You aren’t wasting anyone’s time, Oak; be at ease about that. At the very least, you’re helping me learn more about this bill and maybe consider things I hadn’t before. If you weren’t someone who is able to make cogent arguments and take new information into account you might be wasting time but I don’t recall you being that type of person.
I’ve read the bill that passed the state Assembly a few times now, and it seems to only authorize players to make money from their “name, image or likeness” and to secure an agent for those purposes. I’m not sure it would enable an athlete to get a job at a car dealership or at a shoe store etc., and if it doesn’t then I would agree that is a problem.
BUT I am fully okay with the things the bill does clearly authorize being authorized.
I don’t think this is intended to fix the problem of having college athletes making money for their school and yet being unpaid, basically serving as free labor. That’s a bigger issue that’s more complicated. It’s just trying to open up a way for some athletes to make money indirectly from their college sports career.
Think of it in terms of professional sports. The top tier of talent gets endorsement deals and makes money they way, they could even make more money from endorsements than their actual salary. Not all pro athletes make money that way, in fact the vast majority don’t. If there was a problem with the way player-team contracts were being handled, a law involving endorsements would have very little effect on those contract problems, and would probably do nothing to fix them. Yet that doesn’t mean that such a law isn’t still useful.
To use a crude metaphor, when your car needs an oil change and tire rotation you don’t skip filling the gas tank. Just because a solution won’t fix all problems, or even the biggest problems, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pursuing. As long as that solution doesn’t interfere with fixing the bigger ones.
In this case I don’t think it will. Your concerns about this not helping most college athletes are exactly why it won’t get in the way of finding a solution for compensating players for their work. The NCAA isn’t going to be able to point to endorsements (assuming they eventually allow them across all of their schools) and declare that students are now compensated, precisely because the vast majority of athletes still won’t be.
There are other efforts along those lines aside from this bill, with some recent success:
The NCAA’s “argument” is, if anyone is paid to play, then they stop becoming student-athletes and start becoming athletes who may or may not be bona fide students. No, I don’t think a one-and-done basketball player has any intention of being a serious student, and neither does Mark Emmert.
If there is some “universal” agreement as to athletes being compensated for licensing themselves, the NCAA might accept it. The problem is, trying to implement it without the people doing the paying being “rewarded” by the schools in question. (A school wants to pay a basketball recruit $100,000 for a season? Not a chance. A shoe company wants to pay the same recruit $100,000 to use him in ads? Nothing wrong with that, right? And if the school “just happens” to pay the shoe company an extra, oh, I don’t know, how about, say, somewhere around $100,000 “as a bonus,” well, that’s just business, right?)
Remember that the NCAA has 1107 schools - not just the 80 or so that make up the “Power 5” plus Notre Dame and a handful of men’s basketball power teams - and it has to look at the best interests of all of them. However, don’t expect very many athletes outside of these schools’ football and men’s basketball players to be paid.
Besides - if any school does want to pay players, it has to keep four words in mind:
Title. Nine. Still. Exists.
Or do the top two basketball schools in the country become the ones that don’t have to worry about that sort of thing, as there aren’t enough women there to have women’s sports - VMI and The Citadel?
Don, those are just invented problems by the people who don’t wish to have their applecarts upset. Every other industry in the western world has figured out how to compensate talented people performing a valuable service. The schools’ supporters, along with their athletic departments, will figure out how to compete for and pay the athletes when this revolution succeeds.
But that sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge deal would be a rules violation. What’s to stop them from doing it right now? It’s a rules violation. I don’t see how allowing the endorsement changes things that much. Either way, the school paying the kid isn’t allowed. If a school is going to be dirty and secretly pay athletes, they’re going to be dirty and secretly pay athletes.
You’re essentially arguing that allowing legitimate businesses to exist will enable organized crime to launder money, so in order to fight organized crime we should disallow legitimate businesses. That’s not a great argument.
“Every other industry in the western world” doesn’t accept federal funds, which, as a condition for this, require the industries in question not to discriminate on the basis of gender - i.e. you’re not paying your male athletes more than your female ones. Never mind how much money each one brings in.
Exactly - that was my point; the NCAA has to figure out a way to make sure there’s no link between the people/endorsements paying for the licensing/marketing and the schools themselves before it tries to make any rules that apply to all of the schools.
Thanks, Pac 12 officials, for fucking up the end of the MSU-ASU game. There needs to be a rule to require neutral conference officials for non-conference games. MSU got jobbed by the refs all game long.
We don’t really know if that’s true to the extent some are concerned it may be. And I won’t have the Title IX discussion today because it’s a sideshow to the real issue – which is schools conspiring to fix the amount of their offers to student athletes and illegally restricting those students from maximizing their commercial liberties.
Sure, schools are gonna get involved, heavily involved, in influencing supporters on how they spend their funds for talents. This is a good thing. But Title IX concerns are just an excuse used by people who don’t want this to happen for other reasons.
New York and South Carolina legislatures now also introducing bills similar to California’s. I don’t have much hope for SC doing the right thing, seeing as how it revere’s Dabo’s disturbing marriage of god and footbaw success, but this could be an instance where other blue states join the bandwagon and render the NCAA’s position completely untenable.
So is talk of the schools outright paying players, if we want to limit the conversation to players having the ability to license themselves. Besides, I’m pretty sure SDMB has had that conversation before, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has happened multiple times.
“A good thing” in what way? Schools would now be buying football teams - which is pretty much the sole reason the NCAA came up with the amateurism rule in the first place.
If you do want to allow the schools to get money to the players somehow, I have two solutions:
One - create a separate “Division I-P” (“P” for “Professional” or “Paid”), that allows athletes to be paid like any other student employees of a school. The NCAA isn’t that far from that already, as it has a number of bylaws that affect only the “autonomy” (i.e. Power 5) conferences.
Two, and this would be my choice because, among other things, it gets rid of both the Title IX and “having to take classes” “problems” - disassociate top-level football and men’s basketball from the schools. The teams can use the school nickname/mascot, colors, and arenas (for the use of which, the teams would pay the schools), but there is no requirement that the players be students of the school in question.
I’m sorry; I didn’t realize the high need to be extremely clear and not rely on context: Invoking Title IX when discussing athletes’ right to make money from their image and/or likeness as laid out in the bill we are discussing is a distraction.
Kinda like how bringing up talk of schools outright paying players, which of course circles back to Title IX, is a distraction.
Again, I agree. However, when discussing allowing players to be compensated for use of their name and likeness, we have to distinguish between legitimate uses - e.g. if EA Sports wants to use the athlete in a video game - and attempts to use “marketing” as de facto pay-for-play.
I still say that there has to be a break between the people/companies paying the money and the schools the athletes in question play for. It does not have to be a 100% clean break - in fact, in the case of, say, video games, this may not be possible, as the company not only has to compensate the player for their likeness, but the school for use of its trademarks as well - but you can’t have anybody paying an athlete for endorsement rights subsequently being compensated by the school.
I haven’t read the bill, but I’m glad it allows the athlete to hire an agent. I was afraid it would specify that the university would negotiate on the athlete’s behalf.
Is there anything that would prevent this from being the #1 topic of a recruiting battle? For instance, can Nike say, "if you go to USC we’ll give you X but if you go to UCLA we’ll only give you 0.5X?
The New York bill contains wording requiring schools to set aside 15% of their sports revenues to be distributed equally to all of the school’s student athletes. Win-win?
Incidentally, the math for Syracuse is roughly the following: $90 million in annual athletic revenues X 15% divided by 800 athletes = $16k per athlete per year.