So baseball. You want college basketball to be like baseball.
So baseball. You want college basketball to be like baseball.
Oh, I agree with almost all of this completely. I think it's great that the G league is offering more money, and players should absolutely be able to go pro out of high school. I think limiting that option has been a major issue for many reasons, one of which is that it makes the amateur model make no sense - it becomes a forced model.Originally Posted by JuiceCrewAllStar
The discussion started based on the idea that the NCAA will be forced to pay market rates - I don't see the schools going with that for football and men's basketball. Others disagree.
You mention the soccer model. I could see college soccer making a decent amount of money in 20 years. Soccer as a spectator sport is finally increasing in the US, which is what drove college basketball and football to what they are now. Before COVID Wake was often drawing 3-4000 fans, and other schools were doing the same, which is how college basketball and football started.
Also, I'm not sure you wouldn't design this model (OK, you wouldn't because it wouldn't be imaginable...). But there are a ton of benefits in linking athletics and academics. As I have written on here several times, other countries are definitely exploring the American collegiate sports model because they see the benefit.
nah, soccer -- like I said
baseball has the three-year rule, which I hate, and baseball also uses the draft as its primary way of signing new players, especially American players, and 20 of the 30 1st round picks in the most recent draft were college grads
soccer, on the other had, even if you're just restricting it to the United States has guys in club systems before college and they can join those clubs with or without college and do not go through the draft -- the draft has become weaker every year for a decade or two in college as the club system gets stronger
I really don't like drafts in any sport, I prefer the soccer model for player development and joining teams (though it has flaws too, they're much preferable to football and basketball's flaws, in my opinion)
LOL, we probably should have a FAQs thread so we can just refer to that when these repeated topics come up. How many times do you think you have brought up college baseball in these previous discussions (and yes, I realize I repeat myself too!)?
To answer your question - sort of. But college football and basketball are so much more popular than college baseball that it really wouldn't be on the same level.
My post was directed toward Juice, not you.
you've shared this before, but nobody is doing this for the top athletes in any sport outside the United States -- it's for the second tier and late-blooming athletes
the difference between your take on what soccer could be and what basketball and football were and became is that there are other paths to professional soccer outside of college and those paths are getting even better, whereas football and basketball never had any realistic path to the pros outside of college
some thoughts: open to being wrong and written in a hurry because i really should be focusing on other things:
i start from the presumption that the activities these athletes are performing is not pure play - an activity that produces nothing - when you play a pickup game or throw the ball with your dog or a child playing tag. very little of what a student athlete does is pure play - the overwhelming majority of it is in-fact work! work is a part of labor, but there are larger definitional considerations:
at the risk of writing an essay of defining labor, we'll try to be reductive - do they (1) produce a tangible good that can be either used or accumulated? and (2) do they participate in the maintenance the conditions for their labor [play requires no such maintenance, since its aims are non-productive]
starting with the second: the cross-country runner has been brought to the university and assigned a set of rules and regulations that they must follow - they must show up to practices on-time, attend classes and maintain a certain GPA, go to mandatory tutoring, attend events, compete, study film, instruct and guide junior competitors, etc. if they deviate from this schedule, they run the risk of
considering another group: if a college undergrad wants to work toward obtaining their degree, they set many of these considerations up for themselves, and perhaps we would even reach a stage where we define it as maintaining the conditions, but we're leaving the group we're focused on.
returning to the first part: do the athletes produce a good? they're not making steel or auto parts, for sure, but let's think about that. the cross-country division championship is broadcast on ESPN, a channel that likely has to pay for something to broadcast that and other sporting events - so they're producing some pretty tangible forms of media product (social, network, broadcast) when they compete. the role they play in the production of this media product (even if you don't watch it!) is a form of labor sure. an athlete likely can't say "excuse me ESPN, I'd rather not be filmed today." because they're just a part of the production, and their refusal to participate impedes the production of others? others have alluded to the way the university takes up the product that a cross-country runner produces to add to the reputation of the university, but I think we can at least start to see there's an element of production here - production that can certainly be exploited by those in charge, though I'm not trying to enter into a critique of capitalism here
labor is not a bad thing, but capitalism seeks largely to extract surplus value from one's labor - you can't quit labor when you've broken even - you need to continue working to produce excess value for a higher class of those who don't labor.
typically we're most familiar with wage labor, but if we're going to honest about how these systems are structured and understand who benefits from how they're structured, then resigning ourselves to the thought that "it's only labor if it's compensated" is probably not the move.
Last edited by TenaciousKory; 04-04-2021 at 03:53 PM.
semi-aquatic like otters be.
Sure, but imagine in 20 years when CBS signs a $500 million deal to televise the college cup May Madness (by then college soccer will be year long, with the championship in the spring), aren't the questions going to be the same? Why aren't the student athletes being paid if hundreds of millions of dollars are being made?
The NBA is moving to a modified version of this by the growing viability of the G-League. As 10-30 kids/year enter their program, they will create a pipeline while having college kids go more to the baseball model. The NBA wants to have both of these going as it helps them without costing too much.
Besides the crapshoot nature of one and done or directly to the league, having kids play 2-4 years in college will help show who can really play and develop brands they don't in one year. Colleges will like it as well.
I agree that it's doubtful American will move to the rest of the world model. We could make it better.
Thanks TK. I too should be doing something else!
I think the definition and structure you describe can be carried out all the way to the middle school athlete. I have to pay $5 to watch my kid play middle school volleyball, there are rules, production, etc. I'm not sure that helps differentiate labor from student athlete.
and sure there are probably un/underexplored tensions in my post but really I just hope you see what student athletes (even cross-country athletes!) do as more than play - it's productive labor that props up a lot of other facets of a truly capitalist university system
semi-aquatic like otters be.
I certainly get that. I just think there is 1) labor, 2) straight up play, and 3) a different category - student athlete. And even within the student athlete category there are pretty huge differences - from middle school tennis to D1 football player.
no, and if you think the questions are going to be the same then you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of my argument or you are starting with wildly different premises
if you think there is a world that in 20 years has CBS putting down $500 million for a 32-team college soccer tournament in a world where NBC pays $200 million for the entire 380 game Premier League season then you either have wildly different ideas for the potential of college soccer or a much different expectation for the inflation of the dollar
if you don't understand or agree with the premise that there is a fundamental difference between the current world for American football players who must go to college for three years to play in the NFL -- the world's best American football league -- and college soccer where only a fraction of one percent of the players in the world's top, say, 10 soccer leagues (and probably top 200 or so teams in the world) play college soccer then we should just stop having this discussion
I agree! (I think)
I also think child labor is very real - and just because they're not manufacturing cellphones - doesn't mean that play can't be coopted to produce a tangible good that somebody can extract surplus value from. if the 5$ isn't going to the players/teachers? participating/running the game, we have surplus value that is going elsewhere - that's a building block of capitalism (thru Marx)
again, this requires probably recalibrating some long-held definitions about work and labor and pay, and there are a lot of places that love to take advantage of commonly held understandings of these terms to keep current methods of production/exploitation the way they are (see: every grad student worker fighting a university for a union)
semi-aquatic like otters be.
also again, using Marx to read middle school volleyball prices is tricky (fun tho!) since political economy work is better done on a macro level (who at the local school system is benefiting from all of athletics and other enterprises) rather than trying to argue that you paying $5 is keeping a bunch of overpaid administrators who do nothing employed and call for revolution
semi-aquatic like otters be.
okay. i guess we just disagree. (except on the differences of labor from middle school tennis to D1 fb player, that's certainly true)
it really helps to be in a similar "third category" - a graduate student who works but also is a student (gasp!) - and to hear the admin call the very real college classes to undergraduates we teach "academic training" so they can insist that we are not employees of the university
so totally down to admit bias here.
semi-aquatic like otters be.
Why can't the $5 just go for electricity, clean-up, travel expenses for future games, refs and other things you have to pay for to put on the games? By getting a few bucks maybe it keeps costs for playing for kids whose families are already stretched to allow them to play.
Would you rather have poor kids not be able to play? Would you prefer some teams not exist?
This is not about "child labor" for an overwhelming majority of middle and high schools.
Ha, you really honed in on the specific dollar amount, which isn’t really the point (and I was thinking about a multi year contract anyway...). So let’s cut that to $50 million over 5 years. The point still stands (!) that tens of millions of dollars will be made based off student athletes, and the same questions will remain.
Also, it’s raises another point, which has been discussed before. I don’t think the level of play matters that much - it just needs to be a decent level and competition between colleges for it to be interesting and a money maker. I watched UCLA Gonzaga last night because it was intriguing based on the schools. Prior to the tourney the only player I could name on either team was Suggs (hometown kid!).
I grew up playing soccer and it was never on TV (we bought VHS tapes just to see what professional soccer looked like). That has obviously changed drastically, so I could see the rise in interest in soccer in general plus the rise in MLS leading to college soccer becoming a big deal over the next 20 years (I think we have already seen it to some extent).
Yeah, I think we disagree, but that’s ok. I think it hard to dichotomize labor vs not labor, and in my opinion it makes more sense to have multiple categories. Having played middle school tennis, I just can’t call that labor!
Last edited by Rafi; 04-04-2021 at 05:48 PM.
If a middle school AAU program is getting a shoe deal, the coach is getting paid, and people are watching highlights on YouTube, that’s clearly not just play.
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