Josh Rosen is pushing a plan for compensation for NCAA athletes.
It sounds very sensible to me, without the the obvious drawbacks of some other ideas that have been kicked around. It doesn't ignore Title IX and doesn't aim to blow up college athletics. While it doesn't address everything, that would be too much to expect of any single plan.
As Rosen proposed, the Clearinghouse would be opt in. You don't have to do it. But under this scenario if you want to get paid, you'd have to opt in and sign the contract.
So if you opt in to the Clearinghouse and one of the stipulations of getting paid is that you have to remain eligible and graduate to get the money, and if you fail your classes or get kicked off the team for any of the many dumb things people to do get kicked off a team...good luck with that class action suit.
Like, what's their argument going to be for why they should get the money when they clearly didn't uphold their end of the contract?
It doesn't matter if a person signs a contract that is later found to be illegal. I'm pretty sure it's not legal to only compensate employees for work completed if they stay for a certain amount of time or complete what could easily be demonstrated to be onerous requirements.
Anyone who believes this would be an end-state solution that would survive a court challenge is, I think, a blind idiot.
You keep harping on the fact that it’s already slanted towards the major programs/sports...why does that make it not an issue to further slant it in that direction?
If you are a mid/upper-level D1 wrestling prospect and a low level Football prospect, right now you would likely pursue wrestling...but now let’s say you can get paid to sit on a bench for a decent football program and graduate or you can play and potentially compete at the top level in wrestling but earn no endorsement money...you don’t see any issue with that? If so I have no reason to continue this discussion because we clearly just have very different ideas of priorities.
Get ready for a whole lot of "Josh Rosen is a bad teammate and doesn't care for football" articles.
They're getting school free. That's like $50,000.00 a year clear, isn't it? That's more than I clear a year.
This is a terrible standpoint. Players like Denard or Tebow would've been worth millions of dollars every year they were in college if they were allowed to operate within a free market - so them getting a free education should make up for that? Neither of those players will ever make the amount of money professionally as they would've been able to when they were in college.
These players have a skill that keeps businesses running; without them, there is no product. Since they are the most important part of the company, they probably deserve a bit more than the ability to no pay back student loans.
Then start a semi-pro league for teenagers and pay them there. Like hockey. They can go to college and play as amateurs and get compensated with a full ride scholarship, or they can go semi-pro and get a paycheck.
Just because you can think of an alternative doesn't make it better.
What is the compelling reason for not allowing college athletes to profit from their likeness? Why the resentment towards those players getting paid?
1. Because they are already compensated with massive scholarships, free food, and free housing.
2. Because they are students who are also AMATEUR athletes, not professional using publicly funded schools as minor leagues.
More money in sports doesn't make sports better. The kids playing sports at colleges should be students first, then athletes. Every step we've taken away from this has, in my opinion, degraded the athletic events and the opportunity for students to be students. If we are going to make change, make it in the other direction: Less ads, get corporations out of paying schools to wear Jordan logos, etc.
It's resentment? No.
When we hear that college players should get paid it's always with the connotation that they are being shortchanged in their current state. And they are not. They have a very sweet deal now as it is. And that is always left out of these discussions.
With all due respect Marcia, the amount of money you clear in a year is irrelevant. The issue isn't whether they are compensated well in comparison to the average person, its whether they are compensated well in comparison to what they are worth. Here is a little mind game you need to play. Let's say your Aunt dies and leaves you everything. While going through her things you find an original Picasso painting. You show it to three different art experts and they each tell you it is worth a minimum of $50 million. As you are investigating how to sell the painting a collector shows up at your door and tells you he will write you a check for $25 million on the spot. What do you do???
A more accurate analogy would be:
The painting is worth at least $50 million and Rick from Pawn Stars shows up and says the best he can do for you is $7,500. Which he then turns around and sells in his shop front for $55 million.
No, it is relevant. They have it very good right now. Let's not portray them as being exploited.
Maybe you should have been better at sports.
Also, who cares if they "make" $50k a year. Whose to say they shouldn't be getting $500k a year? Or $5M a year if they are a Heisman caliber star? The whole notion that whatever you consider their compensation should be capped at tuition plus various ancillary perks is crazy.
Its no different than you trying to argue that someone making double what you clear in a year at their job in the profession world is unfair and that their salary should be capped because you don't make much.
“What people misunderstood – it’s not impossible, but it’s really hard,” Rosen said. “I get tagged [on social media] every three months with articles about some athlete graduating in a really hard major – I should be getting tagged every day. Schools should find a way to help every kid succeed in their chosen major."
He's not wrong here certainly. We should be hearing a lot more stories like this but we don't, and that's one of the things that makes this proposal very interesting to me.
Every kid who is getting a five-year full ride should find a way to succeed. It's *not* the responsibility of the school to make sure students, athletes and non-athletes, succeed. Expecting otherwise is whiney entitlement.
So is "I'm a teenager who's good at a playground game, pay me while I get a six-figure free education".
Letting pro athletes into the Olympics did not, in my opinion, make the games better. The explosion of meaningless bowl games has not, in my opinion, made college football better. Each move that shifts it away from "students who are playing a game" to "game-players who are going to school" makes it less enjoyable to watch and, I believe, less beneficial for the students. Making the NCAA into a semi-pro league would be a giant leap in the wrong direction.
I agree with Rosen - no more athletic scholarship, academic only. If a high school kid wants to play football for UM or UCLA, then he gets into UM on his own academic achievements and earns an academic scholarship
It’s nonsense listening to a bunch of kids complain about not getting paid when they have no business being on campus in the first place. These kids live like kings, never go to class, and get the opportunity to audition for the NFL. If you don’t want a free education then don’t play.
And how the hell are some of these players graduating from UM in three years after they barely graduated from high school? Give them a degree on day one and stop the charade
Is MGoBlog running a contest for worst posts? I missed the announcement, but you earned my vote.
Did I miss something? Where did Rosen suggest eliminating athletic scholarships altogether?
I wish him success and caution him about Kapernick. Active players have to be brave to go against the machine.
Now we're talking. If I'm reading this correctly, it addresses one of the biggest issues repeated ad nauseam by opponents of paying players, which is "how do you decide who gets paid, and how much," to which I've always said, "let the market decide."
It looks like to me the stars who pull the most lucrative endorsements will get more $$ at the end (if they stay for the degree), which still allows the market to assign value to the sports, the teams, and the players instead of some some administrative chump at the NCAA or member school making those decisions.
Smart Kid.
I still find it crazy that he got labeled as having a temperamental and inflammatory during the NFL draft process because of this stuff. Good for him.
What I've gathered over my years of following professional football is that it is incredibly closed off to new ideas or people who aren't solely focused on the game. So you see guys come in who have worldviews outside of the field and everyone freaks out.
This makes the most sense of an idea I've ever read on this subject.
The biggest drawback I see, is you have another governing body that must be governed by the NCAA governing body.
Also,somebody will feel slighted or screwed and lawyer up.
But, making the stipulation that you must graduate to receive the benefit is brilliant.
Thought and idea provoking for sure. Why didn't this kid come to Michigan?
I've never had an inherent problem with paying players. Universities make millions off of these guys so they should deserve a piece of the pie. My thoughts/questions behind it, though, are:
1) How do you differentiate what you pay your star QB vs. paying the back-up long snapper? I get that one player is clearly more important to the success of the team than the other, but do you just have the tough talk with the long snapper and tell him he's not getting paid as much? I can see how paying everyone equally would create problems as well.
2) What about walk-ons? How do you handle paying them? Are they paid at all?
3) Assuming everyone is paid according to the value they contribute to the team's success, how do you measure that value? And then how are you compensating players in non-revenue sports? Even if their sport generates no national buzz and no revenue for the school, does it mean they bust their ass any less in women's field hockey than they do in football?
4) Lastly, I would hope that the receipt of these funds is contingent on attaining a certain GPA. Maybe make the GPA subjective to the major the athlete is studying (maybe you need to attain a 3.7 in General Studies but only a 3.0 in Engineering). Also, I would hope there is some kind of incentive for receiving additional funds if you stay through to graduation. What that would look like, I don't know. But you might as well try to incorporate SOME kind of incentive for these kids to stay in school. For your top-10 draft picks, I doubt it will make any difference to them. But it may make some difference to kids who are on the fence about leaving.
It's a good start. Would add two requirements:
- Every player takes at least one semester of financial management courses, and have a team of financial planners ready to assist the players during and after college.
- Every player takes a marketing course (with a contract element) and learns the basics of using and protecting their opportunities. The goal of this course is to educate on how to spot fraudsters and cling-ons that can destroy your wealth and exploit you for their gain.
Let's not just enable the players to have money, let's help them learn how to use it, grow it, and make more. I sure wish there had been practical financial management courses for me to take in college.
I hope paragraphs come out OK, since editing seems not to work...
I don't want to say too much about the issue of whether the education is compensation enough. I don't know the answer. For a guy like Josh Rosen? He generated tens of millions in revenue and the argument that he should share in that is easy to make. For the starting setter on the UCLA women's volleyball team?
The law says we can't really distinguish between them, though, in terms of compensation. So all the revenue from NCAA sports is pared down by all the expenses from NCAA sports. And, well, college sports loses money.
It doesn't just lose some money; it loses a lot of money. The average FBS football program makes more than $5 million per year, but only 55% of those programs run a profit. The average basketball program makes a small percentage of that, and about 50% of basketball programs at FBS schools make money. There are no women's basketball teams that turn a profit - not even at UConn.
So, even though student fees and government fees and other bits of revenue we wouldn't think of as revenue make up about 20% of the funding for NCAA sports (at FBS schools; it's more like 75% at non-football schools), the average college program runs at more than a $10 million per year deficit including that funding. If all the coaches in all the sports worked for free, it looks like college sports would about break even with the public support. They don't. They probably shouldn't.
Let's say you set up a fund for athletes who graduate. Let's say 2/3 graduate - I'm just spit-balling - it seems reasonable. So that's 400 paid athletes per year per school at football schools. Pay them $1,000 each per year? That's less than a half-million per school - or maybe 3-4% added to the annual loss from college sports. So you raise student fees maybe? Should you even allow student fees and government subsidies in these cases? I don't know how these deficits are handled.
I have a better picture of what a sports game license is worth - it's not going to move the needle that much - if it were, then EA would have figured out a way to make the game happen in the current system. In general, advertising/sponsorship is about 10% of the total revenue at FBS schools, 3% for schools without football.
So it comes down to whether Rosen's ideas about endorsements bring significant change to advertising and sponsorship revenue. The existing numbers suggest that's mostly about football and mostly about our familiar Nike/Addidas uniform/shoe/etc paradigm. It's not about the UCLA setter and endorsing vitamins or orange juice. Not that she can't; just that those opportunities are very limited and with close to half a million college athletes, you're going to run out of juice brands fairly quickly.
Primary source: http://www.ncaapublications.com/productdownloads/D1REVEXP2015.pdf
Anyway, long story short, I'm skeptical about this, but I recognize the hypocrisy of the current system.