Discussion for article #226215
Could it be that the NCAA doesn’t have student athletes best interests at heart?
2 Likes
This is great to see. The NCAA will finally have to pay up. And they can’t take the “we’ll go out of business” minimum wage BS excuse.
Kantar Media: March Madness generates more TV ad revenue than any pro sports league’s postseason broadcast. Last year, the NCAA earned $1.15 billion in ad revenue during pre-game, game and post-game programming.
Well, for one thing there is the free education that the scholarship is providing. I understand lots of kids go the “one and out” routine, particularly in basketball, but that is just an unwise choice on their part. The opportunity is still there.
Because even if you succeed and make it into the pros…you simply don’t see many 40 something athletes. You don’t see a whole of them in their late 30s for that matter. Sure, they can try and get into broadcasting afterwards…but there are far fewer of those jobs then there are retired ball players, so the competition is much more fierce…and things like a degree in broadcasting might be the differential.
Additionally, at least in football, there is a significant difference between the abilities of an 18 yr old and that of a 22 yr old, both physically and in terms of decision making/maturity.
All that being said, if this ruling stands, this could very well be the beginning of the end for the NCAA and could start seeing the rise of “farm league” type solutions more the way baseball is. Colleges will be seeing their gravy trains coming to an end. All that money would now have to be spent on player salaries. Which would also be devastating to less profitable collegiate sports like women’s softball or track and field.
1 Like
I have no problem with student athletes getting paid… BUT this must extend to ALL students, not just “athletes”. ANY student that bring in money for the university should get a cut. That means a research students who’s work get the school a $10 million grant gets a cut. The grad student who’s research goes into his professors book, gets a cut. Why are “athletes” now special and unexploitable while everyone else is? Why are we creating a special class of student here? This is just athletic elitism.
1 Like
If y’all didn’t see them, the indispensable Charles Pierce filed two (even by his lofty standards, outstanding) stories from the courtroom, wherein he predicted this very outcome:
1 Like
They actually can take several variations of that excuse. While football and basketball receive the lion’s share of the athletic budgets in most colleges today, they don’t receive all of it. Funding for swimming, track and field, tennis, gymnastics, etc. also comes out of those revenue streams.
All of that goes out the window if colleges have to start paying “students” salaries to play ball.
But I will agree that there is a HUGE problem that is only getting worse. The money that flows into college football is obscene and growing at an equally obscene rate.
And the NCAA has no competition. They are a financial monopoly today. To make it even worse, they are cutting deals with the other big sports monopoly…ESPN, with very little flowing down to the actual students. I mean consider that rosters sizes are set and have been set for quite some time. Yet colleges are bringing in 10, 20, sometimes 100x more money than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Its a set cost for doing business (the price of scholarships) with no discernible upward limit on the revenue potential. Who wouldn’t want to be in that sort of business??
1 Like
Athletes should certainly get college credit for their sports efforts, and schools should develop programs that promote sports as profession gateways, because in many ways they really are. Especially programs that entail non-athletic activities associated with sports, like organization and management, sports medicine, and sports journalism.
But paying athletes for college sports is called “scholarships”, the thought they could actually go to the highest cash bidders would lead to an end to anything akin to parity in college sports.