NCAA- Supreme Court ruling
- Thread starter Mr Janny
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Make each individual athlete have to choose if they want a scholarship or they want to market themselves and get paid for their image and likeness.
If they choose to go the free market route, then they pay their own way for school, housing, etc.
If they choose to go the free market route, then they pay their own way for school, housing, etc.
Except that's not the free market route. The players' labor is extremely valuable to the school itself. In a free market, people generally get to sell their valuable labor to competitive buyers. Image and likeness is completely separate from the value of their labor, which they do currently get compensated for, just in a fixed market.
Personally, I think this whole mess could be solved relatively easy. Allow athletes to market themselves freely. Continue to give athletes scholarships, but if they are able to make money off of their likeness, they should be free to do so. Not everyone will be able to do that, but they deserve the option to. As a student, I was not limited to ways I could make money. If I wanted to monetize a YouTube channel, I am allowed to do that; the fact athletes cannot do that is wrong.
My solution would be 1) continue to give students scholarships and living stipends as they currently do (no change here). Personally, to me, this is their pay. 2) Allow for more full ride scholarships to the non-revenue generating sports. I understand that title IX gets in the way here, but giving partial scholarships to athletes in non-revenue generating sports is not enough compensation in my opinion. 3) Allow athletes to make money by marketing themselves how they see fit.
- Mar 27, 2006
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Some schools could definitely try that. Others might choose to both pay them and give them a scholarship. That's the entire point. Schools cannot collude to fix the benefits they offer to athletes. Any limit to the amount of compensation that a school is allowed to offer is going to be challenged. Schools don't HAVE to make the biggest offer, but they shouldn't be stopped if they choose to.
I think if the NCAA is to survive wrt college football (I think it does have a legit role in organizing intercollegiate olympic sports regardless) then it had better figure out a damn good way to compensate revenue athletes (esp football) asap across the board.
It needs to be fair to the athletes (revenue share seems to make sense to me) and fair across different schools too. You will have to allow the bigger and wealthier schools to pay more but can't have a 100x difference between Bama and say, Texas Tech.
People gripe about the NCAA (rightfully) but the money will come out of schools budgets. If ISU gets $30M in TV money for Big12 football, well, going forwards the players might get half of that. That will impact the budget a LOT. That's a big wrench in JP's works, he will use every bit of accounting acumen to reorganize all that. The facilities and salaries arms race could get tamped down some.
It needs to be fair to the athletes (revenue share seems to make sense to me) and fair across different schools too. You will have to allow the bigger and wealthier schools to pay more but can't have a 100x difference between Bama and say, Texas Tech.
People gripe about the NCAA (rightfully) but the money will come out of schools budgets. If ISU gets $30M in TV money for Big12 football, well, going forwards the players might get half of that. That will impact the budget a LOT. That's a big wrench in JP's works, he will use every bit of accounting acumen to reorganize all that. The facilities and salaries arms race could get tamped down some.
This model is basically the current system+NIL, which still ignores the issue at hand in Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence. The NCAA has developed a system where the the member institutions have established a maximum to what they can compensate to their labor, the athletes. This is a market rate in the form of a scholarship. The athletes have no means of negotiating what their fair market rate is, and the NCAA's de facto monopoly on college athletics means that there is no competition to force the increase of compensation.
Meanwhile, the labor of the student athletes is bringing in what amounts to billions of dollars in revenue each year to the member institutions. Do to the nature of the institutions as non-profit entities, that revenue is being used for sky rocketing coaching and administrative salaries, and ever more elaborate facilities. And the laborers who make it possible are not allowed to ask for a larger share of the pie because of the vaguely defined "amateurism".
Student athletes should be allowed to use their likeness and popularity to support themselves financially. The NCAA should not have the authority to limit how athletes are able to utilize their public personas. How much they are able to receive will be determined by the open market. But, even with NIL, that is all compensation provided by outside institutions. NIL still fails to address the money that comes into the schools as a result of the athletes' labor. And until labor is allowed to negotiate for a share of the profits/revenue, the system should be considered in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust act. (Side note, 99% of players won't lining their pockets and driving Ferrari's around campus; they might get a free copy of NCAA Football for being in the game, or get a few hundred bucks showing up to a local shop for a meet and greet.)
Also, it is worth noting that the NCAA as an enforcement organization only exists at the will of the member institutions. Basically, it is an enforcement racket in which the schools can claim that the NCAA is preventing them from compensating players further, but the NCAA can only do that because the schools give them the authority to do so. While the NCAA, the organization, is receiving the brunt of the criticism, they are not the ones actually in control. The schools are, and they use the NCAA as a scapegoat in order to keep scrutiny off of themselves.
How is your plan going to pass Title IX standards?
This describes very few college athletes. I guess that's ok. It's only going to be a handful of athletes at each school making big money.
I think that major college football, and maybe men's basketball will split from the NCAA.
Schools cant start paying or they will bump up against Title IX issues. The only solution is to allow NIL rights to athletes. It's going to be the Wild Wild West of boosters and local companies paying athletes out there. I can see why the smaller revenue schools are leery of this.
Should be crazy.
Should be crazy.
I don't think they have the leadership in place to do something like that any time soon.
Another thing to think about. If/when college athletes start getting paid, expect increased scrutiny from fans. I would assume their pay would be public knowledge since they are being paid by public institutions?
Fans will be essentially paying their salary and will feel more entitled to scrutinize player performances (probably rightfully so). With bigger salaries comes much more pressure to perform.
Fans will be essentially paying their salary and will feel more entitled to scrutinize player performances (probably rightfully so). With bigger salaries comes much more pressure to perform.
The easiest way to avoid both the Title IX issue and the anti-trust issue, is for all student athletes at a school to collectively bargain. Not just football or basketball individually, but all scholarship sports. A CBA could ensure fair compensation based off of athletics department revenue, and reduce the incentive for the school to cut sports in order to maximize revenue.
Additionally, the CBA can exist separately from NIL. Just like professional athletes receive a contract and a salary from their team, while also having outside endorsements, college athletes could do the same. That would allow the biggest athletes to capitalize on their popularity.
Is there a way to do the collective bargaining with athletes who are going to be there for a little over 4 years?
I think the biggest issue here is competitive balance and fair/realistic compensation. The entire business and competitive models of NCAA Football are different from the NFL or other professional football leagues (arena, CFL, etc).
Anyone can agree its unfair that players are paid relatively little compared to coaches and that they don't have the ability to negotiate their compensation. But what is a fair compensation? The (often repeated) idea that this is a billion dollar business and players are not getting the money they deserve is more false than true. Look at ISU for example. The money made by ISU athletics is primarily going into facilities and other amenities that directly benefit the players. Out of ISU's athletic budget, you could say that Matt Campbell and TJ Otzelberger and a few of the top football staff get extremely high salaries relative to player compensation. So where do you go from here? Where does the money come from to pay the players? Drop Campbell's salary to $100-200k? Cancel facilities upgrade projects? Give the players a choice to take benefits like food and tutoring as cash payments rather than free services?
I think there is this idea that the CFB industry just has piles of money sitting around that are making a lot of people rich off the backs of the players, which just doesn't seem to line up with reality. A small handful (fewer than 10) athletics departments have the money to pay high salaries to players and maintain current levels of facilities and other perks, while the rest can only offer a small increase in pay without making significant sacrifices elsewhere.
So what is the next step? A salary cap system for CFB and CBB? It seems like that's where it has to go if we want to start that path.
Anyone can agree its unfair that players are paid relatively little compared to coaches and that they don't have the ability to negotiate their compensation. But what is a fair compensation? The (often repeated) idea that this is a billion dollar business and players are not getting the money they deserve is more false than true. Look at ISU for example. The money made by ISU athletics is primarily going into facilities and other amenities that directly benefit the players. Out of ISU's athletic budget, you could say that Matt Campbell and TJ Otzelberger and a few of the top football staff get extremely high salaries relative to player compensation. So where do you go from here? Where does the money come from to pay the players? Drop Campbell's salary to $100-200k? Cancel facilities upgrade projects? Give the players a choice to take benefits like food and tutoring as cash payments rather than free services?
I think there is this idea that the CFB industry just has piles of money sitting around that are making a lot of people rich off the backs of the players, which just doesn't seem to line up with reality. A small handful (fewer than 10) athletics departments have the money to pay high salaries to players and maintain current levels of facilities and other perks, while the rest can only offer a small increase in pay without making significant sacrifices elsewhere.
So what is the next step? A salary cap system for CFB and CBB? It seems like that's where it has to go if we want to start that path.
But there is competition. In the case of FB and MBB, it just so happens that the primary "competition" to the NCAA in determining market labor rate for athletes, namely the NFL and NBA, has minimum age restrictions, and those leagues have few jobs to offer relative to the number could compete in college sports. So, in essence, the NCAA is being punished for offering opportunities to athletes that are otherwise precluded from working for the NCAA's competition.
The average career in the NFL is less than 3.5 years, as long as the structure is in place, the particular player really does not matter. They would have a team of people that are in place much like the MLB players association does to worry about the year to year change in the contract or what to ask for in the next contract.
That money will come from the increase in the CFB playoffs from 4 to 12, right now ISU has 541 student athletes, so if each one receives $25,000 that would be a total of $13,525,000 per year in paying the players. That would eat up most of what ISU will receive with the playoff expansion and increased TV deals. But if you only pay the revenue making sports of football and basketball that cuts it down to less than 4 million for 135 players at 25 K per year.
The link below shows here the money is being made and spent at ISU, and most of that money is coming from football and a little from MBB, every other program is running in the red. So the question becomes does the university and the courts allow non revenue sports athletes to also be paid a stipend or only the revenue producing ones?
Iowa State University Athletics Programs - College Factual
Agree, the NCAA is being wrongly punished because no one will fund alternative professional leagues for HS grads, especially for football. The NCAA should have told the Supreme Court: "NCAA participation is purely voluntary and there are no restrictions on someone forming alternative professional leagues."
