The Fallacy of Paying NCAA Players
With March Madness underway, there are numerous articles on how basketball players are under paid. This article from The Atlantic is pretty typical; http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/if-we-paid-ncaa-basketball-players-what-theyre-really-worth-this-is-what-theyd-earn/284559/
While I empathize with student athletes who are juggling impossible time demands while pursuing their dream, all of these “NCAA athletes are underpaid” articles are fantasies far-removed from the real world.
The first mistake all of these writers make is that the student athletes in football and basketball should be paid the same percentage of gross revenues as what NFL and NBA players get. This is a false argument.
They say that NCAA is a business and they should pay like other businesses. Great! Do you know what other successful businesses pay their employees? About 10% of the gross revenue. That shining beacon of American business, Apple, pays $1 in salary for every $8 the make in profit(! Not revenue!!!). And we are talking about a company full of highly educated, highly skilled employees working in a very competitive market. The share NCAA athletes get in scholarships, support, and coaching is much larger in comparison.
You cannot separate football and basketball from all other varsity sports. From the employer’s (the university) point of view, the athletic department is what they are funding, not individual sports. This is the same in the “real world”. Microsoft makes most of its money in Windows and Office, and lose money in Xbox and Bing. That does not mean that employees in Xbox and Bing get paid nothing and employees in Windows and Office get paid millions. The employees in all of those divisions get equivalent pay. Yes, the executives in charge of those divisions may get paid differently (just like coaches in NCAA), but you will not find much difference in pay scale between those divisions even though the revenue generated per employee differs greatly.
NFL and NBA players are best of the best. They represent top 1% of the players coming out of college. These are highly skilled, very valued employees. There is a reason why MLB players make millions (even the worst MLB player) while AAA and AA players do not even make 1/10 of that salary. To argue that 99% should be paid the same way top 1% players are paid is a fallacy. The pay scale is a logarithmic curve, it goes up dramatically as your skillset goes up into the rarified field.
The pro franchise owners can also afford to pay a greater share of revenues to athletes because the owners make money in other ways – the value of the franchise when they sell. The owners make hundreds of millions when they sell their franchise, they can afford to pay more in salaries. The athletic department of a university is not an asset that they can sell, it CANNOT act like a pro franchise, the economic model is not equivalent.
So, what we are REALLY talking about is few star (<1%) players who are getting compensated far below what they could get if they were pros.
But then why would you rip the system apart just for a very small minority of players? Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell them to go and join a pro team so that they can be paid fairly? Yes, some pro leagues do not allow that to happen, but why is that NCAA’s problem? Why should NCAA pay because pro leagues (who make BILLIONS) won’t?
I understand the fairness issue, and it would be great if everything is fair and square. However, very little in life is fair and square.
"If you take the revenue out ..."
That's the thing that will never happen. NCAA athletes are a very heterogenous population - some of them have to overcome greater competition than others to earn a spot on the team, some of them put in more practice hours per week than others, perhaps some of them get more academic support than others, they all face very different sets of challenges and responsibilities ... and yes, some of them are more directly involved with the financial success of your athletic department. The one thing that ties them all together is their status as NCAA athletes. How strong of a link is that? Is it strong enough to warrant equal pay despite all the other factors? I would suggest that maybe it's not.
I do think you've made a lot of good points, just this one doesn't make that much sense to me.
If player marketing is allowed, you run into the same issue as directly paying players. Big schools will create player marketing divisions and schools will wine and dine potential players during their visits with promises of $$$ while small schools will have no hope of competing.
Any form of payment will crush the competitive levels that exist. Michigan can compete as one of the 20 top schools in that form, but good luck scheduling anyone meaningful ever again. You think playing MAC schools is painful now? Just wait until the top 30 programs can pay/market their players- MAC schools will be even worse, and Small Big Ten Schools will be almost just as bad- forget about competitive minnesota, Purdue, Iowa.
If you want better scheduling, you should be against player compensation. You should be in favor of NCAA reform that allows better medical testing, transfers, supporting walk-ons, etc. Those are areas that would improve player life without endangering the fragility of college sports.
This subject is becoming so boring yet idiots keep beating the drum rather than just enjoying college sports for what it is.
Anyhow, here's the thing; schools will never pay athletes because it opens far too many cans-of-worms for them with respect to running professional teams. Additionally, most schools have student bodies full of young folks who would be happy to represent the school on an athletic field (sans pay or scholarship).
Now given those circumstances, how fucking dumb to you have to be to think that schools will ever pay their players? Seriously, enough of this shit because there's games to be watched.
I am not saying I disagree with you re: paying players, but I doubt the board is going to listen to you when you call everyone idiots. Take a deep breath, and if you don't like a topic just downvote the OP, don't read, and simply move on.
...that I called "everyone" idiots. But for the sake of clarity I was referring to the writers/journalists who keep trolling with this issue. It's been in the mainstream press almost non-stop for several years now so persistently that one might think there is an agenda revolving around the idea of destroying college sports.
Have you not been following the Ed O'Bannon lawsuit or the lawsuit Jeffrey Kessler just filed agains the the Big 5?
Legal experts don't expect the rulings in those cases to go the NCAA's way. At some point the NCAA will decide they are going to cut their losses and change the way they operate.
The dumb think is saying "that it will never happen." I don't know how anyone who has followed the NCAA at all can say that.
Also how is it rational to call them amateur athletes, but then also have a rule that limits that says they can earn to $2,000 a year from a job. That makes no sense.
I have been following the NCAA O'Bannon lawsuit. Depending on how that rules, some of you might be in for a unwelcome surprise.
Look, there's nothing stating that schools have to field teams at all. Even under the current relatively lucrative arrangement it's debatable how worthwile these teams are for the schools. Most of the money generated by the sprots goes to fund the sports themselves. Just look at the headaches cause by the minor incident with Gibbons. Those headaches would mulitply greatly if the athletes are compensated (and the inevitable unions, agents, lawyers, etc ) are entered into the mix.
If you want to think like a "fan" then it's easy to cry that the kids need some money. But if you want to think like someone who runs a University (a President or a Regent) then you'll begin to understand the risks and the reasons why they'd be more inclined to pick up there ball and go home rather than cave to peanut gallery demands for "professional" sports teams from their schools. Mary Sue Coleman is not Mike Illitch.
PS. I'll concede that some of the southern schools might be perfectly comfortable fielding pro teams but they'll be the exception rather than the rule.
You said there was no way schools would pay players. Those lawsuits clearly show that is a distinct possibility.
If you think a Michigan or an Alabama is going to stop fielding a football team you are insane. Never going to happen.
"Even under the current relatively lucrative arrangement it's debatable how worthwile these teams are for the schools. Most of the money generated by the sprots goes to fund the sports themselves."
Bingo.
Just 23 of 228 athletics departments at NCAA Division I public schools generated enough money on their own to cover their expenses in 2012.
Here is the problem with this whole thing: players KNOW that they are not getting paid (above their scholarship) when they sign up for it, and they know how much work will go into it. If they sign up and realize they don't like it, they have the option to walk away at any time. Nobody is making them play college sports. Having said that, yes, they should have the right to market their own name, or collect royalties if the university does. It just seems like college sports would be destroyed if they have to start paying players salaries.
No one makes them play, but the NCAA does not have a right to an anti-trust exemption. You simply can't compare pro sports and the NCAA with a normal business.
is that so many people beleive there is some sort or 'purity' in college sports not seen in the professional levels. Sure the players are not making big bucks and flaunting that with flashy cars and threads, but where do you think these billions of dollars are being funneled into? The pockets of Administrators, coaches, and all those that reap benefits of selling a product they are not producing. The money exists, it is just about who is getting it.
When the O'Bannon case successfully shatters the NCAA's weak cover story, there will be a change and my prediction is that the Athletic Departments will look to become their own entity separate from the Universities they represent. They will then have to challenge TItle IX on the basis that they are no longer part of the Education system, but their own company and it is in their best interest to only pursue revenue generating sports, and/or compensate their employees according to the revenues their sport provides. 'Student Atheletes' will then be employees that are directly paid with a possible contingency that they attend college by paying their own way (this might not even matter).
If schools didn't pursue the almighty dollar. We didn't have a Bowl system handing out lavish gifts and trips to Administrators and Coaches. Coaches weren't being paid millions of dollars that is ever increasing. A basketball tournment being shown on 4 channels all day with MILLIONS of dollars in advertisements being paid. Then maybe you could make a case that it is about the 'student' athlete. It is not, and hasn't been that way for a couple decades.
The only people in the system that want the system to be maintained are those that benefit the most under its current iteration. Have you ever seen Jim Delany sink a 3 pointer or score a touchdown? What is his salary? Do you think he is owed more than some of the greats to have played college football or basketball? Do you believe he brings more 'value' to the product? Delany might be owed every penny he makes, but he gets to negotiate his pay. He can improve the terms of his employment. Where does the student athlete get a say in their well being?
Long gone is the real meaning of 'amateur' atheletes.
Just a side note. Both college football and basketball have increased their schedules over the years for their 'student' athletes. Did the student athletes ever have a say in that? Could they have refused more games/practices in respect for their educational responsibilities? The NFL has proposed expanding the regular season, and must reach an agreement with the NFLPA. That will not happen without additional compensation. Who protects the 'student' athletes well being? Who represents them? Taxation without representation.
...in your suggestion that that Athletic Departments seperate from Universities and subsequently treat the athletes as employees rather student-athletes: that is, those ADs would now be professional sports entities. They would wholly be in the business of running profitable teams. Some of the almot immediate consequences would be:
1- nonrevenue sports would be gone cause, like, then need to make a profit now.
2- in theory, the athletes could still be enrolled in the local school but they'd quickly realize that they are now pros and need to spend all of their time honing their craft rather than studying poetry and risk getting cut because of a hungrier 18 year old nipping at their heels.
And longer term consequences:
1-How are the NFL & NBA going to feel about these professional upstarts getting first crack at the 18 year talent? The NFL & NBA would be forced to adjust their rules (not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion) and draft younger.
2- And even if, for example, the Michigan AD found a bit of a late blooming gem like Tom Brady, do you think they'll just spend 4 years training him only to let him walk away to a "better" NFL team at that point? Not likely given the amount they've invested in him (remember, profits now matter above all else).
3- College sports thrive on the close, almost familial association of athletes with fellow students and alumni. If this is severed and the dear old alma mater is no longer represented but, oh there happens to be a pro team availalble for your dollars, how long will students and alumni maintain interest? Frankly, casual fans are of little concern because their loyalties are simply too fickle.
If the formerly "college" teams are now "pro" teams then how much longer do they respect tradtions such as playing on Saturday in deference to the NFL (and vice versa) who they'd now be ruthelessly competing against for talent and fan dollars?
Realistically, all hell would break out on the sporting landscape across America. You get the lawyers involved and probably the NFL's tightly knit cartel would shatter too. The whole sporting landscape could be re-arranged. As an example, consider Michigan. Could the Lansing Spartans, Ann Arbor Wolverines and the Detroit Lions all manage to co-exist? My hunch is that the Lions would fold. But elsewhere, maybe the opposite would happen as I could imagine, for example, the 49ers & Raiders surviving the threat from the Stanford & Berkley.
Some of you may not understand it but it is of vital importance to maintain the student-athlete model lest the whole thing go poof.
That ship sailed when the NCAA struck their deal with EA.
@French West, I totally agree with many of your points. Don't you think that once the O'bannon case is resolved that all hell is going to break loose regardless? It seems inevitable that things are going to change. What are some realistic outcomes, and I think the one I propose is a possibility. Title IX will loom large if you are suddenly expected to pay 'student' employees money. Universities might need to cut ties with that albatross, but the infrastructure and interest is there so those Athletic Departments will look for a way to survive. I think becoming an non-educational based entity is an option. Maybe it could be a non-profit system, mabye it goes even farther, but I think the burden of 'student' employees will change the entire structure.
For your concerns over the Ann Arbor Wolverines or Lansing Spartans, I would like to believe the Universities could 'license' out their name/likeness to maintain the current team names. There could still be a symbiotic relationship without the financial ties/ educational ties.
is not payment received by the athletes. That is money spent by the school to help the athletes do their job, not live their lives outside their job. You may still be right about the fractional compensation received from scholarships.
One in which Title IX doesn't exist, where going rogue in basketball won't effect your standing in your conference or the NCAA status of all of your other sports and where the NBDL is more than an imaginary threat. Even in that fantasy world who would be willing to give up nearly all of their revenue (when the argument is not that they earn too little) in the hopes of getting it back some day so they can share more with the players?
are forced to pay atheletes, that is just simply the beginning (of a very quick) end of college sports.
It will open 5 million cans of worms and the lawyers will be the only ones truly getting paid.
If you want to see the end of college football and basketball (and of course all of the other sports supported by those two) go ahead and keep pushing for paying the players.
Whether you like the NCAA or hate them, they are the only option there is to keep college sports as it is.
As stated by others, if the players dont like the conditions they are playing under, they can simply walk away and market themselves to the various professional leagues.
If the NCAA's choice is between paying players and folding they are going to pay the players. Its incredibly niave to suggest otherwise, especially during the NCAA tournament.
First of all, it's not the NCAA choice, it's up to the schools themselves.
As for your assertion to think that University administrators will pay players and field professional sports teams then, sorry, but you're the one being naive.
Yeah, not feeling this argument. You mention that people who work on Bing don't get less than Office programmers, but that isn't completely true. If you work for a successful department, you usually get a bonus, and that can eb higher than an equivalent worker in another department. That happens all the time.
but i think you are wrong.
If forced to pay the players...and it would almost certainly HAVE to be equal pay for all atheletes regardless of sport..i would bet that 80% or more of the schools will simply disband the athletic departments and go back to what they did before big Tv contracts, that is, be simply places of higher learning.
Most schools simply do not make enough money from sports to also pay players on the same scale as a Michigan or USC or Alabama.
Atheletics are a wonderful part of any college...be it large or small. But the great majority of them will survive just fine without sports and the many headaches it involves.
If the NCAA loses and is told to pay players, there will be a mass exodus from sports and the departments that run them will cease to exist almost overnight.
Thank you alwaystrueblue!
Finally somebody else who seems to have spent at least 5 minutes thinking about the consequences of turning student-athletes into paid employees (which is more than can be said about many of the "experts" who write for national publications yet repeat the same thoughtless clichés about exploited student athletes).
The NBA pays its workers way more than publicly traded companies do, therefore the NCAA shouldn't pay its workers anything?
That is what you said. It doesn't make sense because one is not connected to the other. The argument is unsound. An unsound argument is a fallacy. Your argument is a fallacy.
There are workable ways to renumerate players beyond their current renumeration (tuition, room and board), but these avenues are not open because the NCAA is just plain too bull-headed to allow exemptions from the absolute that Denard Robinson and a D-III quarterback are providing equivalent values to their respective universities.
If the NCAA wanted they could ,themselves, serve as a union for college players and negotiate contracts with licensing entities and with the companies (the schools) on their behalf. The NCAA wasn't made to be the money handler for collegiate athletics; it was made to be an organizing body for collegiate athletics. They could as easily take on the duties of player representation that the players are seeking beyond the rules on their own. They won't because they're too bull-headed to allow exemptions from the absolute of amateurism: that players should be in it for the love of sport as a pastime while getting their degrees.
If the NCAA wanted they could break off the few schools that make a ton of money from collegiate athletics from those that truly operate at close to zero or at a loss while serving as a marketing platform for the educational instutition. That top-top league of 50-60 schools would be able to include reasonable spending stipends, agents, and even limited gifts to the families of their athletes while remaining affordable. They won't because they're too bull-headed to allow exemptions from the absolute idea that Indiana State and Michigan are in the same business.
The only thing the NCAA can't do is pay its football and basketball scholarship players without paying the same out to an equal number of female athletes because Title IX. If the U.S. Department of Education wanted they could...
There are sensible ways to compensate players who produce the billions of dollars that the tippy top of college sports produce, and still maintain the spirit of amateurism that makes college sports as popular as their pro counterparts despite the considerable downgrade in quality of play.
Lastly: companies pay their workers the minimum they can pay their workers in order to get effective work from them, because our system puts the market's price on everything. What I mean is the real value to Apple of having employees is way above 10% (they wouldn't be 90% as efficient if nobody worked there), but they exploit the wide availability of educated labor in an educated society to profit from a market inefficiency.
Pro leagues have had to create salary caps because they're stuck using only the very best workers. Competitiveness drove worker prices to insane levels. Imagine if every year 31 of the 32 biggest metropolitan areas in the United States would get firebombed. The one that isn't firebombed each year is the city whose lawyers wins the one and only case to be tried that year. Now imagine how much those attorneys would charge.
Despite incredible inefficiencies, our society is set on the idea that market value should determine value. That is a thing we determined together and should do our best to live up to, and NCAA athletics are a direct affrontery to that ideal.
Conclusionarily, sorry if I came off like a lecturing dickhole in my response. I have a strong difference of opinion, obviously. Mitigating factor: I didn't nuke the thread, so there's some hope for me.
That is what you said. It doesn't make sense because one is not connected to the other. The argument is unsound. An unsound argument is a fallacy. Your argument is a fallacy.
Equally fallacious: This one part of your argument is unsound, therefore everything else in it is too.
"The NBA pays its workers way more than publicly traded companies do, therefore the NCAA shouldn't pay its workers anything?"
The NCAA already pays all it's workers.
Student-athletes are not employees, and even if they legally were employees - they would not be employees of the NCAA, but the university which they were employed by.
...and the universities ALREADY compensate the student athletes more than "nothing",.
March 27th, 2014 at 12:07 PM ^
in the law as written, no. I've studied Title IX mostly from its enforcement standpoint. The way it's enforced is the schools have to submit rather detailed numbers on how much money they spend in total on sports and per-athlete, and how much revenue those sports bring in. The actual number of participants and the dollar amounts of scholarship are 2 columns out of 60 in the ensuing spreadsheets.
The NCAA then uses those numbers to check whether schools are providing equivalent spending beyond the necessitites to women's sports. Many schools in recent years report ridiculously large incomes and expenditures on women's sports. That's because they break up donations, e.g. a new basketball arena is split between the men's basketball team and the women's basketball team and five other women's teams who will be using the facility for storage. The grossest example of this I found was TCU, which essentially called its new indoor football practice facility a warehouse for the Equestrian Team that the football players just happen to use.
So schools could still find ways around it, but payments to football players would absolutely upset current Title IX compliance procedures.
The NCAA doesn't have to pay players. All they have to do is stop saying they can't take money from "boosters" or other outside sources. Let them get money on the free market just like every other student on every other kind of scholly is allowed to.
The NCAA may think that the money they don't allow players to take goes to the individual programs, but there is no proof. In other words, nobody is really winning and everybody is losing.
In the real world, schools will stop spending as much money on non-revenue generating sports to keep the most profitable players in the profitable sports, because like Microsoft and Apple, if a product consistently loses money, it gets killed and excess employees get laid off. They will also offer salaries based on sport revenue generating capacity and recruit star ranking because they already do things that signal that they know very well the link between talent and wins, which equals money. What the market rate will be will be found out pretty quickly through the same method of price discovery that is a feature of all free markets. I don't know what that will be, but I do know it would be fair, because that is how capitalism works.
The thing is, non-revenue college sports won't die if football and basketball players get paid. What will happen is that Non-revenue D1 sports will come back to earth and start to look like club sports do now unless rich donors step up to endow them. Volleyball won't get it's own 10 million dollar gym, it'll have to sign up for court time at the rec center like everyone else. 2000 mile wide athletic conferences will cease to exist for all but football. Basically It'll look a lot like college sports did 40+ years ago when there wasn't all the TV money floating around and students went to school to play school, and it didn't cost millions of dollars to have a D1 sport.
but they should pay their own tuition.
March 27th, 2014 at 12:25 PM ^
You miss the point of all this. The Northwestern players are NOT petitioning to be paid. They are petitioning to be allowed to collectively bargain with their employer. Period.
If they ever are paid over and above the scholarship, etc. stuff they get now it will be as a result of a negotiating process and will be an agreement made between the parties. It could result in no extra pay, or 10% of revenues, or 50%, or 99%... along with some other things the players give up. That is what negotiation is.