Strickland33
Well-known member
For 95% or more of the athletes who get access to a free education, that education is not a sham. Most college athletes are truly student athletes - working their ass off at their sport and their schoolwork and leaving school with a degree and good job prospects as something other than a professional athlete.
One problem is that there is a lot of nebulous talk about players getting paid, or getting "their share" or having rights or whatever - but no consensus that I have seen as to what they should really get. I don't think anyone has a real problem with players receiving some kind of living stipend beyond what they get now - assuming it works with budgets. The problem, from a mathematical and workability standpoint, arises when people start talking about paying players any kind of real money. How do you do that?
The questions have been asked before ad nauseum, but, who gets paid (everyone? stars more than others? revenue-producing sports only?). How do you deal with Title IX? How do you pay players and still have the money to support the great majority of sports that do not product revenue. Most athletic budgets are running at a loss now - so where does the money come from?
People will point at the millions being paid to coaches as evidence that there is money to be shared - and that is a valid point. But, how much can you reasonably expect to scale that back? Would you ever be able to save enough there to help pay athletes in any significant way?
The NCAA is a screwed up organization is so many ways! But the one goal they have which seems necessary to me is keeping some kind of parity in recruiting. The system can never be such that schools with more resources can pay more.
Maybe you have a plan that will work - I don't know. Maybe college athletics as we know it simply has to go away - I don't know.
It just annoys me when athletes at a place like Northwestern, where a 4-year scholarship is worth probably $250k and where many of them could never sniff the school without athletics, want to complain about not getting their fair share. (and, by the way, I don't even know what these particular athletes even want...)
I have explained my stance on here a few times in the past. I went to college on a scholarship at a private liberal arts institution with need blind financial aid, took out loans for my masters at a private research university, and I am fully funded (with stipend) for my PhD at a large public university, so I feel like I understand the funding landscape in higher education pretty well.
Somehow, institutions are able to make scholarships (and fellowships) work for exceptional academic prospects at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I don't understand (outside of the obvious race and class implications) why it is so hard to translate what already works into a fairly small subset of students who produce a TON of value for their respective universities. That it's a difficult proposition and will involve a lot of policy firepower to implement is a non-issue in my opinion. That's what academics, policymakers and administrators get paid to think about and implement. At the end of the day, fully funded student athletes do not comprise THAT large of a population at a majority of institutions in NCAA Division 1 athletics. They really don't. The schools with student bodies south of 9999 are few.
Granted and you're right, the implications vary according to the size of the institution, whether it's public of private, and lately, nonprofit of for-profit, but college athletics is exploitation as it is and these moves are much needed in terms of pushing policy makers to reconcile the fact that education and athletics are awkward bedfellows.
My plan is and always has been to implement a graduate student funding model for scholarship athletes in NCAA member institutions according to the relative income that programs generate for their respective institutions. There should be a hard cap (let's say $15,000) and students should be able to supplement this stipend with funding generated from profiting off of their likeness and brand and/or other image-related opportunities. On the recruiting trail, schools can compete on the basis of their funding package and education/athletic product.
If schools lack the budget to do this, then they should not have athletic programs unless a uniform exception can be made to take these schools into consideration. The latter actually already exists if you take into consideration the fact that a degree from Prairie View A&M or Grand Canyon University is worthless compared to Cal, Michigan, Wake Forest, or Northwestern. Likewise, the Ivies have managed to buck the typical NCAA rhetorical turn of student-athlete scholarships with their classification of athletes as receiving grant-in-aid for matriculating students.
It's a horribly fucked up situation and for some students (though almost entirely in non-revenue sports), athletics does offer a clear path to academics. You don't have to tell me that twice. Yet, in revenue sports it's straight up exploitation, a situation that begs for a solution that includes a structured funding model as a means of compensating college athletes for the use of and profit from their images and talents. After all, with the exception of elite academic institutions, athletics contributes substantially to most of the most visible institutions of higher learning in this country.
Just my two cents, and thank you for engaging with my point (which I apologize came off as so aggressive/condescending).