Looks like a college players union is here
March 27th, 2014 at 10:07 AM ^
What the 20 starlets want is a piece of the pie that is media revenue. At the expense of the non-profit sports. Do you know that the majority of female athletes have partial scholarships and supplement their athletic scholarships with academic ones, meaning that they had to qualify for academics as well as athletics? What about the baseball players that went to college instead of the minor leagues because they wanted a college degree? Or wrestling, which focused on Olympic aspirations, like track and field? The profitable sports HAPPEN to be football and basketball, the two sports that have taken advantage of the NCAA requirements and profited off of their popularity, but if the starlets get what they want, the 500+ athletes who are going to school on scholarship and the thousands of athletes who aspire to play Division 1 ball won't get to do that anymore.
The NCAA needs to tighten the rules in some areas, but these athletes don't need to be paid directly. They could choose to sit on their behinds for 1/3 years until they are eligible for the draft. They don't, and they get compensated approximately 90,000 a year for it.
All of this will be collectively bargained by those designated as emplyees by the NLRB. They are employees. Nothing you wrote contradicts that. You just seem to think they are already fairly compensated. The players don't think that. Fine. Let's negotiate.....
March 27th, 2014 at 10:12 AM ^
Yes, under the current model the players are "employees." No question about it.
The way around that is to make them more like the graduate teachers in the Brown case from 2004, where they're primarily students, not primarily football players and thus, as the NLRB said, not "employees.". To do that, you'd probably have to cut their football-related activities to something like 10-20 hours per week, all-in and they'd have to be actual students, who show up to all their classes, do all their homework, etc. Coaches would have to dramatically pare back their control of the players' lives to not much more than what is necessary to organize the activity -- set practice times and set travel times.
That's the model I'd prefer, but there's virtually no chance it would ever happen.
The inherent contradictions and the corruption in the system have finally caught up to it. The ultimate cause was the adults in the system -- the presidents, ADs, administrators, coaches, bowl heads, etc. -- becoming greedy pigs. There was no reason they had to fully "monetize" the "brand" and squeeze literally every last dollar out of it and hog all those dollars for themselves -- and they didn't do that for decades -- but that they did.
So it wasn't the players who killed college football as we knew it; it was people like Jim Delaney and Dave Brandon.
I wonder if this will have any impact on schools like Michigan that stand behind their scholarship offers no matter what the outcome of talent is. If you ask me, if you call yourself an employee, then you better be prepared to be treated like an employee.