Good question. If this is really much more hard nosed business and we are to dispense with the whole academic/amateurism model which is the way its going.....why pay for what I call the money losing sports? Right now the major schools can afford it but the fact remains that aside from football and men's basketball...and maybe men's baseball, every other sport loses money because there just isn't much interest. Of course that means women's sports all become non scholarship club teams. I can hear the screaming and the wailing now.........
How long will they continue to allow their academic subsidiaries to interfere with the smooth operation of the football programs — you know, all that nonsense about enrollment, classes and grades, and the need to fake it with tutors and laborious efforts to camouflage academic fraud?
I would bet they keep this requirement in place. The fig leaf of academics looks good and no doubt does some good for a lot of these players who are never going to play in the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc I'm sure plenty of players get college degrees who otherwise would never have gotten one. The school presidents, the alumni and Congress all like that.
How long will they allow the NCAA to impose silly limits on recruiting — as opposed, for example, to just signing middle and high school kids to professional contracts, the way European professional soccer clubs do?
Another good question. In the mid 80s, the NCAA cut college football scholarships from 95 to 85. This was driven by the smaller schools wanting to hamstring the bigger programs to drag them down to the smaller schools' level AND to make more of the top tier talent available to the smaller schools. Before the limit was 95 it was even more than that. The programs in the SEC and B1G can afford to give out more scholarships. Why continue to allow smaller schools to hold them to the lower limit?
Will the basketball programs stay linked to the football programs or go separate? Here and there, we already have football-only or basketball-only schools in conference play. Why shouldn’t this be the norm?
Yes, they will stay linked. Some smaller schools can't afford a major football program but can afford a much cheaper basketball program. The major state universities which comprise the vast majority of the members of the SEC and B1G can easily afford both - and both are included in the lucrative TV contracts both conferences have signed with various broadcast networks.
Do the football programs really need to continue to hold out at least some seats for students? Ticket prices can be jacked up at will; at least at the top ten schools, the alums and corporations doing business entertainment will pay. The real money is in tv contracts and gambling. Isn’t it time to dispense with the low-dollar student market entirely?
That's a bad idea. That's like eating the seed corn. You need to keep the next generation of fans and especially alums engaged. Several major universities keep ticket prices for students and even recent alums below market rates. Its like a gateway drug. Get them hooked. Then you can raise prices later as they get older and start earning more money.
Titily IX regulation says if a college gives scholarships to male players it has to do the same with female players. So colleges with money making sports have to have the sports for women too.