rafi, I understand you derive a lot of pleasure from the model as is, but there is absolutely no way anyone creates what we have if they start from scratch
I disagree with both Ph (at least Ph in this particular thread, he may agree with me given more options) and, especially, rafi in that you have to full detach academics from minor league sports -- it's not about paying college players or letting them profit off their likeness, it's about fully separating them from each other -- football and basketball are what they are because of a lack of minor league options (and due to unfair labor practices that don't really apply to any other profession), though you can see the G-League starting to chip away at that very slowly in hoops
I stand by my take that the goal for college hoops in sports with big money pro leagues should be like soccer: the best young players go through club systems and the next tier may or may not play college; it's a path to the big time for the late bloomers and overlooked guys (e.g. Clint Dempsey) but it's not the main way young guys develop and have access to pro leagues
I realize none of this will ever happen in my lifetime because too many people have emotional attachments to the schools and their athletic programs
So baseball. You want college basketball to be like baseball.
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.
Do you think the cross-country runner is "labor?" How about at a D3 school? High school? Middle school? Serious question, I'm interested in your thoughts. You post some really insightful stuff (many on here, including many on this thread, do too).
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
rafi, I understand you derive a lot of pleasure from the model as is, but there is absolutely no way anyone creates what we have if they start from scratch
I disagree with both Ph (at least Ph in this particular thread, he may agree with me given more options) and, especially, rafi in that you have to full detach academics from minor league sports -- it's not about paying college players or letting them profit off their likeness, it's about fully separating them from each other -- football and basketball are what they are because of a lack of minor league options (and due to unfair labor practices that don't really apply to any other profession), though you can see the G-League starting to chip away at that very slowly in hoops
I stand by my take that the goal for college hoops in sports with big money pro leagues should be like soccer: the best young players go through club systems and the next tier may or may not play college; it's a path to the big time for the late bloomers and overlooked guys (e.g. Clint Dempsey) but it's not the main way young guys develop and have access to pro leagues
I realize none of this will ever happen in my lifetime because too many people have emotional attachments to the schools and their athletic programs
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.
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
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?
I think the definition and structure you describe can be carried out all the way to the middle school athlete. I have to pay $5 to watch my kid play middle school volleyball, there are rules, production, etc. I'm not sure that helps differentiate labor from student athlete.
I agree! (I think)
I also think child labor is very real - and just because they're not manufacturing cellphones - doesn't mean that play can't be coopted to produce a tangible good that somebody can extract surplus value from. if the 5$ 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)
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.
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)
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
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.