EDSBS: Broke (On paying players)
http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2015/9/8/9249681/broke
Great read from "Orson", Spencer Hall over at EDSBS. At the risk of blockquoting the whole thing... just go read it
There is money someone earned over here, visibly earned through labor and special talent. There are people over here who have it. Something stands between them. To extend that point to its logical conclusion: Either what is going on is a vast confusion of what constitutes capital, or it is theft from every single football player that plays this stupid game to enrich a coach, athletic director, and the university. This is a system that willfully commits one of the greatest insults possible: making someone poorer, and then claiming that poverty as a necessary, virtuous and good thing. That's a lie, and anyone who's even been broke for a short time knows it. Pay them. Pay them what you owe them. Pay them because the worst American tradition is taking things that aren't yours and calling it destiny or virtue or principle. Pay them because there is no nobility in keeping someone a dollar poorer than they have to be in exchange for honest work. Pay them because any system that deliberately makes people poorer is one of designed cruelty, even at this relatively small scale. Pay them their goddamn money.
September 8th, 2015 at 6:28 PM ^
Yeah, it would be really terrible if the only schools that could feasibly win a football title were schools with big budgets from large conferences.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:09 PM ^
If the system followed regular laws of labor economics, the value of a player to a school would be established pretty quickly and consistently. Sure, some truly elite players would get paid more than those whose talents were less.
I think your point about women's rugby is also generally correct. For some schools on the east coast, sports like rugby and lacrosse dominate. One would expect that institutions like Johns Hopkins, whose lacrosse program is among the best in the country, would compensate its best players accordingly to maintain the program at a championship caliber.
September 8th, 2015 at 3:56 PM ^
Just letting the players profit on their images would be huge. Cut them into the the merchandise profits, and let them do car commercials/ads/etc
The Olympic model would cover all of the problems we have
September 8th, 2015 at 4:22 PM ^
What's the Olympic model?
September 8th, 2015 at 4:44 PM ^
The university wouldn't pay the players. The rules wouldn't prohibit the players from making money from endorsements. Lots of swimmers wouldn't get a dime. Michael Phelps would get subway money.
You know, just like every other job in america.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:48 PM ^
It's where the athletes can do endorsements and stuff
Olympic Athletes aren't being paid by Team USA (instert country here), but they're allowed to "to be paid for endorsements, memorabilia deals and other business opportunities."
September 8th, 2015 at 4:56 PM ^
Yeah but each country can pay an athlete whatever they want, correct?
September 8th, 2015 at 3:58 PM ^
degrees for the son of a close friend was entirely covered by athletic scholarships. He is currently pursuing his PhD in a science specialty (sorry I don't remember the exact degree) on a full ride academic scholarship, so it's not like his undergraduate degrees were wasted. His athletic scholarships were worth in the neighborhood of $200,000.
Yes he is not a typical case, but the notion that student athletes are not really students, or aren't compenstated is pretty unrealistic. FreddyMercury above has it right, players are compenstated. The question is the if the compensation is adequate, and I suggest that discussion must include the relative value of various degree options and standing of the issuing institution.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:04 PM ^
a young person get training, free room and board, in exchange for agreeing to provide labor for a period of time. It is an old tradition that exists almost in every culture and parents did not have to come up a huge amount of tuitions to get their children an education as we do now, and the young generation do not have to start their own life with a huge amount of debt.
in many other professional sports like tennis and golf, families of young players have to shoulder a large amount of money for their training, easily top 100k a year.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:08 PM ^
If we are going to continue to artificially cap athlete compensation, and claim it is necessary and proper, then it only is logical that we cap coach and administration salaries at equally low levels and funnel all the profits into the university budgets themselves.
It is a monstrous perversity to cap the compensation for the people actually scrambling their brains to earn this money and who often come from low income backgrounds in order to enrich everyone else in the department. The idea that people won't keep watching if the athletes are paid what they deserve is refuted by the fact that the sport has been awash in money with ever escalated coaching salaries and building projects for 20+ years now with no negative effect on the popularity of the sport.
If college sports can be ruined by money, then you have a lot of people getting rich you need to go after instead of supporting a system that steals money from poor teenagers.
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Furthermore the fact that anyone in this day and age is naive enough to believe colleges when they claim poverty with their un-vetted athletic department budget figures while more and more colleges make the move to major college football is hilarious. Yeah guys, all these colleges are losing money on football. Sure sure sure.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:28 PM ^
Title 9
September 8th, 2015 at 4:39 PM ^
Paying 85 football players, that generate revenue, is one thing, but how many student athletes does Michigan have in total?
Pretty sure the Feds would make the schools pay every athlete equally. There's probably 10-20 schools that could afford to do it.
On the bright side, we'd be playing Texas and USC a lot more often since most of the B1G would have to drop out of football.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:47 PM ^
But seriously, there would be some hard decisions - do you drop baseball because you can't afford both softball and baseball and you need a women's sport to offset football. Do some sports get cut just because they have more players on them and therefore a higher payroll.
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September 8th, 2015 at 8:49 PM ^
"do you drop baseball because you can't afford both softball and baseball and you need a women's sport to offset football.
Aaaaaargh! So brainwashed by capitalists!
Why are existing profits and salaries of the overpaid sacrosanct?
OMG you can't pay more than slave labor wages for vegetables or else the ten dollar tomato!... um, u mean if virtual slave owners need to keep making as much as they want to! You mean if the country would crumble if worker owned farms became the only way to pay workers enough? What will we do without oligarch's? OMG!
Why would any sport that can be paid for now have to be cut? Every sport that is paid for now could continue to be paid for, but the money over and above that, which now goes to highly paid coaches & administrators, and over expensive facilities, could be largely redirected to the athletes.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:42 PM ^
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September 8th, 2015 at 4:48 PM ^
There are ways to do this for football. Think engineering - a program takes a student five years to compete, as the student takes semesters off to work for a firm doing specific activities. I'm guessing that there are models that smart people can come up with here that involve no sanctimonious arguments on either side...
September 8th, 2015 at 4:49 PM ^
September 8th, 2015 at 4:52 PM ^
Obviously, the program is making far more money off of Denard than Joe. Just as one example, if they had to pay Denard for the advertising he appears in, at whatever the going rate is for his caliber of celebrity, it would be greater than the value of his scholarship for all 4 years. Yet, Denard and Joe receive the exact same compensation, in the form of an athletic scholarship.
My question: Is it fair for these players to receive the same compensation, based on their value to the team on the field? What about when you also consider the value off the field? I'm offering this example because I hope it might provide some clarity as to what equities or inequities exist in the system as we know it.
September 8th, 2015 at 4:57 PM ^
Awesome solution Spencer spelled out very clearly in that long ass piece.
Almost seems too easy.
September 8th, 2015 at 5:10 PM ^
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September 8th, 2015 at 5:24 PM ^
Agreed. I usually like Spencer but that was my take. It was all emotion about being poor and how much revenue college football brings into colleges.
Yeah, being poor sucks. And people like watching college football. Combining those two isn't a strong argument for why someone should be paid.
September 8th, 2015 at 11:33 PM ^
I haven't read the article but of course there's a connection between being poor & how much revenue college football brings in. You just don't have the knowledge or imagination it takes to connect the dots.
It's all part of the same hideously malformed and unjust economic & political system we have. Colleges over benefit greatly from that system in myriad ways.
Colleges do not generally educate their students or the public in the criminal, unjust, immoral, dishonest & unethical ways our system works, was built, or how it perpetuates. They are instead complicit in it and part and parcel of it. They are prime movers in keeping the terrible status quo in tact in innumerable ways!
The wealthiest athletic departments have benefited the most from the disproportionate exploitation of the most disproportionately exploited and oppressed class of people in the history of this country that still remain, black "Americans."
Because, you know, we pretty much completely wiped out the only group we fucked over worse than them. You know, the owners of the land all this money is made on!
Not sure how profiting on stolen land gained through mass murder and genocide specifically relates to the crime of receiving stolen goods, but it's obviously in the same family of crime & infinitely worse!
Black people are more in need of scholarships in order to be able to go to school than whites are because they have one one hundredth of the wealth on average!
Black people, on average, are severely disadvantaged academically due to the set up of school funding and the rest of the systemic racism and economic racism that factors into it.
There isn't a single college in the country that doesn't have at least some faculty who fully understand why and how that is, and how rigged that is, and what role universities have had in it directly, and in failing to educate the students and public in it or teaching us ways to fix it.
I don't think there's a single college in the country that makes understanding that situation a requirement for graduating, or that attempts to make the case to the public as much as it tries to maximize profits off of black athletes!
So you have diploma mills that should be non profit, and free or almost free, like in civilized countries around the globe, and should certainly be free for descendants of slaves or victims of systemic racism in their living conditions, leading to unequal education, but instead they are wildly and grossly profiteering institutions!
All of these circumstances, including the physical ghettoisation of black people leads to an overemphasis on sports and over production of good/great athletes from those communities.
For so many people sports seems the only path to getting a college education and so many focus on that even though the odds are so low.
The very doing of that takes so much time, focus and energy AWAY from studying and education though! Most people putting in that time and energy won't ever get a scholarship!
Yet in come the colleges, swooping in and scooping up the best athletes in poor places that they target as recruiting hotbeds, often bending or breaking the rules or normal admission standards in order to get athletes in who haven't been trained to be able to do the work or take advantage of the college.
Yet giving a scholarship to people who are just shoved through long enough to use up eligibility regardless of getting any real or useful education is considered a fair trade as it makes billions, trillions actually, all tolled, for the schools, coaches, AD's, networks and advertisers!
The fucking tuition prices are an outrageous ripoff from every angle and they are obviously discriminatory toward poor people! They have no right to be that high.
The colleges fully support, participate in and perpetuate the very government and business systems that create the poverty and the poor people they discriminate against!
The scholarships are of no value to many athletes, but you guys think the inflated stated value is actually what they're worth, and that figure should be used in considering it fair compensation without regard to whether it actually has value to particular people or whether or not it's even designed to help certain people!
The fact that anyone in this country needs a scholarship in order to afford an education is a clear crime against humanity.
That the colleges haven't done anything about that, including making that fact crystal clear to every American, but instead just grow fatter and richer from this crime, and compound it with taking advantage of the worst victims of our whole bloody system, along with all the other athletes, in this sports ripoff garbage, is also a crime against humanity.
Poor, little, Cuba, nowhere near the wealth of the US, suffering under the illegal act of war known as the US embargo for its entire history since the revolution, after suffering for, what, a century (?) before that with US backing of brutal dictatorships, educates all it's people, universal health care for all it's people, housing, food, clothing for all it's people!
They have a surplus of world class doctors and lend them out to other countries in need and don't send bombs to any country! None of those doctors had to pay for school all the way through medical school!
The US, the wealthiest country in human history, has an artificial shortage of doctors, manufactured to keep profits high for doctors and universities!
45 thousand Americans die every year from lack of health care! Maybe down to 40k now with the meager participation in the severely & intentionally flawed/compromised oBomBer care program!
It's a matter of priorities. We like to work hard and give all the money to the bosses and then let them pay a pathetic pittance of what we earn for them in taxes.
We then, after allowing almost all wealth produced, by us, but given to them, to go untaxed or severely under taxed, look at the shrunken budget created by that farce and just except it as what is and what has to be, and then use the majority of that criminally low budget to pay for war and military for the sole benefit of those same wealthy people and to the severe detriment of everyone else!
In order to thank you for this largess those same people and their corporations fire you in favor of the new slaves they can make in the places we attack, threaten or bribe with your funding!
They keep worsening the cycles through their ownership of government, politics, media/"news", energy, education and everything else, ownership they gain from your tax money, your custom and your labor.
Then you root for them in those wars you pay for as if they are you! USA USA USA! As if the victims did something wrong, as if they did something to you!
As if all this is making you safer when it's the only thing making you unsafe and it makes you less and less safe in every way!!!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR FUCKING SERVICE!!!!! WOOOO!!!!!
This is truly a great system for the 1%! My god it even trickles down to the 10% and even the 15 or 20% to some degree before it turns yellow and smelly & trickles ON everyone else!
But hey, this is a sports blog, let's not object to any of that, let's have a heart attack at the disgusting thought of paying some broken, bruised and battered football players who make pimps, hypocrites & thieves fabulously wealthy & will often suffer life long debilitation for their troubles!
Go blue!!!
September 8th, 2015 at 5:24 PM ^
I believe the point is that, like Spencer, many of these college athletes grew up very poor. There are even statistics about how poor they are. And they're generating tons of money and in return getting a piece of paper (don't say they get an education).
September 8th, 2015 at 8:10 PM ^
Education is a broad term. They may not use their degree, but they sure as hell get an amazing education in college athletics, which is a career field on par with, i don't know, name any industry ever.
September 8th, 2015 at 7:01 PM ^
My grandparents were immigrants from Poland; but that doesn't make me qualified to talk about immigration policy.
September 8th, 2015 at 5:16 PM ^
1) few of the 120+ colleges could compete in this environment
2) What about non revenue generating sports that require great dedication from their athletes. Basketball and football keep these sports afloat
3) Fewer schools will be involved resulting in fewer scholarship opportunities, rosters will also shrink resulting in fewer yet
4) If any of my four kids could go to school for free I would be grateful and would teach them to be grateful too
5) If we're serious about letting these kids earn money, start a farm league and allow them to be paid and then go to school on their own time
6) think tickets are pricey now........hold on they'll get more expensive yet
7) salaries and boosters will turn this into another league or several diluted leagues
8) these kids, most of whom won't play after college might not be going to college otherwise
September 8th, 2015 at 5:29 PM ^
1) Few of the 120 colleges truly do compete. How many teams could win the national title this year? I'll give you about 15 as a blind guess.
2) This amounts to a huge wealth transfer from football and basketball players to others. Should it? Could it be better balanced?
3) Fewer opportunities for whom?These poor kids are playing football.
4) Teach your kids to be elite in something. Math, the flute, etc. There are lots of scholarships out there if they're good enough at something.
5) The kids already generate tons of revenue. The system is set up against them. Who would benefit from creating a system when a lucrative one already exists?
6) Yes. They are. And it's not that Michigan needs more money. Its that more of the money they already make should go to the people making it.
7) The free market works elsewhere pretty well. People still watch the Olympics.
8) Yes, they go to college. See North Carolina before you say anything about them getting an education. That can be a separate topic. Getting paid does not dissuade math majors from getting their degrees.
September 8th, 2015 at 6:33 PM ^
in terms of facilities, access to eltie athletes, etc. The rest have little or no shot whatsoever.
I think that if all schools have to pay players rather than just the Power 5 schools(e:g: the ones generating the vast majority of the revenue) there will be fewer scholarships because schools will either drop the sport or a non-scholarship level(D-III).
More kids play for schools that don't make money off of football than those who do. Far more in fact.Only a small fraction of programs actually generate tens of millions in revenue and net millions in proft. For some reason those in favor of paying players continue to ignore these kids. They don't seem to matter to Spencer Hall, John Oliver, etc.
Title IX is a very real issue. It's easy for Spencer Hall to dismiss for he won't be the one having to deal with NOW and the legion of feminists who would demand equality in pay. It doesn't matter that football and basketball generate the money and that women's(and most of men's) sports do not. They want a slice of the pie. Self-interest almost always conquers common sense and fairness in politics.
Politics is an orgy of disparate interest groups brawling for the nation's interest and the allotment of money. This issue is far more complex than the binary situation being presented to us by Spencer Hall.
September 9th, 2015 at 11:13 AM ^
Few of the 120 colleges truly do compete. How many teams could win the national title this year? I'll give you about 15 as a blind guess.
In football - probably true.
In other sports - not true. In the future pay the players world - we're down to that same 15 from the football pool in EVERY sport.
September 8th, 2015 at 5:35 PM ^
If you paid deserving football players, would you be *required* to pay everyone on the swim team, gymnastics, golf, volleyball, etc? The same amount? Even though everyone knows the money is coming in through football.
September 8th, 2015 at 5:54 PM ^
.......COMMERCIAL FREE!
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, bwahahahahahahahahha, hahahahahahahahahahah
And put any athletics profit toward tuition for the quailified but short on cash.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
September 8th, 2015 at 7:09 PM ^
September 8th, 2015 at 8:32 PM ^
I suspect the "just pay them" idea will backfire in a huge way if it's implemented haphazardly.
Any significant payment to players will see a lot of FBS teams fold or drop down a division. The gap between the 'haves' (the richest ADs) and the 'have nots' will widen vastly
If you have to pay ALL athletes then you're going to see a lot of schools either drop sports because they can only afford a certain number OR drop down a division to escape the costs.
Realistically you'd probably see the top 30-50 richest athletic departments form the famed 'Division 4' which would basically be a minor league system while D1-3 will continue as the system is now: varying levels of scholarships
September 8th, 2015 at 8:39 PM ^
No one makes them accept an athletic scholarship under the current rules. Any student who doesn't want to play football in the current system is free to do something else. Semi-pro somewhere whatever.
All this discussion of fairness ignores that the federal regulations about how college sports are adminstered is about political correctness, sexist resource reallocation, and an agenda that has little to do with fairness for revenue producing sports.
Before you talk about paying players, you need to repeal title IX, allow colleges to decide on whatever basis how they will fund their athletic programs, drop the NCAA into a black hole and let every school market their various sports programs to whomever wants to pay to provide them to the viewing public and sell advertising to support that expense.
Revenue producing college sports are about as far from a free market as a vendor in North Korea. Personally I think that college athletes have an enormous educational opportunity to cash in on and that it's entirely up to them. They can decide to go to a school that allows them to focus on their education first and sports on the side. Or, if they didn't come to play school, then they can squander the opportunity to get an education that can change their lives forever, and bet on making it as a pro athlete. Their opportunity, their call, and they can own their outcome.
September 8th, 2015 at 11:48 PM ^
Uncle Fred, the boy in a plastic bubble. It must be nice in there.
September 9th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^