can trade it for actual dimes.
The issue isn’t so much the 145,000 students toiling in obscurity in return for a valued scholarship. It’s the 5,000 students who are playing in front of 100,000 fans, broadcast on national TV, who are at the core of an entertainment product worth billions of dollars. Those students get a scholarship that is devalued due to their athletic commitments, and often their lack of academic skills.
They are used to promote the school and generate revenues, tossed aside when their usefulness is over, and denied the opportunity to generate earnings from their notoriety.
The first two items there are simply business, the last one is selfishness. Selfishness borne out of the enormous amount of control the NCAA and Schools exert over student athletes, far beyond the simple quid pro quo of payment for services rendered.
Of the 130 (soon to be 131 with the addition of Tarleton State, which leads us to another point – why are these small schools joining D1 if there is no hope for national success?) D1 schools, only the same handful are dominating on the field from year to year. Alabama doesn’t recruit the same kids that Georgia Southern does.
A new pay structure for the athletes may result in greater stratification within conferences but I don’t really give a fuck if Oregon State can’t hang with Oregon because of Nike money. I care that young people are denied their full commercial liberties so that people at Oregon State think they have a chance to win that game every now and then.
Fracturing the conference affiliations as they now stand might even be a good thing, if some of the conference game scores I’m seeing are reflective of a dire lack of competitiveness already. Maybe college sports needs a new system, one where schools play their financial peers yet have the opportunity to advance as a result of their success, or be demoted, let’s call it “relegated,” if they can’t hang. If only such a system existed and had proven durable.
This sounds like a bad thing. Luckily for the schools, the NCAA (i.e. the schools) is in charge of who is allowed to pay who, and will certainly ban schools from paying players directly.
The very last thing in the world any of these schools want is to sign players to paid contracts. They are being dragged kicking and screaming into allowing players to make any money at all. What this rule does, what it is intended to do, is to relieve the pressure on schools to pay players directly.
Why would it? It will probably have the opposite effect. Today the ability to play college ball is the market pressure that drives up professional minor league deals. If it collapses it certainly won’t increase salaries in the pros. If it does become a money machine, it will be for a greatly reduced pool of players creating a bunch of haves and have-nots.
It also is thought to increase applications and enrollment because prospective students value having DI sports on campus. It’s basically a marketing program which generates year round “earned media”. The scores for DI games tend to make the local news which builds a brand and if you play a big-time school you get mentioned in the national broadcasts. Having a program is thought to be cheaper in the long run than buying all that ad space. In the example above, NMSU is going to get a ton of air time when they get thumped by Alabama.
Maybe, I’d say that’s the optimistic version of the outcome. I could go on a separate rant about the BCS (and now the playoffs) and how it dramatically amplified the stratification we see today, but that’s a different thread. College sports were better when they were more regional, and this will move things even farther away from that time.
This highlights another pitfall. If these athletes are able to profit from being an influencer and/or spokesperson, you will expect them to be spread even thinner. Focusing on grabbing as much short-term cash as they can in between practice and school, these kids will have one more pressure that harms their academic performance.
As an aside, how long before the first college athletes start trying to make money camming or doing other sex-industry stuff? That’ll be a fun episode of OTL.
The schools can pay football and basketball players because they get big TV and merchandising deals. Baseball doesn’t have that. Colleges won’t have the money to pay baseball players any more than what they get in the minors.
Also, college players lose most of their negotiating power once the graduate. A top high school draftee can always say, “pay me a bigger bonus or I’ll go to college.” Same for a college undergraduate. Once they graduate college, though, they lose all that leverage.*
Further, baseball players in college don’t have the name recognition of players in the big two, so merchandising is not going to bring in much.
But if a college is selling bobbleheads and jerseys of their quarterback, it’s just wrong for them to not pay a royalty to the player. I would say that any offers should go through the school.
*The Mets used this fact this year to go way over slot to sign a high school player who insisted on a big bonus or he’ll go to college. To make up, their later rounds were drafting college seniors who had little negotiating power.
It’s a dynamic system, you’re trusting the status quo too much. Because of the economics and the limitations today, this is true. But, things might change. It won’t change fast, but it could change dramatically.
Hypothetical. Florida State has a very big football program that brings in a lot of money. Florida State has a big tradition in college baseball and a decent fan base already and thinks it can expand on that and become the 800-pound gorilla of college baseball. They siphon off all the surpluses from football, maybe stealing some from basketball too, and throw it at the top high school prospects and create a college baseball dream team. They promote the hell out of it and win 4-5 straight championships and actually start getting significantly increased fan interest and revenue in the new streaming market. Baseball replaces basketball as the #2 revenue generator ahead of hoops. Cal State Fullerton and UNLV see this and start ramping up their programs, and so on.
This is how markets are built, just because one doesn’t exist today, doesn’t mean it can’t change. Hell, maybe the concussion stuff strangles the talent pool and college football dries up of it’s own accord and baseball becomes the safe harbor. Once colleges are able to pay players minor league baseball immediately becomes direct competition, and the schools have deeper pockets and better partnerships to win that fight.
The obvious answer is, Division I men’s basketball money - about half of which is divided among schools without regard to how well their conferences do in the tournament.
