The superstars are happy the lower tier guys are getting paid, and the superstars are making way more on endorsements.
The team aspect just wouldn’t work as well if Lebron made 100 mill and KCP made 1.
I know these are two vastly different situations, but the way I look at college athletes getting paid is how I look at “solving the crisis at the border”
Which is worse: the status quo of kids in cages, or a policy where we let just about anyone in from the Northern Triangle with a simple path to citizenship over the next few years?
Which is worse: the status quo of free labor or allowing college athletes to make money from anyone who wants to pay them?
When the most extreme solution beats the status quo easily, the question really shouldn’t even be framed as “should college athletes be paid?”.
Oregon State has had budget problems for decades, and before their one in a million run to the elite eight this year were as irrelevant in men’s college basketball as is possible while being in a major conference for thirty years. Base salary of their head coach: $2.25 million.
An awful lot of people are making insane amounts of money under this system that “loses money”.
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Doesn’t the whole letting the kids make money on the side circumvent the whole title IX issue? If it’s kids working a “job” for a booster, then I don’t think that the university is actually spending the money. So those payments shouldn’t count towards the title IX total
And those exclude revenue coaches get from sponsorships, radio shows, merchandise, private training camps and so on. These coaches make a shitload profiting off of their name and likeness while athletes can’t profit anything at all off of it.
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i’m pretty sure this is incorrect. It’s the number of sports offered and number of scholarships that matters.
Okay. I guess I’m conflating payer payments. If they pay football players then they have to pay all players and that’s where I think you see lots of programs cut departments.
I don’t see why this is true at all. Maybe it ends up being that way, but there’s stating it as fact is simply not true. Universities aren’t beholden to pay everyone the same thing. They are allowed to pay more or less based on various criteria.
That also has nothing to do with NIL stuff.
I’ve seen this argument hashed out several times before.
We are talking about legislating universities so some of this will of course be hypothetical.
But yeah I need to read up on it.
Why not? Seems like colleges have tons of competitive advantages over pro teams. They are tax exempt, have more valuable brands, have access to other revenue generating sources etc. Why wouldn’t they be able to outbid NFL teams? Don’t they already compete pretty much for coaches (who sometimes make millions already)?
I was being a sarcastic earlier, but seriously why would we assume that colleges would even continue to require athletes to be students? Isn’t that already largely a fiction that colleges maintain to give the appearance of being amateur competitions? If they are paying the players salaries, why not just drop the façade and make them full-time contract staff?
The facade is part of the product that the fans want.
Any evidence for this?
What kind of evidence would you find acceptable?
Do you have any evidence that they would find your model of paid non-students equally desirable?
I very much doubt this.
Sure. They enjoy the current system now which involves paid (under the table) players. No one from Auburn gives a shit that they cheated to get Cam Newton, for example.
Fans who have lost interest in their teams after they were discovered to be cheating, or had athletes who were known to not care about academics, or put pressure on the university to boost graduation rates of football players.
You are telling me that if Alabama signs Patrick Mahomes their fans will tune out? Color me doubtful.
I remember when I was a kid, Robert Smith, then the Ohio State star running back, quit the team to focus on academics. He needed to get a security detail to go to class.
Fans, and you know the type, will call pro athletes overpaid crybaby millionaires. For mostly racist reasons they rant about people getting paid millions to throw a football or whatever. They like college sports because the players are treated more like how they think black people should be. They will handwave away the occasional recruiting scandal the same way they claim Trump is morally superior despite all his behaviors.
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Random Robert Smith story. He played in the NFL for the Vikings. Back at that time there was a Monday night hot spot in Minneapolis that would pop off. Packed with people, line to get in. Women dressed like it was Saturday night, coco and pills, bottle service. We knew the bouncers, bartenders, and staff so we’d get in through the kitchen ala Goodfellas.
Athletes would roll through. Kevin Garnett was there a few times, but especially Vikings players would show up because they could party on Monday nights.
Robert Smith was there one night and he and I ended talking for at least an hour, maybe two. On like intellectual topics. He’s a smart MFer. I was not surprised when he abruptly retired from the NFL at age 29 after his best season ever. He walked away from a lot of money, choosing to prioritize his long term health.
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I respect the nuance you’re bringing here.
My initial reaction was partially motivated by conversations about student debt and how much tuition is now but that is sometimes completely ignored when having the athletic discussion.
I also think it’s reasonable to assume many 18 year olds have awareness of the dangers. The new rules, the implementation of new ideas like how to tackle in pre high school football etc…
A harsh reality of life is that when you’re 18 you have to make insanely important life decisions that can have enormous consequences.
Here’s my view on athletes-as-students after having (many) athletes as students at a major D1 sports school. Main takeaway is that there’s a pretty wide range of talent and behavior, but the major sports athletes are stretched extremely thin which should be obvious to anyone with living brain cells. Asking them to pass courses while playing championship caliber NCAA football/basketball would be like asking a cyclist to win rounds of Jeopardy! between stages of the Tour de France for REASONS. Some of them can do it, but it’s basically a vaudeville show for idiots.
It’s generally true (ime) that the minor sports athletes are dedicated in the classroom as I don’t recall many cases where they weren’t giving high effort. They seem motivated as a group. I’m talking about sports like track, tennis, softball, etc. I considered baseball and women’s basketball major given how much time they were forced to miss. There’s a bigger variation in major sports athletes ranging from people who are incredibly talented to people who honestly have no business being in some of those classes. For the latter group, I think the problem boils down to a combination of academic deficiencies and immaturity–a person can probably succeed with one of those two traits, but it’s hard to get through with both when your time is that limited.
I had two students who came back to finish their degrees after retiring from professional sports. One was an NFL linebacker. If I remember right he was an average student but focused on the bars he had to clear to pass and graduate in one shot. Other guy was a single-digit pick in the 1st round of the MLB draft who never made it to the majors. He was serious and aced nearly everything. He told me once that after 10 years of minor league baseball, it hurt just getting out of bed and that it was hard for him to hold a bat without any pain.
The worst I probably had was a baseball player who was too immature for a college classroom. He turned in (very poor) work with profanity-laden answers which was totally bizarre to me and the only time I’ve ever seen anything like it.
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I agree with Melkerson. People don’t want a team of 27 year olds winning March Madness.
A guy staying a year or something will be a cult hero, but they don’t want radical change.