Ultimately everything is a system. If the NCAA is incredibly militant about enforcing these rules, the schools will be incredibly paranoid about giving athletes any financial incentive. If the NCAA is more lax, schools will put less effort and attention to detail into enforcement. I’m not saying these policies are good or ethical, but this type of militant enforcement absolutely changes how careful schools are.
Indeed. But where are the wokepeople from UMass Amherst? They are all about social justice, why can't they do something for their own students who are being taken advance of by college sports?
It’s not just about enforcing the rules, it’s about the appearance of enforcing the rules.
The NCAA need to seem important, which means they need people to break the rules regularly and be punished for it. That’s just one of many ways their fucking over students for the NCAA’s benefit.
The appropriate response is for students to boycott the NCAA, but socially and financially that is a huge hit. Normally the way around this is a union, but good luck getting one started.
Can't the students start their own league? Internet broadcast the plays, etc. I mean NCAA is just a relic of the old TV epoch and is ready to be disrupted. Maybe we'll see some startup for it.
For a new sport sure, e-sports don’t play by NCAA rules.
However like most monopolies it’s not just network effects, they heavily protect themselves. Anything that makes you a professional athlete permanently kicks you out of NCAA scholarships etc. So, students are going to have a huge issue getting something off the ground, but they have a lot more leverage if students suddenly boycotted the Rose Bowl etc.
It's a bad system - at least for athletes. It's inherently exploitative. I'd liken it to nearly-free labor. The athletes had no idea they were infringing. The NCAA and the schools make money off these athletes. The schools self-reported. There was no recourse for the affected individuals.
The incredible power imbalance between banning these athletes from making money, and then turning around and doing it yourself while being judge, jury, and executioner, makes a mockery of the talent.
These are barely "amateurs" in any real sense, the system exploits that fact and the seal of approval "amateur" status brings to rake in money.
> Its a good system for athletes that are not stars and don't play big money sports.
Honestly, for the author, she was playing tennis and got an education out of it on the backs of those playing revenue sports. I don't fault her for this--she didn't make the system--but it doesn't look like she went pro, and it she wasn't kicked out while she was in school, so the only damage she's suffering is the NCAA saying she wasn't on the team. Unless she's coaching, and being a college athlete is almost a qualification, she seems to have done OK.
That said, I still think she's right for calling out the NCAA.
She wrote that as of 2020, "I had been playing professional tennis for three years"
She graduated; they're not taking her degree away. And honestly nobody cares about the college record of a professional tennis player -- the fact that it was vacated on a technicality like this is not going to hurt her professional career at this point. Likely she could coach as well, there are coaches in the NCAA who have done far worse (intentionally, not accidentally) and still get jobs.
I don't see why saying "athletes can be paid" should naturally lead to "all athletes MUST be paid". There is no reason you can't have a football program run as a separate entity with paid athletes and also have a school fencing program where athletes aren't paid and just play for fun and / or are on scholarship.
That’s fair, it depends on what you’re considering the “trade”. My critique probably applies more to basketball, football more than the article’s case. Still, the nature of the system suppresses any chance to get a better deal, so to speak.
They only this strict out of self-preservation. They know they're ~5 years or one high-profile screw-up away from having to actually pay football and basketball players, so they're delaying it as long as they can.
I mean, a school could just disaffiliate from the NCAA. They could run independent sports programs and play other independent schools, or join the NAIA or some other association, or start a new association. They won't though, because ultimately it's all about the money.
Also to your point about enforcement, you'll see that the money-making programs (i.e. Football and Basketball) at the big D1 schools get away with a lot more operating in the gray area than small schools and non-revenue sports. The NCAA isn't going to shit in their gravy train. They save the virtue-signal enforcement for schools and sports that don't make any money anyway.
Maybe that level of athleticism should be separated from education and run as actual business with people paid as actual athletes for whatever their market value is.
The mods on this website are self serving nigggergagggggotss. You are not entitled to free, on topic and engagement with engineers to boost your rotten vulture capitalist garbage obfuscated products and pathetic “hacker” forum.
That’s really nice surprise why the most applauded engineers never comment here anymore
Should we also stop using tax money to subsidize education for doctors?
College athletics are education too. It's not like you become a tennis pro by just hitting the gym a lot. The best players study the rules, study physiology, study human nature....
Comparing eg tennis players and doctors doesn't really explain anything about your position to me, one serves a critical public function and one does not
This is precisely what should be done. The scholarship model should die. The athletes should be employees of the University and paid a salary for their work. If they want to go to college on top of that, they can pay for that separately or negotiate reduced tuition as a benefit or in lieu of salary.
I agree, but football and basketball are part of college culture, and it would take away a built-in fanbase. I'm not sure if people would be as interested in NFL-lite games with 100+ teams where the players and teams aren't at least nominally associated with colleges. I think it might be too late to actually split them up.
Yeah, it's too ingrained now. Personally I would prefer breaking up the franchises, moving to regional leagues that could feed to top with relegations and promotions.
As someone not from the US, the whole role of sports in college/universities seems so... weird.
Mixing institutions with an education and research purpose with sport tribalism seems like a terrible idea to begin with, adding tons of money to the mix surely can't result in anything that has anything to do with education...
I have nothing against of schools having clubs doing sports. Even marginally supported by funds from students for things like travel and gear.
But the level of strange commercialisation is just different from rest of the world. Insane amounts of money spend and revenues generated, but nothing really end up at athletes.
As you elude to, I think it speaks to a bigger problem which is that Universities don't really know what they want to be or what their main purposes are. Are they places of learning for the sake of learning and scholarship? Are they job training and placement centers? Are they social clubs and camps for young adults? Are they sports franchises? Are they centers of basic research? Are they centers of collaborative industrial research? Are they incubators for companies? Are they political entities that want to shape public policy? Are they centers of social justice? They seem to want to be all things to all people but that's not possible when pursuing mission A inherently puts them in conflict with mission B.
Another disappointing story about the NCAA. I don’t know how to fix it, but since the NCAA represents the schools maybe there should be a parallel body to represent the athletes.
Stop doing anything that gives them money for any reason and let them know why. If enough people do it, the problem solves itself one way or the other.
Definitely a good starting point. Most of us give them money by watching their sports on tv, so that will be the toughest thing to stop. In some way that makes many people complicit in way they don't realize.
Every time discussions about big systems like this one come up, there's a comment that basically amounts to "just solve the collective action problem!"
If enough people do it... but they won't. They need to be sold on the idea, en masse, and that doesn't just happen.
Fortunately, we have a tool for collective action: government! Government regulation is how we can push institutions toward aligning with our values. Of course, entrenched interests don't want to be pushed, which is why there's been a massive campaign over the past few decades to scapegoat governments and paint them in a negative light. But they're the right tool for the job.
> Every time discussions about big systems like this one come up, there's a comment that basically amounts to "just solve the collective action problem!"
I think you have it totally wrong. I didn't suggest collective action. That involves organizing, funding, etc.
I just recommended stop giving them your money.
Also, the law already has a process for which this could be solved. That isn't regulation - it's a lawsuit. They damaged her unreasonably for something beyond her control. She should sue.
Regulating how the NCAA acts is not what the government should be involved in. Getting the government to regulate the NCAA is 1000x harder than just suing, and that's 1000x harder than just stop patronizing those organizations yourself. When you aren't emotionally tied into the NCAA, or when you're patronizing an alternative, NCAA fiascos don't both you.
You literally said "If enough people do it" as though that's remotely possible.
The law doesn't necessarily have a process for this because you can't simply maintain a lawsuit whenever you feel you've been wronged. You have to make a claim for which there is a legal framework established by... the government! Do you have any reason to believe this former student would have a legally established right that the NCAA violated by following its policies?
And besides, your own comment recognized that this is a bigger problem than this one individual case!
I hate the NCAA so much. I can't believe they have the gall to say they need to maintain amateurism while so many people and so many huge corporations make billions of dollars off it. Why does paying the player hurt amateurism but paying the coach doesn't? Why would a player making $50 to sign his name on some hats ruin the game, but CBS paying the NCAA billions for the rights to broadcast the game be totally ok?
If they want to insist amateurism is so important, then fine. Be amateur. Have student volunteers do the broadcasting, don't show any ads during the game, and take all the money out of it. Otherwise don't tell me players are the only ones who can't make money off of this.
The owner of the convenience store near me played football for Stanford on a full ride. He's had to walk with a cane, or a walker on a bad day, since his 30s. It's an impediment to his job today, as he struggles to get around restocking throughout the day.
College football makes obscene amounts of money, while at the same time discarding a ton of young athletes with permanently broken bodies. The TBI stuff in particular is deeply disturbing. I heard a heartbreaking interview with a family where 3 generations are entering dementia simultaneously because the younger 2 both played college ball.
Coaches, schools, broadcasters... true fortunes being made by this industry every single day. But somehow giving the dang kids a slice of that ruins the authenticity of the league. What a pile of nonsense.
Schools are not making fortunes off of college football. With few exceptions football programs do not pay for themselves with their revenue. I haven't looked into it but I doubt any football program paid for the stadium they use so I wouldn't be surprised if there truly was no such thing as a profitable college football program.
Where did you hear this? The first Google result shows that many schools are making fortunes off of their football programs (also it's kind of common sense based on the fact that men's football coaches get paid millions and other sports coaches get paid normal amounts)
A recent N.C.A.A. study determined that only about 20 of the 1,000 or so college sports programs in the nation were profitable.
The 30 largest universities in the country each routinely generate annual revenues exceeding $100 million from sports, but according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most of those revenues are spent covering operating expenses for the school’s athletic programs and paying tuition for their student-athletes. The majority of Division I colleges in the N.C.A.A. operate at a loss.
There is lots of money in college athletics. That money is not going to institutions to generate revenue for the institution at large. That money goes back to the athletic department and almost every college athletic program receives revenue in the form of student fees.
Here’s a quote from another piece [2]:
By far, the largest student fee is the last – the intercollegiate athletic fee – which can be upwards of 80% of the total fee amount at many institutions not in Power Five conferences.
Conventional wisdom says that intercollegiate athletics is a boon to colleges and universities; that it’s wildly profitable; attracts new students; enhances fundraising; and, boosts the university’s profile. Yet these are myths, often perpetuated by the media – and by the universities themselves.
So that's a little different argument, and more complex. Profit/loss is a weird thing in a non-profit.
College Football (in the Power 5, and top tier group of 5) itself is very profitable. But the money is quickly spent on the program and to fund the program and the department as a whole.
Also, some stats there include Div II, III, etc. Programs without big TV deals, licensing revenue etc. do not make money from their athletic departments. Not a shocker or really what any of this is referring to.
But for the major programs, the money from licensing, TV rights, conference revenue sharing, etc. covers the basics for women's programs and less popular sports. Then it gets dumped along with booster $ into the CFB football facilities arms race, ever growing coaching salaries, and multimillion dollar buyouts of contracts.
This isn't totally unique to not-for-profit Universities either. Executive perks in non-profits are another way to make the year-end balance out. Government programs, and corporate departments dump cash at the end of their fiscal years to avoid losing the budget the next year.
My claim was about most college sports programs and that the universities don’t profit from sports programs. Div II and Div III programs are relevant to my claim. When there is profit it gets dumped back into the athletic department. The university as a whole does not benefit in most cases. Given the mandatory fees that students pay to athletic departments, the stadiums built by taxpayer funds the argument that college sports generates lots of money for the university as a whole is wrong.
Consider this. Take away the most profitable college sports program. Will that college be forced to increase tuition to cover the loss of money for non-athletic related expenses? The answer is no.
Yes. Hence the with few exceptions part of my comment. Also profit is revenue - expenses. A $220 million revenue doesn’t say anything about it’s profitability.
Evert P5 school is very profitable with their TV deals. Lesser conferences should also fair very well with TV deals.
In terms of sheer numbers of schools, I guess your definition of "few exceptions" hold true. Should the majority of commuter schools, like say California State University, Sacramento, subsidize heavily in athletics? Of course not. However, your UCLA's, Michigans, and Texas A&Ms make insane amount of money, and often give money back to their university.
Those D1 schools generate insane amounts of revenue from college and that revenue, in general, goes back to the athletic programs. The university as a whole does use money from those programs to fund education. Those programs don’t pay for their stadiums. They are subsidized by student fees. And those programs that do generate great revenue (but usually not great profit) are still a minority even amongst only D1 schools.
You don’t even check your own math when you make that claim about student fees and stadiums. Stadiums costs nearly a billion to even renovate these days. Assuming a athletic fee of $2k per year at even the largest universities of 40k students. $80 million is a tiny drop in the bucket for a billion.
Since you refuse to even do a small amount of research into this, stadiums and capital expenditures are vastly funded by alumni donations. Unofficially that is the biggest metric for athletic director success.
I never claimed student fees pay for stadiums. I think you did not understand what I wrote. I claim that stadiums are built by taxpayers (at public institutions) and that expenditure is not part of the calculation of the alleged profitability of sports programs. Built by taxpayers in the form of bonding bills usually. As I understand these things.
The definition and notions of "profitable" in college athletics is intentionally elusive and varies wildly. Both sides abuse this obfuscation to their advantage, and the articles you link to, besides being archaic, are some of the worst abuses I've seen on this topic.
Each state, university, have different requirements on what is reported as subsidies. For example, discounting an out of state athlete's tuition may or may not be a subsidy. In some schools, all of the apparel sold with a school logo is athletics money, while in others, a percentage. And of course, private universities like Stanford, Northwestern, and the Ivys report very little.
The articles also strawman the entire argument by using student fees to fund athletics. True, some schools abuse the hell out of them. Some Division III schools have ungodly amounts of athletic fees, and the students will never see their return. However, success in athletics, and football in particular, add to the brand of the school. Anti-athletics faculty love to huff and puff about how this isn't true, but common sense and studies in business schools routinely dispute this. Boston College reported a 3x increase in enrollment the year after Doug Flutie threw his touchdown. University of Alabama's enrollment has gone way up while the acceptance rate has gone way down in Nick Saban's tenure. Even if you never attend a game of any sort in school, you will gain in the perceived value of your degree.
> I haven't looked into it but I doubt any football program paid for the stadium they use
This tells me all I need to know about your bias on this.
How does that last quote of mine show my bias? I’ve cited in other posts numerous articles talking about the lack of profitability of most college athletics. I then stated an opinion of mine and indicated that it was merely an opinion. It’s my perception that athletic programs don’t pay for the stadiums they use. Those stadiums use taxpayer money. I know this to true at FSU and at the University of Minnesota. I’m not an expert on this topic and I gave an opinion on an aspect of this issue that I admittedly didn’t have lots of information.
Do you not have opinions, impressions, thought, ideas about things you haven’t studied? Of course you do. In my case I was intellectually honest enough to let the reader distinguish between those thoughts of mine I had ready evidence for and those that I don’t.
As to your third paragraph please keep in mind my usage of with rare exceptions. Of course you can cite counter examples to the general trend of college football being a drain on resources. Also note that I’ve cited evidence to back up my beliefs and you have not. You’ve even made a reference to common sense. There are far too many examples of where intuition and common sense are wrong for this to be a legitimate basis for a strong belief.
I did and couldn’t find any information. I do know at lest 2 major D1 programs have had their stadiums built with taxpayer money and the accounting of those programs’ profitability does not take into account the building of their stadiums. Have you looked into the issue? Do you know of any studies that show college sports programs paying for their stadiums?
I didn’t say the schools were profiting (although some are). The NCAA itself has built up $700 million in assets. Broadcasters make a ton of money off of college sports. Coaches make a ton of money.
There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off of college sports. None of them are players.
> He's had to walk with a cane, or a walker on a bad day, since his 30s.
If instead of destroying his body playing sports, someone had come and broken his legs with a crowbar, would he be better off? Don't get me wrong, I hate the NCAA, but there's a good reason why amateur sports exist.
Presumably there could be a compensatory and punitive windfall from a lawsuit against the crowbar assailant. So even your somewhat colorful example works against the point you're trying to make.
I guess. As a former college athlete though, I do feel like there's something nice about being able to play soccer or whatever without being surrounded by other people who have a financial incentive to murder me.
>Why does paying the player hurt amateurism but paying the coach doesn't? Why would a player making $50 to sign his name on some hats ruin the game, but CBS paying the NCAA billions for the rights to broadcast the game be totally ok?
Are the players underage? If the players are treated as employees of a business would the business have to jump through tons and tons of extra legal hoops?
I'm not saying that this is the case. But it's not too uncommon that messed up situations arise as a result of society's desire to protect a group.
They have to be careful about that. Most high school sports associations ban any kind of payments to athletes, including prize money. One of my kids was in running and if he entered any kind of non-school race he had to get a waiver from the state and also decline any prizes (trophies, medals, ribbons, etc. were OK). I think it may also be possible for stuff like that to impact college/NCAA eligibility, i.e. once you have been paid or earned money from your sport, you are never considered an "amateur" again.
While that's a practical complication, it's one that has a huge number of holes in it—thus my mention of racing in particular, which is often overlooked as a "sport" despite the physical demands it can put on drivers.
More broadly, it points out just how incoherent the demand that some athletes remain "amateur" is, when "amateur" is just used as a proxy for "unpaid": there's nothing noteworthy about a teenage driver winning a cash prize for a small-time race, and nobody in the pro racing world is going to say that they're not an "amateur" driver just because they got money for racing once.
Yes, this is part of the horribleness of the NCAA. I have never heard of someone getting kicked off their school newspaper because they wrote a paid article for someone else. Why shouldn’t athletes be the same?
They are preying on the hope of those athletes. But, just like gambling, many must lose for a few to win big. The pros have formed unions to level the playing field, but the college kids have been denied that.
This athlete got a scholarship, elite coaching, a college degree and is now playing her sport professionally. She's a beneficiary of the system, not a casualty of it.
The only harm that has been done is that the NCAA has written her out of its internal records (it's dishonest to say "My Career" when it explicitly refers to her achievements as a professed amateur).
The NCAA does things that seem exploitative and wrong to me. But it also helps a lot of people. This young lady's outrage is not a good argument for the former.
> it's dishonest to say "My Career" when it explicitly refers to her achievements as a professed amateur
NCAA's claims of "amateurism" are blatantly dishonest in the first place. They control what are pro minor leagues in every way except for the denial of straightforward compensation to the players.
That's one of the worst ad hominems I've ever seen. Sure, the author herself might have done OK, but she's pretty explicit that the incident affected others and that there are many more who haven't been so fortunate. She even names several and tells their stories. She uses her own case only as an example, not as the basis for her entire argument. Dismissing it because "she's a beneficiary" is absurd.
> she's pretty explicit that the incident affected others and that there are many more who haven't been so fortunate. She even names several and tells their stories.
For the three other athletes mentioned by name, in each case the story is that they had medical issues caused by, exacerbated by, or at least neglected by the NCAA. That's a real injustice and a real story. What happened to the author is meh.
So ignore it. Any time you find one part of an argument or its presentation lacking, just look past it. You'll find that it often doesn't affect the validity of the whole, and when that's the case picking on the non-essential part just shows bad faith.
The original idea was a good one: a healthy mind in a healthy body. With higher education for the former and sports for the latter. The point wasn't to make people fit for a particular job, it was just to make well educated and fit people for the elites of that time.
But things have become twisted along the way. Higher education is still there, and it has become a bit more practical, which is not bad. However the "sports" part became completely broken. Instead of giving students a good body (a noble goal), it shifted to competition, taking subpar students with great athletic skills just to beat the other college team, and overworking and ultimately breaking them. The complete opposite of the original idea.
If that were the goal then they would offer daily aerobics or yoga classes and not engage in competitive sports. For most students college sports is a spectator sport and an opportunity to get drunk.
I wouldn't say that the "whole concept" of college sports has been detrimental to education. As a college athlete, sports allowed me to go to a school I otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford. It also taught me valuable lessons and it had no impediment on my education there.
With that said, the current system sucks. Many athletes have lost their scholarships due to injury and were then on the hook for the costs of school, requiring some to transfer or drop out. There are some sports and programs that expect most of your time to be dedicated to the sport rather than your academics. The culture around some programs is toxic.
But none of it is inherent to the idea of "college sports". Would you argue that other extracurricular activities like clubs, student government, etc., are detrimental to education? Or would you say that they provide education in other areas of life compared to pure academia?
With regard to your last paragraph. I believe it is the amount of money that is the corrupting influence. It's not college athletics per se but rather the massive amount of money spent on certain sports that generates problems. The extracurricular activities you mentioned aren't bad or detrimental to the institution's purported goal of education because there's no money corrupting those activities.
The issue here is that people are forced to play sports as essentially slave labor to afford university. University tuition should be free or cheap for everyone.
Yes, let's rip out the one major contributor to school spirit. As a non-athlete, sporting events contributed greatly to my college experience and love for my alma mater. I am lucky to have that experience rather than say in Europe where the schools are basically stale, glorified paper mills.
schools in Europe are setup completely different then american schools.
for one, people rarely live on campus and people are not connected to their educational institute asmuch as Americans. a lot of students are part of associations (some with large legacies. mainly Germanic ones). but these assosiciations are not directly linked to a particular school.
also, the major difference between american colleges and European ones in my experience is the control the school has over people's lives. American schools seem to treat their students as kids in a bigger body, and they have sometimes insanely strict rules about behaviour, student housing etc.
most European school I have experience with couldn't care less about what you do in private, and besides some support networks for mental health, think of their students as adults who should fix their own housing, income, sports etc.
I always wonder about the upbringing(read: brainwashing) that fans of the NCAA who are such rabid defenders of its "heritage" had to have gotten to believe such childish things. The NCAA is the ultimate unpaid internship; if you are such a big fan of those, I encourage you to quit your paying job(if you have one) and pursue one.
I remember in high school(~6-10 years ago for me) people would talk about situations with the NCAA like this, and people who had absolutely no stake whatsoever in the system would defend it, often with the kind of weak arguments many have mentioned in this thread. Disappointing that we can't simply agree that people working should be proportionately paid. Some mention scholarships and the like, and I don't think that this is a "terrible" system, but it's clearly incredibly weighed in favor of the NCAA and the schools themselves.
What's worse is that a women's career start's earlier and ends quicker, so an organization that won't let them profit off their talent controls more of their career and thus decreases their payout.
Leaving aside the ethics of exploiting labor, my question is why are athletics a matter of our education system? Why does our government get involved in it at all? Why not decompose our university system into its individual parts instead - and let college age adults choose which areas they what to gain development in - whether that’s a particular sport or subject or whatever.
why are athletics a matter of our education system?
Why part of universities? Because in the 18th and 19th centuries a sound body was thought to be as important to a sound mind as a thorough knowledge of the great Western philosophers.
Why did it end up in the spectacle we know today as college football and NCAA and so on?
Because Princeton being Princeton, cheated at rugby.
The NCAA is a similarly corrupt club like the olympics. Preaching “amateurism” while making tons of money for the insiders. I wouldn’t mind if both got closed.
There is no equivalent to our college athletics in the whole world and anything that comes close to the scam that the NCAA is.
If you want to become an athlete in the rest of the world you skip schooling after high school and go straight into professional sports. The academic sports complex is a massive scam that is two-fold. It makes money off the (mainly blacks) “student” athletes either from the sports (and NCAA) or the alumni contributions in division 1 schools with men’s basketball or football. The students get nothing in return (not even an education in most cases - many examples of them being “graduated” whilst being illiterate and innumerate - see link at bottom). In the division 3 schools that are ranked competitively academically they are used as quota systems to let more whites into the school with esoteric or “elitist” sports like the aforementioned tennis or fencing or squash.
The rest of the world has the equivalent of our Minor League in Baseball for all competitive sports.Any sports in college is strictly intramural and for “fun”. Schools do not recruit athletes, as entrances are often based on exam results or some form of academic testing system.
First, no one is holding a gun to anyone's head. If the athletes don't like it, they don't have to go.
Second, the non-athletes pay a pretty penny for those classes that the athletes may ignore. It's common for students and their families to part with $150,000 to more than $300,000 for the same access to classes. Now, I agree that many athletes fail to get an education, but I think it's a stretch to say that this is all the fault of the college industrial complex. At some point, the students have to go to class.
Third, I realize that many coaches ask for long time commitments from athletes, but even then the value of the scholarship is still pretty sweet. For many, it may be the easiest money they make in their life. Even if they work out for 20 hours for the 25 weeks in a season, that's just 500 hours, about 1/4 of a normal full-time job. If the scholarship is worth $75,000 (as some are), then you're pulling down the equivalent of $300,000/year on an hourly basis. But it gets better because that scholarship is TAX-FREE.
Your general attitude about college sports has much merit, but the athletes are compensated.
As a former D1 swimmer, I can tell you 20 hours a week is on the low end. Sure, the NCAA mandates it be 20 hours of training but coaches aren’t really doing that. The amount of hours spent PT hours spent to essentially recover has to be considered.
Let’s address your other points:
1. Scholarship money. Scholarship money is great, but here’s the deal. Normally very few people get a full ride. There are only a certain amount of scholarships per team. Each sport has a different number of allotted scholarships and it is fixed across the schools in a a division. Your average scholarship is mostly like half of tuition or less, because of trying to make the team as a whole better.
2. Athletes have to go to class. Yes the have to. Unfortunately, there are these pulling demands or just crap reality.
First scenario: So your broken down student athlete, who has been training 30 hours, has to attend class. He/she attends class but honestly being mentally present is tough.
Second: You’re a student athlete whose ability to attend school is based on athletic performance. You don’t perform well or get hurt, you can lose that scholarship next year. Say bye bye to school.
Sure. I'm not saying it's a great job. I'm just saying that it's a job and there's a real quid pro quo. It just bugs me when people like to get preachy and say the athletes aren't compensated. Baloney.
And you're correct to point out that many of the scholarships in minor sports are fractional. The funny thing is that there's so much prestige involved in getting an athletic scholarship that many don't complain about this. Indeed for many schools up to and including the very best, the prestige may be worth more than the dollar value.
I am firmly against the NCAA. I get a lot of flack for this typically, but the NCAA as a system relies on basically slave labor. Universities are for education. If there are university sports they should be actual amateur institutions, more like our intramural sports and clubs, which some do travel. There should be no sports scholarships, coaches shouldn't be paid large sums, and there should not be millions of merchandise sold or tv rights. The idea of scholarship in exchange for being an athlete should be banned. Universities should be on academic merit, and then afterward people should play what they want. Tuition should also be affordable enough (or free) for any who are able to attend should be able to.
I think this organization has trouble. I think the landline thing is just ... wrong. It should be reversed. I think there should be a reckoning.
As to the author's stand on Name Image and Likeness, I don't know much about being a college athlete, but I don't think that should be allowed. At all.
The NCAA is an illegal monopoly if I ever saw one.
The northwestern group was as close as I’ve seen to a real challenge, but nobody has had the guts to go the distance in a lawsuit. I wish someone would - the result would be enlightening.
The NIL question is basically answered at this point - the student athletes do. There's a lot of state legislation making its way through that are allowing its student athletes to profit off their name and likeliness. Legislatures basically steamrolled the NCAA and said, "you have no power over this." When California started, it basically caused more states to fall quite quickly because other legislatures didn't want to give the California powerhouses an advantage in recruiting.
The NCAA is trying to rein things in and at least provide guidance right now, but their power is crumbling on this and many other issues.
There were other factors but what totally turned me against the NCAA is that the athletic scholarships are renewable every year. If you're hurt or are spending too much time in the classroom then your scholarship might not be renewed.
Sure, that's not going to affect healthy star players. But if you have something that really would be suited to rest or you want to take a tough course load, well, maybe they'll let you "red shirt" and maybe they won't. You still count against the scholarship limit.
If we could go back in time, maybe every town would have its football team and those teams could be promoted and relegated like many soccer teams. Players would be paid to play. Instead the college and university teams fill the need for people to have a local team.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadhttps://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-resea...
The NCAA need to seem important, which means they need people to break the rules regularly and be punished for it. That’s just one of many ways their fucking over students for the NCAA’s benefit.
The appropriate response is for students to boycott the NCAA, but socially and financially that is a huge hit. Normally the way around this is a union, but good luck getting one started.
However like most monopolies it’s not just network effects, they heavily protect themselves. Anything that makes you a professional athlete permanently kicks you out of NCAA scholarships etc. So, students are going to have a huge issue getting something off the ground, but they have a lot more leverage if students suddenly boycotted the Rose Bowl etc.
The incredible power imbalance between banning these athletes from making money, and then turning around and doing it yourself while being judge, jury, and executioner, makes a mockery of the talent.
These are barely "amateurs" in any real sense, the system exploits that fact and the seal of approval "amateur" status brings to rake in money.
No. It's a bad system for some athletes.
Its a good system for athletes that are not stars and don't play big money sports. Free education, free trips, play something you really like to do.
For other they are forgoing money they could earn.
If the system changes, I am sure it will be good for some athletes, not so much of others.
Honestly, for the author, she was playing tennis and got an education out of it on the backs of those playing revenue sports. I don't fault her for this--she didn't make the system--but it doesn't look like she went pro, and it she wasn't kicked out while she was in school, so the only damage she's suffering is the NCAA saying she wasn't on the team. Unless she's coaching, and being a college athlete is almost a qualification, she seems to have done OK.
That said, I still think she's right for calling out the NCAA.
She graduated; they're not taking her degree away. And honestly nobody cares about the college record of a professional tennis player -- the fact that it was vacated on a technicality like this is not going to hurt her professional career at this point. Likely she could coach as well, there are coaches in the NCAA who have done far worse (intentionally, not accidentally) and still get jobs.
I stand corrected. When I googled her to check that statement, I didn't see anything promising on the first page. I should have looked harder.
Also to your point about enforcement, you'll see that the money-making programs (i.e. Football and Basketball) at the big D1 schools get away with a lot more operating in the gray area than small schools and non-revenue sports. The NCAA isn't going to shit in their gravy train. They save the virtue-signal enforcement for schools and sports that don't make any money anyway.
Sounds like an anti-monopoly case in the making.
That’s really nice surprise why the most applauded engineers never comment here anymore
College athletics are education too. It's not like you become a tennis pro by just hitting the gym a lot. The best players study the rules, study physiology, study human nature....
Mixing institutions with an education and research purpose with sport tribalism seems like a terrible idea to begin with, adding tons of money to the mix surely can't result in anything that has anything to do with education...
But the level of strange commercialisation is just different from rest of the world. Insane amounts of money spend and revenues generated, but nothing really end up at athletes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZB0qsJuRDo
Stop doing anything that gives them money for any reason and let them know why. If enough people do it, the problem solves itself one way or the other.
If enough people do it... but they won't. They need to be sold on the idea, en masse, and that doesn't just happen.
Fortunately, we have a tool for collective action: government! Government regulation is how we can push institutions toward aligning with our values. Of course, entrenched interests don't want to be pushed, which is why there's been a massive campaign over the past few decades to scapegoat governments and paint them in a negative light. But they're the right tool for the job.
I think you have it totally wrong. I didn't suggest collective action. That involves organizing, funding, etc.
I just recommended stop giving them your money.
Also, the law already has a process for which this could be solved. That isn't regulation - it's a lawsuit. They damaged her unreasonably for something beyond her control. She should sue.
Regulating how the NCAA acts is not what the government should be involved in. Getting the government to regulate the NCAA is 1000x harder than just suing, and that's 1000x harder than just stop patronizing those organizations yourself. When you aren't emotionally tied into the NCAA, or when you're patronizing an alternative, NCAA fiascos don't both you.
The law doesn't necessarily have a process for this because you can't simply maintain a lawsuit whenever you feel you've been wronged. You have to make a claim for which there is a legal framework established by... the government! Do you have any reason to believe this former student would have a legally established right that the NCAA violated by following its policies?
And besides, your own comment recognized that this is a bigger problem than this one individual case!
If they want to insist amateurism is so important, then fine. Be amateur. Have student volunteers do the broadcasting, don't show any ads during the game, and take all the money out of it. Otherwise don't tell me players are the only ones who can't make money off of this.
College football makes obscene amounts of money, while at the same time discarding a ton of young athletes with permanently broken bodies. The TBI stuff in particular is deeply disturbing. I heard a heartbreaking interview with a family where 3 generations are entering dementia simultaneously because the younger 2 both played college ball.
Coaches, schools, broadcasters... true fortunes being made by this industry every single day. But somehow giving the dang kids a slice of that ruins the authenticity of the league. What a pile of nonsense.
A recent N.C.A.A. study determined that only about 20 of the 1,000 or so college sports programs in the nation were profitable.
The 30 largest universities in the country each routinely generate annual revenues exceeding $100 million from sports, but according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, most of those revenues are spent covering operating expenses for the school’s athletic programs and paying tuition for their student-athletes. The majority of Division I colleges in the N.C.A.A. operate at a loss.
There is lots of money in college athletics. That money is not going to institutions to generate revenue for the institution at large. That money goes back to the athletic department and almost every college athletic program receives revenue in the form of student fees.
Here’s a quote from another piece [2]:
By far, the largest student fee is the last – the intercollegiate athletic fee – which can be upwards of 80% of the total fee amount at many institutions not in Power Five conferences.
Conventional wisdom says that intercollegiate athletics is a boon to colleges and universities; that it’s wildly profitable; attracts new students; enhances fundraising; and, boosts the university’s profile. Yet these are myths, often perpetuated by the media – and by the universities themselves.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/opinion/pay-college-athle...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2014/12/12/who-actually-fu...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
College Football (in the Power 5, and top tier group of 5) itself is very profitable. But the money is quickly spent on the program and to fund the program and the department as a whole.
Also, some stats there include Div II, III, etc. Programs without big TV deals, licensing revenue etc. do not make money from their athletic departments. Not a shocker or really what any of this is referring to.
But for the major programs, the money from licensing, TV rights, conference revenue sharing, etc. covers the basics for women's programs and less popular sports. Then it gets dumped along with booster $ into the CFB football facilities arms race, ever growing coaching salaries, and multimillion dollar buyouts of contracts.
This isn't totally unique to not-for-profit Universities either. Executive perks in non-profits are another way to make the year-end balance out. Government programs, and corporate departments dump cash at the end of their fiscal years to avoid losing the budget the next year.
Consider this. Take away the most profitable college sports program. Will that college be forced to increase tuition to cover the loss of money for non-athletic related expenses? The answer is no.
What is that article missing if your assertion is true?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/why-students-foot-the-...
In terms of sheer numbers of schools, I guess your definition of "few exceptions" hold true. Should the majority of commuter schools, like say California State University, Sacramento, subsidize heavily in athletics? Of course not. However, your UCLA's, Michigans, and Texas A&Ms make insane amount of money, and often give money back to their university.
Since you refuse to even do a small amount of research into this, stadiums and capital expenditures are vastly funded by alumni donations. Unofficially that is the biggest metric for athletic director success.
https://www.ibtimes.com/college-football-public-universities...
Each state, university, have different requirements on what is reported as subsidies. For example, discounting an out of state athlete's tuition may or may not be a subsidy. In some schools, all of the apparel sold with a school logo is athletics money, while in others, a percentage. And of course, private universities like Stanford, Northwestern, and the Ivys report very little.
The articles also strawman the entire argument by using student fees to fund athletics. True, some schools abuse the hell out of them. Some Division III schools have ungodly amounts of athletic fees, and the students will never see their return. However, success in athletics, and football in particular, add to the brand of the school. Anti-athletics faculty love to huff and puff about how this isn't true, but common sense and studies in business schools routinely dispute this. Boston College reported a 3x increase in enrollment the year after Doug Flutie threw his touchdown. University of Alabama's enrollment has gone way up while the acceptance rate has gone way down in Nick Saban's tenure. Even if you never attend a game of any sort in school, you will gain in the perceived value of your degree.
> I haven't looked into it but I doubt any football program paid for the stadium they use
This tells me all I need to know about your bias on this.
Do you not have opinions, impressions, thought, ideas about things you haven’t studied? Of course you do. In my case I was intellectually honest enough to let the reader distinguish between those thoughts of mine I had ready evidence for and those that I don’t.
As to your third paragraph please keep in mind my usage of with rare exceptions. Of course you can cite counter examples to the general trend of college football being a drain on resources. Also note that I’ve cited evidence to back up my beliefs and you have not. You’ve even made a reference to common sense. There are far too many examples of where intuition and common sense are wrong for this to be a legitimate basis for a strong belief.
There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off of college sports. None of them are players.
If instead of destroying his body playing sports, someone had come and broken his legs with a crowbar, would he be better off? Don't get me wrong, I hate the NCAA, but there's a good reason why amateur sports exist.
Are the players underage? If the players are treated as employees of a business would the business have to jump through tons and tons of extra legal hoops?
I'm not saying that this is the case. But it's not too uncommon that messed up situations arise as a result of society's desire to protect a group.
Why would that matter? Underage sports participants get money all the time (tournament prizes, junior racing sponsorships, etc).
More broadly, it points out just how incoherent the demand that some athletes remain "amateur" is, when "amateur" is just used as a proxy for "unpaid": there's nothing noteworthy about a teenage driver winning a cash prize for a small-time race, and nobody in the pro racing world is going to say that they're not an "amateur" driver just because they got money for racing once.
The only harm that has been done is that the NCAA has written her out of its internal records (it's dishonest to say "My Career" when it explicitly refers to her achievements as a professed amateur).
The NCAA does things that seem exploitative and wrong to me. But it also helps a lot of people. This young lady's outrage is not a good argument for the former.
NCAA's claims of "amateurism" are blatantly dishonest in the first place. They control what are pro minor leagues in every way except for the denial of straightforward compensation to the players.
For the three other athletes mentioned by name, in each case the story is that they had medical issues caused by, exacerbated by, or at least neglected by the NCAA. That's a real injustice and a real story. What happened to the author is meh.
So ignore it. Any time you find one part of an argument or its presentation lacking, just look past it. You'll find that it often doesn't affect the validity of the whole, and when that's the case picking on the non-essential part just shows bad faith.
But things have become twisted along the way. Higher education is still there, and it has become a bit more practical, which is not bad. However the "sports" part became completely broken. Instead of giving students a good body (a noble goal), it shifted to competition, taking subpar students with great athletic skills just to beat the other college team, and overworking and ultimately breaking them. The complete opposite of the original idea.
If that were the goal then they would offer daily aerobics or yoga classes and not engage in competitive sports. For most students college sports is a spectator sport and an opportunity to get drunk.
With that said, the current system sucks. Many athletes have lost their scholarships due to injury and were then on the hook for the costs of school, requiring some to transfer or drop out. There are some sports and programs that expect most of your time to be dedicated to the sport rather than your academics. The culture around some programs is toxic.
But none of it is inherent to the idea of "college sports". Would you argue that other extracurricular activities like clubs, student government, etc., are detrimental to education? Or would you say that they provide education in other areas of life compared to pure academia?
for one, people rarely live on campus and people are not connected to their educational institute asmuch as Americans. a lot of students are part of associations (some with large legacies. mainly Germanic ones). but these assosiciations are not directly linked to a particular school.
also, the major difference between american colleges and European ones in my experience is the control the school has over people's lives. American schools seem to treat their students as kids in a bigger body, and they have sometimes insanely strict rules about behaviour, student housing etc.
most European school I have experience with couldn't care less about what you do in private, and besides some support networks for mental health, think of their students as adults who should fix their own housing, income, sports etc.
I remember in high school(~6-10 years ago for me) people would talk about situations with the NCAA like this, and people who had absolutely no stake whatsoever in the system would defend it, often with the kind of weak arguments many have mentioned in this thread. Disappointing that we can't simply agree that people working should be proportionately paid. Some mention scholarships and the like, and I don't think that this is a "terrible" system, but it's clearly incredibly weighed in favor of the NCAA and the schools themselves.
Why part of universities? Because in the 18th and 19th centuries a sound body was thought to be as important to a sound mind as a thorough knowledge of the great Western philosophers.
Why did it end up in the spectacle we know today as college football and NCAA and so on?
Because Princeton being Princeton, cheated at rugby.
If you want to become an athlete in the rest of the world you skip schooling after high school and go straight into professional sports. The academic sports complex is a massive scam that is two-fold. It makes money off the (mainly blacks) “student” athletes either from the sports (and NCAA) or the alumni contributions in division 1 schools with men’s basketball or football. The students get nothing in return (not even an education in most cases - many examples of them being “graduated” whilst being illiterate and innumerate - see link at bottom). In the division 3 schools that are ranked competitively academically they are used as quota systems to let more whites into the school with esoteric or “elitist” sports like the aforementioned tennis or fencing or squash.
The rest of the world has the equivalent of our Minor League in Baseball for all competitive sports.Any sports in college is strictly intramural and for “fun”. Schools do not recruit athletes, as entrances are often based on exam results or some form of academic testing system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_League_Baseball
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_athletics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_athletics_in_the_Unite...
My favorite story on our academic athletic complex is the bond issuance of over 60 million dollars to build a high school football stadium in Texas:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2639092-texas-town-appro...
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https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-...
Second, the non-athletes pay a pretty penny for those classes that the athletes may ignore. It's common for students and their families to part with $150,000 to more than $300,000 for the same access to classes. Now, I agree that many athletes fail to get an education, but I think it's a stretch to say that this is all the fault of the college industrial complex. At some point, the students have to go to class.
Third, I realize that many coaches ask for long time commitments from athletes, but even then the value of the scholarship is still pretty sweet. For many, it may be the easiest money they make in their life. Even if they work out for 20 hours for the 25 weeks in a season, that's just 500 hours, about 1/4 of a normal full-time job. If the scholarship is worth $75,000 (as some are), then you're pulling down the equivalent of $300,000/year on an hourly basis. But it gets better because that scholarship is TAX-FREE.
Your general attitude about college sports has much merit, but the athletes are compensated.
Let’s address your other points: 1. Scholarship money. Scholarship money is great, but here’s the deal. Normally very few people get a full ride. There are only a certain amount of scholarships per team. Each sport has a different number of allotted scholarships and it is fixed across the schools in a a division. Your average scholarship is mostly like half of tuition or less, because of trying to make the team as a whole better.
2. Athletes have to go to class. Yes the have to. Unfortunately, there are these pulling demands or just crap reality.
First scenario: So your broken down student athlete, who has been training 30 hours, has to attend class. He/she attends class but honestly being mentally present is tough.
Second: You’re a student athlete whose ability to attend school is based on athletic performance. You don’t perform well or get hurt, you can lose that scholarship next year. Say bye bye to school.
And you're correct to point out that many of the scholarships in minor sports are fractional. The funny thing is that there's so much prestige involved in getting an athletic scholarship that many don't complain about this. Indeed for many schools up to and including the very best, the prestige may be worth more than the dollar value.
As to the author's stand on Name Image and Likeness, I don't know much about being a college athlete, but I don't think that should be allowed. At all.
The northwestern group was as close as I’ve seen to a real challenge, but nobody has had the guts to go the distance in a lawsuit. I wish someone would - the result would be enlightening.
The NCAA is trying to rein things in and at least provide guidance right now, but their power is crumbling on this and many other issues.
Sure, that's not going to affect healthy star players. But if you have something that really would be suited to rest or you want to take a tough course load, well, maybe they'll let you "red shirt" and maybe they won't. You still count against the scholarship limit.
If we could go back in time, maybe every town would have its football team and those teams could be promoted and relegated like many soccer teams. Players would be paid to play. Instead the college and university teams fill the need for people to have a local team.