But if you allow players to make money off their images, you open up an enormous can of worms. What is to stop a booster from paying players huge sums of money to promote Honest Used Cars, Inc.?
They would pay the schools.
All schools get paid equally? Do the Div II schools get money? Does Northwestern get the same amount of money as Ohio State? What about the military academies? Do they get money from the NFL? They are Div I too. And what happens when the basketball programs want the NBA to pay for its players too?
The schools with successful programs would get paid. And ideally they would be spun off into independent, professional minor leagues with no more than nominal affiliations with their schools of origin, eliminating the fraudulent concept of a student-athlete for revenue-generating work. For the rest of the schools, college athletics would revert to what it should be – an amateur intramural recreational activity – not a cheap minor league for professional sports.
I was reading today that USC’s transgressions were not as bad or numerous as The Ohio State Cheaters. But self identification and self punishment are encouraged. Ohio figured that much out. USC was not very wise and is paying for that. It is a strange system.
I don’t know of many “regular people” that have even a remote chance to make it to the NFL. If you’re trying to suggest that the average college football player that has no chance of making it to the next level get nothing out of a free college education and the greatest interview session you could ever dream of, you’re delusional.
And your constant braying of “and crippling injuries, too!” is a terrible “won’t someone think of the kids” argument. It’s extremely rare these days for schools to pull scholarships of players who fall to career ending injuries.
Wow, you completely missed the point of my post, not once but twice.
I was responding to your assertion that the kids have an option to go to the CFL and play football. Last time I checked, the CFL was in whole other country. Yep, an 18 yr old kid has got a great chance of success, as an ex-patriot. The CFL is not going to cater to a kids every need like the college system or military would.
Who said anything about pulling scholarships? I am talking about the crippling ankle, knee, hip injuries. I know plenty of former college football players that are so crippled that cannot walk without severe pain.
Yes, CFB players have a great opportunity to do something while they are in school. they have tutors, yadda yadda yadda. Despite what some have insinuated, IMO, most of them do have success as students. And yes there are failures, a lot of them, but you seldom hear about the success stories.
But the football players are being exploited, big time, especially the blue-chippers. Schools, Conferences and the NCAA are making millions and millions off them.
I don’t know how to fix it, and IMO, any fixes to the current status quo will go horribly wrong, whatever they are. the problem is bad, but I think any solution will be worse.
Schools are making millions off the players… except for those schools (and there are MANY of them) which are losing money on athletics.
You know who’s really making money off the players? The bowls. Bowls are completely corrupt and pay their directors millions to stage one event per year. That’s money that SHOULD be going to the schools.
OK, so you have a D1 school that has 80 football athletes on full scholarship. If they have a good team maybe 3 or 4 or 5 of them will get a big payday in the NFL.
So here’s the problem. You make the argument that the rest have the benefit of a free college education at a major institution. Consider that in order to maintain that scholarship they have to devote 20 hours a week to practice not including conditioning and physical therapy. What this really leads to is essentially holding down a full time job while taking a full load at college. Conditioning, therapy and tutoring take a lot of time.
Yes, for a few it works and is a bowl of cherries. For others, it is a grueling experience.
In D2 it is 20 hours a week including therapy and conditioning. A little better, not a full time job, but still a lot to ask of a teenager who is going to college with little hope of a professional career.
Bye bye, Sweater Vest!
Jim Tressel resignedfrom Ohio State.
Edited to add: Scooped as I was typing it in.
There are a lot of people who work that many hours in college and it doesn’t even come close to paying full tuition at a lot of those schools. It’s hard to feel too bad for them on that front.
Too bad he didn’t fire Gene Smith as a last act before he left.
Yeah but those people get paid what the market will bear for the jibs they are doing. They aren’t faced with a cartel that collides to keep their compensation fixed at an artificially low level. Student athletes are highly skilled to the point that they generate significant revenue. And except for the few who go on to the premier professional leagues, they are at their peak earning potential in that field. It’s irrelevant that they might get a degree that might sometime in the future get them a job in some other field. They are performing now in a venue that is already generating revenue and they ought to bs free to bargain for a share of that revenue in the same way that NFL and NBA players do.
how bad is it when they asked Tressel to resign? It seems OSU was a very bad boy during his reign.
Fortunately for Tressel, his retirement was vested.
So the college system both caters to the players AND exploits them. Quite the quandary! But you’re right - and that’s the exact point I was making. Not only is the CFL not going to cater to these kids, but they wouldn’t have a prayer of starting. They’re simply not talented enough at that point, and need to undergo a tremendous amount of training, experience building and coaching - things that they receive, for free, in college.
- I suspect that you really don’t know “plenty” of former college players who are crippled. (Unless you’re saying you know “of” them - but the numbers of that aren’t as high as you’re suggesting.) 2. Even if you do, I’d gladly have undergone a similar risk to have had my education paid for. 3. Everyone knows the risks - if they don’t seize the opportunity of a college education to be able to fall back on, then what chance did they have before?
This argument is simply garbage. Players are getting no more exploited than line workers at FedEx are being exploited for FedEx to pull a profit. And at the end of the day, Those millions are being put back in to support student-athletes in every other sport, and going back to the school in general.
When players stop trying to walk on to football teams to be the 3rd string punter without any hope at all of getting a scholarship, and undergo all the risks associated with that, then I might consider that players are being exploited.
Edit:
I take it all back! 
The law prohibits Fed Ex from forming a cartel with all the other companies in it’s business to collude on compensation. The same should be true of the NCAA. Its function should be limited to setting the rules of game play and scheduling.
Furthermore, Fed Ex doesn’t require it’s employees to contract away their rights in their names and identities for the rest of their lives. If nothing else, an individual student athlete should get 100 percent of the compensation from the use of his or name or image on jerseys, in video recordings, in video games, etc. The schools should not get a penny of that.
I can see where the schools should get some, (it is their jersey, and helmets etc) but the Conferences and especially the NCAA should not.
They would get compensation for the use of their marks but none for the added value of any individual’s name or image. For example, the difference in price between a jersey with no individual player identified and a jersey with a person’s name (and in some cases, a uniform number, if it’s obvious whom that number was meant to identify).