12/26/24
August 31, 2003
Led by Jeremy Bloom, a student athlete's bill of rights has been proposed in the California legislature that would allow athletes to earn money outside their sport and share in endorsements. ESPN.Com's Ray Ratto says similar efforts are afoot in Nebraska and other states.
Just one hypocrisy among many: If the amateur status of college athletics is so important, why are coaches allowed to become millionaires and sign endorsement deals?
posted by rcade at 12:25 PM on August 31, 2003
Why do the schools themselves sign deals for sneakers and (at least for) bowl games? This inconsistency has been argued over for years, and it's not far different from the amateur/Olympics threads, but as long as there are entrenched omnied interests...
posted by billsaysthis at 01:04 PM on August 31, 2003
I think this is just a lot of hot air. If California or Nebraska were to do this, the schools in these states simply wouldn't pay the players, since the NCAA would just rule them ineligible. I realize the legislators are simply trying to put this on the table for the NCAA to take notice, but any solution has to be national (imagine the advantage some schools would have if they were allowed to pay players while other schools were not). I myself have changed my mind on this issue. I now think the players should be compensated for bringing big money to their colleges.
posted by panther at 03:01 PM on August 31, 2003
Under the bill, the schools in California could not accept the oversight of a group where the "terms, value, and conditions of student athlete scholarships" are involved. I think that means the schools wouldn't have the choice to follow NCAA's athlete compensation rules. Between this, conference reshuffling, and the anger of non-BCS schools in I-A, there's a lot of stuff going on that could shake up college sports.
posted by rcade at 03:48 PM on August 31, 2003
I think they should be given a salary - an equal stake in the money machine, say $20,000 a season, make it the same for all players, remember these are 18 - 20 year olds for the most part - an amount that won't spoil them, but will still allow them to get some benefit from their sacrifice of time and energy. Call it part of the scholarship.
posted by WeedyMcSmokey at 09:32 AM on September 02, 2003
I think the kids should continue to be left out of the capital market system to which they contribute. It's not like they inked the network deals, or courted Nike for the free gear.
posted by garfield at 09:45 AM on September 02, 2003
Yee-haw, welcome to the new world of college sports! "I was going to sign with Youngstown State but then Western Michigan upped the ante" Or better, "I was just about to sign with Arizona State, but then the California legislature, loosened up the rules, now UCLA can give me free tanning and acting lessons in addition to the car and stipend" If the NCAA took every single dollar in profit, that the schools made and redistributed it, then there would be enough to stipend scholarship athletes. But here's what you would see. #1 The top schools band together to force the smaller, unprofitable schools out of Division 1A (Goodbye Army! See you later Vanderbilt! It was fun, Cal!) Why should Miami pay to help UTEP make a profit? #2 "What the heck do we have a scholarship fencing program for?" Goodbye unprofitable sports! The NCAA must accept responsibility for Maurice Clarett's Visa bill! #3 Incoming recruits are forced to sign contracts, tying their immediate financial security to the average college football coach. They'll play hurt, they'll be forced to take easy classes. Standards shoot right down the tubes. The first time an underclassman wants to turn pro, he has to agree to a settlement with the institution currently employing him. It only makes things worse. You have to remove the ties between semi-professional sports programs and the colleges that currently run them before it can be anything that even approaches fair. Any volunteers to set up an NFL developmental league that competes with the colleges?
posted by pastepotpete at 01:11 PM on September 02, 2003
pastepotpete.... half of the things you mentioned are already happening under the current system. i'd go through them one by one....but your list reads more like current events than some bold prediction of the future......college athletes taking easy classes? who'd a thunk it!......big schools pooling together? oh i never knew!.....smaller athletic prgrams being crushed? just ask all the wrestlers (granted it's for different reasons.....but it's all the same result in the end) it's time to shake it up anyway.....the current system if screwed up beyond repair.
posted by oliver_crunk at 01:44 PM on September 02, 2003
i say.....10% off the top of every dollar profit D-1A schools take in. give that out to the athletes based on a percentage of actual playing time versus total time the team played with the team and individual GPA factored on top of that......just off the top of my head....it could be worked out better i'm sure. when i was in college they were giving away money in the form of work study.....i got paid to sit in a library all day and put books back on the shelf.....granted i was being paid at a cheap rate....but it was money i needed. this way say the football program makes all the money....a girl playing softball with A+ and giving 25 hours a week to the volleyball team gets paid too.
posted by oliver_crunk at 02:03 PM on September 02, 2003
oh, there's such a difference between a lazy player taking Rocks for Jocks and a player with a contract held over his head being forced to. As I understand it, right now as long as you hold your ground and say "I'm not playing and I'm keeping my scholarship" and you maintain the course load and GPA you're supposed to, they can't *make* you do anything. Once, they're paying them it's going to be completely different. Profit sharing doesn't work for any number of reasons, but here's one--profits fluctuate but student fees don't. The problem with this whole thing is that there's a handful of extremely profitable athletic programs, there's a vast mushy middle that could afford to stipend, and there's a number of schools like Rice, for instance, where it would be a real strain on the system. Stipending them is fine, but if the stipend is going to be limited to Division 1-A schools for instance, then you're going to force some schools out of 1-A. When you force schools out of 1-A, you just removed a bunch of athletes from the stipending pool (sucker!--you should have gone to Michigan). You would quite literally break the backs of tons of 1-AA schools if they were forced to stipend also. Do you want to raise tuition to pay for this? The end result is inevitably the best college athletes don't choose one of 20-30 top schools because they *want* to but because this new economic system forces it to. Or, every college student in america pays more, so that Marcus Vick can by an xbox.
posted by pastepotpete at 04:04 PM on September 02, 2003
Nobody is forcing them to play football. They could mortgage their future with student loans and get a job to go to college. I'll bet some of us did that.
posted by pastepotpete at 04:05 PM on September 02, 2003
Well good for them.....I say go for it. It dawned on me last night while watching the Ohio State game. The announcers/commentators were going over the Clarret situation and the whole thing just seemed wrong, saying he couldn't play until he's a student first. Who are they fooling? Who is anyone fooling? We might as well accept the fact that some college athletics is crooked instead of just hiding behind the fact that it's not by pretending education is first. Now, I know what your saying, but what about integrity? What will happen to our great ameutur athletes? Well it's high time that someone stood up and said it's wrong for a bunch hypocrites to be making huge duckets while their athletes are given a hard time for buying a stinking candy bar without someone questioning where the money came from. The integrity has long since gone. Although I think Bloom's ideas are a little over the top and most definetly not the small step that these ideas will need to be furthered, I can at least get behind him for being upfront.....I can't say that about the people running college athletics.