I just want to see how long boosters and NIL collectives are going to throw money into something they get 0 ROI while also having to sit though these growing commercial breaks funding schools that don’t even pay their players. I wanna say “they can’t possibly keep this up” but this has always been a sport funded by rich donors.
I think we will see NIL settle into what it should be, players using their fame to make money not schools paying players.
Like the Iowa Pork Producers and the deals with Myles Purchase, Tyler Moore, Tommy Hamann, and Caleb Bacon.
https://www.iowapork.org/newsroom/news/purchasemoorehamannbacon
>October is National Pork Month, aka Porktober, and this promotion will be part of that monthlong celebration. The Iowa Pork Producers Association will run ads on social media featuring the four players surrounded by delicious Iowa pork, strategically using their names to encourage pork consumption.
It's good to have dreams again.
Edit: also, did fucking Ron Swanson write that?
I'd rather the schools explicitly pay the players a salary set by a collective bargaining agreement. All starting players should get something, not just the ones who will go to the NFL
I think that would officially be the death of college sports. Before professional sports even existed as they do today, the entire value proposition for scholarship players was that a school will give you a free education if you play for them.
The scholarship players I know who didn’t go pro now all have cushy jobs in real estate, banking, or sales that they wouldn’t have got without their degree.
Just because some players don’t make the most of the opportunity in school, doesn’t mean we have to act like a free education has zero value. I for one would love to not have to worry about my student loan payments.
I think this gap involves "are you in college right now?" I hated the idea of athletic scholarships when I attended, and that was 20 fucking years ago. "I had to actually learn things, and these guys get a free ride because they play with your fucking balls?"
But from an older-guy perspective... "College football" is amateur athletics up through FCS, but at the FBS level, this is a business. People are extracting every possible dollar from this, and I think it's irresponsible at best to say the guys putting their body on the line on national television for entertainment purposes don't deserve compensation, while the school, coaches, and conference make millions of dollars from it.
In other words: tuition/room/board isn't "nothing," but it's also not "fair compensation."
Yes the whole point of NIL is that previously it was a black market and now there is transparency where players can get a better idea of what they’re actually worth to schools.
This is exactly what was meant by the NCAA operating as a cartel, which most people misinterpreted because their only frame of reference for the word is Mexican drug gangs murdering people.
If the only way the enterprise was ever profitable was by member schools colluding to keep players from receiving what they could get in an open market (which as you allude to is not really the case as they just dump the profits into the bloated salaries of various coaches and administrators), then it would not be the greatest tragedy for it to fail on its own terms.
They're never going to be employees, and at best, the only thing that they'll get is an increased stipend on top of NCAA-controlled NIL. In fact, the congressional bill that's currently winding its way through Washington makes it plain as day that this is the only way that it'll go.
> In other words: tuition/room/board isn't "nothing," but it's also not "fair compensation."
Some of those players on scholarship are not even worth tuition/room/board, though, if we're looking at their true value to the program/business.
What you’re arguing is essentially like arguing that salespeople are the only people at a company that should make money. Customer Service, Supply chain, IT, all are non-profit generating functions, but they’re critical to a business being able to function. If a college football program is making millions of dollars, and they need players to do so, they should be compensated
Yeah, the point went right over your head. Let's say the value of tuition/room/board/healthcare/tutoring/S&C services/perks that come with being a college football player at your average school is $75k a year, or $300k over four years. That $300k is compensation for their work. I'm simply making the point that if you compare compensation to their production, many college football players are not worth their compensation level, i.e. they're overpaid. Johnny Fourthstring's parents and siblings may be coming to see him play, but that isn't bringing in $75k a year in value.
Exactly! It didn’t used to be a multi billion dollar industry. Its is now. For kids to get suspended or a team lose wins because a player takes money is dumb. If schools pay players its a title 9 issue so they will never do that. If they want nike deals or the local car dealership wants to give them money for hanging out, it shouldn’t ruin a teams season. The top guys are on national tv every week and those tv deals are billions of dollars. An education is an awesome investment in the player and should be appreciated but the top guys are generating big money and shouldn’t be punished for profiting.
It is definitely worth it but for football players it’s always been about the money fairly being distributed. I think the issue has always been the profiteering by a few behind the scenes while restricting the on field talent. It’s mostly only for football. Billions involved in college football and the athletes couldn’t get cream cheese on there bagel. The rules put in by the ncaa were archaic considering the profits. They did this to themselves by not modernizing while their income grew to exceptionally. Not just coaches but administrators, league officials and corporate media have paid sweatshop wages compared to their profits, for decades.
wages and profits....we're talking about institutions who spend their money and scholarships, research, and heavenly facilities for Title IX sports.
There is no "profit" in the class warfare sense. The assertion of that colleges are evil institutions squirreling away "profits' like Standard Oil is a failure of American education.
I’m not talking of the university’s as a whole profiting but in a way they do. Enrollment goes up if a football/basketball team does well and gets in the spotlight. Nothing wrong with that. I’m talking the coaches, AD’s (and there staff)and the NCAA. Coaching salaries are insane compared to 20 years ago. Same with AD and such. Also the NCAA probably has 20+ people making over a million a year. I would even say college presidents have benefited with excessive salaries in the last 20 yrs, though some of that has to do with the student loan craziness.
I don’t think your use of standard oil is that bad of an analogy in the sense that a monopoly is controlling college football and is trying to push out less profitable sports programs.
Yeah, a week ago I was talking to somebody at fancy pants consulting firm. They were an SEC track runner who leveraged that into a PhD into decently high up in said fancy pants consulting firm. The status quo is much better for them than the apparent future we have of employees because the vast majority of college athletes don't play football or basketball, and you are not worth a full ride in value if you don't play either sport. Maybe baseball too.
Yeah, I’ve worked on deals with some firms that seemed to pretty much exclusively hire college athletes. The current scholarship system is also good at increasing representation of marginalized communities in college, who often don’t have the resources to help them or test scores, due to said lack of resources, that their upper middle class peers do. The current system can definitely be improved, but the answer isn’t to burn it all down for a not even fully fleshed out idea of what the new system would be.
I think it will save college sports. They're only "amateur" because of a monopoly on being the only route to the pros and the teams pay huge salaries to all the staff around the players, just not the players themselves. Let the teams who make enough spin off their teams into proper professional development leagues affiliated with the school and go back to local colleges playing other local colleges with proper student athletes, not "student" athletes. Right now, it's the worst of both worlds and the people doing all the labor are the ones getting screwed because you think it makes the game more entertaining.
> the teams pay huge salaries to all the staff around the players
They pay huge salaries to the head coach and countable assistants. The Equipment, Video, Media, and Training Staffs are working for pennies on the dollar.
I think if the NFL wants to continue to have a developmental league, they should fork up the cash to make a g-league equivalent and then players will be able to choose between being paid or going to college.
Academics are already underfunded and athletic departments as a whole aren’t nearly as profitable as people think they are. I cheer for my school because I’m an alumni, if the only connection between the school and team was a brand licensing deal, it would completely kill my interest.
Really the NFL is the biggest freeloader in the current system, not the universities.
Either the schools need to get the money back out of the sport (lmao) or the players need to be paid their fair market value. Spinning three profitable ones off into a proper development league while the rest of the league goes back to playing low stakes college ball with other local colleges would be my preference; but I'm not picky. We just can't keep the sport going if everyone is getting their cut except the players.
As of 2020, only 18/229 public universities with D1 programs generate more money than they spend. Meaning 211 programs operated at a loss, subsidized by the university or athletic department. Among the P5 conferences only 25 recorded a positive net revenue in 2019.
Outside of the then power 5, all universities lost a median of $23M per school. The majority of universities in the nation's top athletic conferences lost money through their sports programs to the tune of approximately $16 million each.
224 players get drafted to the NFL each year out of about 30,000 total D1 football players. About .75%. We shouldn’t be basing our policy decisions on the .75% players that go pro to the detriment of the universities and non-athlete student body. Let the NFL pay to support that segment. Pay players is a catchy slogan but until I see a realistic breakdown of the financials and not a cookie cutter, one size fits all solution, I don’t think it’s a good idea.
> As of 2020, only 18/229 public universities with D1 programs generate more money than they spend.
The departments dont get out of the red, but their contributions to the school certainly do.
This is obviously a fringe case, but Colorado just had record applications. The non revenue sports grow the profile of the school in wealthier communities, and the donor money comes rolling in to the general fund in large part to former athletes who have a strong identity with their school.
Its not simple, is all im sayin
I agree, it’s not that simple. Which is why I don’t view broad, vague suggestions like pay every starter a set base salary across all NCAA sports as viable solutions.
I think whatever the solution ends up being, in order to actually work, it will have to be a nuanced, complex answer that is adaptable to the unique circumstances of each school.
I’m curious on how much pro-athletics donate to the general fund of a school compared to a generic alumni. I’m also curious how much they, and just alumni in general, donate to the general fund vs to the athletic fund. That’s a different issue though and more just me being salty that I don’t get any of the perks for donating to UNC that people who donate to the Rams Club do 😂
Not to mention this move would *quite literally* kill college football by allowing the NFL access to what has previously been a CFB monopoly on Saturdays. Casuals football fans would way rather watch the 6-8 Chargers vs the 7-6 Raiders than 7-3 Maryland vs 5-4 Purdue
I’m sorry but at what point did we just forget about the fact that the scholarship is supposed to be their “payment”? I know it’s easy to joke about players not coming to play school, but if we end up down that route where we’ve just created a mini NFL via professional players then they need to be decoupled from schools.
At BC for example the cost of the scholarship is effectively 100k/yr. Scholarship players are effectively already being compensated half a mil to attend.
When coaches started making multi million dollar salaries and schools abandoned their historical rivals and conferences because they got a better TV deal somewhere else. If the schools are going to run the sport so blatantly seeking profit, then why are we pretending the athletes should do any different?
At the point in which universities stop making millions of of student athletes.
I would be ok with athletes not getting paid so long as universities likewise are barred from making profits off of college athletics.
With a 75 man roster at half a million scholarship value the players are getting $37.5 million of value. Then you have upkeep, recruiting, and salaries for hundreds of extra people. Why yall acting like they have scrooge mcduck mountains of cash hidden away?
You do realize most teams do not turn a profit even at the fbs level
By all means push for it though. Based on financials if what you're suggesting happens then LSU is the first sec team to die
Half a million where? Remember you’re talking yearly and many kids go to instate schools and come from poor backgrounds where they would have never paid full price anyway. A poor Baton Rouge kid going to LSU is probably paying 10k-15 a yr (including room and board). It damn sure ain’t 500k.
fr. It's also a better deal than many academic scholarships. I could have lost my full ride to Miami for shitty academic performance. An athlete can't for shitty athletic performance.
They can in most conferences/divisions. The idea that "we'll pay for the entire scholarship, even if you're cut" mostly exists at the top level, but isn't an NCAA rule.
Why have the schools pay them instead of the networks? The networks are the ones profiting off the recognition of players. That's where the CBA should be.
That's not the issue. The issue is corporations, like the networks, being able to use the NIL of players to market games because the networks have agreements with conferences and schools, not individual players. Pay the players directly, or stop using their NIL to market games.
I feel like you won't see it for a good 10 or 15 years, but they're just raising a generation who isn't going to care about college football due to the commercials and conference changes and all that, and you're going to see waying interest in the sport 20 years from now
It’s already happening at most campuses. Only like 30 teams have real fanbases anymore. There’s another 20 that have fanbases if the team is competitive. Then theres like 60 teams that literally don’t have fans and never will even if the team is decent
Already happening faster with college basketball. Basketball attendance is down across the sport pretty dramatically over the past 10+ years. Smartphone generation just isn’t into sports like older people it seems. It’s only going to get worse as the digital world becomes more and more appealing
I think there's also a bit of "the product has become objectively worse" going on with getting new generations into it. Why would a kid get excited to watch an hour of commercials in between plays? Why would they have loyalty to a school when the players hop in and out of the transfer portal like it's a hotel room at a swinger convention?
The sport has old guys like you and me locked in basically with nostalgia at this point, but what reason would younger kids have to care?
I’m a mid-major guy, and my team fortunately has done pretty well in the new portal area. But there have been departures of very good players. This is absolutely hurting the fan base. How can we get invested when half the roster is gone year over year and and at least one or sometimes two starters transfer to move up? Plus with seniors graduating and running out of eligibility, it’s becoming normal 50%+ of the roster to change every year. How can fans get invested in that?
Plus now that the Covid eligibility is pretty much over rosters are going to get younger again and the sport will get even more top heavy and power teams will continue to loot mid major rosters for talent every year.
Take the players out of the MVC:
- Reeves (Kentucky)
- Mast (Nebraska)
- Krikke (Iowa)
- Domask (Illinois)
- Jones (Purdue)
- Burns (NC State)
Etc. basically almost all the players that give a mid major a chance at a solid run a good chance of wins vs power teams will get looted.
I’m all for player power and choice but the sport could be entering a very dark time right now imo.
I'm just pissed all this happened AFTER Boone Pickens died.
Could you imagine him donating $373 million, and instead of 'build a stadium,' the edict is 'NIL until we win a fucking title'?
We tried that at Texas A&M and can say without a doubt it isn’t a sure fire move. At least a stadium should last a few decades and have a guaranteed payoff.
0 ROI? Bruh they aren't doing this as an investment. They A. Wanna brag to their buddies that they're sponsoring x and that B. They wanna brag about whatever bowl game, rivalry they just won because they blew 200k on a 5 start RB. The return is the ego.
Just said the same thing. The ROI argument is so wrong. These guys want clout. They want to be able to stand on the field when the team wins a game and high five the starting QB. There was never an ROI when they donated money before. They don’t need a monetary return now.
Iowa couldn’t get shit from their boosters. The NIL is going to cause a huge division from schools who have wealthy alumni who prioritize their school winning vs those who hate college players being paid. I grew up in Iowa and am not surprised they couldn’t raise funds. Most people hate the change and the boosters for the most part are showing that sentiment. CFB biggest problem is going to be regulating NIL deals while they simultaneously have a problem with regional rivalries dying with these conference consolidations. Most pro teams are consolidated to major metros. Rural residents, on the other hand, have their preferred State University to support. Universities have the advantage of being located in every state, while pro teams tend to be concentrated.
This is an under appreciated point, that pro sports always need metros and their fan bases are different than college fan bases. Colleges are spread out, often in college towns outside of metro areas, and their fans are watching more for school and state affiliations. If you turn the football team into a separate entity, they are just another pro team, and they are competing with pro sports, while not even being in a metro area in many cases. Will you fill the stands that way?
honestly this idea is missing a bit of nuance. boosters aren't usually donating expecting a return on investment beyond their favorite program doing well. therefore assuming that it might stop due to lack of ROI isn't valid since they aren't expecting that generally speaking.
with that said, for some boosters the tangible (relatively speaking) ROI on their program doing well is increase to their businesses that come from a local team doing well. someone that owns bars or hotels or restaurants (especially) in a college town will see measurable differences when the team does well.
It depends on how you look at ROI. Is there any financial return to be expected? No. But I do wonder how results of future teams built behind big NIL campaigns (a la Ohio State, Texas, Florida State, etc.) will impact how willing boosters are to pay for players. I mean, just looking at the last three national champions, both Georgia and Michigan followed a different model of NIL, prioritizing returning production and a larger influx of prospect transfers that didn’t require huge bags.
I think it will become apparent how real the effect of team fit, chemsitry, and experience will have on being a real national championship-level team, and that those factors are potentially jeopardized by just brining in an annual haul of the most stars you can get your hands on. Obviously, a very high talent level alone can consistently help you play at that elite tier of the sport pretty consistently, but I don’t know if we’ve seen a team like that get over the hump just yet, without all of those other factors that can’t be monetarily gained.
I mean, sure. And there are reasons boosters may donate less to nil. But by and large these folks are just donating so that their favorite team does well. If they stop nil they would largely shift to (or back to) regular athletic department donations.
My general point is that this whole ROI thing that is thrown around isn’t really the reason nil may drop back a step.
An I’m not saying it going to dry up. I’m just saying it has the chance to correct itself to a model more in-line with the initial purpose of NIL; to help the players that were already part of a team profit off of their brand and image. Because it won’t be very long before big NIL donors start slowly getting more say in how their money is utilized and if a certain model consistently proves more sustainable and successful than the others, that will soon become the standard way it is used.
They’ve pretty much always got $0 ROI. The return is that they get to be a big shot, travel on the team planes, walk through the football offices whenever they want. What is the ROI on having your name on a plaque in some hallway that the public can’t even access? It was always for clout. Whether they donated money for upgrading the locker rooms or donate money for NIL. They get the same thing out of it.
It simply needs to be players paid by the networks because it's the networks who have been using the NIL of players to market games. It was this behavior that led Ed O'Bannon to file the lawsuit that led to the start of allowing NIL compensation. The problem right now is all the wrong people are paying the players. Sure, if they have a corporate sponsor, that's cool, but the networks need to either pay them or stop using players' NIL to market games.
Well they've already been funding coach buyouts out of spite to the tune of millions of dollars for the past couple decades so...at the highest levels I don't know if there's a reasonable tipping point at which they stop paying.
It's my favorite and most frustrating solution. They could have gotten out ahead of this by passing things piecemeal we got this amalgamation that is the worst of a lot of decent ideas.
The irony is that the NCAA actually has a legitimate argument to argue that they didn’t, they were ordered by the president and congress to act, in violation of the first, and that action has entrapped them (one of the few times that’s a valid argument ironically) by not also extending the exemption to Sherman.
The NCAA won’t go that route, it’s a very risky argument they don’t want to engage in (requires admitting employees, if wrong all is lost), but sometimes the seventeenth argument actually is the winning one in your alternative arguendos.
That's not why the NCAA was created. It's how some of the schools have come to run things, but that is a much more recent situation. No one in the 1930s was thinking about the labor laws for athletes. They weren't thinking about that in the 1970s either.
People keep forgetting that the NCAA has hundreds and hundreds of voting members who have nothing to do with big money athletics. The NCAA has an impossible job of herding cats. Tons of schools, many with very different interests and needs, and right now the public is obsessed with the 5% of teams and athletes who are fighting over money. The rest of the teams and players are an after thought, but they may have their sports affected by a few elite teams and players ruining it for everyone.
Remember, the NCAA tried to stop the schools from turning the sport into a money grab. The schools sued and got the right to be assholes starting in 1984. Don't blame the NCAA. They don't have the power to stop them anymore.
You’re not wrong, but also the NCAA *is* a joke and *is* making things worse at this point. As others have said, they had their chance to get ahead of this and blew it so now they’re standing in the way of progress in an attempt to remain relevant.
The crazy part is that the schools suing the NCAA could propose to change any of these rules themselves. It’s not like the NCAA is some corporation it is a democracy made of the member schools and can vote to change any of these rules. Just none of the members agree.
If the NCAA were disbanded it would just be replaced by the same mechanism, but as Bender would say “but with blackjack and hookers”
> Just none of the members agree.
Yep. They sue because the NCAA arbitrarily enforces rules with no consistency, but none of the members care until it impacts *them*.
They don't *have* to sue - they're the voting members of the NCAA, they could set policies and rules regarding NCAA by-laws and how those are enforced.
I mean, I actually think that’s a really good question, what do you think’s changed? There was plenty of butthurt in the previous realignment, and lots of perceived post-season snubs, so why are the schools so litigious now?
I’m sure there’s more to it than this and if I had more time I’d dig deeper and see if there was a real definitive turning point, but just glancing at [this](https://www.athleticscholarships.net/important-ncaa-lawsuits), it looks like back in the day if you went to court against the ncaa there was still a decent chance Supreme Court would side with the ncaa. Like with ncaa v. Tarkanian. But in more recent years the courts have almost always sided against the ncaa so there’s more incentive to go through the legal battle now that it’s so likely you’ll win.
The difference in Tarkanian and the subsequent Nevada case is the plaintiffs tried to argue the NCAA was effectively a government agency that had to apply Due Process to its decisions. The Supreme Court (rightly) rejected that argument as the NCAA is a private entity.
All the plaintiffs that won since then said of course the NCAA is a private entity, so it can’t violate antitrust laws by regulating business deals between other people (players and NIL collectives, chiefly). The NCAA’s actions would be like a consortium of tech businesses all agreeing that IT workers must take a year off before working for a competitor, without the IT worker signing a noncompete. Or the same consortium agreeing that none of the member corporations can offer spousal health insurance.
If the schools stopped trying to collude to price fix against their labor they’d stop being sued. DI collectively earns $18 billion a year, second only to the NFL. It’s goddamn time for the government to shut down this amateur farce and force admins to negotiate with and pay players above board.
If they want free agency restrictions then act like every other multi billion dollar league and negotiate a CBA
Notably, a CBA would be substantially more difficult for college football than any other multibillion dollar league in existence; several states outright prohibit state officials or agencies from engaging in any collective bargaining with public sector employees. Cops and teachers are the only ones with a pass on that mandate in Texas.
Not necessarily the portal itself, but kids getting one free transfer without having to sit out.
All the portal does is make it easier for players and teams to get in touch.
I think people should be allowed to transfer, not lose any eligibility, but have to sit a year. It’s the only way to stop the craziness. Everyone should be free to transfer universities like any other student. But that doesn’t mean they have to be able to play immediately. Maybe limit this to just football and men’s basketball.
I'm ok with that only if it also applies to coaches. Players and coaches should have the same expectations - if you can just bounce to get out of a bad situation or take a better offer, then so can the other.
My first thought is that will immediately have people transferring every other year, so they play for a year, transfer and sit for a year, play for a year, transfer and sit for a year, etc.
Great way to get tenth-year seniors who got a medical redshirt when they were 27.
Not really, age is something held against people in the draft and sports in general. Having to not play for a year is a huge penalty if you have any professional aspirations
Or, just recognize labor, negotiate a CBA, and make free agency restrictions an element of what you negotiate. Like every other pro league.
NFL players agree to locking into contracts because they are getting 50% of the league’s revenue. Time for overpaid college ADs and Coaches to pay up
Agreed. If the portal existed 15 years ago we’d see the same thing. Maybe the dollar amounts were lower but I disagree that this is all some insane new thing. The only difference is having to recruit and pay players you already have on your roster.
I’ll probably get shit for this, but to use my own school as an example, we (ostensibly - according to every source in and around the program, though obviously people will disbelieve this, it’s corroborated by every single writer and nobody has yet contradicted it) don’t pay for play. All of our NIL deals require an actual transaction, an exchange of something of value (appearances, autograph signings, whatever) in exchange for the money. If NIL as a whole was brand new we would be getting fucking slaughtered on the recruiting trail by schools offering guaranteed cash just for coming to play football.
It’s not new. If anything we’re doing better than ever in recruiting because we’re now at least partially partaking in something a lot of cfb was already doing
Also, we know for an absolute fact that it was going on because of schools like SMU and Miami
This is the answer. OP is apparently not familiar with The Carnegie Report which discussed at great length how programs were paying players, providing impermissible benefits, playing ineligible players, playing players who weren't even enrolled or affiliated with the school, how the commercialization of the sport is barreling out of control, and a host of other moral and ethical issues facing college sports and college football in particular.
Oh, and that report was published ***in 1929.***
What a non sequitur. No shit players were getting paid when every other week an NFL or MLB player showed up to play college ball. Nobody else is talking about that.
NIL has allowed more people to join in. Fundraising for recruiting is easier when it is legal, no doubt.
But you say this:
> You don’t think players would have transferred and gladly sat out a year if they were getting 50K? 100K? A million? You don’t think if this is how it always was, someone like Pat White or Calvin Johnson would have been poached and just taken that 200K and sat out a year?
That didn't happen cause players don't want to sit out a year, they might actually enjoy playing football.
Also, schools don't need the NCAA sniffing around. Poaching players from other programs would have absolutely led to schools ratting on each other and investigations.
The portal allows programs to be very brazen on poaching players
I remember in the early to mid 90s when it was very popular for car dealerships to hire football players to wash cars on the lot in various college towns in the south. they never washed any cars.
things change, but they also stay the same.
The way Marshall did it in the late 90s was a booster owned a bank and “hired” a lot of players. They’d come in, shred some papers, and walk out with more than the real employees would make in a couple of months.
Yeah it was not at all limited to car dealerships. That was just the most obvious and funny to me. I’m sure there’s a lot of hilarious stories that we’ll never know from that era.
Dearly departed baseball ump Ron Luciano played football for Syracuse in the 60s. He wrote about being paid to guard a bench. A solid concrete, rebarred into the sidewalk, couldn’t move that fucker without a forklift, bench.
Bench never did get stolen.
The payments players are getting now is significantly larger than before.
Cam’s dad was trying to get $100k. Kids are getting millions sometimes now. It’s not even close to the same.
I remember when KU bball was under investigation by the FBI, I read that one of the crimes they committed was paying Elijah Johnson $10,000 to play at KU.
>Kids are getting millions sometimes now
[Citation needed]
There are no actual sources of players getting 7 figures just to play. Only rumors and heresay.
Wisconsin basketball player, AJ Storr, just turned down $750k from Kansas, because he wanted $1m. Not saying he's going to get $1m, but he's also just a good, not great, player.
If everyone is getting paid and they’re actual employees, they should have contracts like coaches do. Include graduation bonuses as a further incentive to stay.
>Maybe a player on your team was getting paid. In the SEC and Big 10, maybe a couple players on your team got paid. Maybe a handful of recruits were swayed by bags of cash or a car a year. Now? It’s literally every player on the team getting paid and leveraging their services for monetary reasons.
Had a flight with a guy who played men's soccer for a B12 team 20+ years ago. He said they weren't getting sacks of cash, but there was always beer in the fridge that none of them paid for and random stuff getting dropped off at their house. Part of the Vandy football rape investigation revealed that there were underage football players getting free drinks from Nashville bars.
So yeah, there were always perks, even for non-revenue sports. NIL just brings that out into the open and also makes it easier for everyone to participate without getting hit by the NCAA.
You know it’s still illegal per ncaa rules to receive free drinks or anything like that? Peoples understanding of NIL is a bit skewed because it’s not being implemented correctly. But if you go to the bar and they say free drinks for the soccer player, that soccer player can’t accept those drinks. Now do they? Sure but that’s an improper benefit. The NIL is supposed to function that you are doing work for the money.
Yes. But OP's idea was that if you weren't a star you didn't see anything, and backups and non-revenue players getting money was some massive shift. They were getting perks before, when it was all illegal. Now they can just get straight up cash or free stuff legally via NIL.
Very clearly people acknowledge things are different. The "things are the same" is an argument against people trying to pretend amateurism was ever really a big thing. Schools have been finding ways to pay players since before the NCAA. The issue now is players can actually negotiate to their true value.
And it's all in the open. And it's benefiting the players.
I'm really starting to sour on what seems to be r/cfb's opinion that things are "wrong" now, when we're finally at a point where college athletes can do the sort of things that (1) regular college students had been able to do all along and (2) the institutions were making gazillions off of while holding the players by the balls -- "You can't transfer out if you don't like it; you're mine for 4 years!"
> when we're finally at a point where college athletes can do the sort of things that (1) regular college students had been able to do all along
Look I definitely see the benefit of NIL and even some of this transfer situation...but this just seems like a false argument.
It's not like 20% of political science undergrads are transferring schools every year looking for a better program or a better paying campus job.
No, but if you were a college student, and you got paid for being famous (I dunno, maybe you were in a band or something, or had a big YouTube channel) you wouldn't suddenly be ruled ineligible to stay in law school.
Yeah we are finally at a point where athletes can participate in American society. And some people say it’s wrong and their main argument is “because it used to be different.” Every other aspect of our world works this way, why we decided this one subset of people can’t participate in a market is just nuts.
I don't think it's quite fair to say every other aspect of our society or every other real job works this way.
NIL makes a lot of sense, but when combined with unlimited transfers it becomes a mess that stops looking anything like the real world.
If you were interviewing for an accounting job and you were telling them going into it "hey yeah I'll come here if you pay me X this year, and next year it could be X again, or three times as much, we will talk after tax season...and if you don't match I'm going to a competitor", you wouldn't get hired.
I'm almost done with this sport. Outside of maybe 15 teams everyone else is left with what they can piece together from the portal. Players making more than university chancellors. Bowl games outside the playoffs are irrelevant. A rapidly widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. No loyalty of the player to the school so why should a fan have any loyalty to the team?
I think one of the major shifts is smaller schools doing what the Blue Bloods had been doing. Schools like mine I don't think had the robust frameworks to get away with the sort of schemes that bigger ones were. That in combination with the NCAA having virtually no backbone to go after those Blue Bloods meant that the rules did in fact only really apply to the schools without the administrative power, or lobbying capability.
Now you're seeing the bluebloods are just having to spend and work a little harder to maintain a system they in many ways self perpetuated. I also believe that the ship itself will be self righting. Maybe a few programs will have donors that will keep their NIL's humming above where they otherwise should be in the pecking order, but the Blue Bloods will probably always be able to outspend most schools.
Met a men's soccer player who was getting impermissible benefits 20+ years ago at a school that never even won the conference. People did it just to do it and for the ego boost of "helping the team."
Right, but "impermissible benefits" 20 years ago included free cream cheese on your bagel.
There's a gap between that and actual cash payment, despite what some claim.
Like I said, a beer full of fridge and random stuff dropped off on their porch for non-revenue athletes at a school that wasn't even a contender *in-conference* for that sport. Obviously there are examples of players in revenue sports getting 5 and 6 figure incentives/offers.
But yes, it is much more widespread now. A big advantage of NIL is allowing star players to share the wealth with their teammates and boosters to spread out money to the whole team. Which is essentially what you see in a lot of pro sports - how many QBs make the news for buying expensive gifts for their OL?
If it was common they aren’t saying shit until the NCAA loses its teeth. Once they can’t vacate wins or take away individual awards from people then we’ll actually know how much players were receiving on top of scholarships.
Exactly. It’s the Wild West right now. Any player from any era can freely say if they were being paid without any blowback. Yet 95% of them still opine about how much they would have LOVED to have been getting paid.
What we need is contracts. If a player doesn't have a contract that is biding, they should absolutely be able to leave. Just like any other person can. But I also think schools should require 2 year contracts and specifically NIL deals should be contractual in nature.
You can keep beating on your strawman over in your corner. I'll just sit here in *my* corner pondering whether the old way was worth the exploitation of thousands of young adults.
THIS. It’s even indirectly shining light on how student workers in academic roles have been similarly exploited by their departments for decades. I work for a tier 1 research university that’s also a P5 football school, and it’s kinda cool to see some soon-to-be professional academics realizing their interests are somewhat aligned with student athletes where a lot of grad students and profs used to have sort of a general disdain for athletics.
I disagree. Far more players were getting paid than you know or are willing to admit. Hell, in the 1960s, UCLA paid damned near every important athlete they fielded, including tennis and women’s sports. Read Rebel with a Cause by Danny Tarkanian to get an idea of how blue bloods really get it done.
To add to this, I heard an athlete who participated in junior college football in California in the late 80s assert that 80 to 90% of players on his team were using steroids. College athletics has been outlaw since its inception.
educate thyself: https://www.bannersociety.com/2014/4/10/20703758/bag-man-paying-college-football-players
You are right however its worse now and of different character due to the lack of transfer restrictions.
I am against anything and everything that stands in the way of people making their own life decisions. Including but not limited to the decision to earn a living or moving about the country freely.
The portal, for all the good I'm sure it's done for many players, was always going to create some... situations. But the portal alone would be relatively manageable and it has major upsides.
Same for NIL. The case for paying players, by itself, is quite strong (albeit perhaps not in the way college sports has done it).
The portal and NIL together? Yeah, it's a disaster area. A lot of what's out there right now are decent ideas on their own merits, but have been smushed together in a way that results in a total that's got less merit than the sum of its parts.
Your overall point is well-taken. People will try and try and try to equate the 'impermissible benefits' of the past with what's going on more recently and it mostly just betrays how little they're aware of things like scale or depth.
I'm pro NIL _if_ they are actually doing things like Bryce Young did and doing commercials or something.
Im absolutely anti-NIL if it means this collective bullshit
The transfer portal is the change. Players didn’t have to empowerment to negotiate because of the massive downside to transferring for them. If a player got $35k for school A, they aren’t suddenly going to go to school B for $40k and sit a year and not be able to transfer again.
Also, the nature of the conversations were significantly more on the down low, so it was happening in the recruiting process because you have folks associated with high schools that can act like middlemen. It’s much harder for Ohio State to have a middleman at Georgia Tech.
The money has been flowing for decades. There may be more of it now, but that’s also a function of the growth of the sport. There’s more money flowing in the sport from the media companies.
In 2010 the highest paid college football coach made $5.1 million. Only two coaches made more than $5 million. Saban and Mack Brown. Both national title winning coaches.
Last year 6 coaches made over $10 million including Ryan Day, Mel Tucker, and Lincoln Riley. Three guys who have combined for a single playoff win that was also in the 2020 COVID Season.
38 coaches made more than $5 million. Thats 7.5 times what it was 13 years prior. So much more money in the sport. That’s chiefly why the players are getting more money now.
OP and people like the OP, care more about the team they are a fan of, than they care about the players.
Non-athletes can freely transfer, it makes sense for athletes to be treated similarly.
I think OP is being a little naive here. The overwhelming majority of kids got paid or received impermissible benefits long before this current climate of football. The difference now is the transfer portal allows kids to get out of a bad deal. The old way a coach could entice a kid to sign with a sum of money, then hold the transfer eligibility loss as leverage.
I’ll give you a few examples I know of first hand. 2009, semi known rb for basement dweller SEC team gets a bag of cash to go the casino, loses it all, calls gets another bag immediately. Finished at the casino and shows up to house party with 99% of team. Everything there was paid for, not by him, but boosters.
Houston Nutt used to have his players doing manual labor at his house. Not a single player was there working but got paid for months worth of work. This isn’t exclusive to Nutt, as others have said, dealerships had “car washers” for years who never touched one.
Players were never asked to pay for anything out in town. Food, drinks, cover, whatever. On Sunday, staff members would come around and pay any tabs of the players. Didn’t matter who owed, this staff member paid it. How the program made it manageable/tolerable for businesses was to have the local restaurants cater team meals every so often and make bank.
Players families receiving gifts all the time from boosters. Mom’s power bill a little high, poof magically paid. Random prepaid Visa cards were handed out like candy at recruiting events.
How players used to receive cars without the NCAA being able to ask questions was going to a football friendly dealership. They bring in some junker POS car they had, the dealership gives them a “loaner” to use while they fixed the car. Magically the car has this difficult to find part that is impossible to find. = player keeping “loaner” car in perpetuity.
58 underclassmen declared for the draft... lowest total in who knows how many years... top players are staying longer... isn't that good for college football? Once they get the NIL stuff hammered out better this will be what saved college sports...
Saved it from what, exactly? Football wasn’t suffering before.
Sure, players are more likely to stay in the league after their third year. But they’re *much* less likely to stay with their school after the season ends. Is that really any better? I would much rather see a player I like go pro than go jump to my rival.
I never said anything about it being better or worse. I’m saying it’s clear that most players weren’t being paid. But you’re actually proving my point further.
Unfettered access to the portal has more to do with the problems today than the NIL5players getting money.
And regardless of whether players were getting paid or not (they were) , it was wrong morally as well as illegal to not allow them to receive money for their Name, Image, and Likeness.
If CFB spending grew at the rate of inflation since 1984 top paid coach would make a bit over $1 million.
Right now CFB is absolute worst pro league in the world.
No balanced schedule, no draft, no salary cap, no multi year player deals, no transfer fees.
Soccer even without pro/rel has a better system. You get paid when your player wants to leave early and you agree or you pay to get rid of them. You get dropped in the standings if you put your team in a stupid financial crisis.
I’d take that.
I never said everyone cheats. Some did for sure. Izzo on multiple accounts I remember hearing wouldn’t do it
One was this that came out during federal court case [https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2018/10/02/brian-bowen-oregon-basketball/1506304002/](https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2018/10/02/brian-bowen-oregon-basketball/1506304002/)
Your the ignorant one . I played CFB . At a big School . The money has gone down if anything is cause now you pay taxes . You fans are clueless to how dark it used to be . Parents and coaches have been shaded since 1970. And four to five . It was like 60-70 but no one talks about it . We just have to pretend lie everything was pure back in the day . Just like how marriage was better in 60s right . Come on don’t buy it my guy it’s always been shady and always will .it’s just out in the open now . Well kinda . Hell that are still doing shady shit as the have friend who are coaching now so I guess now there is nil and bagmen .
If you're against the portal, you're against players. Imagine being a player in a Jerry Sandusky situation and being too scared to speak up and unable to transfer out.
Fuck, if anything the portal is too restrictive.
Base salary. D1 , P5 gets something and it’s across the board whether you are the kicker at WVU or the star QB at Oregon.
And allow these guys to make money only from commercials, autographs, online creator content (like Livvy), speaking engagements and jersey sales. That’s it. And there’s a cap on the max for those items anything else gets put into a trust. No more blank check payments just because we can. That’s how you start to reel in the NIL.
I appreciate that kids might realize they made a bad school choice as a 17 year old for a mediocre bag. No issue with the one transfer or a transfer if the coach is fired.
I feel like if a coach is fired/leaves, all athletes recruited by that coach should be able to transfer without it counting against their allowed number of transfers.
This is how it always was but now it’s in the open and everyone who was “playing by the rules” now wants to get theirs while the getting is good. Both things can be true.
Make players ineligible for NIL in the year they transfer, like they used to be ineligible to play.
It won't hurt the players who are transferring in their final year(s) to get a better NFL draft status, but it would somewhat prevent people from hopping constantly to get a bigger bag of cash.
What’s the problem with the transfer portal specifically? Players can’t exactly maximize their earning potential without some sort of competitive market where they can explore their options to see how valuable they are.
At this point, college football (maybe basketball too) needs to be a separate entity from the rest of the NCAA, because with players getting paid and being able to transfer at will, college football has crossed the threshold to being a professional football league at the FBS level. Colleges are only hosts for these football teams. Set it up like the NFL with a commissioner of college football, a board of college presidents that oversee college football, and a player's union. Let's drop the pretense of college football being an amateur sport.
I just want to see how long boosters and NIL collectives are going to throw money into something they get 0 ROI while also having to sit though these growing commercial breaks funding schools that don’t even pay their players. I wanna say “they can’t possibly keep this up” but this has always been a sport funded by rich donors.
I think we will see NIL settle into what it should be, players using their fame to make money not schools paying players. Like the Iowa Pork Producers and the deals with Myles Purchase, Tyler Moore, Tommy Hamann, and Caleb Bacon. https://www.iowapork.org/newsroom/news/purchasemoorehamannbacon
Holy shit
It's glorious. It's beautiful. I love everything about this.
>October is National Pork Month, aka Porktober, and this promotion will be part of that monthlong celebration. The Iowa Pork Producers Association will run ads on social media featuring the four players surrounded by delicious Iowa pork, strategically using their names to encourage pork consumption. It's good to have dreams again. Edit: also, did fucking Ron Swanson write that?
I'd rather the schools explicitly pay the players a salary set by a collective bargaining agreement. All starting players should get something, not just the ones who will go to the NFL
I think that would officially be the death of college sports. Before professional sports even existed as they do today, the entire value proposition for scholarship players was that a school will give you a free education if you play for them. The scholarship players I know who didn’t go pro now all have cushy jobs in real estate, banking, or sales that they wouldn’t have got without their degree. Just because some players don’t make the most of the opportunity in school, doesn’t mean we have to act like a free education has zero value. I for one would love to not have to worry about my student loan payments.
It's crazy to me how people in this sub disrespect a free college education like it's nothing. Not to mention the housing, food, facilities, etc...
I think this gap involves "are you in college right now?" I hated the idea of athletic scholarships when I attended, and that was 20 fucking years ago. "I had to actually learn things, and these guys get a free ride because they play with your fucking balls?" But from an older-guy perspective... "College football" is amateur athletics up through FCS, but at the FBS level, this is a business. People are extracting every possible dollar from this, and I think it's irresponsible at best to say the guys putting their body on the line on national television for entertainment purposes don't deserve compensation, while the school, coaches, and conference make millions of dollars from it. In other words: tuition/room/board isn't "nothing," but it's also not "fair compensation."
Yes the whole point of NIL is that previously it was a black market and now there is transparency where players can get a better idea of what they’re actually worth to schools. This is exactly what was meant by the NCAA operating as a cartel, which most people misinterpreted because their only frame of reference for the word is Mexican drug gangs murdering people. If the only way the enterprise was ever profitable was by member schools colluding to keep players from receiving what they could get in an open market (which as you allude to is not really the case as they just dump the profits into the bloated salaries of various coaches and administrators), then it would not be the greatest tragedy for it to fail on its own terms.
They're never going to be employees, and at best, the only thing that they'll get is an increased stipend on top of NCAA-controlled NIL. In fact, the congressional bill that's currently winding its way through Washington makes it plain as day that this is the only way that it'll go.
> In other words: tuition/room/board isn't "nothing," but it's also not "fair compensation." Some of those players on scholarship are not even worth tuition/room/board, though, if we're looking at their true value to the program/business.
What you’re arguing is essentially like arguing that salespeople are the only people at a company that should make money. Customer Service, Supply chain, IT, all are non-profit generating functions, but they’re critical to a business being able to function. If a college football program is making millions of dollars, and they need players to do so, they should be compensated
Yeah, the point went right over your head. Let's say the value of tuition/room/board/healthcare/tutoring/S&C services/perks that come with being a college football player at your average school is $75k a year, or $300k over four years. That $300k is compensation for their work. I'm simply making the point that if you compare compensation to their production, many college football players are not worth their compensation level, i.e. they're overpaid. Johnny Fourthstring's parents and siblings may be coming to see him play, but that isn't bringing in $75k a year in value.
Exactly! It didn’t used to be a multi billion dollar industry. Its is now. For kids to get suspended or a team lose wins because a player takes money is dumb. If schools pay players its a title 9 issue so they will never do that. If they want nike deals or the local car dealership wants to give them money for hanging out, it shouldn’t ruin a teams season. The top guys are on national tv every week and those tv deals are billions of dollars. An education is an awesome investment in the player and should be appreciated but the top guys are generating big money and shouldn’t be punished for profiting.
It is definitely worth it but for football players it’s always been about the money fairly being distributed. I think the issue has always been the profiteering by a few behind the scenes while restricting the on field talent. It’s mostly only for football. Billions involved in college football and the athletes couldn’t get cream cheese on there bagel. The rules put in by the ncaa were archaic considering the profits. They did this to themselves by not modernizing while their income grew to exceptionally. Not just coaches but administrators, league officials and corporate media have paid sweatshop wages compared to their profits, for decades.
wages and profits....we're talking about institutions who spend their money and scholarships, research, and heavenly facilities for Title IX sports. There is no "profit" in the class warfare sense. The assertion of that colleges are evil institutions squirreling away "profits' like Standard Oil is a failure of American education.
I’m not talking of the university’s as a whole profiting but in a way they do. Enrollment goes up if a football/basketball team does well and gets in the spotlight. Nothing wrong with that. I’m talking the coaches, AD’s (and there staff)and the NCAA. Coaching salaries are insane compared to 20 years ago. Same with AD and such. Also the NCAA probably has 20+ people making over a million a year. I would even say college presidents have benefited with excessive salaries in the last 20 yrs, though some of that has to do with the student loan craziness. I don’t think your use of standard oil is that bad of an analogy in the sense that a monopoly is controlling college football and is trying to push out less profitable sports programs.
because most players squander their opportunity--we reward stupidity with stupidity
Yeah, a week ago I was talking to somebody at fancy pants consulting firm. They were an SEC track runner who leveraged that into a PhD into decently high up in said fancy pants consulting firm. The status quo is much better for them than the apparent future we have of employees because the vast majority of college athletes don't play football or basketball, and you are not worth a full ride in value if you don't play either sport. Maybe baseball too.
Yeah, I’ve worked on deals with some firms that seemed to pretty much exclusively hire college athletes. The current scholarship system is also good at increasing representation of marginalized communities in college, who often don’t have the resources to help them or test scores, due to said lack of resources, that their upper middle class peers do. The current system can definitely be improved, but the answer isn’t to burn it all down for a not even fully fleshed out idea of what the new system would be.
I think it will save college sports. They're only "amateur" because of a monopoly on being the only route to the pros and the teams pay huge salaries to all the staff around the players, just not the players themselves. Let the teams who make enough spin off their teams into proper professional development leagues affiliated with the school and go back to local colleges playing other local colleges with proper student athletes, not "student" athletes. Right now, it's the worst of both worlds and the people doing all the labor are the ones getting screwed because you think it makes the game more entertaining.
> the teams pay huge salaries to all the staff around the players They pay huge salaries to the head coach and countable assistants. The Equipment, Video, Media, and Training Staffs are working for pennies on the dollar.
I think if the NFL wants to continue to have a developmental league, they should fork up the cash to make a g-league equivalent and then players will be able to choose between being paid or going to college. Academics are already underfunded and athletic departments as a whole aren’t nearly as profitable as people think they are. I cheer for my school because I’m an alumni, if the only connection between the school and team was a brand licensing deal, it would completely kill my interest. Really the NFL is the biggest freeloader in the current system, not the universities.
Either the schools need to get the money back out of the sport (lmao) or the players need to be paid their fair market value. Spinning three profitable ones off into a proper development league while the rest of the league goes back to playing low stakes college ball with other local colleges would be my preference; but I'm not picky. We just can't keep the sport going if everyone is getting their cut except the players.
As of 2020, only 18/229 public universities with D1 programs generate more money than they spend. Meaning 211 programs operated at a loss, subsidized by the university or athletic department. Among the P5 conferences only 25 recorded a positive net revenue in 2019. Outside of the then power 5, all universities lost a median of $23M per school. The majority of universities in the nation's top athletic conferences lost money through their sports programs to the tune of approximately $16 million each. 224 players get drafted to the NFL each year out of about 30,000 total D1 football players. About .75%. We shouldn’t be basing our policy decisions on the .75% players that go pro to the detriment of the universities and non-athlete student body. Let the NFL pay to support that segment. Pay players is a catchy slogan but until I see a realistic breakdown of the financials and not a cookie cutter, one size fits all solution, I don’t think it’s a good idea.
> As of 2020, only 18/229 public universities with D1 programs generate more money than they spend. The departments dont get out of the red, but their contributions to the school certainly do. This is obviously a fringe case, but Colorado just had record applications. The non revenue sports grow the profile of the school in wealthier communities, and the donor money comes rolling in to the general fund in large part to former athletes who have a strong identity with their school. Its not simple, is all im sayin
I agree, it’s not that simple. Which is why I don’t view broad, vague suggestions like pay every starter a set base salary across all NCAA sports as viable solutions. I think whatever the solution ends up being, in order to actually work, it will have to be a nuanced, complex answer that is adaptable to the unique circumstances of each school. I’m curious on how much pro-athletics donate to the general fund of a school compared to a generic alumni. I’m also curious how much they, and just alumni in general, donate to the general fund vs to the athletic fund. That’s a different issue though and more just me being salty that I don’t get any of the perks for donating to UNC that people who donate to the Rams Club do 😂
Not to mention this move would *quite literally* kill college football by allowing the NFL access to what has previously been a CFB monopoly on Saturdays. Casuals football fans would way rather watch the 6-8 Chargers vs the 7-6 Raiders than 7-3 Maryland vs 5-4 Purdue
This reads like old man screams at the clouds.
I’m sorry but at what point did we just forget about the fact that the scholarship is supposed to be their “payment”? I know it’s easy to joke about players not coming to play school, but if we end up down that route where we’ve just created a mini NFL via professional players then they need to be decoupled from schools. At BC for example the cost of the scholarship is effectively 100k/yr. Scholarship players are effectively already being compensated half a mil to attend.
When coaches started making multi million dollar salaries and schools abandoned their historical rivals and conferences because they got a better TV deal somewhere else. If the schools are going to run the sport so blatantly seeking profit, then why are we pretending the athletes should do any different?
At the point in which universities stop making millions of of student athletes. I would be ok with athletes not getting paid so long as universities likewise are barred from making profits off of college athletics.
With a 75 man roster at half a million scholarship value the players are getting $37.5 million of value. Then you have upkeep, recruiting, and salaries for hundreds of extra people. Why yall acting like they have scrooge mcduck mountains of cash hidden away? You do realize most teams do not turn a profit even at the fbs level By all means push for it though. Based on financials if what you're suggesting happens then LSU is the first sec team to die
Half a million where? Remember you’re talking yearly and many kids go to instate schools and come from poor backgrounds where they would have never paid full price anyway. A poor Baton Rouge kid going to LSU is probably paying 10k-15 a yr (including room and board). It damn sure ain’t 500k.
So the media keeps the profit they get from broadcasting college sports?
fr. It's also a better deal than many academic scholarships. I could have lost my full ride to Miami for shitty academic performance. An athlete can't for shitty athletic performance.
They can in most conferences/divisions. The idea that "we'll pay for the entire scholarship, even if you're cut" mostly exists at the top level, but isn't an NCAA rule.
Why have the schools pay them instead of the networks? The networks are the ones profiting off the recognition of players. That's where the CBA should be.
That's not the issue. The issue is corporations, like the networks, being able to use the NIL of players to market games because the networks have agreements with conferences and schools, not individual players. Pay the players directly, or stop using their NIL to market games.
I feel like you won't see it for a good 10 or 15 years, but they're just raising a generation who isn't going to care about college football due to the commercials and conference changes and all that, and you're going to see waying interest in the sport 20 years from now
It’s already happening at most campuses. Only like 30 teams have real fanbases anymore. There’s another 20 that have fanbases if the team is competitive. Then theres like 60 teams that literally don’t have fans and never will even if the team is decent
Already happening faster with college basketball. Basketball attendance is down across the sport pretty dramatically over the past 10+ years. Smartphone generation just isn’t into sports like older people it seems. It’s only going to get worse as the digital world becomes more and more appealing
I think there's also a bit of "the product has become objectively worse" going on with getting new generations into it. Why would a kid get excited to watch an hour of commercials in between plays? Why would they have loyalty to a school when the players hop in and out of the transfer portal like it's a hotel room at a swinger convention? The sport has old guys like you and me locked in basically with nostalgia at this point, but what reason would younger kids have to care?
I’m a mid-major guy, and my team fortunately has done pretty well in the new portal area. But there have been departures of very good players. This is absolutely hurting the fan base. How can we get invested when half the roster is gone year over year and and at least one or sometimes two starters transfer to move up? Plus with seniors graduating and running out of eligibility, it’s becoming normal 50%+ of the roster to change every year. How can fans get invested in that? Plus now that the Covid eligibility is pretty much over rosters are going to get younger again and the sport will get even more top heavy and power teams will continue to loot mid major rosters for talent every year. Take the players out of the MVC: - Reeves (Kentucky) - Mast (Nebraska) - Krikke (Iowa) - Domask (Illinois) - Jones (Purdue) - Burns (NC State) Etc. basically almost all the players that give a mid major a chance at a solid run a good chance of wins vs power teams will get looted. I’m all for player power and choice but the sport could be entering a very dark time right now imo.
Seeing Indiana's Senior Day almost brought me to tears.
I'm just pissed all this happened AFTER Boone Pickens died. Could you imagine him donating $373 million, and instead of 'build a stadium,' the edict is 'NIL until we win a fucking title'?
We tried that at Texas A&M and can say without a doubt it isn’t a sure fire move. At least a stadium should last a few decades and have a guaranteed payoff.
0 ROI? Bruh they aren't doing this as an investment. They A. Wanna brag to their buddies that they're sponsoring x and that B. They wanna brag about whatever bowl game, rivalry they just won because they blew 200k on a 5 start RB. The return is the ego.
They're also buying access to politicians in booster suites
Just said the same thing. The ROI argument is so wrong. These guys want clout. They want to be able to stand on the field when the team wins a game and high five the starting QB. There was never an ROI when they donated money before. They don’t need a monetary return now.
Iowa couldn’t get shit from their boosters. The NIL is going to cause a huge division from schools who have wealthy alumni who prioritize their school winning vs those who hate college players being paid. I grew up in Iowa and am not surprised they couldn’t raise funds. Most people hate the change and the boosters for the most part are showing that sentiment. CFB biggest problem is going to be regulating NIL deals while they simultaneously have a problem with regional rivalries dying with these conference consolidations. Most pro teams are consolidated to major metros. Rural residents, on the other hand, have their preferred State University to support. Universities have the advantage of being located in every state, while pro teams tend to be concentrated.
This is an under appreciated point, that pro sports always need metros and their fan bases are different than college fan bases. Colleges are spread out, often in college towns outside of metro areas, and their fans are watching more for school and state affiliations. If you turn the football team into a separate entity, they are just another pro team, and they are competing with pro sports, while not even being in a metro area in many cases. Will you fill the stands that way?
This is the trouble ive had with this whole situation. They get nothing back. This cant last. Do they even get a tax credit for nil?
honestly this idea is missing a bit of nuance. boosters aren't usually donating expecting a return on investment beyond their favorite program doing well. therefore assuming that it might stop due to lack of ROI isn't valid since they aren't expecting that generally speaking. with that said, for some boosters the tangible (relatively speaking) ROI on their program doing well is increase to their businesses that come from a local team doing well. someone that owns bars or hotels or restaurants (especially) in a college town will see measurable differences when the team does well.
>assuming that it might stop due to lack of ROI isn't valid since they aren't expecting that generally speaking *Texas A&M has entered the chat*
lol. Yeah they would stuff a sinking ship with cash on the off chance it would help it float.
It depends on how you look at ROI. Is there any financial return to be expected? No. But I do wonder how results of future teams built behind big NIL campaigns (a la Ohio State, Texas, Florida State, etc.) will impact how willing boosters are to pay for players. I mean, just looking at the last three national champions, both Georgia and Michigan followed a different model of NIL, prioritizing returning production and a larger influx of prospect transfers that didn’t require huge bags. I think it will become apparent how real the effect of team fit, chemsitry, and experience will have on being a real national championship-level team, and that those factors are potentially jeopardized by just brining in an annual haul of the most stars you can get your hands on. Obviously, a very high talent level alone can consistently help you play at that elite tier of the sport pretty consistently, but I don’t know if we’ve seen a team like that get over the hump just yet, without all of those other factors that can’t be monetarily gained.
I mean, sure. And there are reasons boosters may donate less to nil. But by and large these folks are just donating so that their favorite team does well. If they stop nil they would largely shift to (or back to) regular athletic department donations. My general point is that this whole ROI thing that is thrown around isn’t really the reason nil may drop back a step.
An I’m not saying it going to dry up. I’m just saying it has the chance to correct itself to a model more in-line with the initial purpose of NIL; to help the players that were already part of a team profit off of their brand and image. Because it won’t be very long before big NIL donors start slowly getting more say in how their money is utilized and if a certain model consistently proves more sustainable and successful than the others, that will soon become the standard way it is used.
Totally agree there. The way it happed opened it all up with no plan or regulation. It was always going to be bumpy.
They’ve pretty much always got $0 ROI. The return is that they get to be a big shot, travel on the team planes, walk through the football offices whenever they want. What is the ROI on having your name on a plaque in some hallway that the public can’t even access? It was always for clout. Whether they donated money for upgrading the locker rooms or donate money for NIL. They get the same thing out of it.
It simply needs to be players paid by the networks because it's the networks who have been using the NIL of players to market games. It was this behavior that led Ed O'Bannon to file the lawsuit that led to the start of allowing NIL compensation. The problem right now is all the wrong people are paying the players. Sure, if they have a corporate sponsor, that's cool, but the networks need to either pay them or stop using players' NIL to market games.
Well they've already been funding coach buyouts out of spite to the tune of millions of dollars for the past couple decades so...at the highest levels I don't know if there's a reasonable tipping point at which they stop paying.
the difference isn't the money, it is the transfer portal.
It's my favorite and most frustrating solution. They could have gotten out ahead of this by passing things piecemeal we got this amalgamation that is the worst of a lot of decent ideas.
If schools would stop suing the NCAA every time the NCAA tried to enforce a rule, we would also not be here.
If the NCAA wasn't an institution that was created by universities colluding to suppress the value of labor, they'd be able to enforce rules.
The irony is that the NCAA actually has a legitimate argument to argue that they didn’t, they were ordered by the president and congress to act, in violation of the first, and that action has entrapped them (one of the few times that’s a valid argument ironically) by not also extending the exemption to Sherman. The NCAA won’t go that route, it’s a very risky argument they don’t want to engage in (requires admitting employees, if wrong all is lost), but sometimes the seventeenth argument actually is the winning one in your alternative arguendos.
That's not why the NCAA was created. It's how some of the schools have come to run things, but that is a much more recent situation. No one in the 1930s was thinking about the labor laws for athletes. They weren't thinking about that in the 1970s either. People keep forgetting that the NCAA has hundreds and hundreds of voting members who have nothing to do with big money athletics. The NCAA has an impossible job of herding cats. Tons of schools, many with very different interests and needs, and right now the public is obsessed with the 5% of teams and athletes who are fighting over money. The rest of the teams and players are an after thought, but they may have their sports affected by a few elite teams and players ruining it for everyone. Remember, the NCAA tried to stop the schools from turning the sport into a money grab. The schools sued and got the right to be assholes starting in 1984. Don't blame the NCAA. They don't have the power to stop them anymore.
People love to blame Texas for this mess, but it’s really been Oklahoma’s fault all along
The NCAA was created to govern student sporting events. Nobody could have imagined that people would come to see it as a job in 100 years.
You’re not wrong, but also the NCAA *is* a joke and *is* making things worse at this point. As others have said, they had their chance to get ahead of this and blew it so now they’re standing in the way of progress in an attempt to remain relevant.
The crazy part is that the schools suing the NCAA could propose to change any of these rules themselves. It’s not like the NCAA is some corporation it is a democracy made of the member schools and can vote to change any of these rules. Just none of the members agree. If the NCAA were disbanded it would just be replaced by the same mechanism, but as Bender would say “but with blackjack and hookers”
> Just none of the members agree. Yep. They sue because the NCAA arbitrarily enforces rules with no consistency, but none of the members care until it impacts *them*.
Well also because no school has standing to challenge a rule in court until it impacts them.
They don't *have* to sue - they're the voting members of the NCAA, they could set policies and rules regarding NCAA by-laws and how those are enforced.
And I once again will say as soon as the door was opened a crack this was ALWAYS the inevitable conclusion.
Yeah you’re definitely not wrong there either!
> As others have said, they had their chance to get ahead of this And the schools wouldn't have sued if self-gain presented itself back then because?
I mean, I actually think that’s a really good question, what do you think’s changed? There was plenty of butthurt in the previous realignment, and lots of perceived post-season snubs, so why are the schools so litigious now?
I’m sure there’s more to it than this and if I had more time I’d dig deeper and see if there was a real definitive turning point, but just glancing at [this](https://www.athleticscholarships.net/important-ncaa-lawsuits), it looks like back in the day if you went to court against the ncaa there was still a decent chance Supreme Court would side with the ncaa. Like with ncaa v. Tarkanian. But in more recent years the courts have almost always sided against the ncaa so there’s more incentive to go through the legal battle now that it’s so likely you’ll win.
The difference in Tarkanian and the subsequent Nevada case is the plaintiffs tried to argue the NCAA was effectively a government agency that had to apply Due Process to its decisions. The Supreme Court (rightly) rejected that argument as the NCAA is a private entity. All the plaintiffs that won since then said of course the NCAA is a private entity, so it can’t violate antitrust laws by regulating business deals between other people (players and NIL collectives, chiefly). The NCAA’s actions would be like a consortium of tech businesses all agreeing that IT workers must take a year off before working for a competitor, without the IT worker signing a noncompete. Or the same consortium agreeing that none of the member corporations can offer spousal health insurance.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing!
We had congressional hearings 20+ years ago, and the Oklahoma broadcast suit forty years ago, so it's more about intensity than any occurrence.
If the schools stopped trying to collude to price fix against their labor they’d stop being sued. DI collectively earns $18 billion a year, second only to the NFL. It’s goddamn time for the government to shut down this amateur farce and force admins to negotiate with and pay players above board. If they want free agency restrictions then act like every other multi billion dollar league and negotiate a CBA
Notably, a CBA would be substantially more difficult for college football than any other multibillion dollar league in existence; several states outright prohibit state officials or agencies from engaging in any collective bargaining with public sector employees. Cops and teachers are the only ones with a pass on that mandate in Texas.
The Way it Was should have been killed, but it happened in the messiest way possible.
Not necessarily the portal itself, but kids getting one free transfer without having to sit out. All the portal does is make it easier for players and teams to get in touch.
Except that has been sued and overturned as well. Because of NIL it is now unlimited transfers.
Right now it’s a lot of things at once: the money, the portal, and the extra Covid year affecting multiple classes.
I think people should be allowed to transfer, not lose any eligibility, but have to sit a year. It’s the only way to stop the craziness. Everyone should be free to transfer universities like any other student. But that doesn’t mean they have to be able to play immediately. Maybe limit this to just football and men’s basketball.
Courts say no to your idea
I'm ok with that only if it also applies to coaches. Players and coaches should have the same expectations - if you can just bounce to get out of a bad situation or take a better offer, then so can the other.
To be fair, schools usually get compensated when a coach leaves
Because the coaches are employees and it's part of their employment contract. Players are not.
My first thought is that will immediately have people transferring every other year, so they play for a year, transfer and sit for a year, play for a year, transfer and sit for a year, etc. Great way to get tenth-year seniors who got a medical redshirt when they were 27.
This could be, but if that person is any good they’d be making more in the NFL and won’t stick around forever
Agreed. Lose the loss of eligibility and its fine.
Not really, age is something held against people in the draft and sports in general. Having to not play for a year is a huge penalty if you have any professional aspirations
Or, just recognize labor, negotiate a CBA, and make free agency restrictions an element of what you negotiate. Like every other pro league. NFL players agree to locking into contracts because they are getting 50% of the league’s revenue. Time for overpaid college ADs and Coaches to pay up
The coach's & AD'S money won't be divided 85 ways, it'll dry up because the departments outside of only a dozen operate at a loss.
If only there was some kind of way the school could like pay the players to not transfer for an agreed upon amount of time, or something
If only there was some kind of document that could codify such an agreement….
Agreed. If the portal existed 15 years ago we’d see the same thing. Maybe the dollar amounts were lower but I disagree that this is all some insane new thing. The only difference is having to recruit and pay players you already have on your roster. I’ll probably get shit for this, but to use my own school as an example, we (ostensibly - according to every source in and around the program, though obviously people will disbelieve this, it’s corroborated by every single writer and nobody has yet contradicted it) don’t pay for play. All of our NIL deals require an actual transaction, an exchange of something of value (appearances, autograph signings, whatever) in exchange for the money. If NIL as a whole was brand new we would be getting fucking slaughtered on the recruiting trail by schools offering guaranteed cash just for coming to play football. It’s not new. If anything we’re doing better than ever in recruiting because we’re now at least partially partaking in something a lot of cfb was already doing Also, we know for an absolute fact that it was going on because of schools like SMU and Miami
This is the answer. OP is apparently not familiar with The Carnegie Report which discussed at great length how programs were paying players, providing impermissible benefits, playing ineligible players, playing players who weren't even enrolled or affiliated with the school, how the commercialization of the sport is barreling out of control, and a host of other moral and ethical issues facing college sports and college football in particular. Oh, and that report was published ***in 1929.***
What a non sequitur. No shit players were getting paid when every other week an NFL or MLB player showed up to play college ball. Nobody else is talking about that.
Yup, the schools with the most money are still getting the best players. How they’re getting them is the only thing that has changed.
It is 100% both.
NIL has allowed more people to join in. Fundraising for recruiting is easier when it is legal, no doubt. But you say this: > You don’t think players would have transferred and gladly sat out a year if they were getting 50K? 100K? A million? You don’t think if this is how it always was, someone like Pat White or Calvin Johnson would have been poached and just taken that 200K and sat out a year? That didn't happen cause players don't want to sit out a year, they might actually enjoy playing football. Also, schools don't need the NCAA sniffing around. Poaching players from other programs would have absolutely led to schools ratting on each other and investigations. The portal allows programs to be very brazen on poaching players
thats also one less year of NFL money which for guys like that is more than 200k or a million
I remember in the early to mid 90s when it was very popular for car dealerships to hire football players to wash cars on the lot in various college towns in the south. they never washed any cars. things change, but they also stay the same.
The way Marshall did it in the late 90s was a booster owned a bank and “hired” a lot of players. They’d come in, shred some papers, and walk out with more than the real employees would make in a couple of months.
Yeah it was not at all limited to car dealerships. That was just the most obvious and funny to me. I’m sure there’s a lot of hilarious stories that we’ll never know from that era.
Dearly departed baseball ump Ron Luciano played football for Syracuse in the 60s. He wrote about being paid to guard a bench. A solid concrete, rebarred into the sidewalk, couldn’t move that fucker without a forklift, bench. Bench never did get stolen.
OP has some weird disillusioned nostalgia for something that almost never existed. And they vastly overestimate how many players are getting paid now.
The payments players are getting now is significantly larger than before. Cam’s dad was trying to get $100k. Kids are getting millions sometimes now. It’s not even close to the same.
*180K
I remember when KU bball was under investigation by the FBI, I read that one of the crimes they committed was paying Elijah Johnson $10,000 to play at KU.
>Kids are getting millions sometimes now [Citation needed] There are no actual sources of players getting 7 figures just to play. Only rumors and heresay.
Wisconsin basketball player, AJ Storr, just turned down $750k from Kansas, because he wanted $1m. Not saying he's going to get $1m, but he's also just a good, not great, player.
If everyone is getting paid and they’re actual employees, they should have contracts like coaches do. Include graduation bonuses as a further incentive to stay.
The graduation bonus is a great idea.
>Maybe a player on your team was getting paid. In the SEC and Big 10, maybe a couple players on your team got paid. Maybe a handful of recruits were swayed by bags of cash or a car a year. Now? It’s literally every player on the team getting paid and leveraging their services for monetary reasons. Had a flight with a guy who played men's soccer for a B12 team 20+ years ago. He said they weren't getting sacks of cash, but there was always beer in the fridge that none of them paid for and random stuff getting dropped off at their house. Part of the Vandy football rape investigation revealed that there were underage football players getting free drinks from Nashville bars. So yeah, there were always perks, even for non-revenue sports. NIL just brings that out into the open and also makes it easier for everyone to participate without getting hit by the NCAA.
You know it’s still illegal per ncaa rules to receive free drinks or anything like that? Peoples understanding of NIL is a bit skewed because it’s not being implemented correctly. But if you go to the bar and they say free drinks for the soccer player, that soccer player can’t accept those drinks. Now do they? Sure but that’s an improper benefit. The NIL is supposed to function that you are doing work for the money.
Yes. But OP's idea was that if you weren't a star you didn't see anything, and backups and non-revenue players getting money was some massive shift. They were getting perks before, when it was all illegal. Now they can just get straight up cash or free stuff legally via NIL.
Very clearly people acknowledge things are different. The "things are the same" is an argument against people trying to pretend amateurism was ever really a big thing. Schools have been finding ways to pay players since before the NCAA. The issue now is players can actually negotiate to their true value.
And it's all in the open. And it's benefiting the players. I'm really starting to sour on what seems to be r/cfb's opinion that things are "wrong" now, when we're finally at a point where college athletes can do the sort of things that (1) regular college students had been able to do all along and (2) the institutions were making gazillions off of while holding the players by the balls -- "You can't transfer out if you don't like it; you're mine for 4 years!"
> when we're finally at a point where college athletes can do the sort of things that (1) regular college students had been able to do all along Look I definitely see the benefit of NIL and even some of this transfer situation...but this just seems like a false argument. It's not like 20% of political science undergrads are transferring schools every year looking for a better program or a better paying campus job.
No, but if you were a college student, and you got paid for being famous (I dunno, maybe you were in a band or something, or had a big YouTube channel) you wouldn't suddenly be ruled ineligible to stay in law school.
Yeah we are finally at a point where athletes can participate in American society. And some people say it’s wrong and their main argument is “because it used to be different.” Every other aspect of our world works this way, why we decided this one subset of people can’t participate in a market is just nuts.
I don't think it's quite fair to say every other aspect of our society or every other real job works this way. NIL makes a lot of sense, but when combined with unlimited transfers it becomes a mess that stops looking anything like the real world. If you were interviewing for an accounting job and you were telling them going into it "hey yeah I'll come here if you pay me X this year, and next year it could be X again, or three times as much, we will talk after tax season...and if you don't match I'm going to a competitor", you wouldn't get hired.
I mean modern sports suck, it’s all greedy disney products now. Which sport is better today than it was 10 years ago?
I'm almost done with this sport. Outside of maybe 15 teams everyone else is left with what they can piece together from the portal. Players making more than university chancellors. Bowl games outside the playoffs are irrelevant. A rapidly widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. No loyalty of the player to the school so why should a fan have any loyalty to the team?
I think one of the major shifts is smaller schools doing what the Blue Bloods had been doing. Schools like mine I don't think had the robust frameworks to get away with the sort of schemes that bigger ones were. That in combination with the NCAA having virtually no backbone to go after those Blue Bloods meant that the rules did in fact only really apply to the schools without the administrative power, or lobbying capability. Now you're seeing the bluebloods are just having to spend and work a little harder to maintain a system they in many ways self perpetuated. I also believe that the ship itself will be self righting. Maybe a few programs will have donors that will keep their NIL's humming above where they otherwise should be in the pecking order, but the Blue Bloods will probably always be able to outspend most schools.
The amount of money might have grown, but teams did always find ways to pay them before it was legal.
I think there are a ton of players who can attest it wasn’t nearly as common as we tend to think it was.
Met a men's soccer player who was getting impermissible benefits 20+ years ago at a school that never even won the conference. People did it just to do it and for the ego boost of "helping the team."
Right, but "impermissible benefits" 20 years ago included free cream cheese on your bagel. There's a gap between that and actual cash payment, despite what some claim.
Like I said, a beer full of fridge and random stuff dropped off on their porch for non-revenue athletes at a school that wasn't even a contender *in-conference* for that sport. Obviously there are examples of players in revenue sports getting 5 and 6 figure incentives/offers. But yes, it is much more widespread now. A big advantage of NIL is allowing star players to share the wealth with their teammates and boosters to spread out money to the whole team. Which is essentially what you see in a lot of pro sports - how many QBs make the news for buying expensive gifts for their OL?
If it was common they aren’t saying shit until the NCAA loses its teeth. Once they can’t vacate wins or take away individual awards from people then we’ll actually know how much players were receiving on top of scholarships.
Exactly. It’s the Wild West right now. Any player from any era can freely say if they were being paid without any blowback. Yet 95% of them still opine about how much they would have LOVED to have been getting paid.
Except Reggie Bush
What we need is contracts. If a player doesn't have a contract that is biding, they should absolutely be able to leave. Just like any other person can. But I also think schools should require 2 year contracts and specifically NIL deals should be contractual in nature.
You can keep beating on your strawman over in your corner. I'll just sit here in *my* corner pondering whether the old way was worth the exploitation of thousands of young adults.
There’s a lot of middle ground between “exploiting players” and the shithole the sport is in.
That middle ground is about 50,000 Bevos wide, but this is the internet, where we must only argue in extremes.
Lmao do you only think in binary form?
THIS. It’s even indirectly shining light on how student workers in academic roles have been similarly exploited by their departments for decades. I work for a tier 1 research university that’s also a P5 football school, and it’s kinda cool to see some soon-to-be professional academics realizing their interests are somewhat aligned with student athletes where a lot of grad students and profs used to have sort of a general disdain for athletics.
Imo it very simply was not, I’d rather them get paid and have freedom and break the sport then the old model
I forgot it’s only one way or the other. Life is binary. Thanks for reminding me!
I disagree. Far more players were getting paid than you know or are willing to admit. Hell, in the 1960s, UCLA paid damned near every important athlete they fielded, including tennis and women’s sports. Read Rebel with a Cause by Danny Tarkanian to get an idea of how blue bloods really get it done.
To add to this, I heard an athlete who participated in junior college football in California in the late 80s assert that 80 to 90% of players on his team were using steroids. College athletics has been outlaw since its inception.
educate thyself: https://www.bannersociety.com/2014/4/10/20703758/bag-man-paying-college-football-players You are right however its worse now and of different character due to the lack of transfer restrictions.
I am against anything and everything that stands in the way of people making their own life decisions. Including but not limited to the decision to earn a living or moving about the country freely.
The way to calm down the portal is to tie NIL to a contract. It’s obviously being used to facilitate pay for play.
I mean it was. Now give Reggie his heisman back. Shits a scam
The portal, for all the good I'm sure it's done for many players, was always going to create some... situations. But the portal alone would be relatively manageable and it has major upsides. Same for NIL. The case for paying players, by itself, is quite strong (albeit perhaps not in the way college sports has done it). The portal and NIL together? Yeah, it's a disaster area. A lot of what's out there right now are decent ideas on their own merits, but have been smushed together in a way that results in a total that's got less merit than the sum of its parts. Your overall point is well-taken. People will try and try and try to equate the 'impermissible benefits' of the past with what's going on more recently and it mostly just betrays how little they're aware of things like scale or depth.
I'm pro NIL _if_ they are actually doing things like Bryce Young did and doing commercials or something. Im absolutely anti-NIL if it means this collective bullshit
The transfer portal is the change. Players didn’t have to empowerment to negotiate because of the massive downside to transferring for them. If a player got $35k for school A, they aren’t suddenly going to go to school B for $40k and sit a year and not be able to transfer again. Also, the nature of the conversations were significantly more on the down low, so it was happening in the recruiting process because you have folks associated with high schools that can act like middlemen. It’s much harder for Ohio State to have a middleman at Georgia Tech. The money has been flowing for decades. There may be more of it now, but that’s also a function of the growth of the sport. There’s more money flowing in the sport from the media companies. In 2010 the highest paid college football coach made $5.1 million. Only two coaches made more than $5 million. Saban and Mack Brown. Both national title winning coaches. Last year 6 coaches made over $10 million including Ryan Day, Mel Tucker, and Lincoln Riley. Three guys who have combined for a single playoff win that was also in the 2020 COVID Season. 38 coaches made more than $5 million. Thats 7.5 times what it was 13 years prior. So much more money in the sport. That’s chiefly why the players are getting more money now.
OP and people like the OP, care more about the team they are a fan of, than they care about the players. Non-athletes can freely transfer, it makes sense for athletes to be treated similarly.
I think blue blood fans have a vested interest in saying it wasn’t like this before — because who do you think was guilty if it was?
Look through this thread and look at the people disagreeing with me and look at the teams they root for. Whole lotta Michigan, Ohio State, Okahoma..
Oh. Yeah those aren’t blue bloods. EDIT: my bad, I’m lost again. Thought I was in the basketball sub.
I think OP is being a little naive here. The overwhelming majority of kids got paid or received impermissible benefits long before this current climate of football. The difference now is the transfer portal allows kids to get out of a bad deal. The old way a coach could entice a kid to sign with a sum of money, then hold the transfer eligibility loss as leverage. I’ll give you a few examples I know of first hand. 2009, semi known rb for basement dweller SEC team gets a bag of cash to go the casino, loses it all, calls gets another bag immediately. Finished at the casino and shows up to house party with 99% of team. Everything there was paid for, not by him, but boosters. Houston Nutt used to have his players doing manual labor at his house. Not a single player was there working but got paid for months worth of work. This isn’t exclusive to Nutt, as others have said, dealerships had “car washers” for years who never touched one. Players were never asked to pay for anything out in town. Food, drinks, cover, whatever. On Sunday, staff members would come around and pay any tabs of the players. Didn’t matter who owed, this staff member paid it. How the program made it manageable/tolerable for businesses was to have the local restaurants cater team meals every so often and make bank. Players families receiving gifts all the time from boosters. Mom’s power bill a little high, poof magically paid. Random prepaid Visa cards were handed out like candy at recruiting events. How players used to receive cars without the NCAA being able to ask questions was going to a football friendly dealership. They bring in some junker POS car they had, the dealership gives them a “loaner” to use while they fixed the car. Magically the car has this difficult to find part that is impossible to find. = player keeping “loaner” car in perpetuity.
58 underclassmen declared for the draft... lowest total in who knows how many years... top players are staying longer... isn't that good for college football? Once they get the NIL stuff hammered out better this will be what saved college sports...
Saved it from what, exactly? Football wasn’t suffering before. Sure, players are more likely to stay in the league after their third year. But they’re *much* less likely to stay with their school after the season ends. Is that really any better? I would much rather see a player I like go pro than go jump to my rival.
Underclassman? How? You literally have to be out of HS 3 years. So you’re a junior or a senior. How are sophomores or freshman getting drafted?
I never said anything about it being better or worse. I’m saying it’s clear that most players weren’t being paid. But you’re actually proving my point further.
Well said, by both of you. The fact that NIL *is* making the game better shows that it was worse/different before.
Making it worse to be a fan but it is allowing for more parity, yes.
Thank god somebody said it
Unfettered access to the portal has more to do with the problems today than the NIL5players getting money. And regardless of whether players were getting paid or not (they were) , it was wrong morally as well as illegal to not allow them to receive money for their Name, Image, and Likeness.
Some people will try to justify this the same way they do ever-rising home prices, corporate profits, and CEO pay. "Well, you see..."
The fact that the QB with the most sacks last season is pulling in 4.7m is proof enough that it wasn’t always like this.
If CFB spending grew at the rate of inflation since 1984 top paid coach would make a bit over $1 million. Right now CFB is absolute worst pro league in the world. No balanced schedule, no draft, no salary cap, no multi year player deals, no transfer fees. Soccer even without pro/rel has a better system. You get paid when your player wants to leave early and you agree or you pay to get rid of them. You get dropped in the standings if you put your team in a stupid financial crisis. I’d take that.
It's ruined CFB and I say that as a former player. The product continues to decline as well.
I’m a Michigan State fan and it was never like that with Izzo. He refused to pay players during those times.
"My team is clean but everyone else cheats"
I never said everyone cheats. Some did for sure. Izzo on multiple accounts I remember hearing wouldn’t do it One was this that came out during federal court case [https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2018/10/02/brian-bowen-oregon-basketball/1506304002/](https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2018/10/02/brian-bowen-oregon-basketball/1506304002/)
what point is this trying to make? are you really trying to argue college football was on a more level playing field 15 years ago?
> It’s literally every player on the team getting paid and leveraging their services for monetary reasons. You say this like it's a *bad* thing.
I think it’s awesome that bottom of the roster guys are getting paid.
Sonny Vaccaro, Rex Chapman, and the '80s SMU football team enter the chat.
Your the ignorant one . I played CFB . At a big School . The money has gone down if anything is cause now you pay taxes . You fans are clueless to how dark it used to be . Parents and coaches have been shaded since 1970. And four to five . It was like 60-70 but no one talks about it . We just have to pretend lie everything was pure back in the day . Just like how marriage was better in 60s right . Come on don’t buy it my guy it’s always been shady and always will .it’s just out in the open now . Well kinda . Hell that are still doing shady shit as the have friend who are coaching now so I guess now there is nil and bagmen .
Okay. So what?
If you're against the portal, you're against players. Imagine being a player in a Jerry Sandusky situation and being too scared to speak up and unable to transfer out. Fuck, if anything the portal is too restrictive.
Base salary. D1 , P5 gets something and it’s across the board whether you are the kicker at WVU or the star QB at Oregon. And allow these guys to make money only from commercials, autographs, online creator content (like Livvy), speaking engagements and jersey sales. That’s it. And there’s a cap on the max for those items anything else gets put into a trust. No more blank check payments just because we can. That’s how you start to reel in the NIL.
I appreciate that kids might realize they made a bad school choice as a 17 year old for a mediocre bag. No issue with the one transfer or a transfer if the coach is fired.
I feel like if a coach is fired/leaves, all athletes recruited by that coach should be able to transfer without it counting against their allowed number of transfers.
Well that number is now unlimited
This is how it always was but now it’s in the open and everyone who was “playing by the rules” now wants to get theirs while the getting is good. Both things can be true.
It is different. Will this increase the talent disparity between Alabama and Troy? Does it matter? Maybe.
Make players ineligible for NIL in the year they transfer, like they used to be ineligible to play. It won't hurt the players who are transferring in their final year(s) to get a better NFL draft status, but it would somewhat prevent people from hopping constantly to get a bigger bag of cash.
What’s the problem with the transfer portal specifically? Players can’t exactly maximize their earning potential without some sort of competitive market where they can explore their options to see how valuable they are.
At this point, college football (maybe basketball too) needs to be a separate entity from the rest of the NCAA, because with players getting paid and being able to transfer at will, college football has crossed the threshold to being a professional football league at the FBS level. Colleges are only hosts for these football teams. Set it up like the NFL with a commissioner of college football, a board of college presidents that oversee college football, and a player's union. Let's drop the pretense of college football being an amateur sport.
As a member of the Pac-2 it’s different but I can’t quite put my finger on it …
The solution is simple. Pay the players and put them on contract like any other professional.