WTKA Roundtable 4/28/2022: Let's Go Losers!
Things discussed:
- Hunter Dickinson: This is why NIL is good for the game. In college he's the cornerstone of a very good team, a heel, and a constant presence; no NBA fans are going "Ah man, I hope my team drafts you."
- Illinois is falling apart: nobody wants to play for Brad Underwood.
- NCAA vs NIL: They're going to lose—their latest fig leaf just got blown up by Mississippi and Tennessee. Emmert firing isn't going to change this. They serve the presidents who serve the donors. Opportunity here for the players to unionize and fill the power void.
- The future is contracts whether they want it or not, because the schools are parties who want services, and are hunting for someone to make a deal with because the NCAA can't protect them anymore.
- Players unionizing?
- Transfer portal shopping: Shannon seems like an NIL duel with Texas Tech, who wants to keep him.
- Portal problem for Michigan is transferring credits, because they have a matching system where the classes you took have to match classes offered at Michigan, and the people who could change that are, by design, siloed from people who want to make that change for sports reasons.
- Where Michigan is on NIL versus where they should be are miles apart.
- NCAA has imbalances that have grown up from years. Stop caring who's advantaged; no matter what changes you make to a system there will be a change in advantage. What matters is what's moral—what's right for the game and for its participants.
- Example: small schools like playing over-agers and Michigan doesn't like it because our players out of high school are better than theirs. But it's good for the players and good for college hockey and good for people getting an education and participating in college sports who aren't going to be pros, which matters more than Michigan's traditionalist needs.
- Mel: does he have a job? When are they going to say something?
- Lions/Hutchinson. Seth says the Lions can't take Aidan Hutchinson because he is a winner and the Lions are losers.
- All me to explain, off-air: The Lions are the only franchise in professional sports that knows how to make losing fun.
You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream.
Segment two is available here. And you can watch the video here:
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April 28th, 2022 at 11:37 AM ^
Always fun to note that Matthew Stafford led his team to more playoff victories this past season than the Lions have had in the past 68 seasons combined.
Could Hutchinson help turn that around? It's not like there's all that much difference in talent from teams 1-32 in the NFL. It's not like Rutgers could draft him.
April 28th, 2022 at 11:52 AM ^
"Stop caring who's advantaged." I'm sure this must carry more nuance in the podcast. Yes, players should unionize. The problem is that some NIL is about creating businesses around players' production and popularity; some is payola. We need to start distinguishing between the two. When we say "fire up the money cannon. . ." we're probably not speaking responsibly.
Everyone is entitled to their take. And to remain in the minority on any issue is not yet a crime. But I will submit that it won't just be me who will have long since exited once there are ten teams left in a top tier, the players are all millionaires, and have "Zanussi, the appliance of Science" on their t-shirts and "Eat at Joe's" tattooed on their foreheads.
EDIT: Also, if our head coach is currently having to scramble around trying to patch together some kind of deal to lure Terrence Shannon to Ann Arbor--what money-grubbing shite. I am emphatically agin it. The saddest thing is that, given traditionalist constraints, it's not a game Michigan wins longer-term, anyway.
EDIT: I guess it goes without saying that many of the people who are for "empowering" the players will oppose unionization. I'm glad that Seth and Brian at least acknowledge that this thing is far, far from over.
I think many fans are totally fine if it is "payola" because the athletes labor creates profit. It is also too early to know how this will impact competition but if there is just "ten teams in a top tier" it really isn't much different than it has been historically. It is also a bit hyperbolic to think your will start seeing a bunch of players getting forehead tattoos or else we would see similar things in professional leagues.
I also think it is unfair to claim a young man is "money grubbing" because he wants to receive his value.
I am unsure why you think people who are for empowering the players would oppose unionization.
EDIT: Also, if our head coach is currently having to scramble around trying to patch together some kind of deal to lure Terrence Shannon to Ann Arbor--what money-grubbing shite.
This I don't get - if you're against player movement then say that but getting mad about their reasons doesn't strike me as particularly relevant. Up until about a year ago schools sold recruits on facilities, access to high-level nutrition experts, academic prowess, gateways to the pro leagues, attractive coeds, etc. Oh, and under-the-table payments. To act like bringing that last part into the light is now "money-grubbing" by the athletes reads as (a) puritanical histrionics, (b) naivete, and/or (c) jealousy. If Shannon wants to go to a place where he feels he can maximize his value he should feel free to do so.
And I'm on the side of letting players unionize because as we've seen the NCAA and the member institutions do not give a single shit about you once your value to them drops below their threshold. I don't see the problem with college athletes creating a more powerful bargaining unit to deal with structural issues than what they'd be able to deploy individually.
As I said at the top, I am for unionization--that actually gets at the problem of schools exploiting players for profit, and--one presumes--in a way that could preserve some semblance of equality between players, also limiting the need for them to become businesspeople rather than students and athletes, the original mission. It's not getting paid that I am against, it's bringing auto dealers and slimy donors into the heart of the enterprise that I oppose.
The other stuff already sucked--saying it's okay now because we're bringing it above board. . . ? Athletes really can, for the most part, get laid on their own.
And if you think that Juwan SHOULD be hanging out to cut deals with the guys from Joe's Auto Parts in order to lure Terrence Shannon to A2, cool--again, you're allowed. Then Shannon comes, and one guy in your program is taking (now legal) payola and making 200 k and another guy is scratching along and eating the cafeteria food. Being against that isn't "being against player movement," pretty obviously. And everyone's banging the table and shouting "Coffee is for closers" because he's coming to their school. . . while the vision of any kind of level playing field slides further out of view. The fact that the rest of the country (cross out country and insert "neoliberal nightmare") is like that hardly makes it right.
Jealousy? C'mon.
But auto dealers and slimy donors have always been involved with recruiting, including at Michigan, and favortism and advantages being given to guys at the top vs. the bench guys has existed since the beginning of organized sports.
Unionization would help raise the floor in terms of quality of care and resources afforded to athletes but it still wouldn't address your concerns about inequality. LeBron James and Mike Trout make way more money than DJ Wilson and Dustin Garneau, and any unionization effort wouldn't stop guys like Shannon making more money from NIL than Adrian Nunez.
Also, "neoliberal nightmare" in scare quotes when referring to "people getting paid appropriately for their labors" doesn't sound all that nightmarish, but to each his own.
You're not responding to my remarks. I went out of my way to note that just because it was already that way--or that we were now participating--did not serve, for me, to justify entering in. And that it should become the coach's job. . . you don't speak to that at all. That will remain disgusting to many people, whether they are here or not. Some coaches will leave (some of them are leaving).
No, unionization would not completely address equality concerns, nor do I think that making the world equal via such a mechanism is possible. But we do see college as a preserve in which the rest of students stand away from the world, a little, in which they are insulated for four years, and athletes, until now--for the most part--participated in that (qualified, never pure) pursuit. My old boss Rick Rubin started a record company from his dorm room at Columbia; I agree that student athletes should be able to sell t-shirts, make money off of their jerseys. I don't believe that they should receive payola, or that schools or coaches should be in the business of setting up businesses to lure them to play, or that the monies they receive should be astronomical or utterly wildly disparate.
Those aren't scare quotes, they're surrounded by quote marks to denote what would go in the place of "country" (I didn't know that "scare quotes" was some new conservative trope, either, but I do now.) But we certainly have strayed a long way from the original issue, which was athletes taking their rightful share of what universities were making off of them. Which is the point that a lot of people are starting to make: Payola snuck in, too. Adequate compensation, a rightful share, obtained under some bargaining agreement: All good with me. Payola nope. And the UM does not win by doing so, no matter how ecstatic a segment of fans become when there's a glimmer of hope that we get this or that guy. That, to me, is herd behavior.
Again, I don't CARE if other people don't care about fair; that's what I'm plumping for. And preserving some semblance of semi-amateur and student status for student athletes. Once we're farm leagues for the pros and going to the dealership for our envelope legally, we will suck. I'm already in the minority, I know, in thinking that most college football is garbage because of the number of commercials that shit up the games. Bread and Circuses people will see it differently. I suspect that many of them aren't grads. I'm an Ann Arbor guy who's proud AF that we don't have ads in the stinking stadium. So shoot me! :)
Fortunately, a lot of people see it the way I do. The bottom lines are: We will suck at this, and lose. Administration will drag its feet. I don't want to be in a super conference with Alabama and Clemson, anyway; I think they're awful schools that perpetuate lots and lots of garbage I am against. Others will lose worse. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's a slippery slope, and lots of fools see it as some kind of circus playground slide, want to jump on. In some ways, I envy them. I don't mind disagreeing at all!
April 28th, 2022 at 12:58 PM ^
"The Lions are the only franchise in professional sports that knows how to make losing fun."
I know as a Michigander you don't have a real baseball team to follow, but you'd think you might have heard of the Cubs.
I continue to not quite get this ongoing narrative that UM is light years behind everyone else when it comes to NIL. Are they behind some institutions that have had between 10 and 30 years head start? Sure. But the gap doesn't strike me as that significant, and I'm old enough to remember this very podcast saying that if Dickinson didn't come back that means UM's NIL system is broken. So now it's apparently "if they don't bring in every transfer we want right now then it's flailing".
UM is not the top dog when it comes to NIL but I've seen little actual evidence it's really hurting them (at least compared to historical recruiting issues) in the major sports despite that being a repeated talking point. Like, the idea that UM was suddenly going to buy every recruit in the country was always silly, and I'd argue that major staff upheaval and uncertainty around Harbaugh post 2020 were largely contributing factors to any (minor) recruiting slowdown than being out-spent.
April 29th, 2022 at 12:15 AM ^
I hear some of the numbers flying around. Michigan isn't in the ballpark. We are talking magnitude of ten differences for the same players. Michigan is the only school mostly focused on doing what the NCAA intended them to liberate. The schools they compete with are ramping up already existing operations as if the NCAA doesn't exist.
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