What exactly are you suggesting Coach K do? I established earlier in this thread that his fair market value is probably higher than what Duke is paying him. Are you suggesting he should only coach the pros?
@theloniusmonk
What do you think the market value of the average football player is? In the Arena League, even before most of the teams folded, the average salary was only about $80k. The distribution was highly skewed so the typical player was earning maybe $50k
I’m suggesting that it is wrong for coach k to make $7.5 million a year while his star players get only paid $70k.
Wrong to have an unlimited free market for the coach but a non market cartel price fixed market for the players.
Who knows what the free market value of a college player is.
But it can’t be zero. And it has to be higher than a scholarship. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a need for the ncaa rule that caps the players comp.
best way to determine the value would be to get rid of the cap and see what happens. Wonder why the schools don’t want to try that? Are they afraid the comp would go down without a cap?
@roethlisburger - Exploiting people is wrong. Period. No matter who those people are. It isn’t ok to exploit a young basketball player just because he will make millions in a few years. When people are exploited perverse incentives are created.
The facts of this scandal absolutely prove these college basketball recruits had value. People would not have been willing to pay them to come play for their schools and wear their sneakers if there was not any value. And those payments are basically legal in any normal business. The only reason this thing turned criminal is because the parties had to conceal their activities to avoid violating the NCAA cartel rules. But violating NCAA rules is not a federal crime.
I’m curious – what sport did you play in college? Revenue or non-revenue? Were you a star or a bench-rider? Athletic scholarship?
I guess maybe I wasn’t clear, there is no question that a college player has/brings value, the question is what is that value in the “job market” as opposed to the college market? The answer to that question is $0 as there is no place for them to get a job in their chosen market. The players absolutely bring value to the university but that doesn’t mean they should automatically be compensated as though they were eligible to work in their chosen field, when they clearly are not eligible to work, through no fault of the university. If the players have so much value, why is there no other market for them to test other than the NFL or NBA. If each player has even several hundred thousand in value surely someone would want to create a league to steal these profits from the NCAA. Why has no one done this?
I have tried to find a “real world” parallel and it is difficult. The best I have come up with is the law student clerking over the summer. They want to be a lawyer, they are training to be a lawyer, however due to rules and employer policy they can not be treated like/perform the tasks of the lawyer. Same thing, an 18 year old football player may be able to perform all of the tasks of a professional, possibly at a higher level than current players, but does not meet the qualifications for the employer and as such must take what he can get until he meets the requirements. The NCAA provides that path, much like a law school. Granted a law student is not bringing in the same value as a football player for the school but why is that a problem.
I have a good friend that is a professor at a PAC 12 school. He is one of the most respected minds in his field and as such obtains many research grants and consulting requests. The university takes all of these grants/consulting fees and his expenses are then paid by the university and they keep the overage. I’m sure he is not unique. He is incredibly valuable to the school as he pays for himself many times over each year. Is he being exploited? Possibly but that is the job he agreed to accept and is able to test the open market any time he wishes however that tenure tether makes it a tough decision. Sounds a lot like how his university treats athletes. They give them the amount they were told they would get, keep any overages, and that player is free to test the open market whenever they would like but there is the tether of having to sit out a year (transfer) or the risk of not getting signed (NFL). Maybe this is the way academia works and the athletic approach has grown out of the academic side of things.
To answer your other questions. Non revenue, partial athletic scholarship, 4 year starter at a power 5 conference school that during my tenure was annually a top 15 team.
Iowa. Your professor friend is free to seek employment at any university he wants on whatever terms he agrees to. Coach k has the same rights.
For these players they do not have such rights. Because the schools have collaborated to say they have no value and are prohibited from receiving any comp above scholarship. Get rid of the cap and then let’s see what market value is. Or negotiate.
So your prof friend is apples and players are oranges.
The schools have collaborated to cap their value at a scholarship, absolutely, however the athletes are free to seek employment anywhere they want. I see the sticking point in the argument is you want to call athletes employees of the university, which they are not. I choose to see them as students, which they are. If the athlete wants to be an employee within their sport they have that choice, it just resides outside of the NCAA model but the NCAA does not prohibit them from going that route, the potential employer does prohibit it through their employment qualifications.
I guess my perspective comes down to the concept of personal choice. Regardless of if the NCAA is taking advantage of the athlete, each athlete (and/or their legal guardian depending on age) was aware of the “compensation package” when they signed their NLI and all of the rules that go along with it. They signed willingly. They presumably had other options that they explored (European leagues, private training, semi-pro leagues, etc.) and made an informed choice to accept a scholarship and play by the rules.
Do I think that there could be some changes to how the scholarship for athletes could be changed, absolutely. Are the moves by the power 5 to meet total cost of attendance a move in the right direction, yes. Is there more that could be done, yes. But to think the players should share in large portions of the revenue is not the answer.
I am not a fan of Title IX and some of the changes it has brought to the NCAA landscape (although there are good important changes as well). How would paying revenue sport athletes but not non-revenue sport athletes be viewed in this context? I am not a legal scholar but I would imagine paying a male basketball player while not paying a female player would cause issues under Title IX. Take this out to the next level does it become an issue of paying all athletes to avoid any potential legal issues? I don’t know but at some point a line has to be drawn or the schools already operating in the red just go deeper in the red.
At the end of the day my opinion is if, as an athlete, you don’t like the opportunity put in front of you, don’t accept it, take your ball and go home (or to the pros, or to Europe) but don’t claim an opportunity you willingly accepted is now unfair to you. Athletes do this all the time. Ricky Williams didn’t like the NFL policy on marijuana so he quit. Greg Louganis didn’t like the college training restrictions and felt they were not beneficial to him so he quit (and turned out alright competitively).
“At the end of the day my opinion is if, as an athlete, you don’t like the opportunity put in front of you, don’t accept it, take your ball and go home (or to the pros, or to Europe) but don’t claim an opportunity you willingly accepted is now unfair to you.”
You are basically making a free market/contract argument. Which is fine. Except that the other side of the transaction is a cartel. And the moral problem (for me) is that while there is a cartel for player comp there’s not a cartel for coach comp. With the very high coach salaries being enabled by the money not spent on players.
Suppose Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and the rest of the tech companies got together and agreed programmers can only make $50k a year? And that you are not allowed to do any moonlighting using your tech skils? Would you argue that, hey, you don’t have to be a programmer – go do some other job? Or go work in another country? Of course not – you’d say that was wrong and should be illegal (which it is). The holding in the Obannon case in fact was that the previous cap was illegal. [Although the judge in that case did allow a new slightly higher cap for quite curious reasons. But that’s a whole other legal/technical discussion that rapidly has to get down into the weeds.]
Plenty of college students are also employees of the school – work study jobs for example. But that market doesn’t have a cartel on comp. If kids don’t want to work for min wage at the cafeteria, they are free to try to get a different job on campus with different pay. Or go work at Starbucks or McDonalds instead.
All the flyspecked legal issues that folks throw up (non-revenue sports, title ix, etc.) are so easily solved. They are such weak sauce and certainly no justification for the messed up current system. The most easy and obvious fix, by the way, is not to have the schools pay the star revenue players salaries. Instead, continue to give them just scholarships but remove the rules that prohibit them from getting outside work and outside comp.
Last point. Until you deal with the deprived value of the star revenue players, the system is doomed to continue to be dirty. It all could be so easily solved and cleaned up and made fair. Cheers!
When I was in school there was an NCAA rule against outside employment by nature of something along the lines of every dollar you earned reduced your scholarship by an equal amount or some such nonsense which did effectively make working unavailable to the scholarship athlete. I believe that rule has been changed and there is no longer a NCAA rule prohibiting outside employment but I could be mistaken. Outside comp is another matter. Each university (the whole school not just athletics) have sponsorship deals in place (the soda in the dining halls, the coffee shop in the library, etc.) and to allow each athlete to go and seek their own sponsors could bring harm to the school and their contracts or put the school in a light that they don’t want to be in, not to mention how it would impact amateurism. There is no easy solution.
I don’t disagree that the system is doomed to be dirty but regardless of how the rules are written, short of paying each player how ever much you want, it will always be dirty. 30 years ago in a non-revenue sport I saw countless dirty acts on my own team and I’m sure it continues today. The numbers were much different but for there to be boosters willing to pay softball players, swimmers, field hockey players, and gymnasts that really brought nothing more than victories that no one outside of the sport cared about tells me there will always be this dirt around college athletics and until colleges stop sponsoring the programs it is always going to be there in some form.
Of all the ridiculous statements on this thread, this one takes the prize. In no conceivable political universe would it be easy to repeal Title IX.
Really the only athletes that can’t go pro right out of high school are football players who want to play for the NFL. The NBA currently has a 1 year rule, but previously allowed direct entry (LeBron). All the others who want to go play professional baseball, golf, skiing, swimming can do that. No one is forcing them to go to college or play for the college. The Olympic swimmers had to decide whether to take the pro money or swim in college. Several of them picked college. Missy Franklin gave up millions of dollars to swim at Cal for 2 years because she wanted the college team experience. Tiger played at Stanford.
Even football and basketball players have other options - Canadian football, European basketball. If they are so wonderful, Nike or Adidas could just pay them the $100k to sit out for 1-3 with no college necessary They could have a little professional camp and just sign them to contracts. There is nothing illegal about that, it just makes the player ineligible to play for an NCAA team.
There are just a few players who have won the Little League World Series, a college championship, and a MLB World Series ring. How cool is that?
Earlier someone said that most players at the D1 power conference level play in college with the pros as a goal. I disagree. Even on those 105+ football teams, only a few have a chance at the pros, and in other conferences fewer than that. Thousands of college athletes know that their playing days will be over at graduation. And they are fine with that. They are there for the education and the fun of playing. Some even give up the pros to stay in school and take a Rhodes scholarship or go to med school.
The reason for this rule was rampant hiring by alumni for jobs that paid amazingly well (ie $50+/hr) which often had little or no proof of the hours worked. Alums were basically giving money to the star athletes under the guise of “work”.
@twoinanddone - While there are hundreds or thousands of students who play D1 football that never expect to turn pro, every kid recruited by the Power Conferences is told about the schools’ record of creating professionals. The majority of those kids are primarily focused on getting to the NFL. There are 32 Rhodes scholars per year…the same number of first round picks each year for the NFL draft. In 2016, 2 of those scholars were NCAA athletes… a football player and a runner. Myron Rolle is a unicorn…someone who could play in the NFL and be a Rhodes scholar. I don’t believe you can name another.
Cory Booker. Stanford 1992.
With 20 receptions in 22 games over 2 years, I don’t think Cory was weighing his NFL options too heavily.
But doesn’t that prove the point that he, and many other Power 5 conference players, did not play with the expectation of going on to the NFL? A top team can send multiple players (8? 10?) to the NFL most years, but that’s 8-10 out of 40 eligible juniors and seniors. That’s still more not making it than making it, even on the best teams. Most teams, even Power 5 teams, are happy when 5 players are drafted, and 3 of those may not make the pros.
I don’t think the NFL or the NBA should restrict the high schoolers from going directly into the pros. I don’t think it would make much difference in who goes to college and who doesn’t, but I don’t like the restriction. There have been a few sophomore football players who could be drafted but who have to wait, but overall most play all 4 years in college, or even 5 years after high school graduation because of red shirting, and still may not be ready for the pros. This year’s big junior draftee was Christian McCaffrey and he’s making it big. Would he have been ready to play in the pros as a high school grad? NO! He has the benefit of growing up with an NFL father, plus a mother, grandfather and brother who were NCAA athletes, being around John Elway and professional agents all his life, having real guidance with his decisions. He still benefited from college.
If you want to see the players who don’t want to be in college and do it only for football, watch Last Chance U. The college structure is helping those kids even if they don’t like it. I don’t think the NFL wants any of them yet.
“What do you think the market value of the average football player is? In the Arena League, even before most of the teams folded, the average salary was only about $80k. The distribution was highly skewed so the typical player was earning maybe $50k”
Well the arena league team’s revenues are in the tens of millions, the big ten by itself has a tv contract worth $2.6 billion over six years. And that’s not including it’s tv network, deals with the shoe companies, ticket, merchandise sales etc… If a team like Texas has $120M in revenue, you can do some basic back of the envelope calculations if you will, to come at a player value of $500K. That’s after paying the coaches and staff, administrators, facilities expenses and assuming 105 players on the team - 85 scholarship and 20 walk-ons. But that’s just one of 120 teams and it would represent the high end.
Doug Flutie was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship.
The facts of this scandal absolutely prove these college basketball recruits had value. People would not have been willing to pay them to come play for their schools and wear their sneakers if there was not any value. And those payments are basically legal in any normal business. The only reason this thing turned criminal is because the parties had to conceal their activities to avoid violating the NCAA cartel rules. But violating NCAA rules is not a federal crime.
I’m curious – what sport did you play in college? Revenue or non-revenue? Were you a star or a bench-rider? Athletic scholarship?
I guess maybe I wasn’t clear, there is no question that a college player has/brings value, the question is what is that value in the “job market” as opposed to the college market? The answer to that question is $0 as there is no place for them to get a job in their chosen market. The players absolutely bring value to the university but that doesn’t mean they should automatically be compensated as though they were eligible to work in their chosen field, when they clearly are not eligible to work, through no fault of the university. If the players have so much value, why is there no other market for them to test other than the NFL or NBA. If each player has even several hundred thousand in value surely someone would want to create a league to steal these profits from the NCAA. Why has no one done this?
I have tried to find a “real world” parallel and it is difficult. The best I have come up with is the law student clerking over the summer. They want to be a lawyer, they are training to be a lawyer, however due to rules and employer policy they can not be treated like/perform the tasks of the lawyer. Same thing, an 18 year old football player may be able to perform all of the tasks of a professional, possibly at a higher level than current players, but does not meet the qualifications for the employer and as such must take what he can get until he meets the requirements. The NCAA provides that path, much like a law school. Granted a law student is not bringing in the same value as a football player for the school but why is that a problem.
I have a good friend that is a professor at a PAC 12 school. He is one of the most respected minds in his field and as such obtains many research grants and consulting requests. The university takes all of these grants/consulting fees and his expenses are then paid by the university and they keep the overage. I’m sure he is not unique. He is incredibly valuable to the school as he pays for himself many times over each year. Is he being exploited? Possibly but that is the job he agreed to accept and is able to test the open market any time he wishes however that tenure tether makes it a tough decision. Sounds a lot like how his university treats athletes. They give them the amount they were told they would get, keep any overages, and that player is free to test the open market whenever they would like but there is the tether of having to sit out a year (transfer) or the risk of not getting signed (NFL). Maybe this is the way academia works and the athletic approach has grown out of the academic side of things.
To answer your other questions. Non revenue, partial athletic scholarship, 4 year starter at a power 5 conference school that during my tenure was annually a top 15 team.
The facts of this scandal absolutely prove these college basketball recruits had value. People would not have been willing to pay them to come play for their schools and wear their sneakers if there was not any value. And those payments are basically legal in any normal business. The only reason this thing turned criminal is because the parties had to conceal their activities to avoid violating the NCAA cartel rules. But violating NCAA rules is not a federal crime.
I’m curious – what sport did you play in college? Revenue or non-revenue? Were you a star or a bench-rider? Athletic scholarship?
I guess maybe I wasn’t clear, there is no question that a college player has/brings value, the question is what is that value in the “job market” as opposed to the college market? The answer to that question is $0 as there is no place for them to get a job in their chosen market. The players absolutely bring value to the university but that doesn’t mean they should automatically be compensated as though they were eligible to work in their chosen field, when they clearly are not eligible to work, through no fault of the university. If the players have so much value, why is there no other market for them to test other than the NFL or NBA. If each player has even several hundred thousand in value surely someone would want to create a league to steal these profits from the NCAA. Why has no one done this?
I have tried to find a “real world” parallel and it is difficult. The best I have come up with is the law student clerking over the summer. They want to be a lawyer, they are training to be a lawyer, however due to rules and employer policy they can not be treated like/perform the tasks of the lawyer. Same thing, an 18 year old football player may be able to perform all of the tasks of a professional, possibly at a higher level than current players, but does not meet the qualifications for the employer and as such must take what he can get until he meets the requirements. The NCAA provides that path, much like a law school. Granted a law student is not bringing in the same value as a football player for the school but why is that a problem.
I have a good friend that is a professor at a PAC 12 school. He is one of the most respected minds in his field and as such obtains many research grants and consulting requests. The university takes all of these grants/consulting fees and his expenses are then paid by the university and they keep the overage. I’m sure he is not unique. He is incredibly valuable to the school as he pays for himself many times over each year. Is he being exploited? Possibly but that is the job he agreed to accept and is able to test the open market any time he wishes however that tenure tether makes it a tough decision. Sounds a lot like how his university treats athletes. They give them the amount they were told they would get, keep any overages, and that player is free to test the open market whenever they would like but there is the tether of having to sit out a year (transfer) or the risk of not getting signed (NFL). Maybe this is the way academia works and the athletic approach has grown out of the academic side of things.
To answer your other questions. Non revenue, partial athletic scholarship, 4 year starter at a power 5 conference school that during my tenure was annually a top 15 team.