Great piece on the NCAA and amateurism

[Gothamite]

I'm not naïve enough (see there, you made me figure out how to do that on my phone ) to think that student-athletes are the same as every other student. But while their lives have unique challenges, they also have many educational opportunities that other students aren't given.

If a football player leaves school not having learned a thing, not having taken advantage of the education laid out before him for the taking, that's on him as much as anyone else.

[Viper]

The slavery comparisons are a bit overwrought, but this is still a fascinating history of how college sports got into the mess they're in today, and how they could get out - or be forced out. What I found particularly eye-opening was this part (from the last page), which suggests a "nuclear option" of sorts, if/when the legal fiction of the student-athlete finally does go by the boards:

University administrators, already besieged from all sides, do not want to even think about such questions. Most cringe at the thought of bargaining with athletes as a general manager does in professional sports, with untold effects on the budgets for coaches and every other sports item. ?I would not want to be part of it,? North Carolina Athletic Director Dick Baddour told me flatly. After 44 years at UNC, he could scarcely contemplate a world without amateur rules. ?We would have to think long and hard,? Baddour added gravely, ?about whether this university would continue those sports at all.?

In other words, some schools may respond by simply dumping certain sports or even their entire athletic departments. What I wonder is, which schools? Would it be the Kansas States and Vanderbilts of the world (i.e. non-powerhouses in either football or men's basketball) who throw in the towel, as conventional wisdom would suggest - or would it actually be the football- and/or basketball-factory schools who are so used to exploiting the current scheme that they're unable to adjust to a new pro-like environment where they lose all the advantages (not to mention most of their profit margins) they once held competing against "honest" programs?

[HedleyLamarr]

College players should not get paid until their eligibility expires. I'd allow them to make money off video games, ticket sales, memorobilia sales, etc., but only after their college careers are over. That'd solve a lot of problems.

Besides, student-athletes are already getting paid and handsomely rewarded. I'm staring at a student debt that these guys will never see. They got to take school-funded trips across the country that I would have had to pay top-dollar for. They got plenty of athletic apparel that I have to pay two-three figures for. I can go on and on.

If you ask me, they're being properly compensated. They know what they're signing up for when they accept these scholarships. If they don't agree with it, they can certainly join the rest of us in applying for student loans and paying them off for the next decade or two.

[The_Admiral]

If you ask me, they're being properly compensated. They know what they're signing up for when they accept these scholarships. If they don't agree with it, they can certainly join the rest of us in applying for student loans and paying them off for the next decade or two.

See, I feel that proper compensation would be for them to be employees of the university, rather than nominal students. They should make the same modest wages that minor-league hockey players and baseball players make, with no expectation of being "student-athletes," which, if you read the article, is a stupid term all but invented by the NCAA for the purpose of maintaining the status quo.

Today, much of the NCAA?s moral authority?indeed much of the justification for its existence?is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the ?student-athlete.? The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the ?student-athlete? lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its ?fight against workmen?s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.?

?We crafted the term student-athlete,? Walter Byers himself wrote, ?and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.? The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen?s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a ?work-related? accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school?s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was ?not in the football business.?

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA?s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

And again, knowing what they're signing up for doesn't make what they're signing up for any less wrong. Should workers in dangerous and theretofore unregulated industries have had no recourse because they knew what they signed up for?

[HedleyLamarr]

See, I feel that proper compensation would be for them to be employees of the university, rather than nominal students. They should make the same modest wages that minor-league hockey players and baseball players make, with no expectation of being "student-athletes," which, if you read the article, is a stupid term all but invented by the NCAA for the purpose of maintaining the status quo.

Using the University of Georgia as an example, a student-athlete on a full scholarship "earns" $20,000 a year (or just under $40,000 for out-of-state students). And these figures obviously don't include all the perks that come along with an athletic scholarship, such as expenses for food, living arrangements, and books. These are five-figure deals that athletes aren't paying a cent towards. And they're getting the same education us general students are getting.

Plus, not only are they getting free job-training skills should they make it to the pros, they're also getting an education should they not seek a professional career playing sports.

An average AAA-level baseball player makes $27,600. In four years, a college football player can earn up to $160,000 at Georgia. Other colleges across the country have higher tuitions. Considering that most folks think of college football as the minor league for the NFL, getting $40,000 a year just for playing a game and keeping up with your academics is pretty damn sweet. There are thousands of non-athletic college students that would love to have the full-rides that athletes get.

By the way, since most colleges are state-funded anyway, calling these athletes "employees" means taxpayers are essentially paying 18-22 year-olds to play football. A big "Hell to the No!" goes there. Especially in this economy.

And again, knowing what they're signing up for doesn't make what they're signing up for any less wrong. Should workers in dangerous and theretofore unregulated industries have had no recourse because they knew what they signed up for?

There are other options, you know. Some high-school basketball players have chosen to play professionally in Europe instead of not getting paid to play in college.

[pmoehrin]

With the team I worked for, 70% of the players I would say were incapable of doing a normal college workload.

They couldn't use their education even if they wanted to and most I think did. You look at the background of where alot of these players came from sports for them was a way out of where they were coming from. That is also reinforced at a very young age as well. If your good at a sport you don't have to go to a school in the ghetto, you can go to a private school in a better neighborhood.

They get it. The only they are there is because they are good at a sport. You really think that somebody who for his entire life has put his sport before his education and its gotten him to this level is now all of a sudden going to do a complete 180 and focus on education? And even if they did in alot of cases its too late. College is hard. If you didn't do the necessary work in high school to prepare yourself for it, your not going to be able to handle it. So they don't. They take the easiest classes they can find. The professors give them breaks when they need them to. They basically make it so that its impossible for them to fail a class if they show up. Sometimes they don't even have to do that.

I'm not going to say our school didn't care about whether or not the players were learning. We did do some things to try and make sure the players were at least doing the minimum amount of work to get through college. But push came to shove, winning games was numero uno for what was most important and I think that's how it is with most every division 1 school. And why would the coaches care either to be honest? Nick Saban isn't getting paid $6 million because he graduates his kids on time. If a coach were to ever put academics over athletics, good chance that coach is losing his job.

[The_Admiral]

And they're getting the same education us general students are getting.

baldly false

By the way, since most colleges are state-funded anyway, calling these athletes "employees" means taxpayers are essentially paying 18-22 year-olds to play football. A big "Hell to the No!" goes there. Especially in this economy.

Then spin athletic departments off from state universities into affiliated but independent 501©3 organizations which merely license the names of the universities in their cities, since it's the meatheaded tribalism of Flagship State University fighting for local pride (or if you're a Notre Dame/BYU fan, religious pride) that makes up so much of college sports' appeal: sheer numbers would indicate that all these people did not attend the schools they support. That sweet TV money they get should be more than enough to pay players $10,000-$15,000 a year to play minor-league football or basketball, shouldn't it? It can't be that schools just plumb can't afford $1,000,000 in player payroll. Nick Saban makes $6 million to coach. There's money being spent to field a football team in Alabama, it's just not spent on the poor illiterate black kids that make the money.

So let's say the Nebraska football/basketball organization gets its big cut of Big Ten money from BTN and ESPN and CBS and whoever else, pays its staff, including players, and then pays the University of Nebraska for the right to use the university's trademarks, maybe pay some rent, however you want to arrange it so that money gets to the universities after it gets to the players. Why can't this work?

I know you're in SEC country where this stuff is king, but you can't go on repeating the same old tropes about free educations and just being lucky to play the game and so on when it's plain as day that something is really wrong here.

Fundamental question: if baseball has a robust system of professional minor leagues, and hockey has affiliated professional minor leagues and major-junior leagues which grant stipends, why must football and basketball be the province of higher education?

[Saintsfan]

Knowing you're being exploited makes it okay.

Well I don't believe it is exploitation. But if you openly sign up for something freely and with full knowledge of the results of doing so, it's a million miles away from slavery.

Actually I think in some ways these student-athletes are 'exploiting' their colleges. Free university places, with a national stage to show off their skills, minimal educational pressures placed on them. It's not a one way exercise.

[pmoehrin]

Exploitation I've always viewed as a tremendous discrepancy between what you are worth and what you are being paid. That doesen't mean that your in bad shape or that your not making money. I don't have pity for division college athletes, nor do I really feel for them, but I definately agree that they have a point if they say we're not being given our fair share of what we do for the football or basketball program in terms of finances.

If you are being given an athletic scholarship worth say $30,000 but your contribution to the school in terms of athletics is worth $250,000, then I cannot see how you are not being exploited. Your being "paid" a little less then 1/8th of what your real value is to the athletic program at that particular time.

The number one problem with college sports is that there's too much money to be made by circumnavigating the stated objectives of the NCAA's mission statement at the Division 1 level. As long as that exists you are always going to have a system where you basically have college teams operating exactly the same as a pro team in that they recruit guys with the sole objective being how good at the sport they are. Things like their education level as moreorless obsolete. Very few schools now take the education requirements seriously and even those that do seriously bend the requirements for an athlete to get in versus what would be required out of a normal student. You cannot tell me Reggie Bush would have been able to enroll at USC had he not been as a good of a football player as he was.

The idea of college athletics according to the NCAA is that it should be there to help promote academics for the participants. To say that somehow Division 1 football and basketball are there for the purpose of enhancing the education of guys like Cam Newton I would say is laughable.

The people that are involved in the football program simply want the best athletes for their school and will stop at nothing to get them. No school outside of an Army, Navy or Harvard simply takes what they have from the general student population. They go out and find guys on their own for the sole purpose of playing that sport. You decide your not going to play your sport and simply focus on your education, you lose your scholarship which in many cases is the only reason the players could get there in the first place. They cannot afford to go otherwise. In that sense I view alot of these scholarships as being almost identical in nature to contracts.

I don't think its slavery in the traditional sense, but college should be a time to figure out who you are as a person and where you should go in life. If your a player though that relies on that athletic scholarship in order to be at that school, you don't really have that option. You have to be a football player and if you decide you want to do something else, or if you can no longer play football, your gone. It really seems to go against what the ideals are for college life. These aren't students playing a sport, these are basically unpaid employees of the university who are also take classes.

[Saintsfan]

I don't wholly disagree with that, but at the same time, these student athletes are getting a good deal out of their colleges. How many university graduates will earn as much in their lifetime as a decent NFL running back will in their football career? Or even an NFL punter? Are you going to start suggesting that all college students should be paid a wage? They have to defer earning, why shouldn't student athletes?

[Gothamite]

True enough.

If you are being given an athletic scholarship worth say $30,000 but your contribution to the school in terms of athletics is worth $250,000, then I cannot see how you are not being exploited. Your being "paid" a little less then 1/8th of what your real value is to the athletic program at that particular time.

That's not exploitation, that's business.

My firm bills my time out at an hourly rate approximately six times my hourly wage. So what?

[pmoehrin]

I don't wholly disagree with that, but at the same time, these student athletes are getting a good deal out of their colleges. How many university graduates will earn as much in their lifetime as a decent NFL running back will in their football career? Or even an NFL punter? Are you going to start suggesting that all college students should be paid a wage? They have to defer earning, why shouldn't student athletes?

I'm suggesting pay student athletes so much as I'm suggesting the system needs to be trashed. The amount of money involved is your core problem.

The idea of college athletics is not supposed to be to prepare them for a field in athletics once they graduate. Its to further benefit their education. That is right in the NCAA's mission statement. College athletics are not supposed to be minor leagues for pro sports according to the NCAA. If they are, then the orginzation has failed in its stated objective.

So here are your options as I see them. One is to make it so that major Division 1 athletics are treated completely seperate from the rest of college sports in the stated objective of what they exist for. As it stands now, no such distinction is made by the NCAA. The only distinctions made are for D1, D2 and D3. None however exists for Division 1 football versus Division 1 soccer. What those distinctions are is up for debate but at the very least I feel that should be done.

The other option would be to basically draw back Division 1 sports as a whole and basically copy the plan that a school like Army does. Athletic program are no longer allowed to recruit players. The prospective athletes can come to them, but that's about it. They can also have no say in whether or not a student is admitted. If they do not meet the academic standards they are not allowed in, meaning that if your USC you cannt accept somebody with a 1050 SAT score just because they can be your starting running back. (Just so people know the NCAA tried to get a rule set up in the 90's where SAT scores would play a much larger role in whether or not prospective athletes could be admitted into a school and it was shot down almost immediately.)

As much as I would like to see that inacted, I don't think its very realistic. I think option one is the better route to go.

As far as whether or not earning 1/6th of what you are worth is business or explotation, in alot of cases I'd say its both. We have the highest income inequality amongst developed nations, so I would not be shocked at all to see if a large percentage of the population was making significantly less then what they were worth. Real wages are half of what they were in 1970. Just because its status quo doesen't make it okay and just because you are doing okay doesen't mean your not being exploited. I get business need to make a profit just to stay afloat, but at some you have to say that the money is not going towards making sure the business stays open its towards making sure the CEO can afford that new yacht. That's why you have things like minimum wage laws and unions as much as people seem to hate them these days, but that's another topic altogether.

[Saintsfan]

I was wondering whether or not thus idea is feasible? Maybe it's just crazy??

Here is my idea- basically unhitch the athletic departments, or at least the football/ basketball programs from certain universities. The football and basketball programs would essentially be seperate from the colleges, perhaps even dropping the University part of their official name (not popular perhaps in Miami!) Players would not be students, although teams could play students from the Unis they are connected to if they wanted to. Players could be played (unless enrolled as a student). Universities could run their own football or basketball programs within the NCAA, but the unhitched programs would take part in their own league, probably outside the NCAA. Rules about how long players could maintain eligibility would need to be set up, as would rules about how soon players could become draft eligible.

[pmoehrin]

I was wondering whether or not thus idea is feasible? Maybe it's just crazy??

Here is my idea- basically unhitch the athletic departments, or at least the football/ basketball programs from certain universities. The football and basketball programs would essentially be seperate from the colleges, perhaps even dropping the University part of their official name (not popular perhaps in Miami!) Players would not be students, although teams could play students from the Unis they are connected to if they wanted to. Players could be played (unless enrolled as a student). Universities could run their own football or basketball programs within the NCAA, but the unhitched programs would take part in their own league, probably outside the NCAA. Rules about how long players could maintain eligibility would need to be set up, as would rules about how soon players could become draft eligible.

I don't see why not other then it would be the end of control for the NCAA over Division 1 sports. I don't think its a bad idea, but there's no way that is going to happen with NCAA approval.

I don't know what the outcome is going to be, but at the end of the day somebody is going to have to make less money for the problem to be fixed. Part of the reason I think the government needs to get involved in college sports is that the governing parties themselves are too close to the source of the problem to do anything about it. Too many influential parties involved with the NCAA that benefit from the current system for it to ever change.

[max]

College sports should be run by the students like some club sports. Sports could be given a budget and the players get to handle the money however they want. Put the students in charge as a teaching strategy. College sports would be much more interesting than they are today. A new host of College Gameday on ESPN would only talk about Teaching Methods and the structure of each team's budgetary strategy and voting and legislative structures. I would go back to college! "Who do we know in the medical department that knows chiropractics?" The sports would totally suffer, but then maybe the conferences, "Big 12" and "Pac-12" (etc.) could be tools for each school that provide insight on finance, medical professionals, television deals, and anything else that could make these "sports" conferences extensions of the campus. Real aids for students.

Or maybe the answer is to make sports (and all everything else a student creates at college) profitable for only the students themselves?

[The_Admiral]

I was wondering whether or not thus idea is feasible? Maybe it's just crazy??

Here is my idea- basically unhitch the athletic departments, or at least the football/ basketball programs from certain universities. The football and basketball programs would essentially be seperate from the colleges, perhaps even dropping the University part of their official name (not popular perhaps in Miami!) Players would not be students, although teams could play students from the Unis they are connected to if they wanted to. Players could be played (unless enrolled as a student). Universities could run their own football or basketball programs within the NCAA, but the unhitched programs would take part in their own league, probably outside the NCAA. Rules about how long players could maintain eligibility would need to be set up, as would rules about how soon players could become draft eligible.

This is more or less what I proposed, that football and basketball would no longer be "college athletics" and would instead be minor league sports teams that license the names of popular universities so people can feel as if they're really rooting "for Michigan" or "for North Carolina" without the students having ridiculous (and fictitious) obligations to be students. Also, the legal ambiguity of "student athlete" would be dead and buried.

[max]

...so that university sponsorship of athletes would be eliminated.

Could the players be of any age? Could the players go to college at a different school than for the one they represent?

This sounds feasible.

Some schools may scrap their sports teams altogether, or start a "club sport membership" with other schools -halfway between intramurals and the way athletics are arranged now- to ensure some "education" ideal. I can see the Ivy League becoming a "club" league like this while saving the on-field (and televised, although regional) product. Who knows, in 2015 (when O'Bannon v. NCAA is determined), Harvard and Yale may be the best teams in the country.

*And guess what, if Obama is re-elected in 2012, he could do to college athletics (at Yale's detriment) what Theodore Roosevelt did (for Harvard) by reforming college sports (basketball this time?) to deal with whatever debate the Harvard-Yale rivalry creates off the court*

[Saintsfan]

...so that university sponsorship of athletes would be eliminated.

Could the players be of any age? Could the players go to college at a different school than for the one they represent?

To answer these two points for my proposal, I would suggest an amount of eligibility (say 3 or 4 years). Players could be of any age provided they haven't either reached that limit or signed a contract in the NFL/NBA.

And as for the second question, Guys being paid by the team could not be enrolled as students anywhere. Teams could play students who are enrolled at the college they are aligned to. (So the Michigan Wolverines could play a student at the University of Michigan, though they would not be able to pay that player.)

I'd also have a very restrictive salary cap in the new league.

[Saintsfan]

I was wondering whether or not thus idea is feasible? Maybe it's just crazy??

Here is my idea- basically unhitch the athletic departments, or at least the football/ basketball programs from certain universities. The football and basketball programs would essentially be seperate from the colleges, perhaps even dropping the University part of their official name (not popular perhaps in Miami!) Players would not be students, although teams could play students from the Unis they are connected to if they wanted to. Players could be played (unless enrolled as a student). Universities could run their own football or basketball programs within the NCAA, but the unhitched programs would take part in their own league, probably outside the NCAA. Rules about how long players could maintain eligibility would need to be set up, as would rules about how soon players could become draft eligible.

This is more or less what I proposed, that football and basketball would no longer be "college athletics" and would instead be minor league sports teams that license the names of popular universities so people can feel as if they're really rooting "for Michigan" or "for North Carolina" without the students having ridiculous (and fictitious) obligations to be students. Also, the legal ambiguity of "student athlete" would be dead and buried.

Well the other option is institute a completely seperate development league. But thats a whole other can of worms.

On the point of whether the NCAA would go for it? Well they wouldn't need to if the colleges got together and sorted it out themselves. The NCAA would still get to run proper full on Amateur college football and basketball, and all the other college sports, but a seperate organisation could run this half way house.

I don't see this kind of plan happening because I don't think the NCAA are dumb enough to let it get to this point. Some kind of compromise will be brought in at some point.

[max]

Where does this debate go aside from the court case to be determined...

High school sports?

The electoral college?

Big game tonight:

Liberty Blue Jays (underdog, public school in the historic, "4th best small town in America" in suburbs north of the river) vs. Rockhurst Hawklets (Private Catholic boys school in downtown Kansas City) tonight at 7 at William Jewell College.