Tom Brady’s agent has the perfect solution for the NCAA and college athletics struggling to deal with his ilk: give up.
… What needs to change is the entire attitude toward college football. This is the perfect time to implement an honest approach to the combination of big-time football and higher education, an approach that eliminates the NCAA’s notion of amateurism. College football generates huge revenues, and there is plenty of money to create a win-win business model for players, coaches and universities. A big business deserves market-driven reform, free of hypocrisy.
Yes, because if there’s one thing that’s true about big business, is that it’s free of hypocrisy.
Get The Picture 
Certainly institutional goals of educating young people and forming new knowledge through its faculty research are brilliantly in sync with sponsoring and profiting from employed athletic teams of young people with no educational ties. The connection is so obvious…why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?
LikeLike
And Saban thought it would happen. Agents, any agents are the bottom feeders of society. They are like pimps they make their living off of somebody else’s talent. How many times have actors and athletes been left broke because of the agents bad faith. I know some of them are good but some of them are just crooks that think they can make more money doing this than rolling old ladies for their Social Security.
LikeLike
Douche.
LikeLike
‘Res Ipsa Loquitor’
LikeLike
I believe the college players are certainly entitled to a slice of the pie, though I’d hate to see agents introduced to cfb. It disgusting to think somebody like Kiffin gets millions, while the players get no compensation at all.
LikeLike
Like it or not Senator, college football is big business. A five star recruit may think a diploma is nice and all that but his main concern is being a first round draftee. The “average” BCS football player spends forty hours a week on football, in other words, he is an employee of the university. He just doesn’t get paid. Those forty hours include the “voluntary” workouts, which are voluntary in that you only have to do the workouts if you want to see the field. Before you tell me that he gets paid through free tuition and books and room and board, there are easier ways to get a degree than playing football. Like Hope grants, Pell grants, and student loans. Management in college football has six and seven figure salaries and their workers put in at least forty hours a week to net millions for the corperation, or the university. In other words, big business.
LikeLike
shane, you’re missing the point here. He’s not making a case for paying college players nearly as much as he’s making a case for opening up a new, unregulated market for sports agents. Don’t forget, the NFL is getting ready to impose a rookie salary cap.
Nobody is stopping anyone from creating a professional sports league for eighteen year olds. The NFL won’t do it, because the current set up with college football doesn’t cost anything. And I doubt anyone else will rush in to fill the void because collegiate sports do bring something to the table that a startup pro league couldn’t match – deep fan institutional loyalty.
Don’t look at this as a plea for the players. It’s a modest proposal to save football agents.
But he’s not a hypocrite. No, sirree.
LikeLike
Senator, my point was that college football, at least on the BCS level is a big business. Yet we here about protecting the purity of the game. The game is not now and maybe never has been pure. Talk with older players and you hear about being brought out to the field after the game to “shake hands” with boosters then going back to the locker room with a helmet full of 100 dollar bills. A hundred bucks doesn’t go very far today and it’s agents handing out the bucks instead of boosters, but nothing else has changed. I know one Damn Good Dawg that got a summer job scouting for insects in cotton, in northeast Ga.. The fact that cotton had probably never been planted in those mountains and foothills did not matter. BTW, his boss at the State Dept. of Agriculture was a UGA grad. Imagine that!
LikeLike
This guy is exactly right. Anyone still hanging on to the notion that the team representing their University on Saturdays has anything to do with that university is sadly out of touch with reality.
Who is really the pimp here? The agent, who may get 4-8% of a player’s salary as commission, or the University administration who sets up sham majors so that kids who have no business being in college can matriculate on campus to provide the school with $67.05 million in revenue?
Who is really the pimp? Let’s be real here and do away with the ridiculous idea of amateurism. Let the kids get paid and not have to attend classes. The universities can simply form Minor league franchises and loan their stadiums out on Saturdays.
LikeLike
What benefit do schools get from doing that?
LikeLike
$$$$$$.
LikeLike
The minor league idea is not necessary. All the Universitys have to do is share some of the wealth with the kids that are getting their asses busted. A lot of the players are from poor backgrounds and sell out too cheap. Why don’t the Universities give each athlete a living allowance so that they can go home on break, instead of sitting around an empty dorm, maybe take their best girl out to eat once in awhile, or even buy a pair of sneakers. Forget amateur, that died when Bobby Jones quit golf to practice law.
LikeLike
That’s a better point. The problem is in the implementation. Not every school can afford to pay its athletes.
LikeLike
Cynical, that’s taking it way too far. The majority of the players have no hope of ever going pro, so paying them some stipend while in college and letting them waste their chance at a degree is doing them far greater harm than the current setup.
I’d like to see the system treat players in the “profitable” sports like a job, and pay it as such. Kids get paid to do all sorts of school jobs, why not football and basketball? It doesn’t have to be a huge salary – just a moderately decent reflection of the time commitment so they aren’t as susceptible to agents buying them clothes and giving them “walking around money.”
LikeLike
Muckbeast, good point, but because of some court rulings any pay would have to be divided with the women’s sports, most of which do not make money. Whatever the Duke basketball players made would also have to be given to the Duke field hockey team, for example. It’s a thorny problem, that’s for sure. I think something could be worked out now that conferences have gotten bigger and most confreences have tv contracts. The conferences could allot a percentage of the tv money to be equally divided amoung the schools for the athletes, so that one school wasn’t paying more than the others. In the meantime, at least let the athletes sell their textbooks, like any other student.
LikeLike
These numbers are all way too low and very approximate but this is the easiest way to figure a basic floor:
Football and Basketball = 98 Scholarships x 2 (title IX) = minimum 196 per D1-A Football school, so lets say 200.
200 x 10,000 = 2 million per school.
Georgia, Texas, Ohio State, Florida? No problem at all paying the players this. Most of the other 116 football schools? Not so much.
There is not 240 million in profit out there in college sports each year.
And that assumes that a payoff of 10,000 will make a difference for the players that this would really be aimed at.
The fact of the matter is that the nature of college athletics as they are now is you have to for the most part treat everyone the same and when you accept that, aside from the biggest profit schools the money is simply not there.
LikeLike