Mark Emmert is getting hammered today on the use of players’ images in ads.
This isn’t helping.
Tech sent that out yesterday. Pure Keystone Cops.
Daily Archives: June 20, 2014
If I told you…
… that ESPN would have Georgia listed in the preseason as having the third-best special teams in the conference, would you be giddy about the Dawgs’ chances this year, or shaking your head over how bad special teams play in the SEC is going to be?
Bonus points for the McKenzie reference, by the way.
Filed under Georgia Football
Competitive balance, my arse
If Emmert’s testimony yesterday about player compensation was little more than a combination of sanctimonious wishful thinking and denial, his defense of competitive balance in college football was downright dishonest.
Emmert said amateurism is essential to competitive balance in college sports. While he has supported reforms such as cost-of-attendance increases — though he wouldn’t call them stipends — he added that requiring further compensation to athletes would result in some schools having to drop other sports programs or drop out of Division I altogether, which require schools to offer 16 sports in order to qualify.
He even went to the extent of citing Alabama’s loss to Louisiana-Monroe and Michigan’s loss to Appalachian State in support of that. (Nevermind that losses like those are so rare that it’s easy to remember them by name.)
But this is where my bullshit detector’s needle broke:
“To convert college sports into professional sports would be tantamount to converting it into minor league sports,” Emmert said. “And we know that in the U.S. minor league sports aren’t very successful either for fan support or for the fan experience.”
Professional minor leagues aren’t the minor leagues because their players are paid. They’re minor leagues because their teams are under the control of parties who don’t have a stake in the outcome of their seasons.
Back in the 1930’s Branch Rickey came up with a revolutionary innovation, the baseball farm system. Twice, Commissioner Landis freed a number of players in Rickey’s system from their contracts because he opposed turning the minor leagues into vassal states of major league teams. Read this exchange between the two to understand what the real issue is with minor league play and fan interest. Landis’ final observation – “I think it is as big as the universe. This is just as important in the Three-I League as it would be in the National or American Leagues.” – is the crux of what defines being a minor league.
It’s not about pay. It’s about independence. Until the NFL can dictate to Mark Richt during the week before the Georgia Tech game that Todd Gurley is being brought up to play for one of its teams, Emmert is completely off base with his analogy.
But skip past that. If you want something in the here and now that exposes the phoniness of Emmert’s concern about competitive balance, check out one of the impending fruits of the Big Five’s push for autonomy, a proposed change to the transfer rules.
The wealthiest college football conferences (Big 12, Big Ten, Atlantic Conference, Pac-12, Southeastern Conference) are willing to work with all of Division I to come up with a solution, but they also want the power to make their own transfer rules if need be as part of an autonomy structure the NCAA is moving toward.
If you think this is making mid-major schools nervous, give yourself a nickel.
That worries the schools outside those powerful leagues, concerned they’ll be in danger of losing their best players to the Big Five.
Most of the areas in which the Big Five conferences are seeking autonomy are related to how schools spend money on athletes. Transfer regulations are seen more as purely competitive-balance issues.
”I still haven’t gotten a good answer as to why transfer rules have been included in the autonomy bucket,” said SMU athletic director Rick Hart, whose school plays in the American Athletic Conference, one of the other five leagues in the top tier of college football knows as FBS.
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one, Rick. Besides, I think you already know the answer, even if it isn’t what you’d call a good one. Or the one the Big Five commissioners – or Emmert, for that matter – will give when they enact their own version.
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UPDATE: More thoughts on competitive balance here.
Filed under College Football, It's Not Easy Being A Mid-Major, The NCAA
“Do you think it’s exploitation of them or something you don’t want happening?”
I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that it’s not a good thing when the judge asks the NCAA president that question in the context of justifying the amateurism protocol Mark Emmert was attempting to defend yesterday. Emmert’s answer, while honestly given, didn’t help much:
“When this rule again has been discussed by the membership, the answer to that would be both.” Wilken sought additional clarification, asking how receiving money for the use of their likenesses would harm the athletes. “The assumption is that by converting them into a professional athlete, they are no longer a student-athlete,” Emmert said. “They are not part of the academic environment. They’re not in a position to gain the advantages of being a student-athlete and being a student at that university. They are not there avocationally but vocationally.”
Wilken asked one more follow-up question. “And that is what you consider to be exploitation of them?”
“Yes,” Emmert replied. “In this language, yes.”
I guess anybody with a paying gig is exploited, then. Or just having a moneyed family. No, really.
In earlier testimony, Emmert said payments to players would “separate” and “isolate” the athletes from other students and from the academic life of the school. Wilken then asked whether the same isolation would apply to “students whose parents were rich and had money that other students did not.”
“It is the same problem,” Emmert said.
Hoo, boy. What’s the NCAA gonna do about that?
By the way, it’s not just student-athletes having money now that’s a problem for Emmert. It’s anytime in the future, too.
When Pomerantz asked whether Emmert and other NCAA officials had discussed the trust fund idea, Emmert replied, “Yes, we have discussed it and concluded that even it were paid after graduation, it was still not amateurism. It is still pay, whether paid today or paid tomorrow.”
But you know what is amateurism?
It didn’t get any better for the NCAA when Isaacson produced several images of current and past NCAA athletes appearing in promotional materials for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and other NCAA-sanctioned events. A photo of Wisconsin’s football players appearing at a Rose Bowl news conference — in front of a Vizio logo — also was presented into evidence. So was a photo of Texas A&M’s football players celebrating a bowl victory in front of a table featuring the Chick-fil-A and Kia logos.
“And that’s perfectly fine?” Isaacson asked Emmert.
“That’s fine under the rules,” Emmert replied. “It’s not something I’m personally comfortable with.”
Well, at least there’s that.
It’s not that Emmert is a putz. Okay, check that – he is a putz, but that’s not why he foundered so much yesterday (and probably will again today). He, just like everyone else on his side, is stuck having to defend the logically indefensible. It’s enfeebling.
To paraphrase the immortal words of Michael Corleone, Mark, you’re part of the same hypocrisy.
Filed under The NCAA
Friday morning buffet
Just because it’s June doesn’t mean I can’t fill a few chafing dishes for you.
- I’ll go into detail later this summer about it, but perhaps this is the best thing Georgia’s secondary has going for it this season.
- Bitcoin is going to sponsor a bowl game. Will it hand out a virtual trophy?
- The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Aereo case may impact how we watch the NFL, but keep in mind what’s written in this piece could also apply to CBS and its contract with the SEC.
- Here’s the Post and Courier’s preview of the Clemson-Georgia game. And here’s the preview of the South Carolina-Georgia game.
- One reason the schools fear Jeffrey Kessler’s lawsuit: one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys used to be an associate director of enforcement for the NCAA.
- Believe it or not, ESPN preseason rankings have Georgia’s secondary as seventh best in the conference.
- Gene Chizik predicts a 10-2 season for Auburn, with losses to South Carolina and Alabama.
- Vanderbilt checks in at #74 in Paul Myerberg’s preseason roundup.
- College coaches try to figure out the best way to utilize the new rules on summer supervision. (Brian Kelly knows what to do, but if he told you, then he’d have to kill you.)
- “We’re guessing that many people would agree that college president or medical school dean is slightly more beneficial to humanity than being a football coach.” Depends whom you ask, I suspect.
- Bill Connelly looks at this year’s Clemson Tigers team and comes away impressed, particularly with that defensive line.
Get The Picture 