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swickles posted:I think unionizing is the way to go. Right now, the only people talking about paying players is coming for the media and there are so many things a union or organization of players can accomplish other than pay for athletes. For one, eliminating the the three year rule. Right now it serves no purpose. Its even more ridiculous in basketball with the one year rule. Could you imagine if Lebron spent a year in college? Plenty of NBA athletes are ready right out of high school. Its a ridiculous system of collusion. Good luck to the theoretical college athletes union getting NFL rules changed. Edit: and the three year rule is really the crux of the issue. For all the NCAA's faults, it's the NFL's policies that are forcing these players to go to college if they want any shot at playing in the pros. The three year rule ensures that the owners have time to evaluate talent in what amounts to a free minor league system. It's just one of the nice things you can do when you're a monopoly. There's no pro developmental league because they have no incentive to create one. General Dog fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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swickles posted:Its even more ridiculous in basketball with the one year rule. Could you imagine if Lebron spent a year in college? Plenty of NBA athletes are ready right out of high school. Its a ridiculous system of collusion.  not to start a big fat NBA labor derail but the one year rule didn't come from management in the cba negotiations
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Jan 29, 2014 08:10
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Hazo posted:Chiche, what do you disagree with? That college ball could coexist with a minor football league? Or that going pro shouldn't require x amount of college? I think that the idea the players are well taken care of is a total joke (read the FSU article about football playing students). I also disagree with this being bad for college football. Either we will have minor league teams that pay the players or we will have college teams that pay the players, but this is absolutely not a death knell for the continued existence of the sport.
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Jan 29, 2014 08:28
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Frackie Robinson posted:I'm not approaching this as an advocate for the athletes, I'm approaching it as a college football fan. If you're a fan of college football, this is bad news. I'm a fan of a college football team. But college football is really pretty bad, low quality play, exploitative, and overly commercialized. The NFL needs to bear the cost of developing players instead of benefiting from the current system. Works for baseball. And college baseball still exists.
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Jan 29, 2014 08:38
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Frackie Robinson posted:It's a slippery slope. Between coaches, facilities and other non-athlete expenses, there's already a spending war in major college athletics. The average FBS head coach makes $1.64 million and the average assistant makes $200,000. Head coach salaries are up 70% since 2006, and assistant salaries have increased 30% since 2009. There's money in the system as it stands, so it seems unreasonable to think colleges would fold a moneymaking industry rather than just divide the money they're already paying laborers more equitably
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Jan 29, 2014 09:24
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Chichevache posted:I think that the idea the players are well taken care of is a total joke (read the FSU article about football playing students). I also disagree with this being bad for college football. Either we will have minor league teams that pay the players or we will have college teams that pay the players, but this is absolutely not a death knell for the continued existence of the sport.
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Jan 29, 2014 09:29
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This LA Times article compares college atheletes to graduate student teachers, who successfully unionized about a decade ago.
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Jan 29, 2014 10:13
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The idea of scholarship being as good as payment is like if a retail job paid you in gift certificates. Yeah, it has a monetary value, but the "cost" to the employer is a fraction of its market value. Or if a company picked their ten best employees and sent them paychecks and then sent the rest of their employees a bill instead.
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Jan 29, 2014 10:13
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Dubar posted:The idea of scholarship being as good as payment is like if a retail job paid you in gift certificates. Yeah, it has a monetary value, but the "cost" to the employer is a fraction of its market value. Or if a company picked their ten best employees and sent them paychecks and then sent the rest of their employees a bill instead.
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Jan 29, 2014 10:42
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Declan MacManus posted:If the NFL moves to a true minor league system, it's going to squash any sort of creative offense which will be lovely I think this is a bit of a leap. I see where you're coming from and it's a definite possibility but that's so many steps removed from the current system that it's not worth worrying about. If/when someone tries to set up a minor league then we can worry about it. Declan MacManus posted:That money is not evenly distributed throughout college and most college football programs operate at a loss (and like, an actual loss, not "Pro Sports Accounting is Magical" loss). If you add salaries for 85~ scholarship players you're tacking on something on the order of a million dollars, minimum, to the operating costs of each program, which is not something that the BGSUs and the Rices of the world just have laying around. Not to be pedantic but Rice definitely has the money for that. That said would it be so terrible for everything outside the top 30-50 teams to fold up? It's better for the university since they're likely already operating at a loss. Frackie Robinson posted:It's a slippery slope. I seriously doubt you'd see any major escalation. If players start getting paid you'd immediately see the programs currently losing the most money fold. The rest would suck up the remaining talent and likely pay them 15-20k a year. You might see some select positions or recruits (QBs) get offers for more but by and large there'd be no incentive to pay them more. The top schools could offer a lower salary and still get great recruits based on their ability to get players better opportunities for future earnings. Anyway this has me curious about the math. Let's assume there are 85 players per team that would get paid. At an average pay of 20k per year you're looking at 1.7mil per year for each school. The average HC salary has increased by more than 1.7mil in the past 5 years. There's definitely money for the players. This made me think of a completely different reaction. College athletic expenditures have increased while academic spending has decreased over the last five years. That problem hasn't become a conversation in the wider culture but who wants to bet that paying the athletes, the mostly poor black athletes, will suddenly bring that problem to the forefront? Relentlessboredomm fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 10:54
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bawfuls posted:This LA Times article compares college atheletes to graduate student teachers, who successfully unionized about a decade ago.
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Jan 29, 2014 11:05
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Re: where's the money going to come from? Assuming that you're going to do nothing more than pay 85 scholarship kids a $20k per year stipend, you need to find $1.7 million a year. Multiply that by 14 teams, you've got about $23 million. Now consider that the SEC's currently distributing anywhere between $20 and $40 million a year...to each team, depending on whose numbers you use. Big 10, $20-$35 million.. ACC teams are slightly worse off, they only get $16 million a year. Pac-12, $20 million. If your athletic department's budget can't cope with reserving $2 million of that pie (or approximately one Dabo Swinney) for the most important people in the system, then either it needs to have different people in it, or it shouldn't be playing with such ridiculous sums of money in the first place.
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Jan 29, 2014 11:43
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Relentlessboredomm posted:I think this is a bit of a leap. I see where you're coming from and it's a definite possibility but that's so many steps removed from the current system that it's not worth worrying about. If/when someone tries to set up a minor league then we can worry about it. I agree that it isn't worth worrying about at the moment, but if you set up a minor league you're developing players for your own league. We can pretty much assume that, say, flexbone quarterbacks won't be in demand. Like, it just seems like it would obviously be true if we ever end up there.
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Jan 29, 2014 12:02
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Trin Tragula posted:Re: where's the money going to come from? Assuming that you're going to do nothing more than pay 85 scholarship kids a $20k per year stipend, you need to find $1.7 million a year. Multiply that by 14 teams, you've got about $23 million. Yeah, the source of money is readily available, but there is no way you're getting a whole football team for just $20,000 per person per year. A large Division I university will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 student-athletes, male and female, across all sports. At an average wage scale of $30,000 a year (what the hell, I'm being generous), that's $18 million. That's about 75 percent of the entire operating budget for a mid-level FBS university. Title IX adds a special issue: Because the football team applicants are overwhelmingly male, per job requirements, the athletic departments may have to agree to have wages for male and female athletes line up. Either by averages, median dollars, total salary -- whatever it is, it's going to have a huge effect on women's sports because the colleges won't get away from paying the starting softball catcher $2,000 a year while giving the third-string cornerback $20,000 a year. At least, they won't without significant legislative turmoil and (likely) a court ruling. A highly touted football recruit will attract salaries of $250,000 per year in an open market, perhaps up to $1 million. Players who leave via "free agency" could easily make $1 million, and possibly more. Obviously, conferences will implement cost-control measures such as salary caps and performance expectation clauses and deny me of my fantasy of seeing Alabamans bankrupt their state to support winning football teams.
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Jan 29, 2014 12:13
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How many smaller schools are going to "solve" the problem by just declaring their football progam "club teams" that don't have to follow NCAA rules?
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Jan 29, 2014 12:31
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bawfuls posted:This LA Times article compares college atheletes to graduate student teachers, who successfully unionized about a decade ago. These laws vary from state to state. Some grad students can unionize and some can't. For example, they can't unionize in Ohio.
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Jan 29, 2014 13:41
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Apologies for nested quotes.quote:I think you misunderstand me because unions loving rule and I want the athletes to seize the means of yardage production and get paid according to their labor. Labor reform Owns, gently caress the NCAA and their bourgeois ownership class. D&D is thataway if you want an echo chamber of outrage. Cut the poo poo otherwise. quote:I think unionizing is the way to go. Right now, the only people talking about paying players is coming for the media and there are so many things a union or organization of players can accomplish other than pay for athletes. For one, eliminating the the three year rule. Right now it serves no purpose Blame the NFL for that. I'd bet the players union would fight that as well, as increased numbers of college kids playing in the NFL would lead to more veterans on the street. There's already tremendous economic pressure in the NFL to play rookies due to cap issues, and removing the three year rule would just accelerate that. Jack Bechta touches on a lot of it in this column, which is a pretty good read. http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/The-next-CBA-adjustments.html I don't expect the NFL to remove that rule unless they bite the bullet and actually form a farm system for pro sports. Like with a lot of the rules set up at the NCAA level, it isn't designed to be fair to the players. The three year rule is pretty small change on the 'lovely things done to college players', compared to things like the rules on player transfers and the salaries college coaches draw. quote:Re: where's the money going to come from? Assuming that you're going to do nothing more than pay 85 scholarship kids a $20k per year stipend, you need to find $1.7 million a year. Multiply that by 14 teams, you've got about $23 million. It's more than the cost of athletes, though. Health care costs are a pretty big burden and athletes want the universites to take care of that. There is money in the NCAA system, but it's unevenly distributed among schools and this would drive out a lot of the smaller schools from having college programs. Also the salary for football coaches is pretty outrageous. I blame the NFL (as always) for foisting it's farm system off on colleges.
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Jan 29, 2014 14:28
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It's p sad imo that the state of labor relations in this country is to the point that literally the only unions who have more than an iota of support on a national level are those related to sports (NFLPA, et al).
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Jan 29, 2014 14:56
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vaginal culture posted:The NFL needs to bear the cost of developing players instead of benefiting from the current system. But why should they? It's not like, with very few, very extreme examples, any of our employers paid to develop us into lawyers and consultants and engineers.
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Jan 29, 2014 15:27
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Toymachine posted:Honestly, NCAA players should just shut up and stop pretending like their $120,000 full ride scholarships don't mean poo poo. Most of these guys would be in backwoods Alabama pumping gas if it wasn't for colleges offering athletic scholarships. $120,000 full ride scholarships don't mean poo poo when you're admitted to college with a middle school reading level, and the only possible way you can actually get by in class is having a tutor do your work for you.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:06
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Relentlessboredomm posted:I think this is a bit of a leap. I see where you're coming from and it's a definite possibility but that's so many steps removed from the current system that it's not worth worrying about. If/when someone tries to set up a minor league then we can worry about it. I don't know the specifics of Rice's endowment or their finances; I was just using it as a placeholder for another small school. Substitute Tulsa or Houston or whoever. And while I don't think it would be terrible for the sport as a whole from a playing standpoint I don't know that as many people would watch if they didn't have their alma mater to root for. You'd also have to shut down half the bowl games, which hurts TV revenue. There are drastic changes coming with this.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:08
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Groucho Marxist posted:$120,000 full ride scholarships don't mean poo poo when you're admitted to college with a middle school reading level, and the only possible way you can actually get by in class is having a tutor do your work for you. They are also actively encouraged to not take full advantage of those scholarships by coaches and advisers pushing them towards the easiest classes possible, a culture of rampant academic fraud that teaches them they don't actually have to try to learn anything, and insane practice/workout/film study demands that make it difficult to balance their academic interests with football.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:11
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MourningView posted:They are also actively encouraged to not take full advantage of those scholarships by coaches and advisers pushing them towards the easiest classes possible, a culture of rampant academic fraud that teaches them they don't actually have to try to learn anything, and insane practice/workout/film study demands that make it difficult to balance their academic interests with football. So is the answer to just give up on academics altogether and say "gently caress it, just pay them cash and drop the pretense"? That's just always struck me as a very defeatist attitude. A college education for every athlete should be a tremendous value, the fact that it's not being utilized most of the time is the real scandal. Sure, players who have no interest in or need for a college education should have other alternatives for continuing their football career, but that's not really the NCAA's fault.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:30
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A great viable change I'd love to see come out of this would be for more of the huge amount of money that is being generated through the NCAA to actually go towards athlete welfare in the form of lock-tight medical insurance, realistic stipends, post-eligibility scholarships, and long term support. The IOC and just about every national governing body for Olympic sports is just as bad or worse as the NCAA and they need the same reforms. I don't think the solution is to pay them unless you go straight up minor league. But I think the athletes should be the ones benefiting from all their effort, not a bunch of people who skim off the top. I mean, it isn't going to happen, zero chance, but I wish it actually would.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:30
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Frackie Robinson posted:So is the answer to just give up on academics altogether and say "gently caress it, just pay them cash and drop the pretense"? That's just always struck me as a very defeatist attitude. A college education for every athlete should be a tremendous value, the fact that it's not being utilized most of the time is the real scandal. Sure, players who have no interest in or need for a college education should have other alternatives for continuing their football career, but that's not really the NCAA's fault. Well, in a way it IS the NCAA's fault due to the collusion with the NFL that requires athletes to go through college football to go pro. Football players are more or less being forced through an unpaid farm system. It's also unique to football - you can join the NBA or MLB right out of high school unless I'm mistaken.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:34
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Fenrir posted:Well, in a way it IS the NCAA's fault due to the collusion with the NFL that requires athletes to go through college football to go pro. Football players are more or less being forced through an unpaid farm system. You need a year of college basketball or in europe or the D-League to get into the NBA. Lebron was the last big profile High School to NBA player. Baseball and hockey? Knock yourselves out, kids
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Jan 29, 2014 16:45
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Fenrir posted:Well, in a way it IS the NCAA's fault due to the collusion with the NFL that requires athletes to go through college football to go pro. Football players are more or less being forced through an unpaid farm system. It's not collusion, it's 100% the NFL's rule. The is that you have to be three years out of high school to enter the draft. Unfortunately for those who want to continue their football careers, college football is really the only viable option. The NCAA benefits from the rule, but couldn't do anything to change it if it wanted to. The rule was challenged back in 2004, but it didn't end well. The NBA has a one year rule, by the way, and it's made college basketball even more of a farce than it was before.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:49
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Fenrir posted:Well, in a way it IS the NCAA's fault due to the collusion with the NFL that requires athletes to go through college football to go pro. Football players are more or less being forced through an unpaid farm system. For the last decade or so there's been an effective requirement to attend college for a single year for the NBA, because you have to be both 19 and a year removed from high school graduation (or at least the graduation of the class you would have been in). Surprisingly, you only had about a decade of NBA players coming right out of high school anyway, because prior to KG in 1995 only three players had ever done it. e: beaten on that one ROSS MY SALAD posted:You need a year of college basketball or in europe or the D-League to get into the NBA. Lebron was the last big profile High School to NBA player. For MLB you just have to graduate high school, but if you choose to go to a four-year college you have to play three years or until you turn 21 (which I always thought was a fascinating requirement). And yeah the NHL requirement is "be at least 18 and, if North American, under 20", more or less.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:52
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Lots of Little Chickens in here. I can't help but notice that almost everyone in here lamenting the death of college football is being pretty selfish in their thinking. College football might change a little or a lot, but it's not going to go away and you'll still get your entertainment.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:55
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Basil Hayden posted:For MLB you just have to graduate high school, but if you choose to go to a four-year college you have to play three years or until you turn 21 (which I always thought was a fascinating requirement). I think college and pro baseball by far get the closest to getting it right, although the expenses in fielding a football team make a minor league system on the same scale as baseball unfeasible.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:56
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Frackie Robinson posted:It's not collusion, it's 100% the NFL's rule. The is that you have to be three years out of high school to enter the draft. Unfortunately for those who want to continue their football careers, college football is really the only viable option. The NCAA benefits from the rule, but couldn't do anything to change it if it wanted to. The rule was challenged back in 2004, but it didn't end well. Alright, but it'll be pretty hard to convince me (or most people, I'm guessing) that the NFL's 3 year rule isn't there basically to force players through the college system so they don't have to build a farm league and pay for it.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:56
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Fenrir posted:Alright, but it'll be pretty hard to convince me (or most people, I'm guessing) that the NFL's 3 year rule isn't there basically to force players through the college system so they don't have to build a farm league and pay for it. That's absolutely what it is, but what do you want the NCAA to do about it?
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Jan 29, 2014 17:00
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Frackie Robinson posted:That's absolutely what it is, but what do you want the NCAA to do about it? Relax the amateurism requirements. Allow players to seek revenue on their own.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:13
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Frackie Robinson posted:A college education for every athlete should be a tremendous value, the fact that it's not being utilized most of the time is the real scandal. You also keep saying "what do you want the NCAA to do about any of this" as if the NCAA has any concern or interest in changing things that BENEFIT THEM. The current system BENEFITS THEM. Why would they want to change anything?
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Jan 29, 2014 17:13
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Frackie Robinson posted:That's absolutely what it is, but what do you want the NCAA to do about it? Not be evil and stupid.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:28
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Any relaxation of amateurism completely changes the entire landscape of college sports. If you want an openly semi-pro league then make an openly semi-pro league. But don't attach it to the school at that point. If you want to take the money and use it to benefit the athletes instead of a bunch of TV and bowl execs, then embrace the money and just pour it into stuff that actually benefits the athletes.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:28
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bawfuls posted:This LA Times article compares college atheletes to graduate student teachers, who successfully unionized about a decade ago. Not to get too off-course, but the California TA union is something of a mixed blessing. It means that TAs have regulated work hours, guaranteed pay, maximum student loads, and good health insurance (with vision, dental, and even child care!). On the opposite end, it has meant that TAs are no longer academic apprentices in some disciplines, which has totally changed the landscape of graduate study. When the UAW 2865 formed in the late '90s, it meant that in some cases departments started treating grad students as fungible teaching commodities rather than future researchers. Fifteen years on, that means less security in your academic track (if you get set back and don't have enough advocates on the student review board, you often get cut because of finances in my department), more focus on "hiring" TAs to teach classes, admitting too many students than can be funded long-term (to continually cycle incoming new employees and avoid financial commitments to senior grad students), and slow replacement of adjunct faculty with TAs and tenure-track faculty with adjuncts. Obviously there are a lot of other factors playing into the transformation of universities into businesses, and I can only speak for a single department in the UC system, but unionizing was maybe not the best choice for academic apprentices. If you make researchers employees, what ends up mattering is that they teach and hit the artificial progress deadlines (MA completion, quals, dissertation defense, etc. at certain times) and not the quality of their research. And this also means that, on opposite end, there are plenty of 10-year+ grad students in my department who do no research and haven't published, but are kept because they continue to teach for less than it would cost the department to hire actual faculty. Grad school itself has become a career for some people. But to bring this back to the actual topic of the thread, athletes and grad students differ in a very fundamental way: graduate students are at the university to become future researchers, which is the goal of research schools, or to teach students, which is the goal of all schools. Student-athletes are students who have chosen to participate in voluntary athletics programs, nothing more. As I've said before in this thread, many of them do not belong at the university, cannot complete basic college requirements, and have no interest in anything other than playing their sport. Athletes who are good enough for college, or want a college degree, should apply like everyone else to get their degree, and the rest should do what they really want to do. Like MourningView said, fraud is pretty common and coaches funnel their students to easy classes because they know the kids can't pass college courses. Threatening letters (or even in-person meetings!) from the athletics department are not unheard of if you give a prize student-athlete a D they earned by never attending class and failing just about every assignment (and the passing grades are often probably plagiarized, written by a tutor, or bought papers anyway). There is no excuse for having college athletics in their current form, and the sooner some kind of independent development leagues are created the better. Keep the university branding if you care. But comparing student-athletes to student instructors is just lazy. The purpose of the university is to teach, not to be a sports league. Student instructors are explicitly fulfilling the mission of the university, and student-athletes are basically a distraction and a money sink.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:33
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Thoguh posted:Any relaxation of amateurism completely changes the entire landscape of college sports. If you want an openly semi-pro league then make an openly semi-pro league. But don't attach it to the school at that point. If you want to take the money and use it to benefit the athletes instead of a bunch of TV and bowl execs, then embrace the money and just pour it into stuff that actually benefits the athletes. They're already semi-pro leagues, but they get to excercise draconian control over their players while running roughshod over the athletes. It's not like schools go out and hunt down any attempt by any of their other students to get cash on their own.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:33
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Quest For Glory II posted:GROAN. That's not why these programs recruit these kids. That is such horseshit. What is the value? You're recruited specifically because of your physical talent and that's the only reason you're there. They couldn't give a single poo poo about your education. You're there to make them money. Yeah, but if we had a system where schools actually fostered an environment where these guys could actually attend classes and leave with a useful degree, it would be a good system. You'd have immensely increased the future potential of a lot of guys who'd never have had the means to attend college were it not for athletics. That's pretty decent compensation. That's root idea behind this whole system, and it's not a bad one. On top of that, a lot of the revenue generated by football goes to scholarships for people playing the sports nobody gives a poo poo about. It seems like all the LF-types would love that, but noooo, it's all "is Jameis not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" General Dog fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jan 29, 2014 |
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Jan 29, 2014 17:35
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Frackie Robinson posted:Yeah, but if we had a system where schools actually fostered an environment where these guys could actually attend classes and leave with a useful degree, it would be a good system. You'd have immensely increased the future potential of a lot of guys who'd never have had the means to attend college were it not for athletics. That's pretty decent compensation. That's root idea behind this whole system, and it's not a bad one. You wouldn't see anywhere near the current level of play if that was the priority, and that would probably significantly reduce the money involved. It wouldn't be a horrible thing if that were really true but actual amateur student athletics has been a sham for so long that it's tough to see it as anything else.
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Jan 29, 2014 17:37
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