Posted on 05/18/2022 11:34:32 AM PDT by Nifty
That’s an interesting point. I don’t understand clearly how baseball’s antitrust exemption relates to its minor leagues. The National Hockey League doesn’t have an antitrust exemption, but its minor league system is still very similar to what MLB has.
Gross revenue + 10% cut for The Man = Net Income. Pay up, Whitey! :)
How does the Department of Educational "enable" the NCAA to have restrictions on paying players? Just by not forbidding it? That sounds like classic hardcore leftism - equating a lack of government regulation to government support. And by the way, the NCAA system existed decades before the the Department of Education even existed.
>> Maybe this rule will apply to women’s sports too. The math would sure be fun: (Large negative number) - (All their scholarships) / # of players = Total bill each player owes for the privilege of playing <<
Your idea of the huge bill is funny, but it actually applies to football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and no other teams. Football and, primarily in the case of the little Catholic colleges like the Big East and West Coast conferences, basketball are the money-makers. Women’s basketball is no great huge money-loser. It’s the smaller sports which since Title IX have been mostly women’s sports to balance football, which are the huge money-losers. In Pac-12 sports, there are 15 sports, but not one men’s team plays four of them: Gymnastics, lacrosse, volleyball or beach volleyball. (I’m counting softball as the female variant of baseball.) In all but basketball, golf and wrestling (no female team), there are more universities participating in the women’s conference than in the men’s.
The NCAA may be a private organization, but the constituent universities receive money from the federal government in the form of guarantees of student loans and research grants. You may figure, “meh, who cares... go without the government support”, and some universities heroically do this, but try supporting a student body large enough to sponsor NCAA sports while telling ALL of your graduate students and professors that if the government is who would sponsor research in your topic of inquiry, forget it, you can’t do the research because we have no funds. Alumni support scholarships and tuition, but not research.
You left out state taxpayer support!
Separation of school and sports.
Most NCAA schools have athletic departments that lose money. The relative few that don't are in the black solely because football revenues support the other sports. In other words, there isn't this huge pot of money that NCAA schools have from being "in the black" on sports.
If you removed/eliminated the loans that students take out for their education, you would just be pulling even money out of those schools. So there would be even less net money to pay athletes. In other words, the claim that the federal government somehow created the NCAA system of not paying athletes is simply ridiculous.
The thing that bugs me about this issue is that so many so-called conservatives appear perfectly willing to adopt Marx's Labor Theory of Value. That somehow, because these students are the ones actually playing the games, that they are the ones who should be getting the revenue.
But that ignores everything else that goes into putting on a competitive athletic program. Just for starters, if you separated every college football program from its sponsoring University and just have them enter a private league, the revenues would absolutely collapse. The alumni and students that are the core of a football program's support only exist because of the University structure in the first place. Eliminate the team's link to the university, and you've torpedoed their market. You'd also have eliminated alumni cash support for the programs.
Then there is the issue of having enough players to feel the team in the first place. Even on the very highest level division 1 programs, the majority of players are not drafted into the NFL. Yet, their participation in the program is essential to feel that team. The moment you pull the team away from the university, all those college students who play for the scholarship and love of the game are gone, because they're not going to give up their education and careers to be permanent minor league football players. And that means you no longer have enough players to field the team. So essentially, the university is providing to all those high-end players the competitive infrastructure to feel a team.
That's not even mentioning the stadiums, training facilities, support and medical staff, coaches, and all the other employees needed to keep that program running year-round, (important for this argument in particular) to help train, prepare, and showcase the high-end athletes for their chosen profession.
The real key is what the free market is telling us. If all those athletes were truly underpaid, then you should see a for-profit competitive league open up that would take all those players away from college football by offering a "fair" wage. It doesn't happen because the money would not be there to pay those athletes the money they want, and everything else necessary to field those teams.
You make several excellent points; I don’t know why you come out so confrontational. I was only explaining to someone else how the government has power to abuse the NCAA.
About the only thing I disagree with you about is the notion about the non-profitability of minor league in basketball. The fact is there ARE minor leagues, but the university system allows the same dollar to achieve multiple purposes:
1) Increase the esteem of the university, because for some reason people think if they’ve heard a lot about a school, it must be good.
2) Appear to fulfill the perceived mission of the school, which is to educate people, providing value BESIDES wages to laborers.
3) Of course, pay for the program, including providing the athletes with an incredible lifestyle.
See, the truth is these athletes want say, $100,000 a year. But the truth is that they couldn’t buy their lifestyle with $100,000. Hell, I’d bet some of the NBA 2nd-tier players miss their college days.
Good points. I think what is really going on is that the "star" players believe they should make money in college commensurate with their skill/pro prospects. The problem is that you couldn't afford to put a team around them because as you said, the total "compensation" of tuition/fees/room/board for the rest of the players is worth more than what a minor league could afford to pay. So they'd just stay in school.
That means the minor league teams might have a few star players, but otherwise be worse off than the college teams. Worse supporting players, worse coaches, training facilities, etc.. And that would make for a pretty busy showcase for guys looking to make the pros. You could make it profitable, but I don't think the players would make nearly as they'd want.
You know another thing? A handful of NCAA coaches actually think that they are doing something helpful for their athletes’ lives. OK, so Coach K whored out his principles in the most spectacular, hideous ways possible at the end of his career, but some actually still would earn $200K as a college coach than $500K as a minor-league coach. Look at Pitino: not exactly a moral exemplar, but how much money is Iona College paying him? You think Jim Calhoun, one of the greatest coaches of all time, is coaching at the University of St Joseph (NOT the much more famous St Joseph U) for the money?
CA is looking forward to windfall tax income.
Every dollar earned in the State is subject to the
CA income tax rate. Every pro team, and its players, that play(s) a road game in CA gets nailed for that CA income tax.
Just imagine the huge amount of tax income from college athletes who play games in CA!
the moneychangers have taken it off the charts...
people are surprisingly resilant...
we'll find our entertainment to watch...
maybe it's back to rodeo, stock car races, high school sports, etc...
if that was true, half the college athletic depts wouldn't be in the red, and numerous donation requests wouldn't be going out all the time....stadiums wouldn't have to be named for Resers or other companies....
its become a huge vicious circle of money takers and I'm sick of it...
truth is that its a huge monetary deep hole when colleges have football teams...basketball to a lesser extent....
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