Interesting 538 Article: "The NCAA Doesn't Know How To Stop Boosters From Playing the NIL Game"
To tag along on this topic, ESPN has an article this morning about Saban lamenting on Texas A&Ms ability to buy every player in their class while he approaches NIL the right way.
I read that article. RIght. Alabama has NEVER bought platers while Saban's been there. 🤪
It's more than Saban just being a hypocrite.
The problem with NIL, Saban said Wednesday, is "coaches trying to create an advantage for themselves
he follows up with this:
Saban said people blame the NCAA, "But in defense of the NCAA, we are where we are because of the litigation."
The litigation he is referencing was the lawsuit which opened the door for NIL.
To be clear:
- Saban is calling out coaches for cheating to get an advantage. He's basically saying his whole profession is corrupt and has no ethics. Apparently he is the only righteous man in a profession full of non-ethical cheaters.
- He then blames, in essence the players, because it was former players lawsuits which broke down the NIL door.
- But what he is really blaming, is the court. He's mad the court didn't protect the NCAA's antitrust position. He actually says so:
"If the NCAA doesn't get some protection from litigation, whether we gotta get an antitrust or whatever it is, from a federal government standpoint, this is not going to change because they cannot enforce their rules," Saban said
To recap, Saban doesn't really blame the NCAA. He doesn't really blame the coaches. He doesn't really blame the players.
He's mad the supreme court ruled against the NCAA. An organization which is highly influenced by a collection of non-ethical cheaters who have incredible sway and influence on a multibillion dollar marketplace.
My guess, none of this has anything to do with football. Saban is going to make a run in politics when he finally decides to retire. Then he will finally find the true sleaze he belongs with. Watch out Tuberville, Saban's coming for you!
I guess we better call the Whaaaaaaambulance for all Saban's crying about how TAMU outbid him for players he wanted.
The NCAA is ineffectual with something?
I'm shocked. Shocked.
Can universities use NIL to effectively get around scholarship limits? Here are some scenarios I thought about.
- Hockey – since there are only 18 scholarships can’t we use NIL money for those who don’t have a scholarship?
- For head-count sports like football and basketball, could athletes with large NILs (McCarthy, and Dickerson) opt to give up their scholarships? Thus becoming walk-ons and freeing up a scholarship for someone more in need? Like Tom Brady restructuring his contract to be more cap friendly so his team can acquire/pay other players.
According to the article, Built Brands paid the tuition of 36 BYU walk-on football players.
The problem with that is that walkons are not allowed all the resources the scholarship athletes get. To my understanding. They can't eat with them and aren't allowed the tutoring services. Which WTF NCAA?
This is what happens when you put all your eggs in the basket of a business model that blatantly violates antitrust law, and then spend decades dying on that hill under the bullshit pretext of "amateurism".
+1,000,000
... and simultaneously winks at the SEC bag men. (I understand that bag men are in other conferences to some extent.)
Yes. I want to put this in every thread. There are problems with the NIL system, and it's fine to be somewhat upset about where college sports have been going, but this is the culmination, not the beginning, of the NCAA making every decision based on how many 0s it'll generate in the bank accounts of NCAA officials, ADs, coaches, etc., and fighting the players from getting anything until state legislatures forced their hand and they just gave up.
Nailed it. "Organization that sits on dick instead of preparing for future now unable to cope with change. News at 11"
Before the money cannon Michigan was the 12th best team in recruiting. Now we are the 12th best team in recruiting!
Thanks 2021 for the summer of “lets just see how this NIL plays out”. Itll be the summer that lasts for years to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oxZKXBvbOI
Interesting video clip, when even Saban thinks the situation is out of control, you know there's a problem! I would be shocked if he wasn't playing the game, but he doesn't look very comfortable about pay to play and actually sounded quite genuine.
As for solutions, a no up front money rule (i.e. no pay to play) plus enforcement of that under the table deals would be a good start. Once the player is on campus, he can do whatever he wants with NIL. You need to band together other programs for momentum to push this through and isolate the programs that are taking pay to play to the extreme (i.e. the Texas schools, USC).
A no upfront money rule won’t work. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the NCAA cannot limit their ability to make money. Saying they can’t sign a deal upfront would be an obvious attempt at a limitation.
There are rules that closely exist to this currently. The NCAA hasn’t enforced it year because they don’t want the liability with the courts. They can make rules and ask the schools to follow but we all know not every school will follow them.
Without Congress stepping in people just need to accept the cat is out of the bag and not going back in. I don’t see Congress being interested in stepping in and limiting the income potential of poor young adults that are predominant minorities.
So the universities have one option if they want control and that is to pay the players direct and create a CBA.
You get it! Kavanaugh wants the NCAA broken apart, and the other Justice's don't care one way or the other. They'll readily go along with him if the NCAA tries to limit income potential in any way whatsoever. The first time the NCAA ends up back in court, it will no longer be an organization.
Teams are free to do what they will with NIL because the games' 'governing body' cannot govern it. And they did it to themselves! The only rules we have anymore are the rules that the games are actually played by. NIL? Classes? Tampering? LOL!!! Those things no longer exist as a 'rule', unwritten or not...
While you are correct that the NCAA can not have a say with income, there is a workaround to enforce NCAA rules. They can't tell a kid he can't earn money. But what they can do, and what some of the AD's/Presidents are proposing, is using NIL to land a player. If a player comes to a school, gets a NIL deal, then it's all above board. If there are conversations between the school and a recruit (or active college football player on scholarship and not yet in the transfer portal) about NIL before they arrive at said school, then it is a violation the NCAA can enforce. They can step in and say ok kid, you are more than welcome to make as much money as you want off of that contract, but we deem you ineligible to play, and the school receives some sort of sanctions.
Keep in mind, everything I just said is a "the NCAA CAN do this", not a "the NCAA WILL do this". They have the ability to affect the schools and kids signing these deals if not done through the proper channels and in the right way, but it's the NCAA, so what they actually choose to do is most likely far different than what they can do.
Actually from everyone I have spoken to the NCAA can’t do this. Putting a sanction in about them talking prior to arriving at school is putting a limitation on the players ability to generate income. This will immediately get shot down by the court system.
This would be viewed as you can’t negotiate your salary until you commit to the organization you want to work for. Any rule based around this might get put in place but it will be turned over in the courts so fast.
Saban is worried about other teams poaching his sophomores with lucrative NIL deals. That’s all he’s worried about.
My take as well. His resources are threatened. All that whinging is not a good look.
Yes, he's headlining stories at ESPN this morning, saying that A&M's entire team was purchased. This is a genie that isn't going back in the bottle. Anyone who thought that this would somehow 'level the playing field' was out of their cotton picker.
*cotton pickin' mind
FIFY...
I think it actually is leveling the playing field. Texas A&M and Tennessee are getting recruits they would have never gotten before.
I think it actually is leveling the playing field. Texas A&M and Tennessee are getting recruits they would have never gotten before.
Saban makes some legit points..and love that he openly called out a conference foe, A&M.
If A&M does not win, win big, immediately there will be some serious pressure coming from all directions. Few, if any of those high $$ recruits are going to settle for being the backup for very long esp with the portal.
If they do win, there will also be "serious pressure coming from all directions". Nobody will ever accept them as a legit winner because they bought the team, which is very much against what college is supposed to be.
Alas, this is now how the game is played and college coaches/ADs need to figure out how to manage player payrolls.
So how do the professional leagues control this? There are salary caps. How do you entice a player to come to your team in the pros? Are there under the table deals there? You don't hear of them if so. I suppose it is possible some CEO could be a fan of a team, and then setup an endorsement deal for a player if and only if they play for the team they like.
It seems like there just needs to be a real payment system that comes from the universities that is funded by the boosters. And as people have said, the players have to have a side in deciding how this structure is setup. If the players agree there should be a cap to all, and then setup some oversight, it may have a chance of evening out. Probably not though. The big boys would always have 50MM a year ready for salary while some smaller schools would not. And you could still pay someone a little more under the table to sway to your favorite. If the rules were strong enough, maybe that could be prevented.
There are cap circumvention rules in the CBA of each league, and penalties are assessed on teams periodically when there are violations. I'm sure Matt Stafford's F-150 endorsement deals were disclosed and scrutinized by the NFL, as the Ford family obviously owns the Lions and it could have been an easy way to move a portion of his compensation off-book.
The NBA also has strict rules around cap circumvention, with strict enough punishment that no one tries to do it. The pro leagues take their CBAs seriously, and the players are okay with it because they agree to it and realize it's the best way to maximize their salaries in the long run.
Fortunately there are no bag men in the SEC or college football that would be interested in skirting the rules.
What part of Saban's Alabama teams isn't paid for? Other than the part he doesn't give a fuck about? Like a good politician or gangster, Saban knows how to defend his portion of the trough he's bellied up to.
Saban throwing A&M and Jackson State under the bus. Hilarious.
Well, not really. Just massively hypocritical.
Yes, and sort of. He was playing by a long-established set of tacitly accepted guidelines that afforded him disproportionate advantages. But to say that he's guilty of what he accuses others of would be to miss how much how the shape of the enterprise now changes. Alabama and A&M are interesting cases, because while Bama football was a very big elephant in a relatively small room, the kind of capital that A&M grads can marshall for their cause. . . will soon make clear what a relatively small enterprise Bama football really was. The story will now be told in part through the lens of rising and rival elites; expect Alabama to be eclipsed.
It got them a new town, anyway. When I first visited Tuscaloosa in the early 90s it was a foggy no-place; today it's a generic college town like many in the North.
Saban's whining makes me think this is going to be all right.
This is what I expected when NIL passed. For some reason there were a number of posters convinced that this would only affect things like video game licenses and whatnot. It didn't seem hard for me to imagine that boosters would create shell corporations to funnel money into.
I think the only way you can regulate this would be with a collective bargaining agreement with the players. Even then...
100 percent agree. But I think there's a real chance--now that some players have glimpsed the potential to make big(ger) money--that solidarity between them is harder to build.
the toothpaste is out of the tube.... it will be the wild west for the next couple years until the ncaa puts some crazy, non-sensical rules around NIL and it won't make a lot of sense to anyone, but will have parameters around it..
All the cream cheese you can handle.
The prelude to big-time colleges breaking away from the NCAA and setting up their own Premier League where they handle their own enforcement and keep ALL the money for themselves.
I'm not sure it will get to that. Big-time sports schools also usually have decent academic reputations. University administrators tend to be ambivalent about athletics in general, and I don't think this Wild West situation is reassuring them. There may be some Gordon Gees out there but probably not enough to actually lead to secession.
Because the NCAA is STUPID!
NCAA had every ability to stop this before it got out of the bag even with the Supreme Court Ruling. How, all the rules are already in the by-laws. Boosters or Donors can have zero part in paying an athlete in any way for any reason including to recruit or attain the commitment from an athlete. Use those rules.
Now, force all schools to register Donors/Boosters and their Companies including subsidiaries. Then have all player eligibility tied to showing their NIL Partners. Any that line up as a Booster/Donor makes the athlete ineligible. Also, athletes, boosters, donors, coaches and athletic departments must be accountable including the athlete to maintain eligibility will show the financial record of NIL deals/partners. If a player is to transfer and commit to another school in order to be eligible at the new school the following season must show all communication records and have zero contact including intermediaries with the new school or any booster/donor prior to entering the transfer portal. This includes family, former coaches or other channels to be communicated with. The Tampering with other programs players will be an immediate 2 year Bowl Ban and Loss of scholarship and total roster #'s and a 2nd offense will be a 4 year CFP ban.
i would love for something like this to happen, but how could you force someone to show all of their communication records? You have to start somewhere though. I'm thinking this would be the kind of rule UM would follow to the T and LSU would not even consider.
You propose an enormous compliance apparatus - registries, open records, accountability, enforcement, and judicial proceedings to punish the offenders. All to what end? Satisfy the coaches making millions who now have work harder to maintain their roster?
We had a system like that and found that workarounds were easy and rule enforcement was impossible. There's no reason to try again.
Enforcement was not impossible. Enforcement was not a priority.
[quote]it may take more litigation to find where a line can be drawn[/quote]
The problem is that there are many, many places to litigate and they tend to erase each other's lines.
Professional leagues work because each team answers to a commissioner and membership is tightly controlled. Litigation is limited (Jerry Jones and the late Al Davis notwithstanding) because everyone benefits from being part of the club.
This gets solved by University presidents. Not by lawyers, not by coaches or boosters or agents or reporters or people on a message board. They have to get together and agree on a set of rules. Which likely means a super-league for football/basketball.
Essentially, there has to be a replacement for the NCAA, unbound by the pretension that major college football/basketball are amateur sports. But the details... hard to figure. The reason this hasn't been solved is that it's going to be very, very uncomfortable. It's entertaining watching the major powers snipe at each other, steeped in hypocrisy. That's just the opening salvo. Leagues work because of the perception of parity/fairness of some sort. If you're the Detroit Lions or the Cleveland Browns, there's always hope. But college sports is not an equal landscape, and probably can't be because a draft of some sort is unlikely.
Money? in college athletics?