Another one of the many college sports issues. If you got the scholarship, they shouldn’t be able to remove it for a non-academic reason, and probably not even then.
Or what if a non-famous player gets injured in college which prevents them from playing in the pros or affects them later on in life. Again, the CA bill wouldn’t help them, but just paying college athletes would, at a minimum, provide them with compensation for their work.
College athletes play in a system where literally everyone other than them gets paid for something they do. That’s about as unjust a situation as you can design.
It’s a step in the right direction. A week ago they had nothing.
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True, I’m not disagreeing with that at all.
I’m just saying that it’s just the first step.
Pay them all.
Yes, and no.
The division 1 athletes, famous or not, are working. Someone is paying money to come see them. Someone is buying their jersey. People are paying to broadcast their games and advertise on those broadcasts. Someone is advertising on the field. Someone is making money off their play.
The division 3 athletes in other sports are not doing any such thing. The NCAA also covers the rowing team at a tiny-ass college. That’s just a bunch of kids rowing for fun. Nobody is making money off of them. If anything, the school loses money on them. Are they really laborers deserving to be paid?
I mean, I’m not going to complain if they start paying the rowing team kids, but should they be forced to do so? That might actually mean the end of the rowing team.
There’s also the competitive fairness to consider. Even if they pay kids, without a draft or a salary cap, things will become wildly unfair very quickly. The schools with the most money will attract the best players. There’s no draft, so you could see the top 5 men’s basketball players all on the same team every single year. It will be the all-star freshman team vs. the field every yeah. It sure will be exciting when they lose, though. It will happen eventually.
And if the kids in the small sports can be paid, too, then things will get really problematic. Any school with money will suddenly have a Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Softball Team.
I think the real rule we need is this.
Colleges may not have pro sports, period. That means a college may not make money on the sport. Free tickets. No TV. No ads. No nothing. If it’s truly an amateur sport, then nobody should be allowed to make any money from it. The athletes really are just students who want to have fair and fun extracurricular athletic competitions.
If someone is making money on the sport, then it’s pro, and everyone needs to be paid. If the school wants to license its brand to a local, but otherwise unrelated, pro sports team, that’s ok. For example, get rid of the NBA G league. Instead, there’s a professional minor league, and one of the teams just happens to be called the Duke Blue Devils and just happens to play near the Duke campus. The players are just pro players. They might be students, they might not be. They’re just pro basketball players who aren’t good enough or the NBA right now.
These leagues would have nothing to do with the NCAA whatsoever. The NCAA would continue to exist according to its original purpose. Make sure those amateur athletic sports where nobody makes any money are truly fair and nobody is pulling a Mr. Burns.
Ideally, this is my preferred outcome as well, but I doubt that’s going to happen. There’s just too much money in college sports.
And college athletes are already being paid, it’s just under the table and they’re the ones who are punished for it when they’re caught.
To use your example of Division I athletes, there are roughly 4,500 Division I basketball players in the US. Only 60 players are drafted by the NBA each year, and some of those players are international ones who aren’t even Division I athletes. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say that all 60 players drafted are NCAA players. That still leave 4,440 players who won’t play in the NBA who still aren’t being compensated for playing.
In 2015-2016 alone, the Louisville Basketball team made $45.6 million. In one season. The players saw none of that. Duke made $31 million. Again, none of that money went to the players.
While the CA bill is definitely a step in the right direction, it will only benefit the 0.01% of NCAA players. For the rest of them, nothing will change.
I mean, my full scholarship to RIT required that I maintain a 3.4 GPA or it would have immediately been cut.
There are about 400-500k student athletes total each year. The overwhelming majority are not even in a sport that makes money. Pretty much only division 1 has these issues. And those issues are only in men’s basketball, men’s football, a few women’s basketball teams, and a few men’s ice hockey teams. Even in division 1 men’s basketball and football there are plenty of do-nothing teams that are far from pro.
The NCAA is built to handle the majority of those 400k+ student athletes. It’s just that those top 1% are such extreme outliers, that it’s a catastrophic situation applying the same rules to them. I don’t think there’s any real solution that doesn’t involve excising them completely.
Exactly. As long as they maintain the lie that the scholarship is for a student athlete, then athletic performance should not be a requirement of maintaining the scholarship. As long as they meet the academic standards, you have to keep paying.
That doesn’t take into account that for a lot of these student athletes, their entire college experience is based around athletics, not academics.
That’s a whole separate issue though.
Yes, that small 1% are at school playing sports and not going to school. Excise them and stop the farce. The remaining true student athletes should be focusing on academics because they have no future as professional athletes.
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100% this is the right approach.
For the upper extremes of college athletics, they should be treated more like university staff who happen to also be students. For everyone else, they should be treated like students who happen to also be athletes.
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There’s actually a lot of precedence for university staff also being students. When I worked in the scheduling office at RIT, the scheduling officer was taking classes and getting a graduate degree, presumably for free or low cost, because they were an employee of the school.
Yes, there is a huge imbalance, but this kind of imbalance would venture into the absurd.
Sorry paywall. Really great interview, though.
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Wow! Not enough, but a step in the right direction.
I guess with every sport on hold, they’ve finally got time to get their heads out of their asses.
Stanford is canceling 11 varsity sports. Not corona canceling, canceling canceling. This is crazy news.