Player Salaries Need to Come ASAP
I always opposed player payments believing that they would destroy the sport as we know it and bring about a radical transformation in it with unforeseeable consequences. And I still believe that. But I also believe that you can't kill what's already dead.
We're now faced with the following situation:
- Amateurism is dead. Officially dead. NIL ensures that. There's no way back. Pandora's box has been well and truly opened.
- The further consolidation of power and resources among national brand programs via the playoffs.
- The threat of SEC national hegemony to a degree where they are indisputably seen as the only first tier 'major' college football league.
For Michigan this is a perilous situation, but also one of many chances. As a financial heavyweight with resources ranked more highly than our on-field successes in the last two decades would indicate, Michigan could be a winner in this situation. But it can also be a loser if it fails to read the signs of the times.
In reality, only a handful of players at each of the biggest 20-25 programs in the country have image and name rights of any significant value. Many more will get deals where NIL purely serves as a cover for compensatory payments. This will be impossible to police. Any attempt to police it will solely be an impediment to your competitiveness and quite frankly ridiculous. But this will act as a further catalyst for consolidation at the top as some programs may have guys willing to pay a left tackle 250k for NIL rights while most won't.
And there is of course another problem here. On the one hand, NIL is convenient for programs because they don't have to be the ones paying the players. But on the other hand, this makes players beholden to whoever is paying them. If you have a NIL deal for 500k with an agency, well that agency owns that player. If it is with a prominent booster, well that booster could literally buy control of the team by acquiring the rights for the majority of star players on the roster. He who pays the piper, calls the tune. This could be a huge problem for teams as you're dramatically increasing the power of shadowy figures and power brokers on the fringes of the sports entertainment industry.
It seems to me far more logical and healthy for the teams to pay players in order to be able to maintain control over the players and to ensure some regulation of said payments.
It would behoove Michigan exceptionally well to take the lead on this rather than to deny the inevitability of professional college football. Taking a bold leadership role would allow Michigan - and other institution s- to set the terms for this apparent professionalization rather than to be behind the 8 ball by clinging to a dead past. Player compensation needs to be organized in a sustainable and fair way - which cannot be done if you leave the initiative and control to shoe companies, sports agencies and power-hungry boosters.
And it would allow Michigan to take advantage of its huge fan base and massive commercial potential in a completely legitimate and ethical fashion. It's time to re-think Michigan Football as a professional sports entity. Michigan needs to come up with a vision of how that business can be set up in a way that ensures maintaining the traditions of the team and its historical ties to the university while being realistic about what is needed commercially to compete at the top of the game.
The only real alternative is a complete opt-out (which will not happen for many reasons, so let's not even go there). But if you're saying "yep we want top level football" then you can't be a reluctant follower in the area of commercialization, you need to be among those leading the way.
NIL just allows a few of the best athletes to become millionaires. I'd rather all of them get a reasonable stipend.
How many times do we have to go down this road? Directly paying the players is a terrible idea due to (in no small part) Title IX. Nobody is going to foot the bill for non-revenue sports.
And how do you decide who gets what amount?
Players already get a stipend and the argument that the “university is getting rich off their back” is BS. For the true stars, they’ll get some money through NIL which was always the best path.
Sorry OC and NT. Unless you are truly a standout the real $ are going to the “skill” players.
Title IX has absolutely no impact on NIL. It’s not related at all. When a pro athlete gets a shoe deal, Nike isn’t required to also sign a female pole vaulter to the same contract.
Not the argument he’s making, he’s talking about player salaries.
Okay then I should just say every time an nfl player signs a contract they don’t also sign a female to the practice squad.
What does Title IX have to do with the NFL? Do you even know what Title IX is?
He's/they're on a roll......I can't believe that ANYONE reading a college sports blog doesn't know what Title IX is, lol!
Also lol at people claiming I don’t what Title IX is when they think it has anything to do with compensation. Paying male athletes would not violate the 3 prong test used to determine title IX compliance. I’ll say it again, you guys are arguing against paying players by using a buzzword, in this case “title IX”, with no understanding of what it actually means and then accusing me of missing the point. Bizarre.
You cannot pay only revenue sports players a salary. If you did, you would then not be able to afford non-revenue sports or be in the red for the AD. Thus, you’d be fucking with Title IX compliance when they have to cut the sports that are money sieves.
You are the one that misunderstood, thinkings the Title IX reference meant that signing one would mean you have to sign a woman bc of Title IX.
Students are paid in scholarships. For many schools, a lot of non-revenue athletes don’t have full scholarships. The idea that scholarships just come from nowhere and aren’t somehow funded leads to people believing students getting a paid-for degree (maybe even two, with Masters for some) is nothing. Their scholarships are their salaries. NIL is their “the college is using me to make money” excuse breaker.
Football revenue is used to keep other sports healthy. You don’t see Olympic swimmers that go to UM crying so hard for more school money from the university—these folks work as hard or harder to be the best of the best.
Yeah the point is that title ix doesn’t bind the NFL and prevent them from paying their players, so why should it prevent a college from paying players?
People have built Title IX up into this all powerful boogie man that will prevent any change from coming. It doesn’t apply to the rest of society. Title IX is being used as an excuse right now. Everyone else gets paid a salary for their work without title IX even coming up. Athletes can and should be paid, just like in the nfl, and title IX has nothing to do with it. Not sure how that’s hard for people on here to grasp.
One of these entities is not like the other, why is THAT so hard for you to grasp?
What makes it not like the others? Why are you trying to put college athletics programs in their own special box and not allow them to operate like every other for profit venture in the country?
Lol college athletics is governed by a specific set of regulations including Title IX that do not apply to the other entities mentioned. Did you recently suffer a sledgehammer to the face? What the fuck even are your posts?
How about the fact the Pittsburgh Steelers football franchise isn't supplementing the Pittsburgh Steelers women's rowing, basketball, volleyball, fencing, equestrian, gymnastics, swimming, soccer, softball, field hockey, lacrosse, track, and cross country teams.
No? I think there's are a lot of possible issues with decisions to pay one group of players based on it.
Huh?
Someone actually upvoted this trash. What a hoot.
It's IMO inevitable that pro college football teams are set up as companies outside university frameworks and thus beyond the reach of Title IX.
As owner of said company, the University of Michigan would be free to take profits from said football entity and distribute them among non-revenue sports for instance.
It could be a similar setup as in German soccer where you have a 'club' which is 'owned' by its membership base and run along democratic principles. This club funds non-revenue sports and social programs etc. Meanwhile the professional soccer entity is set up as a corporation or LLC controlled by the club and might even be on the stock market.
ding ding ding. players should not have to be students. employees of university or associated entity...end of traditional college football. problem solved
All the Title IX nonsense above aside, officially making the players employees probably solves the 1:1 issue. There would be litigation, but there is relevant precedent with lawsuits around women’s and men’s coach salary disparities
Who makes what? Feels like the market would settle that.
There are many potential Title IX issues. The one that seems most relevant is that pay, even in the form of compensation from third parties like booster clubs, must be equal.
There would be litigation. The outcome, for example, if mgoblog got together and provided payments for incoming freshman football players, might be (I'm not saying it would be) that the University had to provide equal payments for women athletes.
Absent of a ruling that NIL rights are an exception to Title IX, it's not nonsense (though the NFL example is). This is probably a big part of the reason the NCAA was so reluctant to address this issue.
The door was opened, and a lot of things are going to rush in that no one has planned to address. It's going to be uncomfortable for a long time.
If you are an offensive lineman at ND, you can have free pizza. That counts as something, right?
You were exactly right until you came with calling "the University is getting rich off my back"...b/s.
If I gave you a 4-year scholarship to Michigan, free housing, and every bit of stipend money Denard Robinson ever received.
OR
All of the money he made the University of Michigan.
Which pile of money are you taking? And remember, one a lot of it isn't even money...it's free rent and free classes. You can't take that to Best Buy, you can't take that to your auto dealership, free classes don't buy your mom a house, etc.
Which deal are you taking? Me? I'm taking the second one every day...
So does schools make money off the stars? YES! So does the local community.
Do schools make money off every player? NO!
Do schools make money off the TEAM? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY! So does the community.
Take Michigan football away from the University and see what it does to the University and to Ann Arbor. Okay, now who is Michigan football? The players, the labor.
It's not a hard concept. Michigan absolutely makes money off their back.
...but other than that, I agree with everything else you said ?.
How do you drill out exactly what Denard made the University and what the football team made the University? Denard playing 1 against 11 on offense, defense and special teams isn't going to generate the revenue which the University of Michigan football team generated between 2009 to 2012.
Well if you think the ONLY thing they are getting is free tuition and board and a stipend your sorely mistaken. These kids are taken care of their 4-5 years at UM and if you had to put a dollar figure to it you would be amazed at how much it costs a university to keep a kid on a full ride while getting an education.
You talk about buying a house a degree is going to earn you a ton more money in your life then football will. Ask Denard today how much he is making off of football. Bet he’s glad he has a degree
People forget that this is why the women's cross country coach makes exactly as much money as Jim Harbaugh.
I'd prefer to see a model where the NFL could draft back to HS seniors. They would own the players' rights for up to 5 years (Sr year + 4 years of college). The NFL team would then pay the school for the scholly, stipend, and maybe a little beyond the normal stipend. The schools could then redistribute the scholly to other sports/students, or use that money to distribute across all student-athletes. I think a model like this would be great for helping keep kids in school to get degrees while developing further for the team that drafted them.
Regardless, these are new and changing times for sure.
No
Your ideas are terrible.
Please make it stop!
"If it is with a prominent booster, well that booster could literally buy control of the team by acquiring the rights for the majority of star players on the roster. "
Ed Martin was way ahead of his time. Put the banners back up. Put the wins back on the record. It's all good now. We were there first. That's what I call leadership! It's the Michigan Difference.
Man once I read your,”control the players” I assumed this was Mr. Emmert, himself.
From a practical standpoint I agree with you but I think it presents many problems from the perspective of the schools. The idea of professional college football is a bit of an oxymoron. Universities are already in no man's land as tax exempt entities whose primary mission is tertiary education. Having affiliated for-profit businesses attached to them may push public outrage over the edge at the tax-payer funded subsidies that they are given via grants, R&D funding, and student-loan guarantees, especially in light of the student loan crisis. People do not want to indirectly subsidize businesses. You can see it in the widespread trend at opposing taxpayer funding of stadiums for professional sports franchises.
It would be better to hive the football operations off of the athletic department completely into its own entity and declare football an affiliate of the university rather than a direct unit of it. That may necessitate no longer guaranteeing that all football players are automatically enrolled students. That would really make football programs not college teams. They would be more like marketing adjuncts of the universities.
The practical "hows" are part of the debate we need to kick off. But I am in full agreement with you that the future situation will be a company separate from the university itself.
Maybe a company that is majority owned by the university and you can sell minority shares to professors, staff, alumni. This would ensure control of the company remains with the university but would generate capital as well.
It's hard to imagine any of this. Because baseball's minor league system was an important entity on its own a long time ago, college baseball never had to deal with this. The NHL and college hockey have their own dance.
It's likely that college football and basketball need to undergo a similar transformation, but since billions of dollars are already invested in these sports, we're not going to want to sacrifice concepts of particular cultural importance, like the 100,000-plus capacity of Michigan Stadium when all the top football recruits are off in a professional system.
I don't see the way through this, but it has to happen nonetheless. Too much money is being made, and the unfairness of not letting the tiny percentage of those who can earn a lot go out and make that money themselves has reached a point where a major adjustment needs to take place.
Agreed, but the cultural problem of which you speak is a real problem of hypocrisy and likely to be deeply divisive because universities say one thing and do another. Private universities might have a bit of an easier time because they exist off of tuition money largely for their general funds. The problem is that even private universities are not truly private and are subsidized in all kinds of ways, from federal grants for R&D, student loan guarantees, bond guarantees for sub-units of the universities such as their athletic departments facilities building and maintenance programs, and their tax-exempt status. Public universities have it even worse. Asking strapped parents and students to continue to pay for the upkeep of an entity where the profits of that entity are largely recycled entirely within that entity (e.g. coaching salaries, scholarships, NIL revenue for students, expensive gold-plated athletic facilities largely only available to revenue-producing sports teams) instead of being distributed to the larger university, will at some point become untenable.
The idea that the athletic departments are self-sufficient is a bit of a ruse unless you only consider fiction that their revenues are in excess of their expenses. In fact, that is truly only with respect to direct operating costs for most of them. If they had to finance their own facilities construction based entirely off of their credit, their interest expense would likely be much higher. They are basically given a break by having their parent institution as the backstop to guarantee the loans, thus giving them a break on financing costs. But those guarantees obligate the universities at large in case something bad happens with respect to a massive deficit from a massive unforeseen crisis, like say a worldwide pandemic. I'm not saying that this necessarily pertains to Michigan because Warde has indicated in the past that the athletic department will take responsibilities for those deficits. But most university athletic departments probably don't have the wherewithal to lift themselves out of a fiscal crisis without sticking out their hands to their parent institution. This is the rub.
I agree with NIL. Not sure why anybody feels the need to pay the players more. Are they on strike? Are they threatening to go somewhere else? I know my job isn't paying me more because our CEO is too wealthy.
He’s not completely wrong.
With NIL, the schools that have been playing players under the table now can pay it over the table, and a lot more than before, and call it “NIL.” But we all know it’s just a salary to sign and play.
NCAA didn’t do shit about enforcement before, and they fought NIL tooth and nail, so you know they are going to police NIL even less. And how would you police it anyway? A player can sell a selfie with an alum for $250,000 if the alum claims that that is what he wants to pay for ownership rights to a photo.
NIL may not turn out to be an equalizer for the more honest and upright schools with money like U of M and its alumni, because the cheaters and the $EC will continue to do what they have always done, just a little differently, and the NCAA won’t do anything about it.
Upright school? Same school that allowed years of sexual abuse but you're clutching your pearls over $$$. Get the fuck outta here. The whole system is a shit show, let them get paid whatever the market will bear.
I think it was clear that what I meant by "upright," is that U of M, it's alumni and boosters are not widely known to be paying players under the table. Yes, it's happened (Chris Weber and the like), but it's a way of life in SEC country. They don't even hide it.
Your comment "let them get paid whatever the market will bear," is a non-sequitur. It is irrelevant to the point I made which is that NIL may not be the saving grace for U of M football that many think it will be. It could make things worse.
Lighten up, keyboard warrior.
some programs may have guys willing to pay a left tackle 250k for NIL rights while most won't.
You do realize that this has been true for a long time?
And you think by enabling a situation where this can happen at a much larger scale and without fear of punishment you won't increase the impact of this?
This is a train that's been going for decades but it just got equipped with a new engine that's going to allow it to go much much faster.
But is that a bad thing? People want to give adults money, why should we stand in the way?
What is “the impact of this”? That college athletes will regularly make six figures? Why is that a problem? It’s not paid for by the universities themselves (which I would be opposed to) but by private individuals.
No other country has this fixation with amateurism. It’s routine for 18-year-olds (and younger!) to make money playing sports in much of the world.
It's true that young people in other countries make money at young ages playing sports. However, other countries dont usually have their sports tied to academic institutions. Those young players in other countries are playing in professional leagues at young ages.
I doubt there are very many—if any—left tackles who've gotten six figures cash in college.
TL;DR
I personally believe this is a case of needing to be careful what you wish for.
You need to buy cryptocurrency ASAP!
Please explain to me why the football players should be paid more than the students who work the dish machine in their dorm cafeteria or the student who checks out books in the library. Without them, those football players would not be able to perform.
If these football players want to be paid "professional" salaries, the NFL should set up a minor league system to accommodate them? Why should the colleges be running a free minor league system for the NFL who benefits from this system without incurring any expense.
Priorities and values seem pretty skewed.
A student dishwasher shouldn’t be paid the same as a star football player for the same reason the office janitor isn’t paid the same as the vp of marketing. Are you kidding me?