Minimum wage is a band-aide on gaping wound. The problem is that employers control employees lives, while employees at worst can take a company down - leaving the owner in a position where he just has to go get a job. The power obviously weighs heavily in the favor of the employer.
If everyone (and I do mean everyone including the 1%) was given a wage that could keep you alive and healthy, then there would be balance of power between employer and employee and you would see people taking advantage of each other much less.
Let the poor demand to be paid. And ignore that for most universities, the sportsballs are net losses on the whole.
By all means pay them what they are owed. They are owed exactly what they demand and receive for contracting their playing services. If they can strengthen their hand by bargaining as a team, go for it.
They should be bargaining collectively, but they're not being allowed to do so. The NLRB acknowledged that football players at Northwestern University are employees, but then refused to say whether they can form a union on the basis of a technicality (specifically, that the university is a state institution, and the NLRB only has jurisdiction over private employers). So none of the employees in question is represented by a union, and it's not clear whether any or all of them are even legally entitled to such representation if they elect it.
I agree that this would go a long way toward addressing the fundamental inequity here, at least for the tiny fraction of employees whose skills are actually generating cash for their employers. It's pathetic that we can't agree that everyone has the right to join a union and bargain collectively if they wish, but that's where we are.
The counter to paying college players is that it can be a gateway to the NFL, so college players play for "free" in exchange for access to a potentially very lucrative career. So why not a venture capital model? Pay players, with the condition that the university receives a % of their pro pay.
Top-tier college recruits shouldn't need a gateway to the NFL with their talent level.
We can stick with a tech metaphor: It would be like all tech companies and startups and VCs colluding to require a certain number of years in college before being willing to hire or fund anyone. And the universities would own any apps/code the kids wrote while they were in school. Obviously it would be ludicrously imbalanced for the top 18-year-olds in that situation to give up that much earning potential in exchange for a "gateway" to a profession that needs them anyway.
Sadly people really get into tribalism, and have much stronger ties to their college than they would to any local minor league team, so there's tremendous amounts of money in play to maintain the status quo.
Agreed that they shouldn't need a gateway, but disagree on the 18 year old being ready. There may be one from time to time, but the extra 3 years of both skill and physical development makes a big difference for almost every player/position.
That's certainly true; it's true in most other sports as well. That's why for example baseball players spend anywhere from 2 to 5 or 6 years in the minor leagues before they make the big club (which many never do). There's no reason to prefer that they spend that developmental time playing for free on a university's team instead of for peanuts on a minor-league professional club. And there are plenty of reasons to prefer the alternative.
More realistically, it's 3 to 4 more years of a chance to get a career ending injury. It seems like there's at least 1 or 2 every draft season that never gets a shot at the pros because they're injured in college.
Apart from the few star players, professional football doesn't pay that well. Certainly not enough to make up for it being a pretty short career.
I'm not sure what it is today, but "roster fillers" in the NFL were only making $50k/year not all that long ago. The average career length is 6 years according to the NFL, and 3.3 years according to the players' union. Decent players will make over 100k, but it's still a pretty short career.
Thanks, that's a better link than I found. It also shows that the minimum combined salary over 3 years for a player starting in 2016 would be $450K + $540K + $630K = $1.6M. Even assuming that they had no other employment for the rest of their life, that's significantly greater than the current median lifetime earnings for college graduates: http://www.businessinsider.com/college-majors-biggest-lifeti...
I'll never understand why people reject the most sensible answer: allow high school students to be drafted into the NFL.
Even if they're not playing in the NFL for 2,3 or 4 years, pu them into a developmental league where they can earn $30K a year for a shot to make the league.
Then college is reserved for people who want to go to college, not for people who have to go because that's the collusion that's been designed. It's been designed to protect the value of college football, which exploits poor athletes who otherwise have no way to make a living in sports.
The system is likewise awful for college athletics. Kids who have no reverence for school (why should they) break the rules, break the law and are coddled because they make millions for the university with no pay. Then we all have to pretend like we care about academics in student athletes, coaches impose 1-game suspensions during the 1-AA game week and everyone happily looks away.
Major League Baseball has solved this - you may be drafted out of high school, but once you start college you have to be out three years. It preserves the notion of amateur athletics - of trading your athletic skill for a shot at a degree - without forcing people to take that route.
Youre looking at it from the wrong side. NCCAF is one of the largest making money leagues in the world and certainly the largest money making "amateur league" the reluctance is on the systems side, not the employee side.
No, that's exactly how I'm looking at it. I understand why the collusion exists - it exists to protect college football as a money-making mechanism.
It also provides the NFL with a no-cost developmental league.
I just wonder why there's not more clamoring to blow this rule up. I can't recall a peep since Maurice Clarett challenged it last.
I will say this, though - if we accept this rule (that you cannot enter the NFL directly out of high school) - colleges should at least be honest about this. The notion that you go and get a "Communications" degree (insert your alma mater's sports academics program of choice) is insulting to everyone involved. Why not make a "Sports" degree that focuses on the elements of being an athlete or former athlete? Why is that taboo?
I said as much. As to the alumni not allowing that to change, I'm not convinced. Frankly, I don't think having a concurrent developmental league would really alter the brand that much. The MLB does it, the NBA does it ... and yet both are successful collegiate entities. It's not like people are skipping March Madness to watch D-League action.
That doesn't solve the problem. Even if football athletes could go straight from high school to college as in basketball and baseball, college football will still be a huge moneymaker, and the athletes will remain broke.
> Secondly, your premise is incorrect. It's the NFL that has a rule against drafting players out of high school, not society.
I'm not sure how you could have interpreted my post any other way. When I refer to "collusion" I'm speaking of that between the NFL and the NCAA. I'm aware it's the NFL's rule (in collaboration with the NCAA).
> That doesn't solve the problem. Even if football athletes could go straight from high school to college as in basketball and baseball, college football will still be a huge moneymaker, and the athletes will remain broke.
Actually, this solves a lot of problems. First, that there is more than one route to the NFL. If you're 18, insanely talented and want to go to the NFL, you don't have to waste everyone's time pretending to be a student for 3 years. Colleges can focus more on academics instead of the charade it is now. And if you have the skills necessary to make money out of high school, you have an avenue to do so.
Let me get this straight. Your proposal is to force the NFL to draft players out of high school? How would that work? They'll simply say that none of the athletes are developed enough and pick them out of the college programs as they do now. How would the regulators know?
More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem, and we know this because it hasn't solved the problem for basketball. (College baseball and college soccer were never moneymakers and never will be, so not even the coaches and administrators make money, and we can ignore them for now.) The second tier players will still play in college, where all the non-athletes involved with the NCAA will still make bank, and the athletes will still stay broke.
I think the user's proposed solution is really more in line with kill/modify the NCAA so that it is a minor league and emulate the baseball style drafting system so that players can go straight to the sport.
> Your proposal is to force the NFL to draft players out of high school?
Force? No. I have no idea where you've conjured that.
> More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem, and we know this because it hasn't solved the problem for basketball.
Well that's because basketball still has a similar rule. You must be out of high school one year. It's the same disingenuous nod toward academics and amateurism. The NBA had this solved before one-and-done was (re)instituted.
> The second tier players will still play in college, where all the non-athletes involved with the NCAA will still make bank, and the athletes will still stay broke.
I don't think you read what I wrote. I proposed that by eliminating his rule the NFL would likely go back to having a developmental league where kids could either get drafted out of high school or go to college, depending on their goals.
Football is a different case from other college sports for one main reason: physical development. Your average NFL squad has players that are much bigger and stronger at every position.
A receiver who is 5'9" has a fighting chance to be successful in many college conferences where there aren't monstrous cornerbacks but absolutely no shot in the NFL where size is a requirement. Undersized and underdeveloped players also risk significant injury by going pro too soon. College players need at least a year or two to build up the physical condition to compete at the next level.
This is the reason why the worst NFL team would easily crush the best college team. The college team just wouldn't be able to handle the size of your average NFL squad.
The same conditions hold true for most baseball players drafted out of high school. They spend several years in the minors for this reason. Why not have a football minor league?
I agree with pretty much every criticism in this article. Where I differ in opinion is the solution.
First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point. Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive.
Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education. If these athletes are paid, do they still have to attend classes? Do they have to get good grades? Are they given scholarships in addition to monetary compensation? Can athletes switch colleges if another school will pay them more?
It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college. If people are so attached to college names, then the colleges can sell naming rights.
But honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find a sport more repugnant than football. If football came into being today, people would riot in the streets. Who would pay money to watch mostly lower-class, mostly black[1] players permanently damage each other's brains and bodies? Who would cheer during such an event? Yes, it can be argued that athletes know the risks, but the same is true for dueling. In the past, people thought dueling was fine. Today, we recognize it to be a barbarous tradition. I believe that, as we do with dueling, future societies will condemn us for allowing this sport to continue.
What makes Football different than Female baseball or wrestling? Full stadiums.
I'm not a football fan either (nor any sport where "we" will go all the way)... but to say that people will riot in the streets over it is a bit over the top. YOU don't like it. Many people obviously disagree - and enough that it's a major sport. Probably THE major sport currently.
I feel the brutality of the sport every morning when I get out of bed. And I was a scrub for the most part. But I wouldn't trade any of it. If it weren't for the increase in brain injuries and the muscle-mass maximizing arms race that ends careers (and limp-free middle age) on a weekly basis, I'd encourage my son to play. I absolutely loved the sport.
It still has its merits, and I'm still a huge fan, but there's a lot of ugliness that needs to be fixed before I'd encourage anyone to play. It's a lot like encouraging someone to serve their country. If the mission is clear and moral, no problem. But it's rare you're gonna find that these days. Just work hard and try to be happy. That's honorable.
> brain injuries and the muscle-mass maximizing arms race
The huge players and huge hits are a direct consequence of the modern changes to the game. Just go back to no separate defense/offense/special teams. Everybody runs the whole game. Maybe also bring the play clock down to 15 seconds.
> First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?"
That's easy: what makes football special is that it generates absolutely gigantic piles of cash. If a delegation of athletes from, say, the college ultimate frisbee team were to demand similar compensation, the burden would be on them to demonstrate they're generating similar revenue.
(And if they can actually make that case? Then heck, pay them too!)
> Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive.
Wait -- because we might end up paying female athletes less than male athletes, we shouldn't pay any of them anything? Surely we can cross this particular bridge when (and if) we ever actually come to it.
> Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education.
Which isn't really a problem, because the "education" many (most?) college football players currently receive is pretty nominal anyway.
> It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college.
I'm always wary of a proposed solution whose first step is "change everything," not least because frequently it's proposed less to provide an actual alternative than to delay taking any steps at all to improve the situation. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good, in other words. You can advocate for creating a whole new league if you want to, and maybe someday that will happen, but in the meantime there's all these real people getting really screwed out of real money they've really earned. A whole new system that takes 10 or 15 or 30 years to get worked out and implemented doesn't do them any good. So let's just start paying them, and then we can take all the time we want to work the bigger questions out.
I'm fine with a huge wage gap, but most people aren't. There's an odd defect in most people's thinking where if you make some small contribution toward solving a problem, they'll berate you for not doing more.[1] I'm simply pointing out that because of this, the author's solution is politically infeasible.
Paying college athletes is probably as difficult as starting minor league football. There are a significant number of regulations in place to prevent college athletes from being compensated, to ensure gender parity, and to stop colleges from spending "too much" on sports. Their efficacy varies, but repealing them would be an immense political effort. For starters, you'd have to get rid of Title IX.
There's no hill-climbing solution here. We're in a local maximum. :(
I'm of the opinion that there are two things that colleges owe their revenue-generating athletes:
1) Insurance policies. These people put their bodies on the line for 4 years and serious, life-long injuries can be sustained. In the event that a player is hurt in this way, they should receive compensation (an annuity, to ensure it lasts their entire lifetime). Insurance seems like a good way to handle this.
2) Financial education. This works for both the 2% that go on to professional careers and the 98% that don't. What goes along with being broke is not having basic financial skills like budgeting or even opening a bank account. There's a reason that the majority of professional players are broke only a few years after retirement despite making millions during their playing careers. ESPN's documentary, Broke, did a good job of dissecting it, but the moment that left the biggest impression on me was when one player admitted to taking his $500k signing bonus to a check cashing store.
I agree with you about creating a minor league instead of using colleges, but it will never happen. The two popular college sports are the ones where the pro league has no minor league (the D-League is a very recent development, so it remains to be seen whether it survives.) Baseball and Hockey have minor leagues and neither is popular. The college equivalent is also unpopular. But Football and Basketball have found a way to put an inferior product on the field/court and make it incredibly popular/lucrative. It's unlikely they'd be able to replicate that success with a minor league.
So given that the current setup is too profitable to discontinue, I think the only conscionable thing to do is to give athletes who don't pass the admissions process an alternate education. Paying them will, for the vast majority, not make them well off given what we see of athletes paid in the professional leagues. Paying them in a practical education that prepares them to make the most of what they do have once their fame expires with their athletic eligibility seems more appropriate and maintains the mystique of the amateur athlete.
Also, as an aside, I think Universities and football programs are missing a huge opportunity. Football coaches should be required to teach a course in the spring in football theory. As it is now, the only people who become Football coaches are ex-players. But Universities have access to some of the brightest minds in the country and most would love to learn about Football. Offering elective courses could open up the coaching field to a much wider field and make teams much more successful. We saw what happened when the Baseball nerds were allowed to influence how players were valued (Moneyball)...there's no reason to believe that bright and motivated Math/CS nerds couldn't do the same to other sports as well. From analyzing the tendencies of opposing teams using statistical analysis to designing new plays based on computer simulations, we have the tools today to revolutionize these sports if we're only allowed access to their insular communities.
> If football came into being today, people would riot in the streets. Who would pay money to watch mostly lower-class, mostly black[1] players permanently damage each other's brains and bodies?
Mixed Martial Arts is a very popular sport which is exactly this (maybe not the 'mostly black' part), and as a spectator sport in the US has only really risen recently. No rioting in the streets against it yet.
Also, given your criticisms, how do you find football more repugnant than professional boxing, given that the latter's explicit goal is to literally beat your opponent into submission?
MMA likes to tout itself as the closest thing to a pure fight, but it's scarcely less restrictive than boxing. Fish-hooking, biting, eye-gouging, rabbit-punching, breaking and dislocating fingers and toes... those were never allowed. Even UFC 1 didn't come close to actual "anything goes" fights. And much of MMA's popularity is owed to the fact that public outrage has significantly tamed it. Many effective (but permanently damaging) moves are now banned. Fighters wear gloves to prevent broken hands and ugly faces. Refs err on the side of stopping the fight early, rather than letting a fighter suffer significant injury. Ethics-wise, I place MMA in the same bin as boxing. Speaking of which...
It's hard to say whether I find boxing more repugnant than football. If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate one, I'd pick football due to its popularity. The number of people put through that meat grinder is much higher than the number of boxers. That said, I do find boxing abhorrent. Watching a boxing match, I get the same emotions as watching a disaster. Horrifying, yet fascinating. Some part of me is compelled to keep watching. I think most people are similarly affected.
> First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point.
What makes it special is that it's what more people will pay to see. There's more demand for it and so athletes should be paid more to play it. I would imagine college basketball players will also rightfully demand large compensation to play.
> Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive
This gulf is already massive in professional sports, but I never hear anyone complaining about it. It's fairly well understood that men's college basketball is more popular than women's college basketball for example (at least by any metric that I can think of), and salaries will probably reflect that.
> Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education. If these athletes are paid, do they still have to attend classes? Do they have to get good grades? Are they given scholarships in addition to monetary compensation?
No, players who are paid will be employees of the university and will receive a salary and benefits. They will not be students. Perhaps there could be a mechanism in place to allow for some players to receive a scholarship in lieu of payment if they choose to (with the caveat being that they need to be admitted to the University under the same criteria as other non-athlete students), but in reality most of these players in top D1 programs are there to play football or basketball, not to go to class.
> Can athletes switch colleges if another school will pay them more?
Why not?
> It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college. If people are so attached to college names, then the colleges can sell naming rights.
I agree, and that's basically what this will be. These sports teams will be discrete entities affiliated with the University, but their players will not be students.
I like this a lot. There's certainly no social stigma against paying for athletics (e.g., multi-million dollar coaching salaries, stadiums in the hundreds of millions). There's no stigma about students working for the college during undergrad (e.g., TAs, lab assistants). And there's no stigma against non-student college-aged adults working for a college. So...
Let's call a spade a spade. Let's be fair to the real scholar–athletes that the NCAA trots out in their TV spots. Let's stop comparing apples-to-oranges student statistics and trying to put a price on opportunity.
One of the necessary things that needs to happen if we are to begin paying players is that there would need to be some serious contraction in the number of Division I Football teams. A team like Boise State is just not going to be able to keep up with players at the University of Southern California for example.
Since a lot of those would be in small, rural towns, there is A LOT of resistance to this outside the traditional power conference (and frankly some of the stragglers inside power conferences too for that matter)
There's another possible solution, too, which for the 95% of post-secondary institutions you've never heard of is either already the status quo or would be a much more economical answer. That solution is to get out of the business of athletics. If you are not a "power 5" program or one of the top NCAA D-I basketball programs, athletics is a money-loser. The UAB debacle provides a pretty good case study in why this is so: there are only a handful of universities that the system will allow to make any money. So what looks like one problem is really two: first, the employee-athletes at the major athletic programs aren't being paid, and they should be. But the flip side of the coin is that many of the same retarded rules that harm those employees are being applied to people playing sports at much smaller programs, where they are not at all profitable and there is essentially zero chance that anyone is ever going to make their career as a major league athlete. That's the second problem.
The solution to the first problem is complex. It starts with paying your employees. But there's more to it than that: something has to be done about the fiction that those employees are fundamentally students. They're not. Scandal after scandal shows every trick and dodge in the book is and will continue to be used to keep functionally illiterate players off the academically ineligible list and on the field. It would be healthier, if these schools insist on keeping their highly profitable athletic programs, to partner with the NBA and NFL (baseball doesn't really have this problem) to transition their status to minor league affiliates. In the process, they could also cut the sanctimonious and absurd NCAA out of the game. No more scandals, no more bullshit. But it's going to take some work to get from here to there.
The solution to the second problem is very simple. For the other 95%, no more NCAA rules (they're designed for the big-money programs to deceive themselves, not for the others). No more TV, period. Not that most of them are ever on TV anyway, except for the one or two games a year they volunteer to be slaughtered by far superior competition to fund the rest of their season (in games which, for no conceivable reason, actually count for both teams!). No more licensing. If they want to sell merchandise, they can sell it at the campus bookstore. Not like any of them are making millions from Amazon or Foot Locker anyway. Above all else, no more "athletic scholarships", a profound contradiction in terms hardly anyone ever ponders long enough to recognize.
That means no more pressure, no more extended seasons, and no more faux students hanging around in hopes of transferring to a big-money program so they can get their shot at the big time. If you want to play intercollegiate sports, fine. But the reason those academic standards that are so low yet somehow impossible for the big guys to meet without cheating exist in the first place is to prevent students who don't have time for a hobby from being distracted from their studies. Raise them, high. If you don't have at least a 3.25, you have no business doing anything but studying. And without the pressure of having to maintain your "athletic scholarship", why should you?
No more games against hopelessly superior competition. You'll play against other teams of full-time students with no funding for fancy uniforms and gleaming locker rooms, at a simple gym or on a field shared with 8 other teams next to a single set of bleachers. High school baseball teams don't play against AA clubs; there's no excuse for pay-for-play in other sports, either. If you can't fund your athletic programs through student fees, they get cut. Simple as that. But stop pretending that "student athletics", a huge money loser and waste of time and energy, is a necessary part of your institutional identity, or that it "builds character". There's nothin...
College athletes are paid. I'm not just talking about getting free school. They get free housing, free food, and lots of other free benefits that are all completely allowed by the NCAA. That's without any of the shady booster money.
The athletes I knew (two large division 1 schools) got considerable housing and food stipends. They were quite a bit more than what most students were paying for rent in the area and these athletes had much more disposable income than most of the regular students I knew.
I've never understood why the American model of mixing academics with athletics came to existence. I understand why it continues, of course, since the status quo nearly always does.
The Australian(/European? I'm not sure) model of having schools only passingly involved with athletics, and then having the athletics clubs and associations as separate entities just makes much more sense to me.
First, it allows for amateur sports to continue well past high school/college, allowing those who compete for fun and fitness to do so. Sports, after all, shouldn't just something you watch on TV once you're out of school.
Second, apart from providing a fun diversion to students in much the same way as a video gaming club might do, why should any teaching institution be involved in sports? Surely that's outside the core mission.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 94.4 ms ] threadIf everyone (and I do mean everyone including the 1%) was given a wage that could keep you alive and healthy, then there would be balance of power between employer and employee and you would see people taking advantage of each other much less.
By all means pay them what they are owed. They are owed exactly what they demand and receive for contracting their playing services. If they can strengthen their hand by bargaining as a team, go for it.
I agree that this would go a long way toward addressing the fundamental inequity here, at least for the tiny fraction of employees whose skills are actually generating cash for their employers. It's pathetic that we can't agree that everyone has the right to join a union and bargain collectively if they wish, but that's where we are.
We can stick with a tech metaphor: It would be like all tech companies and startups and VCs colluding to require a certain number of years in college before being willing to hire or fund anyone. And the universities would own any apps/code the kids wrote while they were in school. Obviously it would be ludicrously imbalanced for the top 18-year-olds in that situation to give up that much earning potential in exchange for a "gateway" to a profession that needs them anyway.
Sadly people really get into tribalism, and have much stronger ties to their college than they would to any local minor league team, so there's tremendous amounts of money in play to maintain the status quo.
I'm not sure what it is today, but "roster fillers" in the NFL were only making $50k/year not all that long ago. The average career length is 6 years according to the NFL, and 3.3 years according to the players' union. Decent players will make over 100k, but it's still a pretty short career.
The average salary is about $2 million/year. The median salary is about $1 million/year. The minimum salary for a first year player is over $400,000.
Here's an article with lots of details for 5 years ago: http://work.chron.com/much-money-nfl-player-make-year-2377.h...
And here are links to team-by-team numbers: http://www.spotrac.com/nfl/
$400k for a 3-year career is a lot better than the picture I was painting, thanks for the correction.
edit: link fix
Even if they're not playing in the NFL for 2,3 or 4 years, pu them into a developmental league where they can earn $30K a year for a shot to make the league.
Then college is reserved for people who want to go to college, not for people who have to go because that's the collusion that's been designed. It's been designed to protect the value of college football, which exploits poor athletes who otherwise have no way to make a living in sports.
The system is likewise awful for college athletics. Kids who have no reverence for school (why should they) break the rules, break the law and are coddled because they make millions for the university with no pay. Then we all have to pretend like we care about academics in student athletes, coaches impose 1-game suspensions during the 1-AA game week and everyone happily looks away.
Major League Baseball has solved this - you may be drafted out of high school, but once you start college you have to be out three years. It preserves the notion of amateur athletics - of trading your athletic skill for a shot at a degree - without forcing people to take that route.
It also provides the NFL with a no-cost developmental league.
I just wonder why there's not more clamoring to blow this rule up. I can't recall a peep since Maurice Clarett challenged it last.
I will say this, though - if we accept this rule (that you cannot enter the NFL directly out of high school) - colleges should at least be honest about this. The notion that you go and get a "Communications" degree (insert your alma mater's sports academics program of choice) is insulting to everyone involved. Why not make a "Sports" degree that focuses on the elements of being an athlete or former athlete? Why is that taboo?
College football is the development league.
And the alumni will never permit that to change.
I said as much. As to the alumni not allowing that to change, I'm not convinced. Frankly, I don't think having a concurrent developmental league would really alter the brand that much. The MLB does it, the NBA does it ... and yet both are successful collegiate entities. It's not like people are skipping March Madness to watch D-League action.
Secondly, your premise is incorrect. It's the NFL that has a rule against drafting players out of high school, not society. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/sports/football-citing-ant...
I'm not sure how you could have interpreted my post any other way. When I refer to "collusion" I'm speaking of that between the NFL and the NCAA. I'm aware it's the NFL's rule (in collaboration with the NCAA).
> That doesn't solve the problem. Even if football athletes could go straight from high school to college as in basketball and baseball, college football will still be a huge moneymaker, and the athletes will remain broke.
Actually, this solves a lot of problems. First, that there is more than one route to the NFL. If you're 18, insanely talented and want to go to the NFL, you don't have to waste everyone's time pretending to be a student for 3 years. Colleges can focus more on academics instead of the charade it is now. And if you have the skills necessary to make money out of high school, you have an avenue to do so.
More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem, and we know this because it hasn't solved the problem for basketball. (College baseball and college soccer were never moneymakers and never will be, so not even the coaches and administrators make money, and we can ignore them for now.) The second tier players will still play in college, where all the non-athletes involved with the NCAA will still make bank, and the athletes will still stay broke.
Force? No. I have no idea where you've conjured that.
> More importantly, even if players could be recruited out of high school as in basketball, it doesn't solve the problem, and we know this because it hasn't solved the problem for basketball.
Well that's because basketball still has a similar rule. You must be out of high school one year. It's the same disingenuous nod toward academics and amateurism. The NBA had this solved before one-and-done was (re)instituted.
> The second tier players will still play in college, where all the non-athletes involved with the NCAA will still make bank, and the athletes will still stay broke.
I don't think you read what I wrote. I proposed that by eliminating his rule the NFL would likely go back to having a developmental league where kids could either get drafted out of high school or go to college, depending on their goals.
A receiver who is 5'9" has a fighting chance to be successful in many college conferences where there aren't monstrous cornerbacks but absolutely no shot in the NFL where size is a requirement. Undersized and underdeveloped players also risk significant injury by going pro too soon. College players need at least a year or two to build up the physical condition to compete at the next level.
This is the reason why the worst NFL team would easily crush the best college team. The college team just wouldn't be able to handle the size of your average NFL squad.
First, there's the "me too" effect. If colleges pay football players, other athletes will want to be paid. They'll ask, "What makes football special?" and they'll have a point. Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive.
Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education. If these athletes are paid, do they still have to attend classes? Do they have to get good grades? Are they given scholarships in addition to monetary compensation? Can athletes switch colleges if another school will pay them more?
It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college. If people are so attached to college names, then the colleges can sell naming rights.
But honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find a sport more repugnant than football. If football came into being today, people would riot in the streets. Who would pay money to watch mostly lower-class, mostly black[1] players permanently damage each other's brains and bodies? Who would cheer during such an event? Yes, it can be argued that athletes know the risks, but the same is true for dueling. In the past, people thought dueling was fine. Today, we recognize it to be a barbarous tradition. I believe that, as we do with dueling, future societies will condemn us for allowing this sport to continue.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_players_in_American_prof...
I'm not a football fan either (nor any sport where "we" will go all the way)... but to say that people will riot in the streets over it is a bit over the top. YOU don't like it. Many people obviously disagree - and enough that it's a major sport. Probably THE major sport currently.
It still has its merits, and I'm still a huge fan, but there's a lot of ugliness that needs to be fixed before I'd encourage anyone to play. It's a lot like encouraging someone to serve their country. If the mission is clear and moral, no problem. But it's rare you're gonna find that these days. Just work hard and try to be happy. That's honorable.
The huge players and huge hits are a direct consequence of the modern changes to the game. Just go back to no separate defense/offense/special teams. Everybody runs the whole game. Maybe also bring the play clock down to 15 seconds.
That's easy: what makes football special is that it generates absolutely gigantic piles of cash. If a delegation of athletes from, say, the college ultimate frisbee team were to demand similar compensation, the burden would be on them to demonstrate they're generating similar revenue.
(And if they can actually make that case? Then heck, pay them too!)
> Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive.
Wait -- because we might end up paying female athletes less than male athletes, we shouldn't pay any of them anything? Surely we can cross this particular bridge when (and if) we ever actually come to it.
> Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education.
Which isn't really a problem, because the "education" many (most?) college football players currently receive is pretty nominal anyway.
> It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college.
I'm always wary of a proposed solution whose first step is "change everything," not least because frequently it's proposed less to provide an actual alternative than to delay taking any steps at all to improve the situation. Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good, in other words. You can advocate for creating a whole new league if you want to, and maybe someday that will happen, but in the meantime there's all these real people getting really screwed out of real money they've really earned. A whole new system that takes 10 or 15 or 30 years to get worked out and implemented doesn't do them any good. So let's just start paying them, and then we can take all the time we want to work the bigger questions out.
Paying college athletes is probably as difficult as starting minor league football. There are a significant number of regulations in place to prevent college athletes from being compensated, to ensure gender parity, and to stop colleges from spending "too much" on sports. Their efficacy varies, but repealing them would be an immense political effort. For starters, you'd have to get rid of Title IX.
There's no hill-climbing solution here. We're in a local maximum. :(
1. http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
1) Insurance policies. These people put their bodies on the line for 4 years and serious, life-long injuries can be sustained. In the event that a player is hurt in this way, they should receive compensation (an annuity, to ensure it lasts their entire lifetime). Insurance seems like a good way to handle this.
2) Financial education. This works for both the 2% that go on to professional careers and the 98% that don't. What goes along with being broke is not having basic financial skills like budgeting or even opening a bank account. There's a reason that the majority of professional players are broke only a few years after retirement despite making millions during their playing careers. ESPN's documentary, Broke, did a good job of dissecting it, but the moment that left the biggest impression on me was when one player admitted to taking his $500k signing bonus to a check cashing store.
I agree with you about creating a minor league instead of using colleges, but it will never happen. The two popular college sports are the ones where the pro league has no minor league (the D-League is a very recent development, so it remains to be seen whether it survives.) Baseball and Hockey have minor leagues and neither is popular. The college equivalent is also unpopular. But Football and Basketball have found a way to put an inferior product on the field/court and make it incredibly popular/lucrative. It's unlikely they'd be able to replicate that success with a minor league.
So given that the current setup is too profitable to discontinue, I think the only conscionable thing to do is to give athletes who don't pass the admissions process an alternate education. Paying them will, for the vast majority, not make them well off given what we see of athletes paid in the professional leagues. Paying them in a practical education that prepares them to make the most of what they do have once their fame expires with their athletic eligibility seems more appropriate and maintains the mystique of the amateur athlete.
Also, as an aside, I think Universities and football programs are missing a huge opportunity. Football coaches should be required to teach a course in the spring in football theory. As it is now, the only people who become Football coaches are ex-players. But Universities have access to some of the brightest minds in the country and most would love to learn about Football. Offering elective courses could open up the coaching field to a much wider field and make teams much more successful. We saw what happened when the Baseball nerds were allowed to influence how players were valued (Moneyball)...there's no reason to believe that bright and motivated Math/CS nerds couldn't do the same to other sports as well. From analyzing the tendencies of opposing teams using statistical analysis to designing new plays based on computer simulations, we have the tools today to revolutionize these sports if we're only allowed access to their insular communities.
Mixed Martial Arts is a very popular sport which is exactly this (maybe not the 'mostly black' part), and as a spectator sport in the US has only really risen recently. No rioting in the streets against it yet.
Also, given your criticisms, how do you find football more repugnant than professional boxing, given that the latter's explicit goal is to literally beat your opponent into submission?
It's hard to say whether I find boxing more repugnant than football. If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate one, I'd pick football due to its popularity. The number of people put through that meat grinder is much higher than the number of boxers. That said, I do find boxing abhorrent. Watching a boxing match, I get the same emotions as watching a disaster. Horrifying, yet fascinating. Some part of me is compelled to keep watching. I think most people are similarly affected.
What makes it special is that it's what more people will pay to see. There's more demand for it and so athletes should be paid more to play it. I would imagine college basketball players will also rightfully demand large compensation to play.
> Then we'll run into some unhappy truths regarding sports. For example: If colleges base compensation on revenue, the wage gap between male and female athletes will be massive
This gulf is already massive in professional sports, but I never hear anyone complaining about it. It's fairly well understood that men's college basketball is more popular than women's college basketball for example (at least by any metric that I can think of), and salaries will probably reflect that.
> Then there's the problem of mixing sports and education. If these athletes are paid, do they still have to attend classes? Do they have to get good grades? Are they given scholarships in addition to monetary compensation?
No, players who are paid will be employees of the university and will receive a salary and benefits. They will not be students. Perhaps there could be a mechanism in place to allow for some players to receive a scholarship in lieu of payment if they choose to (with the caveat being that they need to be admitted to the University under the same criteria as other non-athlete students), but in reality most of these players in top D1 programs are there to play football or basketball, not to go to class.
> Can athletes switch colleges if another school will pay them more?
Why not?
> It seems to me that most of these problems would be solved by creating a minor league separate from college. If people are so attached to college names, then the colleges can sell naming rights.
I agree, and that's basically what this will be. These sports teams will be discrete entities affiliated with the University, but their players will not be students.
Let's call a spade a spade. Let's be fair to the real scholar–athletes that the NCAA trots out in their TV spots. Let's stop comparing apples-to-oranges student statistics and trying to put a price on opportunity.
Since a lot of those would be in small, rural towns, there is A LOT of resistance to this outside the traditional power conference (and frankly some of the stragglers inside power conferences too for that matter)
The solution to the first problem is complex. It starts with paying your employees. But there's more to it than that: something has to be done about the fiction that those employees are fundamentally students. They're not. Scandal after scandal shows every trick and dodge in the book is and will continue to be used to keep functionally illiterate players off the academically ineligible list and on the field. It would be healthier, if these schools insist on keeping their highly profitable athletic programs, to partner with the NBA and NFL (baseball doesn't really have this problem) to transition their status to minor league affiliates. In the process, they could also cut the sanctimonious and absurd NCAA out of the game. No more scandals, no more bullshit. But it's going to take some work to get from here to there.
The solution to the second problem is very simple. For the other 95%, no more NCAA rules (they're designed for the big-money programs to deceive themselves, not for the others). No more TV, period. Not that most of them are ever on TV anyway, except for the one or two games a year they volunteer to be slaughtered by far superior competition to fund the rest of their season (in games which, for no conceivable reason, actually count for both teams!). No more licensing. If they want to sell merchandise, they can sell it at the campus bookstore. Not like any of them are making millions from Amazon or Foot Locker anyway. Above all else, no more "athletic scholarships", a profound contradiction in terms hardly anyone ever ponders long enough to recognize.
That means no more pressure, no more extended seasons, and no more faux students hanging around in hopes of transferring to a big-money program so they can get their shot at the big time. If you want to play intercollegiate sports, fine. But the reason those academic standards that are so low yet somehow impossible for the big guys to meet without cheating exist in the first place is to prevent students who don't have time for a hobby from being distracted from their studies. Raise them, high. If you don't have at least a 3.25, you have no business doing anything but studying. And without the pressure of having to maintain your "athletic scholarship", why should you?
No more games against hopelessly superior competition. You'll play against other teams of full-time students with no funding for fancy uniforms and gleaming locker rooms, at a simple gym or on a field shared with 8 other teams next to a single set of bleachers. High school baseball teams don't play against AA clubs; there's no excuse for pay-for-play in other sports, either. If you can't fund your athletic programs through student fees, they get cut. Simple as that. But stop pretending that "student athletics", a huge money loser and waste of time and energy, is a necessary part of your institutional identity, or that it "builds character". There's nothin...
The athletes I knew (two large division 1 schools) got considerable housing and food stipends. They were quite a bit more than what most students were paying for rent in the area and these athletes had much more disposable income than most of the regular students I knew.
The Australian(/European? I'm not sure) model of having schools only passingly involved with athletics, and then having the athletics clubs and associations as separate entities just makes much more sense to me.
First, it allows for amateur sports to continue well past high school/college, allowing those who compete for fun and fitness to do so. Sports, after all, shouldn't just something you watch on TV once you're out of school.
Second, apart from providing a fun diversion to students in much the same way as a video gaming club might do, why should any teaching institution be involved in sports? Surely that's outside the core mission.