midnightx wrote:There are so many flaws with concept of paying NCAA athletes contracts, salaries, revenue sharing etc. Very few NCAA student athletes (particularly in Football and Basketball) actually have a chance to play professional sports after college. We focus on the major programs, but the majority of college teams are not major programs and rarely produce professional athletes. So, how do you even begin to determine who gets paid what? Do all starting quarterbacks get paid the same, or does someone like Manziel get paid significantly more? Or do you play the players a percentage of what their team generates? Do starters make more than bench players or backup players? The potential for mass corruption is enormous. If athletes become paid employees, what happens to academic requirements? Why give someone $20-$30K a year in tuition/living expenses via a scholarship when they are also being paid in some capacity to play a sport? One of the only fair ways to deal with the issue if one goes down that bumpy road is give the athletes some sort of revenue sharing capacity that is split evenly nationally, and that is paid when the student/athlete leaves school (either at graduation or when they choose to try to get drafted). If individual schools can pay larger payments due to their own massive revenue streams (like Alabama football), it will destroy sports and usher in an era of mass corruption.
If the NFL and NBA want to create a real farm system, then those concepts should be developed. The reality is, there will be very little national interest in watching farm system games. How much can you pay a kid to play basketball in a farm system that few people will watch and that will generate little advertising/sponsorship revenues? More than the D-League? The kids will have little ability to create a buzz and a brand because no one will really care. Fans of college sports just don't watch because there is some charismatic starter, they watch because of their allegiance to the team and school. They watch every year. AZ fans are going to watch basketball this year with or without Aaron Gordon. If all the best athletes choose to go farm system leagues, the viewership will drop in college sports, but not entirely. It is still a viable product because even if a faction of elite athletes bypass playing at the collegiate level, there will still be many talented kids playing and keeping the game interesting and exciting.
I've said it before, but I don't buy this at all. Richer schools use that wealth to attract players already.
Richer schools use money to get players.
http://www.sbnation.com/college-footbal ... -interview
The solution is easy as pie. Allow athletes to receive money from non-school sources for their image. It answers every question you ask. How do you determine value? The market does. What happens to academics? They stay identical, or possibly even improve. The NCAA has less energy spent on enforcing pay rules and can spend more ensuring that schools meet academic standards.
It's a crazy joke when we say that the playing field is level when most schools pay their coaches more than the president of the university, many coaches are the highest paid employee in the state and schools drop 50-70 million on football facilities. It's a similar joke to pretend the system is amateur in any way.
Anyone who has the perception of a level playing field has their head buried so firmly in the sand that we could hand bales of cash to players on the sidelines and they wouldn't notice (in Miami, handing the bales is known as Shapiroing). The idea that schools can create 20-50 million a year, and somehow we'd slip into a Marxist dream if there was a minor league is similarly odd to me. Schools won't stop competing for players and prestige as long as there's money to be had.
The NCAA gets billions. Schools get millions. Coaches get millions. Players are the foundation of it all, and they get nothing. On the 4th of July, we should allow them a little independence and let the market dictate if they can make coin off their image.
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