Posted on 03/27/2014 7:43:27 AM PDT by A'elian' nation
College football players should not be paid. Plain and simple. But there is no reason why any player should not be given carte blanche to capitalize on his chosen sport.
Capitalism 101 rides to the rescue once again. In addition to the free education players get, any player, on scholarship or not, should be allowed to sell and hawk his personal merchandise from t-shirt to jockstrap. He or she should be allowed to put his name and school name/logo on his jersey or helmet or whatever - just like the pros do. A player could sell and trade cards with his name and stats - anything he can come up with that is marketable.
Paying athletes to play and unionizing the sport is a terrible idea. It's just another desperate grab by the dying unions. Not only would the athlete earn limitless compensation, but these young college students would quickly learn all about Economics 101 and Conservatism 101 instead of just pocketing a paycheck and paying union dues.
The NFL is not a valid analogy for two or three foundational reasons.
It is for your list of questions. Both forms of the game have all the same job titles doing all the same work. The difference is NFL players get paid and college football players are specifically barred from payment by an oversight body that’s corrupt and inept.
If they are employees, don’t they have to declare their free tuition, books, fees and tutors as income and pay taxes on it?
No need to negotiate rights. This is our school’s policy. You are on scholarship. We are paying for you to be here. Do you want to be here? Yes or No?
End of discussion.
The problem is to get a farm system as robust as the MLB or NHL you need fan buy in. Minor league baseball and hockey work to develop players because they work as leagues with enough fan support that they can function on their own (as shown during various work stoppages in the major leagues). The failure of NFL Europe, the XFL, the “suspended” Arena season, and the fact almost nobody even remembers the NBA even HAS a d-league show that there isn’t that kind of fan support for minor leagues in those sports.
I wonder how much the success of the college sports feeds into the inability to have minor leagues for these. College hockey and baseball aren’t very popular, and are often considered dumping grounds for bad players that will never make it in the pros even the minor leagues. They’re addendums to the sport. Meanwhile college football and basketball are HUGE, rivaling in popularity their pro leagues. I don’t think there’s enough oxygen in their rooms for minor league football or basketball unless they’re HEAVILY funded by their majors.
OK, here is my 2 cents, as if anyone really cares.
College sports is a multibillion dollar enterprise that has allowed the university system to get filthy rich from sea to shining sea in America.
There is not a medium sized city in this country that does not have some sort of higher education entity in its area. Whether it be a community, state University.
These education entities are raking in big bucks off the talent of athletes. Usually basketball, football, and baseball, are the sports that rake in the big bucks.
These big bucks allow the higher education system to buy up properties at a rate far higher than the civilian sector in the areas. In Chico, where I live, Chico State University is the largest property holder in the are, just above Enloe Hospital.
These university systems use their tax free money to influence the politics in every city and town they reside in. Ever wonder why all these college towns are so liberal when the surrounding areas are conservative? Well it all goes back to the money.
We all bitch and complain about the way these so called higher education entities do more to propagandize our children to get them to vote against their parents then they do teaching them anything worth using. After all, a good 85% of college graduates never ever get a job in the field they studied in college.
So, back to the athletes. I think each and every kid who is playing any type of sports that the higher education entity is making money off, should get paid. Then, if the kid wants to go to class, let them pay for it out of their salary.
Then, we can eliminate the charade that is played and accept the fact that college Basketball, Football, and baseball, are nothing more than a minor league training system for professional sports.
This will reduce the money the university systems are making and maybe just maybe reduce the amount of money these tax exempt entities use to influence politics in cities and towns across America. Along with maybe just maybe they will discontinue teaching students propaganda and get back to educating them on how to actually get a job from what they are learning.
Your third paragraph is poorly written. You jump from thesis to thesis with no bridge.
Might want an editor.
There are two big gains with a minor league system. The first is the teams’ ability to have players taught the way they want them taught without taking up roster spots on the main team. You don’t worry if trying to season the player is dragging the team down because they’re on the farm team any winning the farm team does is just icing.
The second is it presents an opportunity to experiment with the game without risking annoying your main audience. The NHL does this all the time, most rules changes have been tried out for at least part of a season in the minors, and a lot of the things they try out there they don’t like the results and back them out. Sometimes even mid season which is something you just can’t get away with in the big money league.
I don’t know if these benefits make a need, but they could make a lot of things go smoother. Look at the recent debate in the NFL on extra points, all of the solutions presented are major changes that Goodell has basically admitted they’re afraid to adopt because they don’t want to commit a whole season to a new rule that might actually be worse. If they had a real minor league that’s a solvable problem. Also look at draft busts, a lot of the discussion around Tebow is people saying he should have gotten more chances, but his completion percentage shows there was a definite cost to giving him more chances, with a farm team he could have gotten a couple of seasons to be taught the NFL game without anybody worrying he was costing the team any games. There’s a constant discussion in the QB position on how different the college and pro games are and how few star college QBs have been given any of the training pro coaches want their QBs to have.
But somebody’s gotta pay for it. And I don’t see the NFL as ever deciding to foot the entire bill for a league they know nobody will watch. If they were willing to do that NFLE would still exist.
If they require the universities to pay their football players, get ready for the Title IX crowd to come in and insist on equal pay for an equal number of female athletes, who play sports that draw hardly any ticket sales. That will make the whole system totally unworkable, financially.
Frankly I don’t see a thing wrong with the current system. If a student athlete thinks he is being taken advantage of, just receiving a free education, he is free to quit.
The get paid now - it's called a scholarship, which includes part or all of room & board, books, tuition, and tutoring (as required).
Then, if the kid wants to go to class, let them pay for it out of their salary.
So, they could play sports and not go to class??? They are called student/athletes for a reason.
I don’t care about your question.
...just for the record...I’d like to see your answer to the question he/she asked as well...
A side benefit to not having nationally popular college level or nationally popular independent farm system is that even the star players are much less likely to come into the pros with entitled baggage/jerkitude in the character department.
Freegards
Obviously you keyed in on those points without reading the rest of what I wrote.
Hence your ignorance of my whole point.
The thing to keep in mind about minor leagues is the players down there don’t make the same as they would in the major. They get what’s called 2-way contracts, an NHL player might get 4 million a year in the league, but if he’s sent down to the AHL farm he’ll make dramatically less than that (probably not more than 100K). And there’s nothing saying teams have to have these other players or a minimum number (might be a maximum), if they don’t want to have anybody developing in the minors they don’t have to. Meanwhile remember they already do carry extra players for the practice squad. And if your QB is in the minors he probably isn’t your new franchise QB, you’re hoping he is, but if you were certain of it he’d at worst be on your bench.
I think the rarity of games has more to do with unwillingness to develop players than free agency. With a 16 games schedule and the #1 seed usually going to teams with 3 or fewer losses you just don’t have the freedom to let a guy lose games for you while he gets better. You’ve always got the opportunity to keep players with contract extensions and the franchise tag.
There’s always going to be rules tweaks. As players get bigger, stronger and faster the old ways don’t work as well anymore, and smart coaches figure out ways to circumnavigate the intent of rules, and sometimes you find out that you wrote a bad rule. There’s always something broken, the problem is actually fixing it vs making it worse.
As someone else pointed out, your ranting was hard to follow. So, I responded to the portion that was understandable and I still don’t see anything that indicates that you think differently, so I stand by my response.
And, rather than discuss the comment, you choose to attack the writer - I guess you don’t have any facts to support your statements. You must be liberal.
The NCAA is inept and corrupt…..no argument here….that doesn’t change the argument, although you are not the only one blinded by how you feel about the NCAA.
But the difference between college and pro is that any highly skilled highly paid industry needs those who would enter that industry to be trained. If a year of Harvard Law School is worth say 100 thousand dollars because of how much money it will train you to make, then what is a year playing basketball or footall worth in future earnings?
But there’s more. A university makes money because of the name of the university, period. A particular group of players is hardly relevant. If the players think they are the relevant item, then a minor league that makes a lot of money will spring up. Until then, the players have no argument in logic that “they produce the revenue.”
Johnny Manziel is awesome and compelling, but he walked out onto the field for his first snap ever with 95 thousand adoring fans simply because he had Texas A and M on his helmet. Period.
Everything you said about the problem is true….I don’t agree with your solution, but it’s a very interesting post. What will happen, if the players unionize, is the entire relationship between players and fans will change….and it will not be good for college football in general.
Now, would that be the worst thing in the world? Maybe not, but it’s something no one is thinking about. If players are paid, there will be about 20-30 huge universities in a new Division One, and it will be much like a 30 team pro league. That’s about the tolerance the nation has for “pro” teams in a given sport.
Northwestern will itself become irrlelvant compared to Michigan, Ohio State, etc….in a very short time.
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